There are two sides to the battle in front of us, and on one side is Black Friday discount, Wi-Fi hotspot, this year’s model, subscription only, now with more stretch, noise-canceling-noise-creating headphones, one car to every green, this lane ends.
The other side is magic.
With effort, Ronan recalled where his physical body was, riding in a car with his brothers, on his way to Adam and a new life with his dreams firmly under control.
Don’t bring anything back, Ronan told himself. Don’t bring back a truck, or a road sign, or dubstep that can never be shut off, only buried in a yard somewhere. Keep your dreams in your head. Prove to Declan you can do it.
Bryde whispered:
You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.
Ronan woke up.
4
Wake up, Waaaaaashington, DC! Authorities should be notified,” laughed TJ Sharma, the host of the party. “Someone tell them a young woman with superpowers is on the loose.”
All eyes in the DC-suburb McMansion were on Jordan, a young woman with eyes like a miracle and a smile like a nuclear accident. The other partygoers wore relaxed casual; Jordan didn’t believe in either relaxing or being casual. She wore a leather jacket and lace bustier, her natural hair pulled into an enormous kinky ponytail. The floral tattoos on her neck and fingers glowed bright against her dark skin and her enthusiasm glowed bright against the suburban night.
“Shhh, shhh,” Jordan said. “Superpowers are like children, mate—”
“Two-point-five for every American family?” TJ asked.
“Better seen than heard,” Jordan corrected.
In the background, a nineties band whined frantically about their youth. The microwave dinged—more cheap popcorn. The party’s mood was equally ironic and nostalgic; TJ had joked the theme was delayed development. There was a punch bowl full of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and SpongeBob played on the flat screen next to a pile of PS2 games. The partygoers were all mostly whiter than her, older than her, safer than her. She didn’t know what they’d be doing at this party if she wasn’t performing for them.
“Push in, punters—queuing is for rule followers,” she said. She indicated the scratch paper TJ had provided. “Homework time. No partial credit. Write ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ and then put your name to it in your best school signature.”
Jordan was attending this party as Hennessy. No one here knew the real Hennessy, so there was no one to say she wasn’t. Even TJ knew her as Hennessy. Jordan was accustomed to wearing identities that weren’t hers—it would’ve felt stranger, in fact, for someone to know her by her actual name.
“You’re gonna love this,” TJ told the others, voice invested with high excitement. Jordan liked him well enough—he was the young vice president of an area bank, a slender-boned Peter Pan, a boy in a grown-up world, or vice versa. He still bought himself toys and waited for his phone to tell him when to go to bed. He lived in this mass-produced mansion with roommates, not because he couldn’t afford to live alone, but because he hadn’t yet learned how to.
They’d met on the streets of DC just a few weeks after Hennessy and Jordan had first arrived in the area. One a.m., nothing but anticipation and mercury vapor lighting the night. Jordan was on her way to return a stolen car before it got them all shot, and TJ was returning from a bored midnight Walmart run.
His: a souped-up Toyota Supra he’d bought off eBay after seeing one in a YouTube series.
Hers: a souped-up old Challenger Hennessy had stolen a few hours before.
He’d challenged her to a grudge match at a gas station. Winner took the other’s car. Jordan wasn’t ordinarily a fool, but she was just enough like Hennessy to get sucked into such a game.
The short version of the story was that Jordan now drove a Supra everywhere. She’d driven TJ for a little while, too, but Jordan didn’t date anyone for long. They were still friends, though. Or at least as close as people could be when one of them was pretending to be someone else.
“The key to proper forgery,” Jordan told the partygoers, “is to remember you can’t copy it, the signature. The curves and the flourishes will look stilted, everything will end in hard stops instead of trailing off prettily. Okay, I hear you say, so I’ll trace it. No way. Trace it, the lines’ll wobble their way from bed to pub and back. Any amateur who looks close can tell if a signature’s been traced. But, Hennessy, I hear you say, what else is there? You have to internalize the organic structure of it, don’t you? You have to get the architecture in your hand, you have to have the system of shapes memorized. Intuition, not logic.”
As she spoke, she rapidly drew signatures and random letter combinations over and over. She barely looked at her work as she did, her eyes entirely on the partygoers’ handwriting. “You have to become that person for a little bit.”
Jordan had homed in on just one of the handwriting samples. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, signed with the unusual name Breck Myrtle. It was an angular signature, which was easier than a fluid one, and he had a few really good specific tics in his handwriting that would make the trick satisfying for onlookers.
Flipping the paper over to hide her scratchings, she confidently wrote one last set of words on the blank expanse: I deed over all my possessions on this day in November to the most fabulous Hennessy. Then she signed it flawlessly: Breck Myrtle.
Jordan pushed the paper to the partygoers for their assessment.
There were delighted noises. Laughs. A few sounds of mock dismay.
Breck Myrtle, the partygoer in question, had a complicated reaction to this. “How did you … ?”
“She’s got you, Breck,” said one of the other women. “That’s perfect.”
“Isn’t she scary?” asked TJ.
None of them had seen the scariest bits of her—not by a long shot. If Breck Myrtle kept talking, Jordan could’ve learned to predict his way of using language, too, and she could use that knowledge to compose personal letters and emails and texts instead of having to hide in formal contractual language. Forgery was a skill transferrable to many media, even if she generally used them more in her personal than business life.
“You’re so young for crime,” laughed one of the other women.
“She’s just coming into her powers,” TJ said.
But Jordan had been pretty well into her powers for a while. Both she and the real Hennessy were art forgers. The other girls in their house dabbled in it, but they were more properly copyists. Jordan found there was a tendency to misunderstand—to conflate—art forgers with copyists. The art world had plenty of artists who could replicate famous paintings down to every last fold in a sleeve. Copies, Hennessy would say contemptuously, are not art. A true forgery was a new painting made in the style of the original artist. To copy an existing Matisse was nothing: All one needed was a grid system and a good understanding of color and technique. To forge a new Matisse, one must not only paint like Matisse, but one must also think like Matisse. That, Hennessy would say, is art.
And Jordan would agree.
A doorbell ring cut through the nineties music.
Jordan’s heart flopped with anticipation.
“Bernie!” TJ said. “You don’t have to ring the bell like a stranger! Come in, straggler!”