Chapter Text
The police were here. At least some of them. One man and two women in blue uniforms were standing at the edge of the crowd, shouting and waving along with everyone else. Victor stood by the bench, where the injured or otherwise second rate players sat. Sydney wasn’t here. She was on the field, by her opponent’s goal, open, but not offside.
Good.
The soccer moms were as loud as the police, if not louder, screaming at their children to get in position or screaming at the referees or screaming at the opposing teams. Sometimes, they were just screaming. If Victor could have chosen his spot it would not have been by the bench, smack dab in the middle of the shouting, PTA soccer parents. But it was Sydney’s turn to bring snacks, and so Victor stood by the bench, in front of the cooler exploding with cut up watermelon.
Mitch usually came to these things.
Mitch was cool under the gaze of these idiotic suburbanites, and he knew how to sweet talk them. Usually it was by not saying much, smiling politely, and not glaring, something Victor was currently failing at. If that wasn’t enough, Mitch’s hulking form kept everyone else from interacting with him. But Victor was thin and pale and young and these mothers would not stop talking to him.
It would have been almost bearable, if not for the police.
“Which one’s yours?” someone asked. Victor didn’t turn. The man was in plainclothes, standing next to him, smiling. His daughter was on the opposing team, and it had been her turn to bring snacks too. The man’s wife was fretting over the food and the opposing coach rolled her eyes.
This man was a cop. Victor knew by the way he stood. And also by the way he waved to the other cops at the end of the field.
But those three cops didn’t need to be here in uniform. They didn’t need to be here at all, and something suspicious was happening. If Victor had been alone, he might have been able to extract this information, but as of now, his options were limited. Susan, whose daughter actually knew how to play her position as keeper, was inspecting Victor and the cop closely, silently. Helen, whose daughter seemed more interested in rugby or full contact football than soccer, was thankfully preoccupied with something else.
The cop asked Victor again.
Victor didn’t respond. There was no way the man would recognize him. Victor and Mitch and Sydney had moved across country to a tiny suburb that had never heard of EOs or Eli Ever. They’d bought a nice, detached house and established nice, fake identities. It was for the best. In the city, there were too many new people, too many chances that someone would recognize one of them. No one would look for Victor in suburbia.
“Which player, number ten?” the man asked.
“Number 13,” Susan said, ambling her way over. Helen turned suddenly to look at Victor and the cop. The cop looked at Sydney and paused.
“Ugh…”
“She looks more like her other father,” Susan said. Victor opened his mouth to say something. To point out that Mitch wasn’t Sydney’s birth father and, to Victor’s knowledge, had never pretended to be. Sure, Mitch was supposed to be Sydney’s parent, how else would they explain two adult men living with a "13" year old girl, but the two never claimed to be genetically related. But the other implication of Susan's statement was fresher. Other father.
“What?” Victor said.
“Hmmm…” Helen stepped further into the conversation, eyeing Victor up and down and then turning to the cop. “Sydney does look more like Mitch with the,” she waved a hand in front of her face. The man opened and closed his mouth and Victor wondered how uncomfortable this man would have to feel before he went away. "But there's a weird resemblance to Victor, too. With the hair and something about the cheekbones. Doesn't make any sense when you think about it."
“She’s adopted,” the man said, slowly, trying to put the pieces together.
“KEEP MOVING TURNER!” the coach yelled at Sydney who had gotten the ball and was on a one-way dash to the goal. The cop kept squinting at Victor and Victor’s hatred flared, rising in him like a cloud of black smoke.
“Sydney’s pretty good,” Susan said conversationally. Helen chewed her lip, caught between sucking up to Victor and trying to flirt with this new cop whose wife was standing a few feet away. “Did your husband play?”
“My—what?” Victor asked again. Part of him felt like an idiot for not saying something more substantial, but who did he need to impress? The fake mother who probably went home to a loveless marriage and a budding alcohol problem? The good families were all on the other side of the field, sitting down, quietly. Victor didn’t need to impress these wannabe socialites. The point was not to end up in jail, to not give anything about himself away to the police.
