Nick
“It’s official,” Andrew said. “He can’t get out of this one. I think Lightning Man is fucked.”
“He’s not fucked,” I said, taking another swig of beer. “He’ll get out of this, just like he gets out of everything else.”
“No way.” He leaned forward, his computer stylus pen in hand, and fixed something tiny on the screen that I couldn’t see. “Temptus has made the entire planet of Pluto into a nuke and is hurling it at Earth. How the hell is Lightning Man supposed to get out of that?”
I didn’t know, actually. It was Saturday night, and we were sitting in Andrew’s living room, each of us with a beer in hand. I was on a chair with my feet up, a notebook on my lap as I jotted down sketches and ideas. Andrew was at the computer, his Illustrator program open, actually creating Lightning Man onscreen.
I may have been a party animal, I was a homebody one night a week: Saturday. My friends—acquaintances—didn’t understand it, but I didn’t give a shit. This was our ritual, Andrew and me. Saturday nights, we’d hang out in his living room, drink beer, and make comics.
I didn’t even remember how it had started. Sometime after his accident, I’d taken to coming up with outrageous comic stories by his bedside, and sometime after that Andrew had started drawing the stories I invented. During the long, thick fog of his recovery, after our parents had bailed on both of us, the comics were a way for us to keep each other company without actually having to talk. Because when we talked, we always danced around the real issues—or talked about them, which was way fucking worse. We were talked out. Making up the exploits of Lightning Man was better.
Now we’d graduated to making Lightning Man on a computer instead of a pad and paper. That was Andrew’s talent, not mine. He could take up a stylus pen and do a computer drawing that knocked your socks off, while I could barely draw a stick figure.
So I stuck to the storytelling part.
We didn’t publish Lightning Man, not online or anywhere else. No one had ever seen Lightning Man except for Andrew and me. That was what kept him interesting—the fact that he was ours, and ours alone.
“Okay, genius,” Andrew said now, quickly setting up the next panel. “Pluto, which is now a nuke, is hurtling toward Earth. What’s next?”
I was already doodling a solution. This was how I plotted Lightning Man—I came up with an unsolvable problem, then pulled a solution out of thin air. Since no one was reading it, it didn’t matter whether the plot was believable. “Well, here is Temptus’s problem,” I said, referring to our supervillain, who had horns and was always trailed by wisps of smoke in Andrew’s drawings. “The distance from Pluto to Earth is so big, his nuke is going to take”—I looked it up on my phone—“twenty-three years to get here. So he has to send the nuke through a hole in the space-time continuum to get it here faster.”
“Uh huh,” Andrew said, already sketching Temptus in his sketchbook, his way of trying out ideas. Temptus was scribbling equations on a white board.
“When Temptus opens the space-time continuum,” I said, “Lightning Man will jump into the rift, reversing the effects with his presence.”
“That puts Lightning Man adrift in space and time,” Andrew pointed out.
“Not if Thunder Boy is back at headquarters with a program that will pull Lightning Man out of the continuum, as long as he is pulled out before the rift closes. Which is ten seconds.”
Andrew nodded as if this was an actual possibility. “Tricky,” he said. “But Thunder Boy is a genius. What’s going on with the redhead?”
For a second, I thought he was still talking about the comic. “What redhead?” I asked.
My brother turned from the screen and rolled his eyes at me. “The hot girl you took out for a sandwich, dumbass. That redhead.”
Fuck. Evie. “Nothing is happening,” I said, and I felt the pain of those words, right in my balls. Nothing is happening.
“Nothing?”
“It’s possible I fucked it up.”
Andrew looked surprised, though he shouldn’t have. “It’s possible? Fucked it up how?”
Just talking about this brought a tension headache to my temples. I had never done anything more difficult in my life than turn Evie down yesterday. But I couldn’t think of what else I could have done.
No, that was a lie. I could think of it. And I did. A lot. But I still didn’t think I was wrong.
Andrew was waiting for an answer, and I told Andrew everything, so I said, “I fucked it up by not having sex with her.”
“What?” Andrew said. “I thought you weren’t sleeping with her.”
“I’m not. Thanks for the reminder of my blue balls, though. She asked, and I said no.”
“Uh huh,” Andrew said, disbelieving. “So the redhead asked you for sex.”
“Yes.” I think some dirty, dirty sex would make it better. And I think you’re the guy to provide it. Damn, I would be hearing those words on my deathbed. When I would still be regretting saying no.