Since my family’s intervention I had been clean and sober; I quickly reverted to form and returned to the Dean’s List in short order—but not before having completely trashed my full scholarship and done irreparable harm to my grade point average. While I calculated what it would take for me to make up for lost time, I also resolved to add a second major—the net result being my four-year undergraduate degree would now take five years. With the summer class back in Detroit under my belt, I could take a regular course load when I returned to Ann Arbor in the fall and be ready to graduate the following spring alongside my housemate, Stella Starlight.
That was my plan, at any rate.
But once I arrived back in my parents’ house in Detroit’s historic Boswick-Addison district, and went downtown to register for my summer class at the Arbor State extension, I talked things over with the counselor there. She made me realize I could take all the remaining classes I needed to complete my bachelor’s degree in Detroit—either there at the Arbor State extension, or by cross-registering for certain courses at Warren Woodward University just a few blocks away. This made perfect sense, since I was already planning to attend Warren Woodward for grad school later. The more I discussed things with Mama and Daddy, and my sister Avie, who would be starting at Warren Woodward as a freshman herself in the fall, the more doing my senior year in Detroit—and closer to home—seemed like destiny.
I would still have to drive out to Ann Arbor for my honors thesis and to meet with my other academic advisors a few times over the course of the year, and I was still planning to graduate in the big ceremony in the Abyssinian Wolves Stadium in the spring alongside Stella, if only for old time’s sake. But I had to admit I didn’t feel all that much at home on Ann Street anymore, and I really hadn’t for a long time. Stella and my other housemate, Trent, and their two-year-old, Simon, had become a tight family unit—even though Trent and Stella were merely postmodern parenting partners and only seldom if ever lovers in any romantic sense, at least as long as I’d known them. And with my other housemate Pammy off to teach at the Dearborn extension—that’s Pamela Jointly, controversial columnist and honorary Arbor State teaching fellow—or out on the road speaking and promoting her new book year-round, the old house on Ann Street just didn’t feel as much like the communal house that it used to, and for a long time I had come to feel as the odd man out.
I’d grown apart from my housemates during the two and a half years I lived on Ann Street. After all, when I moved into the house I was just a scrawny, introverted sophomore who was all about hitting the books and making summa cum laude. Then, there was my belated growth spurt—like two and three-quarters inches over the next year or so; then, Yarn Man showed up. I lost my virginity and we eventually shacked up in the basement—and things spiraled out of control from there. But you’ve already read my account about that.
Then, after I realized I had completely blown my junior year and resolved to redeem myself, another shock: I learned I had somehow suddenly gained awesome megapowers and become a megahero myself—Ms. Megaton Man.
You’d think this would have brought me closer to Trent and Stella; after all, they had once been megaheroes in New York. Stella Starlight, the former See-Thru Girl, had left Megatropolis and a bad marriage to Liquid Man to return to school, only to realize she had become pregnant with the love child of Megaton Man. Meanwhile, back in New York, the once-mighty Man of Molecules—that would be Megaton Man—lost his megapowers and decided to follow Stella to Ann Arbor, taking a lowly job in a used bookstore just so he could be a part of the expected child’s life. But Stella only kept Trent in the dog house, so to speak—I guess Megaton Man had broken her heart too badly—and even after Simon was born, they were never a very affectionate couple. I always thought that was a shame, but at least baby Simon had two loving parents, even if Trent and Stella weren’t in love with each other. They were also both trying to put their respective megaheroic pasts behind them, while my career as Ms. Megaton Man was still ahead of me; ironically, it was little old me who was now the big-shot megahero, while my housemates—possibly the most famous former megaheroes in the world—had settled into the lifestyle of a normal, if unconventional, civilians.
And, even though Trent and Stella were only parenting partners, and not married or even a romantic couple at all, I had the sneaking suspicion I hadn’t helped matters by finally shtupping Trent in the shower during finals week—just before I left school for home over the summer. In fact, I was pretty sure I had complicated my living situation enormously. I felt guilty around Stella, although she probably didn’t know or care one way or the other, and I couldn’t be around baby Simon without feeling like a homewrecker. No doubt this was because I had never known my own biological father—who, very likely was a megapowered relative of Trent’s. Oedipal incest anxieties aside, I dreaded the thought that I could become a reason for Stella to expel Trent from Simon’s life, just as my own mother had expelled my father, even going so far as refusing to ever discuss or even identify him to me.
