Good Night, Lois – Peter Pan
The phone rings and I know it's Lois. Ever since I gave her my phone number, we’ve been talking on a regular basis, almost every other night.
I force a smile on my face, hoping it will make it all the way into my voice. “Hey, kiddo, good to hear from you. How have you been?”
“Fairly good, Clark. Know what, I –” There's a brief moment of silence. When she speaks again, she sounds worried. “Are you okay?”
“Sure.”
Apparently, I'm not at all convincing. “Is it Lana?”
I rub the bridge of my nose. How is she so perceptive? Lana was here this afternoon and just bulldozed me into taking her out tomorrow. She reserved tickets for the movies, which of course I am supposed to buy. It didn't ever occur to her that I might not want to go. Still, she's not the reason I'm in a foul mood.
I sigh. “Not exactly.”
“What happened?”
The last thing I want is to burden Lois with my problems. But she's also the one person I can talk to. Suddenly, there's a huge lump in my throat.
“I wasn't able to save them,” I whisper.
Fresh tears spring to my eyes. It's killing me ever time that happens. No matter how strong, how fast I am, there's always someone I fail. And this time it wasn't even that I couldn't have gotten there in time.
“Who?” she asks softly.
I should tell her that I don't want to talk about it, which really I don't. Reliving the moment isn't going to bring them back. It's only going to make things so much worse.
Yet, the words just flow from my lips and I'm helpless to stop them. “There was a tornado. A family was driving in their car when it headed into their direction. I should have been able to save them. Catch their car when the tornado hit it and smashed it into a bridge. I could flown them to safety. But that would have meant revealing myself.”
I close my eyes and try to breathe through the nausea as my stomach clenches with guilt. Would it have been easier to just stay away altogether?
What good did it do to catch flying debris and reroute the tornado around homes when I might have driven it right towards that family? They might have even seen me, for all I know.
Well, they can no longer tell anyone what they might have witnessed.
And a part of me is relieved about that, which only makes the guilt weigh that much heavier.
“Oh, Clark.” Her gentle voice feels like an embrace. “I'm so sorry.”
My throat is so tight I can't speak. And on the other end of the line I hear Lois breathing. But with her, even silence is comfortable. In the seven years we've known each other, this kid has grown into my best friend, my confident and I wouldn't know what to do without her.
Even if sometimes we're just being quiet together and share each other's pain.
After a while she clears her throat. “Would it be so bad if you revealed yourself to the world? All the things you can do, they could really make a difference.”
“I know.” My stomach clenches in renewed guilt over all the cries I ignored. “But what kind of life would that be if everyone knew? People would be terrified, I'm sure.”
Or so I'm trying to tell myself. After all, not wanting to scare others is a lot better than being a coward. But the truth is that I'm the one who's terrified of being pegged as a monster.
“Not if you help them,” she says quietly. "I wrote about you in school, you know? We wrote an essay on who was our hero. And I chose you. All the stories about Peter Pan you told me. They were true, weren't they? You really saved all those fairies and mermaids and Lost Boys in trouble, didn't you?”
I don't quite know what she's getting at. “In a sense.”
“What if people didn't know it was you doing all these things? What if you turned yourself into a fantasy? Like you did to save me?”
I almost burst out laughing as I picture myself in green shirt and tights, trying to keep the hat in place as I fly. John M. Barrie never told us how that's supposed to work anyway.
But then I realize what she means. “You think a costume would work?”
Lois chuckles. “Depends on the costume, I’d say. If you're wearing a leopard skin and green tights nobody's going to look at your face.”
I grimace. “That sounds like Tarzan rather than Peter Pan.”
“You’re not allowed to pick Peter Pan, anyway, because he belongs to me,” she says cheerfully. And I can almost see her stick out her tongue. “Good Night, Clark.”
Oh yeah, Peter belongs to her, hook, line and sinker. For better or worse.
“I'll think about it.” And I will. My heart is already beating a little faster at the idea of becoming someone else so that I can help and still have a somewhat normal life. Someone who's a hero rather than a nightmare. “Good Night, Lois.”
Last edited by bakasi; 12/20/24 12:47 AM.