“Mitch,” Susan said slowly. “Did he teach her to play? He always comes to these…”
“Mitch doesn’t know how to play sports,” Victor found himself saying. “Except swimming.”
“So who taught Sydney hmmm?” Helen asked. “You’re not exactly the sporting type yourself.” Helen moved to squeeze his bicep, but Victor stepped fully away. “Well, I’m just surprised. You know Beth had tried to teach Michelle to play forward, endlessly, but with no success…” Helen sighed, dreamily, blinking her eyes at the cop.
Seeming to understand that people were talking about her, Beth go up from her folding chair to join the assembled crowd. Victor wished Mitch were here. At least he’d be able to communicate to someone the sheer, excruciating torment of talking to these people.
At first, Victor had thought he could fake it. He’d be fake nice and get into their good social graces and smile and nod. Eli had done it long enough, hadn't he? Then surely Victor could, too. But that confidence had waned been months ago, and it turned out there was only so much useless, petty drama he could take. It turned out that had been three weeks worth. And now he was here.
“Which position does yours play?” Helen asked the cop. Beth waved at Helen, her braids drifting in the wind. The cop started talking about his daughter and how he’d taught her everything he knew. His daughter wasn’t that good. She was defense, but she couldn’t kick hard enough to clear the ball to the other side of the field. Victor didn’t know much about sports, but he knew this cop was not good at them either.
Beth and Helen and the cop started talking and talking, but Susan just watched. She was watching carefully, her eyes flickering between Victor and the cop and back again. Her husband had left her, so technically, Susan was the only single mom here, but this was not a flirting gaze. Her face was pressed into a fake, peppy smile that Beth and Helen were seldom seen without. But her hands were tight where they clutched her lanyard and her fake plastic nails were chipping where she had started to pick at them.
“And so I decided to move out here!” the cop finished. He thumped Victor on the back and made some remark about not enough testosterone being at these games. Victor wanted to punch him. Punch him and then explain what an imbecile he was.
Instead, Victor looked at Susan and frowned.
Something was going on here.
#
Mitch laughed. It was a low, quiet sound, something that sat heavy in the pit of Victor’s stomach and made his lips twitch upward.
“This could be a serious problem,” Victor said as he filled the pink and blue ceramic bowls with pasta and began placing them on the wooden place mats. Sydney was still washing her hands before dinner, but Mitch, Dol and Victor were in the kitchen, sitting around the mahogany table. The kitchen was nice, well appointed and fresh, the kind of thing straight from a home improvement catalogue. Naturally everyone in the family hated it. Not that they were a real family. It didn’t matter.
“Susan McCaffery is not on to us,” Mitch said as he set down the forks.
“She was staring between me and the cop.”
Mitch mixed his pasta with his fork. Victor’s finger went the grains in the wooden table as Dol rolled onto his belly on the floor. Mitch reached for the dog, scratching his belly with ease and Victor’s shoulders tensed without understanding.
“She’s suspicious of something,” Victor continued. “And the officer was too…present.” Victor knew that police officers existed in every town. And he knew that Victor Vale was legally dead and not a suspect anymore. There would be no bulletins out for his arrest. There wouldn’t be any for Mitch either. For one, the prison they had been in still refused to admit that someone had broken out. For anymore, Mitch had gone in and changed his arrest record to be about someone named Mick Turnabout. It was similar enough, he claimed that the guards would probably start to believe that’s who they really had arrested. Meanwhile, Mitchell Turner’s record would be clean and he could use his regular social security number and adopt Sydney (closed adoption all records sealed) in a perfectly legal way.
So, no one was looking for them. No one even knew to look for them except their allies. But Victor couldn’t shake the feeling that anything could go wrong. There were still EOs popping up all over the country and he and Mitch were still compiling their own list of people they would have to visit. It was a bit of a carrot and a stick issue. On the one hand more allies never hurt, on the other Victor was not going to let another Eli Ever jeopardize his safety.
Sydney came back in the room, sitting at the table primly. Her dyed white-blond hair was held back in a ponytail—the kind she’d never worn before, but did now as part of her ‘disguise.’ She was also wearing a soccer jersey of someone she had never heard of before coming here.
