Outside Popeye's the street looked like a war zone. Hunks of timber hung from demolished buildings . . . broken glass littered the street . . . dazed people surged back and forth. Cars collided and fights broke out. The bulldozer, the source of all this destruction, had apparently gone completely beserk. It had torn the gas station apart and, with little red and yellow flags (Free Car Wash When U Buy 10 Gals.) draped all over it, swerved wildly toward the highway. And all this time, Jimmy professionally clicked off picture after picture.
Nearby, on the sidewalks, in the crowd that milled and swayed and screamed, not a soul had the sense or the instinct to look upward for help, to look up, that is, in time to see Supergirl landing on the roof of a nearby building. What a sight they missed! She was nothing less than magnificent. Tall and broad-shouldered, alert, steady-eyed, her blonde hair streaming, her red-booted legs planted firmly, she radiated confidence and strength. Had that crowd only had the sense or the luck to turn their eyes upward and, thus, see Supergirl above them, they would have calmed down at once. Shamed and strengthened by the mere sight of her, they would have stopped their frenzied, meaningless activities and waited with a calm and patient belief for her to straighten out the mess.
From her post on the roof of a nearby building, Supergirl took in the situation in the street. Bad. Very bad. The wires brought down by the fallen telephone pole crackled dangerously. Already, several little fires had broken out; black smoke engulfed the area and endangered life. Wasting no time, Supergirl focused her heat vision on the electrical insulators on the telephone pole. The wires melted and fell harmlessly to the ground. Cinch-o City. Now to take care of the fires. Flying off the roof, into the thick of the swirling smoke, she aimed herself like a bullet, straight at a water tank. Headfirst, she crashed through one side of the steel tank and out the other. Behind her, streams of water gushed out of the tank, poured into the street below, and doused the fires.
Selena was irritated. The bulldozer appeared more dazed and off-course than any respectable monster ought to be. The only good thing she could say for it was that Lucy was still unconscious and Ethan still imprisoned in the bucket.
"Around! Around . . . come
AROUND
. . . ." Selena ordered. The bulldozer began turning crazily in wider and wider circles, wrecking stores and shearing off fire hydrants.
With the fires under control, Supergirl turned her attention to the berserk bulldozer. Nothing but terror before it and destruction behind it. Arms tight to her sides, Supergirl flew off the water tank, her gaze fixed tensely on her objective.
The crowd spotted her, and a hoarse shout went up. "Do you see that!" "Who is it?" they asked each other, their faces turned skyward. It couldn't be Superman. He was millions of miles away. . . on his mission of universal peace. But she was so like him . . .the same red and blue . . . yet different, too. Not just that she was female, not just that over her blue leotard she wore a little red skirt. It was more than that. It was her . . . yes, her
style
. In the crowd they poked each other and smiled knowingly ("See what I mean, see that landing?") as Supergirl touched down gracefully on the roof of the behemoth.
There, for one second, like an athlete absorbing that final moment of concentration before launching herself heart, soul, and strength into the supreme competition, Supergirl paused. And the collective heart of the crowd seemed also to pause, to be balanced, as it were, between beats. One second, one second only of intense concentration, and then Supergirl wrenched the bucket loose with one hand. The machine screamed in pain, a grinding screech of metal.
The crowd went crazy. "Ooooh!" they cried. "Hurrah!" Like fans at an opera, they burst into applause and cries of "Brava! Brava!" And even as Supergirl flew off with the bucket in her arms, they kept up their cheers, undoubtedly hoping for an encore.
The bulldozer, now minus bucket and Ethan, but still containing Lucy, wandered erratically down the street . . .
Setting the bucket down in a secluded area in the woods, Supergirl pulled apart the steel teeth. There lay Ethan, looking sweet as a baby in a crib. Superbly handsome, even covered with soot and debris, he was also completely out of it. Alive or dead? Alive, Supergirl decided, a tiny smile at the corner of her lips. She certainly hadn't forgotten poor Lucy . . . but she couldn't leave this man unconscious, could she? In a flash, she transformed herself back into Linda Lee and gave Ethan's face a brisk, rather un-Linda Leeish slap.
Ethan's eyes slowly opened.
"You're going to be all right," a girl leaning over him said.
He stared woozily. An angel. A perfect angel.
