Page 39 of Too Many Beds

Sensing a need for a topic change, I offer up another friendly grin to Tim and ask, “Can I use your clipboard?”

Tim, although initially startled by the non-sequitur, rallies with impressive speed. “Uh, what for?” His fingers tighten protectively on the clipboard.

“Yeah,” Caleb says narrowly, squinting at me with a deep and undeserved suspicion, “what the fuck for?”

I shrug one shoulder. “I’ve never held a clipboard before. I want to see how it feels. Does it make you feel empowered?” I ask Tim. “I think I would feel empowered by it.”

Caleb, sensing trouble born from ingrained wariness due to our past interactions with anyone outside our family, warns, “Tim, whatever happens from here on out, don’t give him the clipboard.”

I shoot a look of absolute betrayal at Caleb. “Why are you constantly trying to crush my hopes and dreams, Cal?”

“You only started wanting to hold a clipboard five seconds ago!” Caleb huffs irately.

“Says who?” I demand. “Maybe I’ve wanted to do that for years. You don’t know me, you don’t know my life!”

“Yes, I bloody do,” Caleb says, looking up at me with one of those rueful half smiles on his face that never fails to catch me right in the chest. “I have literally known you since we were six.”

That’s true. First time I met Caleb Moon was just after my parents and I moved to Colbie, the tiny seaside town my friends and I grew up in. My parents wanted to get away from the city, and their friends, Mei’s parents, who were also looking to move somewhere quieter, told them about a couple of cottages for sale in Colbie.

Before I was stolen by the ultimate-evil corporation Obsidian Inc. and experimented on with the superhuman drug called Liquid Onyx, my parents were city people through and through. But after they got me back, they were afraid of it, of all the people they couldn’t trust surrounding them all the time.

Colbie gave them the chance to start over someplace where they knew absolutely everyone. It was where we found and built our new, much larger, much more bizarre family, with people who knew exactly what they went through because their children were exactly like me. Liquid Onyx survivors. Kids who had our DNA mutated by one of OI’s scientists in an experiment that turned us into superhumans with enhancements and powers that made us dangerous to the outside world.

I met Caleb on Colbie beach when I ran away from my new house to escape being forced to unpack boxes. Caleb was kicking a football around on his own, having snuck out of his house after an argument with his dad, one of many to come.

Caleb kicked the ball at me without warning, and my shield powers reacted on instinct when I raised my arms to block it. A bright-orange shield materialised in the path of the football. It bounced off the shield, and I dropped my arms, horrified at what I’d just revealed to a complete stranger. I might have been only six years old, but I understood better than anyone the consequences of my secret getting out to people I couldn’t trust not to react badly.

But Caleb ran right up to me that day without any trace of fear and told me, in a rush of excitement, that I didn’t needto be afraid, and wasn’t this brilliant because I was just like him. We were the same kind of different. Superhuman. Special.Survivors.

I was so relieved that he didn’t run away from me screaming that I let myself be dragged to Rex’s house, where Caleb introduced me to his best friend, who he said was one of us too. They told me about their powers, Caleb’s complex empath abilities and Rex’s terrifying ability to combust matter with his mind. Later, I took them to meet Mei, and I watched them be extremely impressed by her ice powers.

It was improbable that the four of us would wind up in the same small town the way we did, and I don’t have much belief in the idea of fate, but if the universe did have some hand in bringing us together, I’ll be grateful for it for as long as I live.

My life would be so much less without them. Without Caleb. He was the one who first took the fear out of what we are, who made it something exciting and good rather than a reminder of the pain and horror we went through at the hands of Obsidian Inc.

I don’t realise how Caleb and I have been staring at each other, bubbled off in our own little world for what has probably been a weird amount of time, until Tim clears his throat to get our attention.

“So, like, how old were you when you got together, then?” he asks, like that’s a perfectly reasonable question that doesn’t make all the synapses in my brain fire off at once in a cacophony of sheer, bloody panic.

“Not now, Tim,” I say, holding out a hand in front of his face and ignoring how mine is burning with the embarrassment over having been caught practicallygazingat Caleb like a lovelorn romantic hero from a romcom. “We’re having an argument about … wait, what are we arguing about again?”

“You know what? I don’t even remember.” Caleb ducks his head, taking a very deliberate step back from me, which I’m not sure whether to thank him for or be annoyingly hurt by.

I never know how to feel when Caleb pulls away from any intimacy we share these days. There was a time when we were freer in how we touched and acted towards each other, but things have undeniably changed between us since his breakup with Mei, and there’s only so much pretending we can do before it gets stupid or genuinely harmful.

“Uh, well,” Tim says, tilting his head like he’s actually trying to remember how this bullshit kicked off. “I think it started with you wanting a race-car bed, and your boyfriend saying he doesn’t want a race-car bed, because he became of legal drinking age or something, maybe.” He doesn’t sound sure or happy about any of that, which is fair.

“Tim, he became of legal drinking age three years ago, come on,” I scold. “If you’re going to live here, learn our laws. At least the important ones. Also, he’s not my boyfriend. If he were my boyfriend”—I throw Caleb a pointed look—“he would let me get arace-carbed.”

“Holy shit, fine, get the race-car bed,” Caleb says, exasperated. He glares at me, warning, “But I’m not sleeping in it.”

“Why would you sleep in it?” I ask before I can stop myself. “We’re not boyfriends yet.” Triumph is singing too loudly in my veins to realise how that’s going to sound.

“Not yet?” Tim prods, coming very close to smirking for someone who was afraid of me ten minutes ago.

Caleb is just doing the slack-jawed,did you really just say thatthing he usually reserves for Rex and the oftentimes insane results of our brother’s faulty brain-to-mouth filter.

“Shut up. I just meant … metaphorically,” I say, trying unsuccessfully to blag it out.

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