This, too, isn't a particularly long chapter - not quite 10 pages. But again, I ended it at a logical place in the story. I'm still not sure what my posting schedule will be - twice a week, hopefully, but that may slow down a bit as I start to lose my 'cushion.'
From Part 1:
Dr. Lane, the lady doctor Lane, was a nice lady. Lois had been to her house many times. At the end, Mama and Lois both stayed at Dr. Lane’s house. Mama had explained to Lois that the doctors would adopt her, and that her name would change to Lane. That was okay, Mama said. The name she had before was only a borrowed one, anyway.
“But not your first name, Lois,” Mama had reminded her. “That’s your very own name to keep forever. I gave it to you, and I chose the best one I could find. So you’ll always remember how special you are, and how much I love you.”
Now the doctors were leading Lois to the car, the big black one that Mr. Dr. Lane drove. Lois bit her lip and climbed into the back seat. She was going to be strong, so Mama would be proud of her. She was going to fight dragons when she grew up.
The Girl Next Door, part 2
-----
Life with the Lanes was very different.
While they seemed to understand her need to grieve, she was left alone far more than she should have been. Sam Lane was a psychiatrist, but for all that, he didn’t relate well to Lois. He didn’t seem to be able to do small talk, at least not with her. She’d formed the impression within a short time that he’d have been much more comfortable with a boy.
Ellen Lane showed Lois genuine affection, but not the powerful love Mama had always shown. Ellen was not physically demonstrative. She’d always had staff at the medical office to do all the mundane things throughout the day, and it was the same at home.
Lois had a nanny, a good woman but one who was always conscious of the social difference between her and her employers. There were no more snuggly reading sessions, no more hugs. No more messy sessions in the kitchen; the Lanes had a cook and a housekeeper and both were too busy for an introverted and lonely child.
Lois had tried once or twice to make a connection with one of the staff members. And she’d come into the kitchen one morning, very early, and had decided to try to make herself an omelet. Maybe the cook would appreciate not having to fix her a meal every morning.
Maybe she would let Lois help fix some of the meals. Maybe they could even bake cookies.
Mama had always allowed Lois to help on omelet mornings. Lois would stand on a chair next to Mama at the stove, hair and sleeves carefully fastened back, and Mama would let her stir the eggs as they cooked.
It wasn’t easy to do it all by herself. She dropped one of the eggs on the stovetop before she could crack it into the pan, and the other egg’s shell crumbled into the pan along with the egg. She carefully turned on the burner like Mama used to do, and tried to stir the eggs.
Unfortunately, she didn’t know she should use a nonstick pan. She didn’t know that she should put a pat of butter in the pan so the egg wouldn’t stick. She had the heat too high, and the egg mixture quickly began to stick to the pan and brown, and then blacken.
Dismayed, Lois took the pan off the burner and tried to dump the ruined mess into the trash. She rested the pan on the edge of the plastic garbage can, forgetting how hot the pan was. The garbage can’s rim and the garbage bag melted on that side.
She was standing there, unsure how to fix everything, when the cook arrived in the kitchen. Instead of reassuring Lois, the woman reacted to the mess, and immediately and loudly involved the Lanes in the situation.
Lois stood there fighting tears while the cook raged about unattended children, and Sam Lane assured her that it wouldn’t happen again. He sat Lois at the kitchen table across from him and Ellen, who was irritable because she was going to arrive late at her office.
“Now, Lois,” Sam Lane began pedantically, “you simply *can’t* cause this kind of damage. Cook will overlook it this time, but from now on you must not attempt this sort of thing again. You need to leave the cooking to someone who knows how to do it.”
“But – “ Lois started, but Sam held up a hand.
“You don’t know how to cook, Lois,” he said, ‘and it would be better for everyone involved if you just gave up on any further attempts.”
“But I can learn, Sam,” Lois protested. He preferred that she call him Sam.
“It would be much better if you simply leave it to the expert. You can’t cook, and you don’t really need to. You should concentrate on your schoolwork. Good grades are imperative if you want to get into medical school.”
“But I don’t want...” Lois hesitated, then continued bravely, “I... I want to be a reporter when I grow up, Sam.”
Sam was shaking his head dismissively before she even finished. “No, no, it would be much better if you just dropped that idea now,” he said.
Ellen was nodding. “Yes, my dear. The medical field is just the sort of thing you need. It’s prestigious and will earn you a decent living.” She stood and continued briskly, “Well, now that we’ve sorted that out, I do need to get on with my day.”
“I want to be a journalist,” Lois whispered softly, but neither of the doctors heard her.
