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Why are they taking the city bus to Stevie Hunter’s studio? Kitty can’t drive—she’s learning how to fly the Blackbird, as well as how to drive a conventional car, and the former set of lessons has been going better than the latter; when she imagines their grown-up life together, which she’s been letting herself do, she imagines Illyana will drive, but Illyana’s only just too young to drive legally—she’d rather ride on the back of a flying demon, if one were advisable, which in the four-block-long so-called downtown of historic Salem Center they are definitely not.
Sam and his beat-up Chevy? Wolverine and his motorcycle? Unavailable. And so—because it’s such a long walk from the X-Mansion—Kitty and Illyana are taking the bus: Kitty so she’s not late to her dance lesson, the Russian girl for companionship, and because she wants to buy something in town. (What thing? she won’t say; likely components for a trial spell, whose names Illyana knows, but not in English.)
Each girl has two books; they are reading while holding hands. Kitty has all the discrete math from the first of her two volumes down cold, and she’s in the middle of Up the Walls of the World, which she’s not sure whether she’d recommend (she likes the way the author invented aliens, but it’s slow-moving, and maybe too sad).
Illyana carries her red leather Advanced Summoning textbook (on long-term loan from Stephen Strange) and The Master and Margarita, in Russian.
The mutant from Chicagoland is wearing a lavender demin jacket that has become a bit tight for her, the sleeves a bit short for the girl she now is, but she loves it. The spellcasting teleporter from Siberia via Limbo has black jeans, a white button-down shirt that’s loose in the shoulders, made for a squarer figure than hers, and a mischievous look epitomized by a raised eyebrow. The girls know better than to interrupt each other’s avid reading, but the occasional giggles, or astonished intakes of breath, are hard to ignore.
“Go ahead, tell me,” Kitty finally says after Illyana mumbles something, happily, but too fast for Kitty’s very imperfect spoken Russian. Kitty is expecting a running joke from the Bulgakov, which her friend couldn’t share with her brother (Piotr’s not a big reader anyway, not the way that Illyana is, and he would probably scratch his head when he learned how long the book had been samizdat).
“It is actually the textbook that made me—snarf,” Illyana says (the verb is, to her, brand-new). “It’s what you have to do to control a number of these particular air demons at once. It is like juggling—you have to hold, to imagine— you know what? You can read this page yourself.”
Kitty reads the page, and understands perhaps half of it: she doesn’t do Advanced Magic, but nothing bad will happen if she reads a book about it, if the book has come from Stephen Strange, who won’t let dark magic books circulate. By the time she finds the end of the English language text she’s laughing too. “You mean you have to— oh.”
“Right,” says the Russian girl. “And it works—it could save somebody’s life. You just have to put—you know.”
Then the bus gets to the end of the line: Main and Maple, in Salem Center, half a block from Stevie Hunter’s studio. “I’ll meet you there,” Illyana says.
Kitty walks up two flights of stairs, the way a baseline human teen girl would—uncertain on one step, throwing her shoulders back, projecting confidence, on the next. She could phase and go faster, but she won’t: dance class is the one part of her life where she’s neither ahead, nor behind, about where a normal girl her age, one who practiced but had no exceptional gifts in this art form, would be. She takes her jacket off as she ascends, so that by the time she’s through the door and in the mirrored studio, with its polished wood floors, she’s wearing what you’d wear to practice modern dance: gold leotard, hair scrunchie, ballet flats, nothing else.