Maybe this was all in my head, and I’m just a coward. But it was a relief when finals were finally over and I could get out the hell out of Ann Arbor and come back home. In Boswick-Addison I was able to gain some perspective on things; once I was home, it began to seem to me like a good idea just to stay put in Detroit for my senior year of college.
As I said, I’d still have to visit Ann Arbor every so often for school stuff; I could even shorten the fifty-minute trip back and forth to ten—five if I really hauled ass—by flying. I am a megahero after all, although I tend to forget. Either way, I’d still get to see plenty of Simon—whom I adored—as he was growing up, without inconveniencing anyone as a house guest.
Not to say I’d burned my bridges with the Extended Nuclear Family, as Kozmik Kat referred to the gang on Ann Street. But if I were being completely honest, I was more than a little afraid to hang around Ann Arbor. After all, even though Stella was no longer actively the See-Thru Girl—she was doing everything to live down her megaheroic past—she hadn’t lost her megapowers as Trent had. She was still awesomely powerful—I got a glimpse of this when she had a near-total meltdown one Thanksgiving. I was afraid should she suddenly become possessive of Trent—she had nearly swooned when Trent temporarily had his Megaton Man powers restored. What would she do, what would he do, what would I do—if Trent and I were to have an ongoing, physical relationship?
More to the point, what if I were to become pregnant? That’s what really scared me. To be sure, I had never bothered with precautions before, but now things were different. For one thing, it would throw off my entire education again—I saw how hard it was for Stella to both go to school and raise a baby. Sure, Trent had been Megaton Man when Simon was conceived—I still remember the baby flying around the hospital room, and the nurses having a terrible time flagging him down just to change his diapers. But what if the treatment administered by the mysterious Dr. Quimby—Stella’s ex-husband Rex Rigid, as it turned out—rendering Simon a docile, normal baby boy turned out to be only temporary? And Simon wasn’t even the only potentially megapowered baby in the world—there were at least two others: Stella’s half-brother Chuck Roast—the Human Meltdown—supposedly had a daughter in Paris, and Trent’s Uncle Farley—the Golden Age Megaton Man—had knocked up Beatrice “Kiddo” Bryson, one of the Youthful Permutations. I had witnessed a very pregnant Kiddo survive the Devastation Chamber, testing ground for the Y+Thems, while Avie and I visited New York over the winter. Although I hadn’t gotten an update, I was willing to bet her blessed event yielded yet another megapowered being just as awe-inspiring. The last thing I wanted to do was to bring yet a fourth infant wildcard into the world. Not that I had anything to worry about. All Trent and I had done in the shower and subsequently in my bedroom during finals week was fool around— stuff that, according to my sister Avie, didn’t even count as sex. She would know. After all, Avie had been sexually active since the age of fifteen, whereas I—the late-blooming older sister—had only lost it when I was twenty.
Okay, so it was a bit more than fooling around—I let Trent do me up the butt; you don’t even want to hear Avie on that subject. She considers hetero oral and anal sex “degrading” and “subjugating” to women—everything’s political with my sister—although whatever they were, they sure got me off. But maybe because I was megapowered now, and Trent was only a civilian, I found it oddly pleasurable. I also hadn’t wanted to risk pregnancy for the aforementioned reasons—although I really, really wanted him in my pussy. But that’s the problem: If I hung around Ann Arbor, would Trent and I keep going at it? I knew that sooner or later I’d break down, and we’d be doing more than fooling around and butt-fucking. Even though he may not be Megaton Man any more the resulting baby would still be the child of Ms. Megaton Man, and more than likely a megapowered handful. The whole thing was too terrible to contemplate.
I still couldn’t shake the lingering feeling of guilt about finally having done it with Trent—whether you call it fucking or fooling around of something in-between. I don’t know why, since in over two years Stella had never made any claims on Trent’s affections. In fact, Stella mostly spurned Trent as an unwelcome houseboy—good only for changing diapers and feeding the baby while she did her theoretical physics homework. Maybe because tensions between Trent and I had been building for so long—Pammy had pointed this out to me when I was still a virgin, long before I recognized it myself—that when we finally hauled off and did it, it just really rocked my world.
On second thought, maybe I had burned my bridges with Ann Street—and with Stella—unconsciously on purpose. I can’t help but feeling that if Stella had known I had slept with the father of her son, she’d feel differently about me. Maybe she’d even be jealous. Maybe I wanted her to feel jealous. And maybe the queasy feeling I had felt ever since, even back in Detroit, was a secret hope that Stella would find out, and it would bother her. Maybe I wanted to explain to myself how it happened to me—how my own father had been seduced away from my mother, and kept away from me. And maybe I kinda wanted Trent to love me, and that’s what really scared me.
