"Seven Is An Even Number" II
Title: Seven Is An Even Number II
Author: Starhawk
Rating/Category: G, friendship
Characters/Pairing: Warren, Will/Layla, Magenta, Zach, Ethan, Freeze Girl, Jetstream
Summary: Warren figures that sometimes it's more important to study people than classes.
Numbers Matter
by Starhawk
How he had ended up at the Stronghold residence was something of a mystery to him. He had plenty of other stuff to be doing after school, and none of it involved studying. Especially not studying with other people.
Especially not studying with Stronghold.
He couldn't believe he was standing on the front steps of someone else's house--of this particular house, no less--with two textbooks under his arm and papers stuffed into the book jackets. Good thing no one from school could see him. His bad boy rep was in enough trouble as it was.
The door swung open before he could turn around, and Stronghold didn't look at all surprised to find him there. "Hey, Warren," he exclaimed, stepping away from the door and waving him in. "Layla said she heard someone outside. Come on in."
"What, does she have superhearing, too?" Warren grumbled. He shouldered his way past Stronghold and came to an awkward halt inside. There was nothing comfortable about this house.
"No superhearing," Stronghold assured him. "Just tree spies."
That sounded ominous to Warren--he'd never thought to ask the hippie if she could do more with plants than make them grow--but Stronghold was already calling for the others as he lead the way into the living room. "Hey, guys, Warren's here! Hide the snacks unless you want your chips charred!"
"Ha ha," Warren muttered, lagging behind. He leaned on the doorframe and stared at their cozy circle, sprawled out over couches and armchairs that had been gathered in the middle of the room.
"Hey, you own textbooks," Magenta remarked. She was scrutinizing him from the armchair farthest from the door. "I had no idea."
"Hey, you know what books are," he snapped, giving her a dark look. "I'm as surprised as you."
"Okay," Stronghold interrupted, falsely cheerful. He clapped a hand on Warren's shoulder and tried to steer him toward the other side of their circle. When Warren glared at him, he snatched his hand back and held both of them up in a gesture of surrender.
"Okay," he repeated. "Warren, why don't you sit... wherever, and I'll get some more chips. You want anything to drink?"
"No." Warren eyed the circle, wondering once again why he was here.
Stronghold's place was clearly on the couch next to Layla, and he was tempted to take it just on principle. If he was here anyway, he might as well do some damage. But he really didn't want to be that close to anyone, even the relatively benign hippie. Magenta had taken the only nearby chair, and the two remaining sidekicks were sharing the other couch.
Which was to say, Glowstick was hogging most of it while Popsicle perched on the edge of a single cushion. Warren wasn't surprised to see that the tall kid looked bored out of his mind, and had resorted to bugging Magenta to pass the time. The short kid had an entire library arrayed on various levels around him: the back of the couch, the arm of the couch, the table next to the couch, even the floor.
Warren figured the floor was the safest place to be. He wouldn't accidentally wreck any of the ridiculously expensive-looking furniture, and no one would sit down next to him. He dropped his stuff on the floor between the two couches and lowered himself to the ground after it.
The short kid promptly slid off the couch to join him. "So Layla says you're good at math," he began.
Warren glowered at him, then included Layla for good measure. Traitor.
Neither of them seemed to notice, the short kid because he was pointing to something in his book, and Layla because Stronghold came back with the chips just then and she was totally smitten. "I got you some soda," Stronghold said offhandedly, leaning over to set it on the floor beside him.
"So I was just wondering if you remember this stuff," the short kid concluded, ignoring the interruption. "Because I don't understand magnetism at all and frankly I don't trust the rest of these guys to know anymore than I do."
Warren stared at him. "Why would you think I have any idea what your classes are about?" he asked at last.
"Dude, math is math," the short kid told him.
"Yeah, and magnetism is a mystery," the tall kid added. He seemed pleased with the alliteration. "A monumental, malevolent, mystery."
"I'm afraid Ethan's right," Layla offered with an apologetic smile. "None of the rest of us understand it either, and you did really well in Heroically Applied Math last year."
He didn't even want to know how she knew that. "Yeah, and this year I'm doing well in More Mad Science," he informed her. "That doesn't mean I have any clue what it's about."