"No broken bones."
Ethan smiled like a drunkard. He
was
drunk—on love. Say it again, darling angel.
No broken bones
. Let me hear those sweet words issuing from your perfect, tender lips just once more.
At that very moment, Selena's perfect, tender lips were framing quite a different sentence. "No, no, no,
NO
." A cry of true despair. First, that Super-whoever-she-was had come barging into her, Selena's, territory and made off with Ethan. Then the screen had gone crazy and kept showing her the bulldozer, even though Ethan was no longer in it. Just when she thought she couldn't stand it any longer, it had found Ethan for her—at the very moment his eyes opened. And who was there for him to see but that tall drink of water, that preppy Midvale School dip. Where had
SHE
come from?
"Don't look at her!" Selena ordered. "Don't, don't,
DON'T
."
Ethan looked. Ethan smiled.
Selena gagged. Oh, yuuuck. He looked even dippier than the Midvale School dip with that dopey, drooling smile dripping across his face. Then his lips moved. "What did he say?" Selena demanded.
Bianca chewed her gum thoughtfully. "Looked to me like, 'I love you.' "
Linda Lee had just heard those same three words. "You what?" she said, giving Ethan a hand as he climbed out of the bucket.
"Love you. With all my heart, forever." He put his left hand to his chest. Oops. Wrong side. He switched hands and thought with sorrow of his past indiscretions, of the many women he had loved and left. All that was changed. He was a new man. "A bird of free and careless wing was I . . ." he said, moving toward his only love, "through many a careless spring . . ."
Well. Really? Linda Lee didn't know what to make of this. She backed away as Ethan came toward her, romantically tossing back his hair.
"Stay, love! Let me behold thee."
Linda Lee had time only to think that he had a perfectly good view of her, when Ethan, arms out, leaped. A moment later, Linda Lee found herself being embraced and kissed. Even though it was her first kiss ever, instinctively she knew she was being well and thoroughly kissed. She closed her eyes and decided to cooperate (at least for a few moments).
Ah, love, love, love, Ethan thought. This was far from
his
first kiss ever, but kissing away enthusiastically, he concluded that all the other kisses that he had kissed were but pale imitations of kisses compared to this kiss he was kissing with his one true, adorable, and most kissable love. He closed his eyes ecstatically (but not without experiencing just the tiniest glow of satisfaction at how. . . well,
terrific
he was at this sort of kissing thing).
A turgid, chugging, uneven sound was wafted on the fresh breeze to the ears of the two lovers.
Ba, aaa, aaa . . . booom . . . ba, aaa, aaa . . . booom . . .
Ethan and Linda Lee heard nothing. And saw nothing. And knew nothing. . . even as the bulldozer rolled into view . . .
Lucy sat up, rubbing her head. The bulldozer, still wheezing metallically, ground to a stop. Where was she? Lucy wondered. What had happened? The last thing she remembered was leaping up on the bulldozer. Lucy's eyes fell on Linda Lee. Lucy's jaw fell open. Linda Lee?
Her
Linda Lee kissing that hunk?
And, now, Linda Lee's eyes opened, too. And Linda Lee saw Lucy. No, she didn't just see Lucy—she saw Lucy watching Linda Lee kissing Ethan. To say that Linda Lee was embarrassed was to say nothing. She was humiliated, mortified, overcome by shame. She had forgotten all about Lucy, deserted her best and only friend for a kiss, abandoned her for an embrace. Linda Lee pried herself loose from Ethan and ran.
Ethan ran after her, declaiming all the way. "The cold repulse, the look askance, The lightning of love's angry glance! . . . Like melting wax or withering flower, I feel my passion and
THY
power!"
Up on the bulldozer, Lucy snorted disbelievingly. Was this guy
fa real?
In Selena's bedroom, the mirror screen faithfully rendered Linda Lee's hurried exit from the scene of the kiss. Selena was unmollified by Linda Lee's running away from Ethan. A need for revenge burned in her heart.
"I don't know why you even bother about her," Bianca said. "She's nothing but a skinny, scrawny string bean. Wait till he sees you again," she added loyally.
"Forget it. Nobody gets in my way. Aha! You see where she's going? Midvale School."