There’s Stevie Hunter, waiting with a clipboard; there’s a metal rod for opening and closing the curtains across the window and the other curtain, the stage curtain, at the long mirror. There are three pitchers of water and a lot of plastic cups on a plain wooden table. And there are five other girls, none of whom Kitty knows well, and there are the exercises, some familiar to anyone who’s watched or even read about ballet, some unique to this kind of modern dance training, and a few that Stevie—who knows what she’s doing (she also studies conditioning for other kinds of athletes) had made up: one knee, both knees, one toe, five toes, sixty degrees, now eighty degrees… now with late Romantic music (Dvorak); now with all over the place modernist music (it reminds Kitty of Ilya’s growing interest in heavy metal: too dissonant, too much for her), now with a very familiar pop track… New Order?... leap, turn back, hips out…
The girl who has used a jet engine to incinerate aliens, who regularly invades the inner sanctums of super-bad guys who can level city blocks with a word, struggles to make her calves, her heels, describe an arc that’s clear and fair and smooth.
And struggles again, to another New Order track. Shoulders back. Hips level. She gets it. She doesn’t get it. She gets it. (Another girl three feet away gets it, doesn’t get it, gets it, gets it just right.)
Now something fast with pizzicato strings—up, back, forward, straight up. Kitty’s body feels, to her, like a sailboat in a strong breeze that’s blowing the wrong way, now the right way, now the wrong way. She can get where she’s going, but to get there with grace?
(Is the girl three bodies away from her, the one in the jade leotard, a girl she’s seen at the mall? Did she drop by the X-mansion, but choose not to stay, on the night that Warlock first arrived? Had Kitty, or Ilya, met her older sister, maybe? Meg, with dark hair?)
“Focus!” the dance teacher says to Kitty, not unkindly. She’s walking between the dancers in a way that only experienced dancers can do, somewhere in between a painting teacher inspecting her pupils’ evolving canvases and a cat among close-set tree trunks.
The string quartet enters a slow movement. “Stillness,” Ms. Hunter says. “Now, the angle we practiced last week—arms and spine parallel, slowly, move out…” She demonstrates.
In non-Euclidean dance space, Kitty thinks, all the girls’ heads would meet at infinity. But she leans sideways, just as Stevie Hunter has asked her to do.
Half an hour passes. It’s exhausting and refreshing and a relief, all at the same time. The balls of Kitty’s feet hurt; her shoulders and hips, on the other hand, feel good, and her rib cage, and her breasts, in that just-purchased sports bra, feel neither too big, nor too small, nor distractingly new (though they are, even more than usual, tender).
The other girls leave quietly. It’s now that Kitty normally talks to Stevie about, frankly, whatever might be bothering her, whatever she’d want to confide in somebody who’s not a mutant, and has never lived at the school.
But Stevie’s already in her office. There’s just a barre, and a very long mirror… when Shadowcat (that’s the code name she’s considering, though nobody but Ilya knows it yet) looks at herself in that big mirror, what does she see? It wavers, and not just because of her mutant powers: sometimes she sees the same girl she’s seen for years, the one who’s flat and tall and fades into the scenery except when somebody wants an academic answer, when she pops out front again.
Sometimes she sees what she wanted Piotr to see: an ingénue, the protagonist of the Greatest Mutant Love Story Ever Told, Except That They Were (Oh!) Too Young! She blushes just thinking about it—he was hot, and kind, but she was really ready to crush out on anybody who fit those two criteria, and he was so kind about it, for a while, until he wasn’t, and was it his fault that she fell so hard, in secret, for his little sister, who was little indeed when they met? And now—
What does Illyana see, when she looks at Kitty? A girl in command of herself? Or a girl who doesn’t know where to put her feet (she is so very much not an especially talented dancer), a girl who doesn’t know which was is up, a girl whose body really seems like it will keep changing, very slowly, for who knows how long?
She’s standing on tiptoes deciding whether she has hips, trying to figure out whether she can set her elbows, wrists and shoulders level, meeting her eyes with her eyes, and yes, looking right in the mirror at her breasts, which are so tender that even looking at them seems to make them ache: when will they get there? How long have they been on their way? Should she dress differently somehow—when she’s not in costume, and not in a leotard—to make them stand out, or to help them along, or to keep them quiet until she understands what her body even wants her to be?