"Who are you blackmailing to make that happen?" Magenta asked, not as though she cared.
"My lab partner and I have an agreement," Warren told her. "She does the work, and I leave her alone. It was her idea," he added defensively when Magenta rolled her eyes.
"Look, just tell Ethan what to do and then he can teach the rest of us," the tall kid declared. "He's smart and stuff. It'll only take a few minutes."
Warren looked around at all of them. "I'm not your tutor," he warned them.
"Not yet you aren't," Layla agreed cheerfully. "We'll find a way to repay you, I promise."
He didn't believe that, but allowed the short kid to give him his notes. He frowned at the paper, compared it to the question in the book, and shook his head. "Look, you're not even using the right formula. Electrically generated magnetism is variable; you have to take that into account if your hero is fighting a battery-powered robot."
The others didn't go back to their own stuff, he noticed. They just watched, even when he and the short kid started arguing over the field strength necessary to pull screws out of a screwed-in surface at thirty feet. The question was stupid, he pointed out, because magnetism wasn't a rotating force--there was no way it could unwind a screw from its threads, so why bother calculating the strength it would take to yank the screw thirty feet?
Fine, Ethan said, but telling the teacher the question was flawed wasn't going to get them any points on their math midterm. So pretend they were nails, or paperclips, or anything small and metallic that wasn't screws. He just needed to calculate the strength of the field.
"How are you using paperclips to hold up a metal plate?" Warren wanted to know.
"You know what, go back to your own work," Ethan told him. "You stopped being helpful five minutes ago."
"But it matters, right?" the tall kid interrupted. "Screws or paperclips? Because the strength of the field depends on the object it's acting on."
"No it doesn't," Ethan said impatiently.
"Yeah, it does," Warren grumbled, reaching for his pencil. "Look, the robot is like a giant electromagnet, so pretend you're dealing with induced magnetism instead of electrical magnetism and the equation is simpler."
He had finished writing it out before he realized there had been no answer. He lifted his head to find Ethan staring, not at Warren, but at the tall kid who had corrected him. "Hey, are you listening?"
"He's right?" Ethan demanded, looking from the tall kid to him and back again. "It matters?"
Everyone else was staring at the tall kid too. "Yeah," Warren said, frowning at them. "So?"
"So how did you know that?" Magenta wanted to know. She wasn't talking to Warren.
The tall kid was drumming two pencils against the top of his notebook, paying no attention. He was bopping to the rhythm in his head and didn't seem to have the faintest idea that they were all looking at him. Magenta tossed an eraser at him, hitting him in the chest.
"Hey!" he exclaimed, stopping the pencils. "Yeah, what?"
"How did you know the strength of a magnetic field depends on the object it's acting on?" Magenta repeated.
"Oh." The tall kid shrugged, glancing down at his notebook. "I don't know. It says so right there."
Magenta pushed her binder off of her lap and leaned over to look at his. "That says B equals F divided by the quantity q sub zero times velocity times the sine of theta," she informed him. "Where'd you get that?"
Ethan scrambled up off the floor and snatched the tall kid's notebook away from him. "Is this from class? I don't have these notes."
Layla intervened. "Let me see," she said, holding out her hand. "I have all the notes. Including the ones we got while you were daydreaming about being Catgirl's sidekick," she reminded Ethan.
"Hey, observation of heroes is an important part of our duties as hero support," he defended himself. He handed over the notebook anyway.
"Catgirl and I so wouldn't get along," Magenta muttered.
"Oh, Zach, we didn't have to write this down," Layla said suddenly. "I remember this now. This was part of the introduction to the 'unseen forces' unit, but he said we wouldn't need it for the homework. He was just trying to intimidate us with obscure mathematical symbols."
"Well, I guess math teachers are the same everywhere," Will joked. "Always trying to make it harder than it is." He took the notebook Layla gave him and handed it back. "So do you have it all figured out yet, Ethan?"
The short kid was gazing down at the numbers Warren had written out for him and nodding enthusiastically. Layla was watching Stronghold, who was watching the head nodding with amusement. None of them were even looking at the tall kid anymore. Not even Magenta, who was toying with a strand of purple hair and completely ignoring the rest of the room.