Before he left, Sam made Lois promise she would stay out of the kitchen and out of the cook’s way.
---
Materially, Lois lacked for nothing as she grew. There, at least, Sam Lane was generous. She came to realize as she got older that while the Lanes were basically good and decent people, her presence in their family had been intended partly as an effort to save their marriage.
They argued all the time. Their childlessness was an issue that had driven a wedge between them long before Lois joined the family. They didn’t seem to have anything in common outside their professions. When they did talk to each other, they couldn’t agree on anything, and there were many silent, tense meals in the Lane house.
Lois tried not to hear the fights, but she was still learning to control what she and Mama had called her extra-noisy hearing. When she couldn’t concentrate enough to block the angry voices out, she would pull the pillow over her head and sing Mama’s song softly to herself. On those nights, she usually woke up with a tear-streaked face in the morning.
Lois spent a lot of time alone. She stayed in her room, writing in her journal and planning her future. She became involved in journalism in school, but steered clear of close friendships. She read a lot, and every night she opened the Princess Elizabeth story and read it. It made her feel closer to Mama.
-----
When she was sixteen, she started to change again. It was a terrifying time for her, and she’d never felt so alone. She couldn’t tell anyone about the scary things that had started happening.
She’d become used to her special vision and hearing over the years that she had been living with the Lanes. But one day while she was studying in her room, working on a particularly frustrating math assignment, she accidentally set fire to the paper as she glared at it.
In a panic, she snatched the paper off the desk, crumpling it in her haste to get to her feet, thinking to take it into the bathroom and pour water on it. The flames died beneath her clutching hands, and shaking, she turned her hands over to see the damage.
There was none.
Her hands were shaking, but there were no marks on them. No burns, not even any redness.
What if something like this happened at school?
Determined to learn to control the strange new thing she could do, she began to practice secretly, carefully testing her fire-starting ability with tiny scraps of paper in her bathroom, in the tub so that nothing else would accidentally catch on fire.
That was how she discovered her freezing breath, too.
She blew a little too hard on one flaming scrap of paper, coating it with ice in a matter of seconds. Flabbergasted, she jerked backwards, slipped, and landed on her bottom on the bathroom floor. It seemed like a good idea to just sit there for a while, trying to wrap her brain around these new abilities.
But two things Lois had in abundance were curiosity and determination, so before long she was up on her knees by the tub again, practicing both new abilities.
She learned, also, that she couldn’t be hurt.
She knew that she should have been burnt when she’d had her hands in the flames that day, and her natural curiosity drove her to find out why she hadn’t been injured. She tried to get a paper cut; the paper wouldn’t cooperate. She pricked her finger with a pin; the pin bent like a misfired staple, and her skin remained unbroken.
Sitting at her desk after she bent the third pin, she tried to recall the last time she’d had a cold; it had been at least three years ago.
Fire vision.
Freezing breath.
Never sick, never hurt.
Trying to hide her strange abilities, to cope with them and control them, further isolated her. No one at school was mean, really, but she had developed a reputation for being standoffish and hard to know. ‘Socially uncomfortable’ was what Sam Lane would probably call it. She didn’t date, didn’t have giggling girls over to stay the night.
She didn’t really have time for that anyway, though. She had dragons to fight, a world to save.
---
There was a facet of her invulnerability that she hadn’t considered at all until she encountered it. Being invulnerable meant she couldn’t trim her nails or her hair with ordinary scissors.
Lois looked at the broken nail scissors lying in her bathroom sink. The broken fingernail clipper was already in the trash-can.
Of course, it also meant she wouldn’t have to worry about breaking a nail ever again, but of more importance was the fact that she couldn’t very well just let her nails – or her hair – grow.
What to do, then?
Bite them? Invulnerable teeth versus invulnerable nails... but she’d never had a nail-biting habit and didn’t intend to start one. No matter how good a reason she had in favor of nail biting.
What was strong enough to trim invulnerable fingernails, to cut invulnerable hair?
Certainly a metal nail file wouldn’t do it. She’d just broken her scissors *and* her fingernail clipper, both of which were stainless steel.
“How about one of those heavy-duty industrial files – don’t they have diamonds on the cutting surface?” Lois asked her reflection. “Or a – what do they call those knife-sharpening things? A whetstone.” She could buy one of those at the kitchen store in the mall.
For Lois Lane, to have an idea was often to act on it. Heck, sometimes she acted on the idea first and then had it. At least, sometimes it seemed that way.
The kitchen store not only had whetstones, it had them in various sizes. Including a cute little one with its own little cloth pouch. Just right to fit in the palm of her hand.
