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Chapter 1: School's out

It began on the day school let out for Christmas holidays, a sudden hush falling on the mansion and the school grounds. He'd granted her gruff praise and, later on the porch, a beer out of his jealously guarded stock of Molson's. They'd sat a while in silence, watching the zodiac turn over them while he smoked one of his stinky cigars.

The silence was comfortable and familiar like the smell of his leather jacket and the first of the mist making its appearance. She could already feel when it would begin to turn into dew, a tentative flutter behind her eyes telling her exactly how the delicate moisture came to fall on earth, her mind automatically finding the handle to tweak for turning 'eventually' into 'immediately', but she knew better. It was perfect like this for now.

They'd sat like this so many times, around camp fires, at the edge of the lake or on the roof of the remodelled boathouse, breathing the cool night air in deep lungfuls and letting time pass with its own momentum. She took a sip from the cool bottle and found the taste a lot better than the smell of the stuff, then risked a sideways glance at him. It was now or never.

“Dad...”

“Hrmph?” As an answer from him, that was as good as they came.

“Well, I was thinkin'... well, uh, you know I did turn fourteen recently?”

“Hrmph.” Wary and gruff, okay. Definite thin ice here. Be certain, Mom had said, and don't mess around about it.

Well, easy for her to bleedin' say!

“So, I was kinda, er, hoping to ask... I mean, tell you somethin' that won't probably make you happy like, at all.”

“... hrrrmh.”

Okay, now he was definitely having a worst case scenario running through his head. Great job, Kendall! Another minute of awkwardness and he'll probably think you're preggers or somethin'.

Better make sure that he doesn't get the wrong idea, like, Right Now.

“Ihavekindabeenwantingtoworkonthatbike.”

She held her breath as he exhaled cigar smoke slowly in a plume of hazy blue. Then he turned to catch her eyes, tilted his hat back and gave her the patented crooked smile.

“Absolutely. No. Goddamned. Way.”

He flung the cigar butt into the night, ruffled her hair tenderly and strolled indoors with the screen door echoing a final beat to the conversation that never really was.

Dammit!


The next day:

“... and it's only scrap metal, really! Like, over half of it needs to be re-wrought and untangled and welded together again! It's not like it's a real bike after he decided to wrap it in a freakin' bow around that stupid oak...”

“Uh-huh”, said her mother in that infernally patient tone of hers, hands busy potting a batch of young gardenias. She passed each pot to Kendall's table where her daughter distractedly patted down the soil around the fledgeling plant and wiped the pot edges clean.

“But then he just said in that granite-boulder-ne'er-to-be-moved voice of his, 'absolutely no goddamned way',” Kendall said and pulled her best imitation of her father, which involved an out-thrusted jaw, squared shoulders and a lot of un-boulderlike swaying, “and I think it's so unfair! It's not like he does anythin' with it ever.”

“Huh,” Storm said non-committally and hefted the bag of compost-made potting soil back into its air-proof container in the corner. She grabbed a rag and wiped the specks of dirt from the worktop into the last waiting flowerpot, giving it a cursory nod of approval before divesting it into the tender care of her daughter.

“I mean, all he'd have to do would be to take the keys to garage 6 out of his key fob and he'd have to worry like, none 'bout it. I already know how to work metal like a pro, he said so himself when he read my last report card and that portfolio I did on my assignments, but noo, he won't trust me with a bit o' junk yard material! How unfair is that?” the fourteen-year old demanded and patted the soil of the last pot down with a little too much enthusiasm.

“Careful with the roots, Kennie”, Ororo reprimanded gently as she washed her hands in the rainwater basin bolted outside of one of the windows of the attic. “Water them, would you?”

Behind her the air was scented with a sudden build-up of oxygen as the teenager's fashionably thin eyebrows knit together in concentration. There was a precarious moment of uncertainty and a breath drawn and withheld, and then the gentle patter of rain hitting newly potted soil echoed on the high ceiling of the loft. Ororo turned with a smile to see her daughter washing her hands in a fluffy little rain cloud of her own devising while carefully keeping an air of nonchalance.

“Thank you”, she said just as nonchalantly, although her heart ached with pride. The beginnings of a deeper understanding for the tangled gossamer webs of atmospheric layers spanning the globe were already self-evident in Kendall's careful weather experiments.

She didn't jump in headfirst like her mother at the same age, instead preferring to work carefully on honing one skill at a time. It was a rather joyless approach to the gift of the skies in Ororo's opinion, but she understood her daughter's anxiety with her powers all too well “ Kendall had been born with the same enhanced senses and bony claws as her father but weather control was an unfamiliar, recent presence in her young life.

All for the best in Ororo's opinion “ Kendall's temper tantrums had been thunderous enough on their own when she had been four.

There was budding self-confidence, too - Kendall had truly learned finesse in the past year in all fields of her life, not just with her growing powers and the metalworking that seemed to intrigue her.

She was blossoming into a gamine young woman, all long legs and awkward elegance and shiny long hair. Logan would probably begin to keep a shotgun at hand in a few years. Or, Ororo thought considering her daughter's growing height and fragile beauty, a bazooka. She hid her smirk by flicking an errant lock of hair out of her face as Kendall raised her still pearly eyes from her ablutions.

“Come on, child, let us hang up our aprons for the day. It's almost nightfall already and you've made my afternoon's work much lighter.” Kendall followed her mother's example of cleaning up the gardening tools without a word and slouched out of the door with her hands loosely crossed, deep in a teenage sulk.

She didn't even notice when her mother took a sudden turn to a dark corridor, just followed her steadily advancing back without much of a thought. Only when they stopped for a second of muffled metallic clinks did she notice they were not headed for the boathouse. Palming the lockpicks, her mother pushed open a steel door with a black number '6' painted on scuffed beige and clicked the lights on.

Kendall's nose knew where they were before her brain registered where their little detour had taken them. The smell of old tires, scorched metal and long-stale tobacco was unmistakable.

She'd been here a few times with Dad and Uncle Remy but had never noticed the small maintenance door through which they had just stepped. Kendall had been too mesmerized by the blackened carcass of the once glorious Triumph to spare her attention to much else in the garage on those short visits.

Now the sight of the massive bike rendered into a mad pretzel made her heart trip-hammer with excitement.

“So that's what's left of it”, Ororo said and regarded the warped remains of the Bonneville with such a critical air Kendall was surprised the broken bike didn't rise up and dance to make amends for its sorry state.

Ororo took in slowly the old girlie calendar on the wall, the happy motley of bottles of beer and bike wax littering the shelves, the pile of dirty rags in the corner and the overflowing pickle jars used as ashtrays. It was such a long look that Kendall had ample time to squirm in her boots, plan escape and a dozen good excuses, especially for the girlie calendar (which was disturbing, not least for the ungodly outdated hairdos).

Her mother's sapphire eyes came to meet hers, something dangerous dancing in their corners.

“You want the keys to this mess, child?” It was a typical question from Mom, one to which there were no right answers, only a variety of wrong ones. All you could was to lay down your best gamble and hope for the best.

“Yes”, Kendall said and took the plunge. "Yes, I really do, Mom."

“... Interesting”, said her mother archly, then opened the door for her in an obvious gesture of getting a move on. Kendall turned to go in time to miss her mother glaring at the girlie calendar.

The shift of air in the garage was so subtle that the teen didn't even think about it, used as she was to living in a house with a few perennially open windows.

The sound of old paper fluttering in the slight breeze was masked by the solid sound of the shutting metal door and in the darkness the naked girl on October's leaf was hidden as the calendar fell to the floor, snapping shut.

TBC...





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