"Yeah, yeah," Ethan was saying, "this is a much better way of looking at it. Basically you can see that if the robot has a magnetic field strong enough to pull screws out of things, your hero has bigger problems than the numerical strength of the field."
Basically, that was what Warren had said from the start. But he was more interested in the fact that everyone was happy to write off the tall kid's apparently random knowledge as a mistake, a fluke, something he had copied down by accident and then coincidentally read at just the right moment. Weren't they at all curious that he had known, not only that it was relevant, but also what it meant?
Warren hadn't thought anything of it until the others dismissed it. He found that other people tended to be wrong about most things, so if they thought it was a fluke... He frowned down at his notes while Ethan chattered about the simplest way to solve the magnetism problem, and finally he started to look around for a blank piece of paper. He hadn't brought any, but hey, Stronghold had a whole notebook there that he wasn't using.
Ethan did pause briefly when Warren ripped a blank page out of the notebook, but Stronghold didn't say anything. He tossed the notebook back into its former haphazard position and started to fold a paper airplane. He took care to look as bored as he could while he was doing it, and he heard a faint snort of amusement from Stronghold when he figured out what the paper was being used for.
He started drawing flames along the leading edge of the wings, doodling until Magenta made a snarky comment that drew everyone's attention. Then he flipped the airplane over and wrote on the bottom of the left wing, What are you, a secret math geek or something?
Warren tossed the airplane in the tall kid's general direction before he could think better of it. "Hey, cool," the recipient declared, picking it up and swishing it around like it was a scale model or a remote controlled toy or anything else that would be cooler than a note on a piece of notebook paper. Which was everything.
He didn't even notice the note, as far as Warren could tell. But Stronghold noticed that Warren had time to fold paper airplanes, which meant that he wasn't studying and that apparently meant that he was fair game for idle chit chat. Warren didn't do idle chit chat. Stronghold didn't seem to get that.
"Will," Layla reminded him at last. "Some of us are trying to study?"
Warren smirked at Will, who hurried to assure Layla that he had been about to ask Warren something really important having to do with his studies. Layla just shook her head, and Will went back to his books. The question never came.
The paper airplane did, though. It returned to him with a gentle thwack as it collided with his leather jacket in the quiet room. A couple of glances were shot his way, but when he ignored it they looked away. Warren looked over at the tall kid. He was currently trying to balance a potato chip on the end of his pencil, and he didn't seem to be sparing attention for anything else.
The plane had landed upside-down beside him. Warren glanced sideways at it. Written in a large scrawl on the bottom of the right wing was proof that the tall kid wasn't quite as oblivious as he'd thought: What are you, the plane read, a secret school spy?
His mouth quirked involuntarily. He frowned as soon as he realized what he was doing. He picked up the plane and dropped it on top of his notes, using Ethan's pencil to write Yes underneath the question before turning it over to continue his doodling on the top of the wings. This studying thing wasn't as bad as he'd expected.
Then Will asked if anyone wanted music, and studying got really entertaining in the ensuing chaos. Warren didn't even have to make fun of their requests--Magenta or Layla vetoed everything the guys suggested, and the guys complained just as loudly about anything they picked. Warren threw his paper airplane at the other end of the couch while they argued.
"I'm turning the radio on," was the eventual decree. This had the potential to lead to more of the same, since Warren was pretty sure someone would have to pick a station, but just then the phone rang.
"I'll get it," Layla said quickly. She bounced up and disappeared into the kitchen before Will could argue, leaving him to deal with the radio situation.
"Stronghold residence," Warren heard her say. Then Layla was coming back, standing in the doorway as she said, "Oh, hi Annabelle. We thought it might be you."
There was a pause, during which Will turned the radio on and Magenta gave him a disgusted look but very obviously refrained from saying anything because they were all trying to overhear Layla's conversation. "Sure, we understand," she was telling the phone. "Maybe you can come next time."
The paper airplane took a nosedive next to Warren's open book. It toppled over, and for just a second the bottom of the left wing was visible. Under Warren's question was the word Yes.