Okay, that’s way more over-sharing than you need to hear. But when I told Avie, Mama, and Daddy it looked like I was back in Detroit for good, they were overjoyed—particularly when I stressed I would be finding my own apartment near the Arbor State extension and Warren Woodward University as soon as possible. This meant Mama wouldn’t have to surrender her TV den—my old bedroom, and I’d be sleeping on the living room sofa for only half the summer, maybe less, if I got a job and an apartment around the North Cass neighborhood right away. It also meant that once school started, I’d be living a heck of a lot closer to home than when I was living in Ann Arbor, and I’d be able to have dinner with my family in my old Boswick-Addison neighborhood every Sunday instead of just holidays. Plus, I’d get to attend all of Avie’s experimental theater productions in and around Detroit.
As I said, Avie would be starting at Warren Woodward herself as a freshmen in the fall—as a theater major, naturally—which from Mama’s point of view meant both her daughters would be able to keep an eye on each other. I’d be seeing a lot of Avie around the University-Cultural Center, as it was known. The idea was even floated—maybe it was Mama’s—that Avie and I become roommates, since we’d be attending school right next to each other, and some of my classes would be at her school, like I said. But that was never going to happen; for one thing, Avie was too spoiled from living alone with my parents as their only daughter, as it were, these four years I’d spent in Ann Arbor. And I sure as hell didn’t want any roommates for the time being, if I could help it. I needed my own space, like I’d had back in South Quad. Besides, I had a feeling that my megapowered alter-ego, Ms. Megaton Man, might be roommate enough.
One of Avie’s and my favorite things to do in past summers was to watch lots of subtitled foreign films at the fine arts museum and other arthouse venues around town. The irony was that now that I was back in Detroit—for the summer and maybe for good—Avie always wanted to drag me back to Ann Arbor to see some cinematic masterpiece or other—some Chaplin or Kubrick classic. And, we both loved browsing through Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore, not to mention the record stores and other shops. But the bookstore is where Trent worked, and I was worried I’d run into him on these trips to downtown Ann Arbor, even if we didn’t go past Ann Street, which was only a couple blocks away. Keep in mind all my stuff was still at the Ann Street house, and I still hadn’t told Trent and Stella I’d made my mind up to move out permanently, and not just vacate for the summer, as I’d done the past two years. Luckily, we never saw Trent, at least for the first couple of movie trips. Avie always wanted to stop by the house to see Simon, but I always talked her out of it.
But summer wasn’t even half over—it was about the third or fourth time Avie and I had gone back to Ann Arbor—when we finally ran into Trent at the bookstore before our movie. It was awkward for me, but Trent seemed real glad to see us and insisted we come by the house for dinner afterwards. Well, you know Avie—she couldn’t pass up a chance to visit Simon, and really, neither could I; there was no talking my way out of this one. After all, I still lived on Ann Street as far as anyone knew, and ostensibly was only staying with my folks in Detroit for the summer as I’d done in past summers. So, we dropped by Ann Street after our movie.
Stella was there and Trent cooked hamburgers on the back patio and we ate on the picnic table and we all had a nice little visit. Avie and I ran all around the yard with Simon playing hide and seek—a great way to avoid talking to the adults—then we went inside as it got dark. That’s when Avie spilled the beans about me staying in Detroit for my senior year and not returning to Ann Street in the fall. Stella was cool with it; it was only July, she said, and she could easily rent my room out before September. I could pick up my bed and stuff whenever I settled on an apartment in Detroit, or they could even store it in the attic. But I could tell Trent was upset. It had only been a month before that he and I had done it, and I’d avoided talking to him since; he’d left a message or two at my parents’ house, always concerning something trivial, like leaving a textbook I might want; but I knew what it was really about. He clearly blamed my decision to stay in Detroit on our triste—I could tell from the look in his eyes.
In the kitchen, as we cleared away the coffee cups, he and I spoke. “When did you plan on telling us, anyway?” Trent whispered.
“I didn’t,” I replied.
