INTERVENTION

Monday

“Ok, Vantrice,” I said, wheezing as I exhaled the way my therapist had showed me, “You have five minutes.”

“Five minutes?! How I’m gonna explain to you in five minutes, though?”

“Four minutes and fifty-six seconds.”

She slumped back into the chair and crossed her arms. Rays of flickering afternoon sunlight bounced off her orange jumpsuit and stung my droopy eyes, reminding me that it was too late in the day to deal with this shit.

Mr. Tubman, head janitor of the facility, stood next to me, scowling. Having to explain to him, a 68 year old man who was always a year away from retirement, that yes, the toilets (and the labyrinthine extradimensional space holding them) were permanent … Lordy. That had made me feel like one of those soldiers charged with presenting a folded flag to some dead kid’s parents. There was agony in his face.

Through a stroke of cruel bad luck, the toilet in the area initially caught up in Vantrice’s power had been leaky, and thus, so were its myriad of cloned porcelain children. As anal as he was, Mr. Tubman would never be able to clean the mess up fully. Those flowing johns were in non-euclidean space, a realm that only spacetime scofflaws like Vantrice could navigate safely. If she hadn’t been on probation (and incarcerated, to boot), JIT probably would have rejiggered her apprentice program to include mandatory powered community service in this regard, just to help ease the burden on the venerable Mr. T and his colleagues. Certainly they would have appreciated the assistance.

For a sweet second, I pictured Vantrice and the custodial staff trying to work together. Her, a perpetually disinterested conjurer, trying to lead a group of angry, roughly-bearded men through endless dark corridors while they questioned her judgment. I know for damn sure that Mr. Tubman would have loved every minute of it.

I didn’t get time to dwell on it. The young wizard piped up.

“First off, Ms. Sagan,” she paused a second, licking blue-colored lips, “I guess … I’m just sorry? I, uh, know you don’t need this.”

Mr. Tubman snorted. I motioned at him ever-so-slightly with my head.

Vantrice stared blankly at no one in particular. It took her a second, but she got the hint.

“Oh! I apologize to the JIT staff too. And that’s real. I am so sorry.”

I looked to the old man, expecting to catch his eyes rolling. Instead, I found myself looking into a thousand-yard stare. He opened his mouth to say something. A sigh came out.

“If y’all need me, I’ll be cleanin’ tawlets upstairs.”

As he shuffled away, Vantrice leaned in closer to me. The jumpier of the two mooks from the Powered Policing Group escort reacted to the sudden movement by inching forward a bit.

“Look,” she said, shifting nervously in her chair, “I know that you know I’m in trouble.”

“No shit?” I thought, almost aloud.

“I know,” I said, almost inaudibly. I coughed. My mouth was parched.

Vantrice nodded, then raised a hand to tuck some strands of her blue hair behind one ear. The tattoo on her wrist made me cringe a bit. Pigpen, her gang moniker. One of the cops saw it too and looked away. I wondered how many officers he had seen trapped in Vantrice’s little mazes.

“So, what did they finally bring you in for?”

I tilted my head at Vantrice and imbibed a cup of coffee, black like me, that I had spiked earlier that morning.

She put her head down and murmured something under her breath. I heard “gang-related,” but it could have been any number things that included the word “gang.”

“Thought you were done with Ded2Rites?”

She sighed a bit and peered down at her feet. Either she was lost contemplating the aesthetics of grey socks and plastic prison sandals—which, as a millennial girl, was totally within the realm of possibilities—or she was thinking about how to explain her backsliding in a way that wouldn’t seem like a slap in the face to me and all the hard work that I’d done on her behalf.

“I … Well … You know, Ms. Sagan.”

“Do I? Am I a mind-reader now? You the one with powers here.”

A smirk.

“Also, to read your mind, I’d have to look you in the eyes.”

She tilted her head up.

“Look, I just wanna go home for the day. Ms. Lamarck said you have something to share. Some …”

“… information.” She shifted again in her chair.

“And you think what? Why would I want this?”

Vantrice shrugged her shoulders and resumed shoe-gazing. More murmurs.

Ded2Rites was an occult gang: black hoodies, ritualism, esoteric cadences. The truth is, for all the BS about their terrifying “Older Gods”—jokers with names like ’Shrub-Niggawrath’ and ‘Iza-Thot’, who often demanded tributes in the form of stolen bling, 40 ounces, and EBT-approved take-and-bake pizza—they feared The Man more. I could make these kids shake more than any Red Hook abomination.

She strung together a stammered sentence that contained the words “charges” and maybe “get,” or “get me off.”

“Come on Vantrice, it’s almost 3:30. I know you aren’t trying to keep me here late.”

“That missing honor student bitch,” she said, doing her best at eye contact, “I know where she is.”

Who?

“What hono—”

Within a second of her comment, it came to me.

The high school beauty queen abducted from her posh uptown home the previous year. The extradimensional prodigy who created elaborate worlds with her brain to escape the stress yoked to her by hover-parents. The winsome face plastered on every nightly news outlet and monetized digital milk carton.

We basically said it at the same time:

“Wardrobe.”