"See you in school," Layla was saying just as Warren realized the short kid was paying attention to the wrong conversation.
"No offense, but you guys make the worst paper airplanes," Ethan said, reaching for the folded piece of paper.
That was when the front door opened. Warren ignored it, snatching the airplane off the floor before Ethan could reach it and crumpling it in his fist. It burst into flame without conscious thought and the kid scrambled back. "Hey, whoa, I was just saying--"
"Boys," a woman's voice said reprovingly. "No burning in the house, please."
Warren looked up to see Josie Stronghold standing behind Layla, looking... like a business woman? In an ordinary suit and glasses, with a briefcase in one hand and a pile of mail in the other, the look she was giving him was no less pointed than it would have been coming from her alter ego. His mom had always said all mothers were superheroes.
He'd just figured she meant all the mothers she knew.
"Sorry, Jetstream," he muttered. He let the fire burn out. It left behind black soot from the paper on his fingers, which was why he preferred fireballs. The residue didn't go unnoticed.
"You can wash up in the kitchen," Josie told him with a smile. Then she looked at Layla, who was still holding the cordless as she looked from him to Will's mom. "Who was on the phone, Layla?"
"Oh!" Layla looked back at him. "That was Annabelle. She says she can't come over to study because her mom's having company and needs her to help out."
Warren pretended to ignore them as he slid past into the kitchen. What did he care if she showed up or not? So she was pretty and she could freeze things. So what?
"Oh?" Josie was asking. "Who's Annabelle?"
"She's a friend of Warren's," Layla replied blithely. "They danced together at Homecoming."
Warren rolled his eyes, scrubbing his hands diligently under the water so that he could pretend he didn't hear. She was going to start introducing herself that way if this kept up. "Hi, nice to meet you, I'm the girl Warren danced with at Homecoming."
"I see," Josie answered. She sounded way too interested. "Well, I look forward to meeting her."
Yeah. He couldn't wait.
***
Backstory: Part 1
Thanks so much for the kind words on the first part! I should probably warn you that if this story continues, I expect it to involve slash. (Proud supporter of gay love.)
Author: Starhawk
Rating/Category: G, friendship
Characters/Pairing: Warren, Will/Layla, Magenta, Zach, Ethan, Freeze Girl, Jetstream
Summary: Warren figures that sometimes it's more important to study people than classes.
Numbers Matter
by Starhawk
How he had ended up at the Stronghold residence was something of a mystery to him. He had plenty of other stuff to be doing after school, and none of it involved studying. Especially not studying with other people.
Especially not studying with Stronghold.
He couldn't believe he was standing on the front steps of someone else's house--of this particular house, no less--with two textbooks under his arm and papers stuffed into the book jackets. Good thing no one from school could see him. His bad boy rep was in enough trouble as it was.
The door swung open before he could turn around, and Stronghold didn't look at all surprised to find him there. "Hey, Warren," he exclaimed, stepping away from the door and waving him in. "Layla said she heard someone outside. Come on in."
"What, does she have superhearing, too?" Warren grumbled. He shouldered his way past Stronghold and came to an awkward halt inside. There was nothing comfortable about this house.
"No superhearing," Stronghold assured him. "Just tree spies."
That sounded ominous to Warren--he'd never thought to ask the hippie if she could do more with plants than make them grow--but Stronghold was already calling for the others as he lead the way into the living room. "Hey, guys, Warren's here! Hide the snacks unless you want your chips charred!"
"Ha ha," Warren muttered, lagging behind. He leaned on the doorframe and stared at their cozy circle, sprawled out over couches and armchairs that had been gathered in the middle of the room.
"Hey, you own textbooks," Magenta remarked. She was scrutinizing him from the armchair farthest from the door. "I had no idea."
"Hey, you know what books are," he snapped, giving her a dark look. "I'm as surprised as you."
"Okay," Stronghold interrupted, falsely cheerful. He clapped a hand on Warren's shoulder and tried to steer him toward the other side of their circle. When Warren glared at him, he snatched his hand back and held both of them up in a gesture of surrender.
"Okay," he repeated. "Warren, why don't you sit... wherever, and I'll get some more chips. You want anything to drink?"