Should she do something about the cloud of rat-sized, six-winged fire-breathing demons that have materialized in back of her, the ones she can see in the mirror, singeing the air with the sparks from their tongues?
That’s a much easier question. She phases immediately, looks around for a weapon: something that might work against demon-dimension creatures in Illyana’s absence? cold iron, maybe? the metal in the curtain rod, if its iron content is high?
She’s not invisible when phased, of course, unless she enters a solid object, which she’s done now—in fact, she’s entered the mirror; she walks back out, seizes the curtain rod and starts to charge at the demons, hoping to bat them down before they escape and terrorize Westchester—
and then stops: she was so startled that she forgot to see whether they might be a threat, or whether they were really more like Lockheed’s uglier cousins, friendly unless they felt threatened themselves. “Hi, guys,” she says, steel curtain rod still in hand, in case they are a threat.
They wheel forward threateningly, then zoom up towards the ceiling, all six at once, and exhale fire in a kind of coordinated grid display, harmlessly; then they vanish, all six at once, with a splash, as of water being poured from a pitcher onto the floor.
Or onto Illyana, because Kitty’s best friend is standing in the doorway, soaking wet, having poured the remaining contents of one pitcher of ice water, meant to refresh the dancers, over her head. That button down shirt has become translucent, and Kitty finds her gaze moving back and forth from her roommate, to the empty dance floor where six winged creatures once hovered.
Illyana looks very wet, out-in-a-thunderstorm wet. But she doesn’t look sheepish, or even amused, or even uncomfortable; she looks proud, and yet she doesn’t look like herself, because her cheeks are bizarrely puffed out, because she has—she spits them out—a mouthful of cherry tomatoes. “It worked!” she says. “Sorry—I mean, to startle you like that. I like to surprise you but that was not a surprise I meant.”
“What,” says Kitty. “I am looking forward to your ‘I meant to do that’ talk.”
“I meant to do that,” says Illyana. “I was trying to figure out the way to tell the miniature fire-wyverns where to go and when to go away—but the root for the dispel part of the spell was in, I think, Old Church Slavonic. Which Doctor Strange I have learned, does not read fluently.”
“But you do? I know it turned into Russian eventually, but was that the passage you showed me, with the pencil markings—oh.”
“Right. That was Doug. Doctor Strange thought you had to drown a witch and fill her mouth with poison to send the wyverns home, which was why he forbade me to learn the spell, but it turns out—“
“All you have to do is pour water over a witch…”
“..while her mouth is filled…”
“…with plants belonging to the nightshade family. That’s almost as good as meeting at infinity,” Kitty says.
She pours another full pitcher of water over her best friend’s head, and then pours the last half-cup or so over her own.
“That,” Kitty says, “is for scaring me a bit. And this”—she picks up her lavender jacket and drapes it over Illyana’s shoulder—“is to keep you warm on the walk back, so that you don’t have to teleport us home.”
“That is a lot of water,” Ilya says, draping the jacket on a chair. Both the girls look around—the studio’s deserted—before they remove, together, button by button, the soaking wet button-down shirt: there is Illyana’s newly filled-out figure again, and her black bra—certainly not a sports bra. The cups are sheer but the straps and the sides are mesh, like the shadows of vines over clean skin.
“Give me a minute,” Kitty says. “You are beautiful.” She is: the sun haloes her shoulders, her white-blonde hair, her chest. “And that was awesome. That was…”
The sun hasn’t set yet; it flares, giving Illyana a corona, and Kitty a silhouette. The girls are surrounded by mirrors, every one of them telling them what they want to know, and nothing they don’t want to see, about themselves.
That demin jacket is even tigher around Illyana, with her wider shoulders, than it was on Kitty, but it can fit. Together, again, the girls button the recalcitrant final buttons, and walk down the stairs to discover, of course, that there’s a county bus, if they wait a while, but the sun’s still out, and they’d rather walk home.