Which was true. I didn’t plan to tell them—I didn’t have any plan to tell them. And if Avie hadn’t blurted it out I probably would have procrastinated until the very last minute, like the second week of fall classes. But Avie had blurted it out, which saved me the trouble. I know I wasn’t handling the situation like a mature adult, but I guess that’s because I wasn’t a mature adult. In any case, I didn’t apologize to Trent; I just left it at, “I didn’t.”
That was all Trent and I said. We didn’t discuss the soapy shower or the fooling around in the bedroom or degradation or subjugation or how it had really gotten me off—we didn’t have the opportunity. Luckily. Otherwise, we had a really nice visit.
Stella suggested we sleep over, but no way—so when Avie and I started home for Detroit it was very late. I was mad at her all the way back, but she didn’t get what the problem was. I hadn’t told Avie before that I had balled Trent at the very end of the spring semester, and that I now regretted balling him because I was afraid I had complicated everything. After I explained this to Avie, she still didn’t see the problem. “You’re moving to Detroit because that’s the best choice for your education, right? Not because you messed up you’re housing situation by balling your roommate. Because it didn’t look to me like anyone was mad at you, least of all Stella. And I could have guessed that’s what you did, because it looked to me like Trent positively still wants you.”
I suppose Avie was right—Stella probably didn’t even know or care. Although I wondered whether I hadn’t messed up a really good friendship with Trent.
“You’ve got to stop feeling guilty every time you have sex with someone you care about,” Avie said.
I wanted to punch her in the shoulder, but she was driving, and we were on the freeway by then. So I just fumed and wondered what was wrong with me the rest of the way home. Avie prattled on about how big Simon was getting, although he really hadn’t grown that much since the last time she’d seen him. As we pulled into our parents’ driveway, Avie said, “You’re just afraid you’re in love with Megaton Man.”
That’s when I punched her in the shoulder. Harder than I realized.
“Oww!” she screamed. “I’m not a megahero…that hurt! You’re Ms. Megaton Man!” She started crying.
I felt horrible. I rubbed her shoulder, but she pulled away. “I’m so sorry, Avie—I’ll never do that again…!” But she jumped out of the car; I got out on my side and ran around and hugged her. She was still crying.
“I didn’t mean to hit you that hard,” I said. “Really, I didn’t. I’m so sorry.”
She pulled away and started laughing. She swept her arm and did her best Jon Lovitz impersonation. “I was acting!” she announced histrionically.
But then she rubbed her shoulder and started crying again. That’s when I knew I really hurt my little half-sister. What a brutish asshole I was. I hugged her and rubbed her shoulder and we cried for twenty minutes. And I told her I would never do that again at least twenty times.
It was the first time we shared a cry since New York. There, she had endured a terrible trauma there, but sucked it all up. I knew she was proud of me and loved my friends in Ann Arbor and was sad that I had essentially broken up with them. She was trying to help me through the transition—even her trips dragging me back to Ann Arbor to see foreign films was a ruse to help me confront my issues because she knew I was helpless—and here I was abusing her.
Despite everything, I think Avie had gotten a bit of the megahero bug—something akin to the theater bug—since our trip to New York over the past winter, even though she was a civilian. We had stayed with the Y+Thems in Brooklyn, which Avie likened to Off-Off-Off-Broadway; met the Youthful Mutants Sabersnag, Domina, Kiddo, and Tempy; had nearly gotten ourselves killed when my old boyfriend Yarn Man stalled out the Q-Mobile forty stories above Fifth Avenue; and met the Devengers—a slangy contraction of Doomsday Revengers—who lived in the Doomsday Factory. They claimed not only to have known our grandmother Seedy James but also tried to convince us she was still alive. So, despite nearly being raped by the Human Meltdown, which I just barely saved her from, Avie had had a pretty good time in ol’ Megatropolis. This on top of getting to know and love my friends in Ann Arbor over the past couple of years. Now Avie was smitten with the legends and lore of megaheroes—fitting, since her half-sister now happened to be one. And, like me, Avie was curious to know whether our mama had once been a megahero herself named the Mod Puma, or had only been one in another life in some alternate reality.
Avie was right: staying home in Detroit for my senior year of college was the right choice for my education. And she was also right that I was afraid I was falling in love with Megaton Man. And she’d have been right about another thing, too: I wasn’t ready to go to New York and be a megahero on the big stage just yet. I still needed my family, and my little sister especially, desperately. And I needed to leave Ms. Megaton Man in a garment bag in the back of my closet for a while. And stop punching people. Especially Avie, whom I loved more than anything in the while, wide world.
Next: You’re Not the Boss of Me
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