"No." Warren eyed the circle, wondering once again why he was here.
Stronghold's place was clearly on the couch next to Layla, and he was tempted to take it just on principle. If he was here anyway, he might as well do some damage. But he really didn't want to be that close to anyone, even the relatively benign hippie. Magenta had taken the only nearby chair, and the two remaining sidekicks were sharing the other couch.
Which was to say, Glowstick was hogging most of it while Popsicle perched on the edge of a single cushion. Warren wasn't surprised to see that the tall kid looked bored out of his mind, and had resorted to bugging Magenta to pass the time. The short kid had an entire library arrayed on various levels around him: the back of the couch, the arm of the couch, the table next to the couch, even the floor.
Warren figured the floor was the safest place to be. He wouldn't accidentally wreck any of the ridiculously expensive-looking furniture, and no one would sit down next to him. He dropped his stuff on the floor between the two couches and lowered himself to the ground after it.
The short kid promptly slid off the couch to join him. "So Layla says you're good at math," he began.
Warren glowered at him, then included Layla for good measure. Traitor.
Neither of them seemed to notice, the short kid because he was pointing to something in his book, and Layla because Stronghold came back with the chips just then and she was totally smitten. "I got you some soda," Stronghold said offhandedly, leaning over to set it on the floor beside him.
"So I was just wondering if you remember this stuff," the short kid concluded, ignoring the interruption. "Because I don't understand magnetism at all and frankly I don't trust the rest of these guys to know anymore than I do."
Warren stared at him. "Why would you think I have any idea what your classes are about?" he asked at last.
"Dude, math is math," the short kid told him.
"Yeah, and magnetism is a mystery," the tall kid added. He seemed pleased with the alliteration. "A monumental, malevolent, mystery."
"I'm afraid Ethan's right," Layla offered with an apologetic smile. "None of the rest of us understand it either, and you did really well in Heroically Applied Math last year."
He didn't even want to know how she knew that. "Yeah, and this year I'm doing well in More Mad Science," he informed her. "That doesn't mean I have any clue what it's about."
"Who are you blackmailing to make that happen?" Magenta asked, not as though she cared.
"My lab partner and I have an agreement," Warren told her. "She does the work, and I leave her alone. It was her idea," he added defensively when Magenta rolled her eyes.
"Look, just tell Ethan what to do and then he can teach the rest of us," the tall kid declared. "He's smart and stuff. It'll only take a few minutes."
Warren looked around at all of them. "I'm not your tutor," he warned them.
"Not yet you aren't," Layla agreed cheerfully. "We'll find a way to repay you, I promise."
He didn't believe that, but allowed the short kid to give him his notes. He frowned at the paper, compared it to the question in the book, and shook his head. "Look, you're not even using the right formula. Electrically generated magnetism is variable; you have to take that into account if your hero is fighting a battery-powered robot."
The others didn't go back to their own stuff, he noticed. They just watched, even when he and the short kid started arguing over the field strength necessary to pull screws out of a screwed-in surface at thirty feet. The question was stupid, he pointed out, because magnetism wasn't a rotating force--there was no way it could unwind a screw from its threads, so why bother calculating the strength it would take to yank the screw thirty feet?
Fine, Ethan said, but telling the teacher the question was flawed wasn't going to get them any points on their math midterm. So pretend they were nails, or paperclips, or anything small and metallic that wasn't screws. He just needed to calculate the strength of the field.
"How are you using paperclips to hold up a metal plate?" Warren wanted to know.
"You know what, go back to your own work," Ethan told him. "You stopped being helpful five minutes ago."
"But it matters, right?" the tall kid interrupted. "Screws or paperclips? Because the strength of the field depends on the object it's acting on."
"No it doesn't," Ethan said impatiently.
"Yeah, it does," Warren grumbled, reaching for his pencil. "Look, the robot is like a giant electromagnet, so pretend you're dealing with induced magnetism instead of electrical magnetism and the equation is simpler."
He had finished writing it out before he realized there had been no answer. He lifted his head to find Ethan staring, not at Warren, but at the tall kid who had corrected him. "Hey, are you listening?"