While Sydney was rebranding herself into someone sporty, Mitch had rebranded himself as a gentle, caring father (albeit one that hit the gym very frequently and would terrify his daughter’s potential romantic partners on site). He drove Sydney to soccer practice, he volunteered for school events. He had even volunteered for the upcoming charity bake sale.
Victor was supposed to have rebranded too, but that had gone much less successfully. Right now, he wasn’t quite sure what he was. He wasn’t even twenty years older than Sydney and the parents around the school looked at him with a curious fascination. He was young. Not immature like their own children, but still holding onto the vestige of youthfulness that they all craved. He was supposed to be a travel writer to explain why he might leave town unexpectedly. But that was it. Victor had tried gung-ho neighbour to little success. He’s tried sullen writer too, but the other parents would not give him two seconds alone.
Mitch was supposedly a freelance programmer, which was close enough to the truth at any rate. Whatever he was doing, most of it surprisingly legal, had paid for the little house in suburbia and the off-white picket fence and the flowers that kept un-dying. The flowers were Victor’s idea—to help Sydney practice her powers. Animals were good, but killing and reviving them repeatedly was cruel. But with the flowers, Syd could bring them back when they died again and again, exploring the feelings it caused in her and the extent of her powers. But somehow having lush undying flowers in the middle of winter only seemed to piss off his neighbours, and make them more curious.
There was no winning. And they had been here so long, that even the very core of what had made them a group was starting to change.
Sydney ate silently. Mitch ate silently. Victor wanted to talk about something, for once, but he didn’t want to betray how much Susan was bothering him. So, he ate silently too. Only Dol, whose loud mouth breathing beat out like a metronome, made any sound at all.
Victor wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel. Right now, he was angry. Angry at Susan, at the police officer, at the concept of suburbs. This was a good place to lay low, he told himself. But it didn’t stop him hating it. It didn’t stop the feeling that something was slowly killing him.
Across the table Mitch smiled at him, and Victor smiled back, reflectively. It was obvious what Mitch was trying to say: don’t worry about it. But Victor was worrying about. He was worrying about how Mitch smiling produced such an automatic reaction in him.
He was worried that the silence at the table was digging into them, eroding what they really were. He was worried they would get complacent, or that they would turn into Helen and her husband, who hated each other and only stayed together because of their daughter Tiffany.
Above all Victor was worried that here was where he was going to spend the rest of his life, not flying or soaring, but driving to soccer practice and sitting at home, washing dishes, and never getting his feet off the ground.
#
Victor waited by the car. A minivan. No one pulled over minivans. It was a good car for a disguise. Victor hated it. He hated it so intensely it surprised him sometimes. Like the minivan was a symbol of everything that was wrong with here. And Victor had known that before coming here, he had known he wouldn’t like it. Ah, hubris.
Now Victor waited by the car and focused on what he’d learned in prison. Coiling his hatred into a ball, into determination. Waiting. Sydney had tryouts for the advanced soccer team today. The parking lot was next to the soccer field and Victor looked onto the grass to see all the girls desperate to make the cut.
Victor waited.
A white Mercedes Benz pulled up beside him in the parking lot and Victor knew who it was instantly.
“Hello,” Susan said. She was smiling. Her daughter would be at the tryouts too, of course. Most of the parents were waiting in the front of the school by the “Kiss and Ride” but Victor had parked in the parking lot to avoid them.
Of course, Susan would be here.
“Look, I know that you’re a writer, and writers tend toward the pretentious, sullen type, but I’m here as favour to you, actually.” Susan locked her car and stepped over to Victor, not touching the minivan, but still leaning back toward it. Victor wanted to scoff. Instead, with remarkable restraint, he raised an eyebrow. “Helen nominated you for the PTA.”
Victor whipped around.
“I know. I figured you wouldn’t like it. But you know Helen.” Susan shrugged. “It won’t stick since Sydney’s in grade eight and she’ll be off to high school in a couple months, but you’ll have to attend the lead up nomination meetings. The first one is this week. When we decide what to bring to the bake sale.”