Shut carefully in her bathroom, she ran the stone once across her index fingernail, experimentally.
Nothing.
Weren’t you supposed to get the stone wet?
Okay. She ran the stone under water and started again.
Still nothing.
She began to file fast and furiously.
Still nothing. Unless you counted the deep groove down the center of the stone.
Okay. What was stronger than diamonds?
Ginsu knife? What did those commercials say, again? Lifetime guarantee or something... Slices, dices, juliennes (what the heck was a julienne, anyway?) ...and, maybe, cuts fingernails?
Maybe. And if not, she’d get her money back. If she could adequately explain what, exactly, the knife had failed to do.
Or how about titanium? Where would she get titanium, though? Did anybody actually make titanium-bladed nail scissors? And if they did, *why*?
Or... how about acid? Hydrochloric acid? But where on earth would she get something like that? Hydrochloric acid – wasn’t that what was in your stomach? Ick.
Okay. Acid was out.
A laser?
A focused beam. Like...
Like her fire vision? A tightly focused beam of heat... and maybe a mirror when she started on her hair.
If she ever wrote an autobiography, she’d have to put that in – ‘I did it with mirrors’.
“Okay, Lois, get a grip,” she muttered. “You’re losing it. Let’s try the fire vision gizmo.”
The first few attempts weren’t real professional. And she accidentally scorched the wood along the edge of the sink counter.
After that, she shifted operations so that she was working over the sink itself.
“I’m pretty sure porcelain doesn’t burn,’ she muttered, directing a short, focused beam at her left index fingernail.
Trimming her nails with heat made the bathroom smell kind of funny, but hey, so did perm solution.
“The things we go through to look nice...” she muttered, tipping her hands back and forth as she inspected the final result.
It was the same with her hair – her first attempts were pretty ragged. And trying to guide the focused heat using a mirror took a while to master. She burned the back of her shirt once, and melted part of the plastic frame on her handheld mirror.
Fortunately her hair was quite long by now, so she had enough length to refine her technique. By the time she was finished, though, it was fairly short. Oh, well. Short hair was easier to take care of, she’d heard.
Lois looked at her reflection. Not bad. The hair looked even on both sides. And her nails were short and well shaped.
Okay. She finally let herself think about the other side of this whole thing: it would work for the... other stuff, too. Legs. Underarms. As long as she was careful and took her time.
It might be awhile before she tried a bikini line, though.
She sighed. “I did it, Mama. I figured it out,” she said. “But sometimes I *really* wish you were here.”
---
Lois was a good student. By the time she was in high school, she had been on the honor roll consistently since fifth grade.
She was on the staff of the school newspaper, and won the journalism award in both her junior and senior years.
Ellen Lane seemed proud of Lois’s accomplishments, although her typical comment was a brisk “Good work, my dear.”
But with Sam it was harder to tell.
She remembered the math assignment that had given her so much trouble – both the actual assignment and her setting it on fire. Despite the terrifying incident, she had persevered and turned it in on time. She’d gotten the highest score in the class, ninety-eight percent.
When she showed the paper to Sam, at Ellen’s prompting, he took the assignment and looked it over carefully.
“Hmmm... Ninety-eight percent?’ he asked in the slightly ponderous voice he often used when addressing her.
“Yes, Sam,” she said proudly, “I got the highest score in the class.”
He glanced at her over his glasses and returned to the paper. “I see...” he continued. “Hmmm. Calculus. I see you had trouble with implicit differentiation.”
“Yes, but Mr. Sorenson, my math teacher, said everybody did,” Lois said. “He’s going to go over it again.”
“You are not ‘everybody’, Lois,” Sam said. “You need to be *better* than everyone else to succeed in life, especially if you want to get into the right school.”
“But I did... I was,” Lois said, starting to feel defensive. “Ninety-eight percent was the highest score.”
Sam handed the paper back to Lois. “Ninety-eight percent,” he said. “That leaves two percent for improvement, Lois.”
He stood and picked up his briefcase. “I have a meeting in an hour,” he told Ellen, who was also preparing to leave.
Lois watched them go to their separate cars, and then went up to her room and closed the door. She had half an hour before she had to leave for school, and suddenly she wasn’t hungry.
She sat down on her bed, fighting tears.
No. She wasn’t going to cry.
She picked up Mama’s picture from the table beside her bed.
“Hi, Mama,” she whispered. “Look what I got. A ninety-eight percent. The highest score in the class. And I did it because of what you said, Mama. I decided I could do it, and I did, even with my fire-starting eyes.”
Despite her best efforts, a single tear tracked down her cheek.
-----
To be continued