"He's right?" Ethan demanded, looking from the tall kid to him and back again. "It matters?"
Everyone else was staring at the tall kid too. "Yeah," Warren said, frowning at them. "So?"
"So how did you know that?" Magenta wanted to know. She wasn't talking to Warren.
The tall kid was drumming two pencils against the top of his notebook, paying no attention. He was bopping to the rhythm in his head and didn't seem to have the faintest idea that they were all looking at him. Magenta tossed an eraser at him, hitting him in the chest.
"Hey!" he exclaimed, stopping the pencils. "Yeah, what?"
"How did you know the strength of a magnetic field depends on the object it's acting on?" Magenta repeated.
"Oh." The tall kid shrugged, glancing down at his notebook. "I don't know. It says so right there."
Magenta pushed her binder off of her lap and leaned over to look at his. "That says B equals F divided by the quantity q sub zero times velocity times the sine of theta," she informed him. "Where'd you get that?"
Ethan scrambled up off the floor and snatched the tall kid's notebook away from him. "Is this from class? I don't have these notes."
Layla intervened. "Let me see," she said, holding out her hand. "I have all the notes. Including the ones we got while you were daydreaming about being Catgirl's sidekick," she reminded Ethan.
"Hey, observation of heroes is an important part of our duties as hero support," he defended himself. He handed over the notebook anyway.
"Catgirl and I so wouldn't get along," Magenta muttered.
"Oh, Zach, we didn't have to write this down," Layla said suddenly. "I remember this now. This was part of the introduction to the 'unseen forces' unit, but he said we wouldn't need it for the homework. He was just trying to intimidate us with obscure mathematical symbols."
"Well, I guess math teachers are the same everywhere," Will joked. "Always trying to make it harder than it is." He took the notebook Layla gave him and handed it back. "So do you have it all figured out yet, Ethan?"
The short kid was gazing down at the numbers Warren had written out for him and nodding enthusiastically. Layla was watching Stronghold, who was watching the head nodding with amusement. None of them were even looking at the tall kid anymore. Not even Magenta, who was toying with a strand of purple hair and completely ignoring the rest of the room.
"Yeah, yeah," Ethan was saying, "this is a much better way of looking at it. Basically you can see that if the robot has a magnetic field strong enough to pull screws out of things, your hero has bigger problems than the numerical strength of the field."
Basically, that was what Warren had said from the start. But he was more interested in the fact that everyone was happy to write off the tall kid's apparently random knowledge as a mistake, a fluke, something he had copied down by accident and then coincidentally read at just the right moment. Weren't they at all curious that he had known, not only that it was relevant, but also what it meant?
Warren hadn't thought anything of it until the others dismissed it. He found that other people tended to be wrong about most things, so if they thought it was a fluke... He frowned down at his notes while Ethan chattered about the simplest way to solve the magnetism problem, and finally he started to look around for a blank piece of paper. He hadn't brought any, but hey, Stronghold had a whole notebook there that he wasn't using.
Ethan did pause briefly when Warren ripped a blank page out of the notebook, but Stronghold didn't say anything. He tossed the notebook back into its former haphazard position and started to fold a paper airplane. He took care to look as bored as he could while he was doing it, and he heard a faint snort of amusement from Stronghold when he figured out what the paper was being used for.
He started drawing flames along the leading edge of the wings, doodling until Magenta made a snarky comment that drew everyone's attention. Then he flipped the airplane over and wrote on the bottom of the left wing, What are you, a secret math geek or something?
Warren tossed the airplane in the tall kid's general direction before he could think better of it. "Hey, cool," the recipient declared, picking it up and swishing it around like it was a scale model or a remote controlled toy or anything else that would be cooler than a note on a piece of notebook paper. Which was everything.
He didn't even notice the note, as far as Warren could tell. But Stronghold noticed that Warren had time to fold paper airplanes, which meant that he wasn't studying and that apparently meant that he was fair game for idle chit chat. Warren didn't do idle chit chat. Stronghold didn't seem to get that.
"Will," Layla reminded him at last. "Some of us are trying to study?"