"Selena. I could have told you. I mean, like check out her outfit. Who needs a magic mirror to—"
Selena wasn't listening. Her mind was clicking in its own warped grooves. From Midvale School, to teachers, to Nigel, to a conspiracy against her, Selena, was but one tiny hop. She snapped her fingers. "Nigel put her up to this!"
Bianca was the very voice of reason. "Like, I don't see that at all, you know?"
"Oh, you think she just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time? Is that what you think? Just happened to be there when he woke up, so he could see her first?"
"What I think is, you should, like, leave her alone and worry about the other one, the one that, like, flies."
"I," said Selena majestically, "worry about everything. Stand back, Bianca." She opened the Coffer of Shadow and muttered something over it. A cold evil wind rushed out of the box.
Bianca put up her hands. "Selena, come on, like, she's just a nothing; this is high-powered stuff. That kid's a total zero. Anyway, you can't do this; you don't even know her name."
"I shall concentrate on her face. My Shadow will do the rest." She held the Coffer of Shadow out in front of her. Inside, the Omegahedron, darkly radiant, spun round and round, gradually revealing a strange dim mass at its center. The light glowed joylessly up onto Selena's face: it was the dark glow of a cold, moonless night.
"Power of Shadow, take shape . . . . Thou art my sooty star. . . . Seek out the wretched creature . . . Destroy her. . . wherever she are!" An ominously shapeless shape oozed from the heart of the Omegahedron.
"That's awful!" Bianca said, unsure which was worse, Selena's poetry, the order she'd given, or that slimy little cloud she'd released.
"And nuts to you, too," Selena said royally.
The cloud, at first no more than a wisp of black smoke, gathered thickly below the ceiling, filled the corners of the room, and curled around the mirror. Bit by bit, it enveloped and overwhelmed the room with its shapeless, stinking, invisible presence.
"Oh, Selena," Bianca whimpered, and Selena paled, unsure of what she had unleashed.
The room grew dark . . . darker. . . still darker. The monstrous shadow enveloped everything. It gathered itself into one huge, looming shape, smashed through the wall, and swarmed out into the world, seeking Linda Lee.
What had happened back there? Linda Lee asked herself as she hurried away from Ethan in confusion. It was absurd that something as trivial as a kiss (and from a Total Stranger) had messed up her mind. After all, what was a kiss? Just two pairs of lips meeting. Why was that any more significant than two hands meeting? She knew there was a flaw in this reasoning, but it didn't reveal itself to her. The kiss had shaken her up.
All right, start again, she told herself, go over it logically. One—Supergirl had rescued a helpless human being. (No surprises there.) Two—the helpless human being had turned out to be a Gorgeous Male. (Wow!) Three—the helpless human being had said, "
I love you
" (to Linda Lee!). Four—not helpless anymore, he had then kissed her. And here, Linda Lee found that logic had its limits. He had kissed her . . . Her mind stuck right there. No five in the sequence appeared, and she was unable to figure out how and why one and two led to three and four. . . . But did she really care? And so what if she was confused? Better confused than refused.
On this happy thought, she arrived back at the Midvale School and signed in. Only a Linda Lee, at such a moment, still thinking of Ethan and, furthermore, the only student on a deserted campus—only a Linda Lee was capable of such a gesture. Who cared if she signed in, out, up, or down? Certainly not Mrs. M., who, snug in her little den with her TV and her beer, was in her usual well-buzzed state. But Linda Lee, alone on this alien planet, was still cautiously figuring out how to act like a regular kid, one of the girls, someone worthy of being Lucy Lane's friend. There were rules and there were rules, and what she noticed was that Lucy broke some and observed others. The trick was to figure out which rules Linda Lee could break, which boundaries she could cross, and which fences she could leap . . . though Linda Lee didn't tend to leap, so much as soberly walk around anything in her way.
She walked down the long corridor. Every room was empty, and she was acutely conscious of her aloneness. The sound of her echoing footsteps followed her, and it seemed to her one of the loneliest sounds she'd ever heard. Her mood shifted, thoughts of Ethan faded. It was her family she was thinking of, her mother, Alura, with her steady, wise eyes; her father, Zor-El, boyish-looking, loving, warmhearted. And Zaltar, long and graceful, Zaltar her mentor with his clever hands and fertile brain. Where was there anyone on Planet Earth like him?