I was not in the best of moods on the way over. June was still in her doctor gear, stethoscope, no-fun shoes, the better to buckle me into her front seat and grill me: was I scheduled for the knee surgery, was I off those painkillers yet. I said Coach would be looking into it, now that the season was over. I didn’t tell her to check with the devil about his establishment freezing over, because that’s the day I’d let that bone doctor cut into me. She asked how long since I’d seen the Peggots, another sore subject. I’d passed on dinner invitations until Mrs. Peggot quit asking. You know, busy. Tomorrow is always another day.
I was surprised Emmy was not in the car with us. And that Maggot was, in the back seat, shrunk into his black hoodie like a mad turtle. I asked if Emmy was meeting us over there, and it was June’s turn to go moody, saying Miss Emmy was now under the impression certain rules did not apply to her. And that Maggot had been staying at her house for a few weeks. She glanced over her shoulder like he might have something to add, which he did not. Fun outing.
The Peggot place was crowded with parked cars and an occupying Peggot invasion. Some I’d not seen since back in the day, cousins I’d crushed on Warcraft, now turned into their dads, same face hair and Buckmark tattoos. Hammer Kelly caught me off guard with a bear hug halfway between tackle and drowning man. I’d not seen him since the day of Emmy’s not-engagement ring and all that. He looked wrecked. I told him cheer up, the world’s not ended yet.
Which it hadn’t, as far as I knew. But this was no normal Peggot hootenanny. Men out in the yard with their volume turned down, shuffling their work boots, blowing smoke at the trees. Aunts with faces like old pocketbooks, rolling the foil off covered dishes that nobody was eating. Maggot wouldn’t come inside. His aunt Ruby nabbed me and said if I’d not been upstairs to see Mr. Peg yet, I could take my turn whenever somebody else came down. Which made no sense. I said we’d already spoken, and she eyed me with her tongue bulging out the side of her cheek, the exact thing her mom Mrs. Peggot did if she caught you lying. There we stood, Ruby with her dyed-to-death black hair coming in white at the roots, me wondering if some law says we all turn into our parents. If so, here’s me signed up for death at an early age. And Maggot, damn. With a fucked-up snake like Romeo Blevins for a dad, you actually hoped the mom’s jailbird genes would win out. I promised Ruby I’d hunt up Maggot and we’d both go upstairs to see Mr. Peg.
I found him down by the creek, playground of our mighty boyhoods. Squatting in the dark, side-arming rocks towards the water. “Yo, Storm,” I called out. “What’s the forecast?”
He craned his long neck around. “Wolverine. Get a fucking manicure.”
I sat down, gave him a fake punch in the shoulder, and even that small violence made him shrink deeper into his hoodie. He tossed another rock at the invisible creek. “We were some pitiful Avengers,” he said. “You know that, right? Vengeance was never ours.”
“Speak for yourself. You’re the one that always picked the lame-ass superpower.”
“Okay. So even back then, me being Stormlady insulted your manhood.”
“I’m just saying. You can pick anything, and you go for the power to make bad shit happen in terms of weather? It’s like you’re purposefully limiting your range.”
“Or to make good weather happen. Always look on the sunny side!” He made a smiley leer at me that was terrifying, even in the dark.
“Right. Convince me that ‘Have a nice day, for real’ is that useful as a power.”
“Like you’d know, big chief jockstrap. I’ve been waiting to have one of those nice days for, what. Eight or nine years?” He picked up a rock and threw it with such shocking force, we heard it connect with a sycamore on the other bank. Thwock, a random dead strike.
And then, shit. Maggot was crying. Breath racking out hard, like screaming with the sound off. I was scared to touch him. I just sat there wishing I could get something back for him, from our childhood days of people cutting us so much slack. Mr. Peg, my God. He had the patience of Job. Taking us fishing, setting down his own pole over and over again to rescue Maggot and me from our lines cast into the trees overhead or snagged on the bottom. Mr. Peg baiting our hooks with the worms Maggot wouldn’t touch. It’s possible Maggot hated fishing. If I knew, I wouldn’t have let him say, for fear Mr. Peg would stop taking us. Now I watched him wring himself out like a rag, with no idea what powers existed to save him.