Mitch had mentioned the bake sale. Victor sighed. He did not want to deal with Helen.
It wasn’t that all of the parents at this school were horrible. The issue was the ones that were decent did not join the PTA and were not accosting Victor in supermarkets to talk about how to test the firmness of melons.
“Thank you for the warning,” Victor said. If he was going to find out what Susan suspected, he would have to seem nice, or at least, not overtly hostile.
Susan waved her hand as if it was nothing. She was not much older than he was. She was thirty-five, and the girl, Jack, was her oldest. Susan had apparently gotten pregnant right out of university.
“You know, Jack mentioned to me that Sydney might want to come to the same summer camp, it’s a soccer boot camp. You can talk to her about it and I can give you the details.” Susan fished out her phone, but Victor’s eyes just flickered to the field where the prospective soccer team was still running drills.
“Why would you talk to me?”
Susan’s hand paused on her phone. “What do you mean?”
“Why wouldn’t you talk to Mitch? Besides, if Sydney wanted to go, she would have mentioned it.”
“All right,” Susan said, but there was an edge of steel to her voice.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Victor remained unconvinced.
“No, I get it. Mitch takes her to soccer practice and comes to parent teacher conferences, and takes care of her summer camp and her school work and drives her to hang out her friends. Mitch does everything.” There was a bitterness to her voice that suggested she was taking this very personally. Victor didn’t have to justify himself to her. He didn’t have to talk about the even splitting of house chores or how he had to do most of the grunt work because Victor couldn’t really cook and Mitch could. They even spilt their EO research evenly. But even if they split everything with the household, Mitch did do most of the taking care of Sydney.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your concern,” Victor said again. The coach on the field blew her whistle and the girls excitedly gathered around. This would be the point where the coach made some statement about all of them being good and other nonsense and then she’d tell them when she’d post the list of who made the team.
Susan was glaring at him, but Victor focused on the field. And then something sunk in his gut as he recognized one of the girls. She was smiling and laughing and Victor had seen her before at the game where Sydney had to bring snacks.
It was the cop’s daughter.
Susan seemed to recognize her too, and her hands balled into fists, her posture rigid. It didn’t matter what Mitch said, Susan was thinking about something. She knew something.
Victor unlocked the van and climbed in, eyes focused ahead. Susan didn’t move, her body facing the field, her legs bent, like she was standing at attention.
Something was very wrong here. And Victor was going to find out what it was.
#
Cindy Tenenboym hated conspiracy theorists. Sure, some seemed harmless, like the ones about faked moon landing, but once someone started claiming Jews were lizard people controlling everything behind the scenes—fuck no.
Her roommate was the only such theorist she tolerated and that was because Hanan didn’t believe in Martians or ghosts or the fucking Illuminati. She believed in EOs. She believed so emphatically, and did so much research that even Cindy was starting to question whether or not they were real. And Hanan was always kvetching. She was so close, so unbelievably close to a real breakthrough.
So, at first, Cindy had thought that maybe there was something behind these EOs. Not in the way that Hanan thought, but maybe in some capacity.
And then Hanan disappeared.
And then Cindy was walking home when white van jumped the curb and hit her.
Cindy lay there, struggling to breathe, struggling to remember what Hanan had said about almost dying and EOs. She was just outside their apartment, the window a few floors from her head. But everything already seemed so far away.
Her head was woozy, her thoughts swimming and she was dying and dying and it seemed like there were police lights on. Had the police come here so soon? Or maybe these people who had hit her were the police. Maybe Hanan had known to much and now so did Cindy.
If Cindy could just get to her room she could see it all, pinned to Hanan’s corkboard. If Cindy could just fly up and get to her room. But her limbs would not obey her and her vision was swirling around in circles. Her lungs were two dimensional, impossible to expand open.
Fight it. She remembered.
And so, she fought it. Maybe Hanan had been right after all, maybe that was why she disappeared, maybe that’s why these men had jumped the curb for her.
All Cindy needed to do was get up to her room.
Up.
Get up.
Up.
White and blue and red lights flashed.
“What the fuck Chad! What the fuck!”
Get up.
Up.