Warren smirked at Will, who hurried to assure Layla that he had been about to ask Warren something really important having to do with his studies. Layla just shook her head, and Will went back to his books. The question never came.
The paper airplane did, though. It returned to him with a gentle thwack as it collided with his leather jacket in the quiet room. A couple of glances were shot his way, but when he ignored it they looked away. Warren looked over at the tall kid. He was currently trying to balance a potato chip on the end of his pencil, and he didn't seem to be sparing attention for anything else.
The plane had landed upside-down beside him. Warren glanced sideways at it. Written in a large scrawl on the bottom of the right wing was proof that the tall kid wasn't quite as oblivious as he'd thought: What are you, the plane read, a secret school spy?
His mouth quirked involuntarily. He frowned as soon as he realized what he was doing. He picked up the plane and dropped it on top of his notes, using Ethan's pencil to write Yes underneath the question before turning it over to continue his doodling on the top of the wings. This studying thing wasn't as bad as he'd expected.
Then Will asked if anyone wanted music, and studying got really entertaining in the ensuing chaos. Warren didn't even have to make fun of their requests--Magenta or Layla vetoed everything the guys suggested, and the guys complained just as loudly about anything they picked. Warren threw his paper airplane at the other end of the couch while they argued.
"I'm turning the radio on," was the eventual decree. This had the potential to lead to more of the same, since Warren was pretty sure someone would have to pick a station, but just then the phone rang.
"I'll get it," Layla said quickly. She bounced up and disappeared into the kitchen before Will could argue, leaving him to deal with the radio situation.
"Stronghold residence," Warren heard her say. Then Layla was coming back, standing in the doorway as she said, "Oh, hi Annabelle. We thought it might be you."
There was a pause, during which Will turned the radio on and Magenta gave him a disgusted look but very obviously refrained from saying anything because they were all trying to overhear Layla's conversation. "Sure, we understand," she was telling the phone. "Maybe you can come next time."
The paper airplane took a nosedive next to Warren's open book. It toppled over, and for just a second the bottom of the left wing was visible. Under Warren's question was the word Yes.
"See you in school," Layla was saying just as Warren realized the short kid was paying attention to the wrong conversation.
"No offense, but you guys make the worst paper airplanes," Ethan said, reaching for the folded piece of paper.
That was when the front door opened. Warren ignored it, snatching the airplane off the floor before Ethan could reach it and crumpling it in his fist. It burst into flame without conscious thought and the kid scrambled back. "Hey, whoa, I was just saying--"
"Boys," a woman's voice said reprovingly. "No burning in the house, please."
Warren looked up to see Josie Stronghold standing behind Layla, looking... like a business woman? In an ordinary suit and glasses, with a briefcase in one hand and a pile of mail in the other, the look she was giving him was no less pointed than it would have been coming from her alter ego. His mom had always said all mothers were superheroes.
He'd just figured she meant all the mothers she knew.
"Sorry, Jetstream," he muttered. He let the fire burn out. It left behind black soot from the paper on his fingers, which was why he preferred fireballs. The residue didn't go unnoticed.
"You can wash up in the kitchen," Josie told him with a smile. Then she looked at Layla, who was still holding the cordless as she looked from him to Will's mom. "Who was on the phone, Layla?"
"Oh!" Layla looked back at him. "That was Annabelle. She says she can't come over to study because her mom's having company and needs her to help out."
Warren pretended to ignore them as he slid past into the kitchen. What did he care if she showed up or not? So she was pretty and she could freeze things. So what?
"Oh?" Josie was asking. "Who's Annabelle?"
"She's a friend of Warren's," Layla replied blithely. "They danced together at Homecoming."
Warren rolled his eyes, scrubbing his hands diligently under the water so that he could pretend he didn't hear. She was going to start introducing herself that way if this kept up. "Hi, nice to meet you, I'm the girl Warren danced with at Homecoming."
"I see," Josie answered. She sounded way too interested. "Well, I look forward to meeting her."
Yeah. He couldn't wait.
***
Backstory: Part 1
Thanks so much for the kind words on the first part! I should probably warn you that if this story continues, I expect it to involve slash. (Proud supporter of gay love.)