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But life did not come with a trapdoor.
"It's for a school project. Homework. On, um, mating rituals."
"Thought crime was more your thing." He hit her with one of his half smiles, too cool to pull out a big grin. "You pla
That had been a mistake. Not stopping the guys who'd held up Ron's 24-Hour Open Market #3, but sticking around long enough to let the police see her. For some reason they'd found it hard to believe that she'd just been leaning against the lamppost when it fell across the front of the robbers' car as it sped through the intersection. It was sad how suspicious people were, especially people in law enforcement. And school administration. But she'd learned a lot since then.
"I'm trying to keep it to one heist a month," she said, hoping for a light, ha-ha-I'm-just-kidding-foxy-is-as-foxy-does tone. "Today it's just my regular job, VIP airport pickup." Miranda heard his cha-cha heartbeat speed up slightly. Maybe he thought VIPs were cool.
"That boarding school you go to, Chatsworth Academy? They let you off campus any time you want or only certain days?"
"Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, if you're a senior. We don't have classes then," she said and heard his heartbeat pick up more.
"Wednesday and Saturday afternoons free. What do you do for fun?"
Was he asking her out? No. Way. NOWAYNOWAYNOWAY! Flirt! she ordered herself. Winsome Smile! Say something! Anything! Be foxy! Now!
"What do you do for fun?" she repeated his question back to him, raising one eyebrow for that hint of suggestion.
He seemed taken aback for a second, then said very formally, "I work, Miss Kiss."
Please give a warm welcome to Miranda Kiss, our new Miss Idiot Girl of the year, she thought. Said: "Of course. Me too. I mean, I'm either driving clients or at team practice. I'm one of Tony Bosun's Bee Girls? The Roller Derby team? That's why I do this," meaning to point to the Town Car but bashing it with her hand instead. "You have to be a driver for Tony's company, 5Bs Luxury Transport, to be on the team. We usually only have games on the weekends, but we practice on Wednesdays, sometimes on other days…" Crazy Mouth trailed off.
"I've seen the Bees play. That's a professional team, isn't it? They let a high school student play?"
Miranda swallowed. "Oh, sure. Of course."
He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses.
"Okay, I had to lie to get on the team. Tony thinks I'm twenty. You won't tell him, will you?"
"He believed you were twenty?"
"He needed a new jammer."
Deputy Reynolds chuckled. "So you're the jammer? You're good. I can see why he might have made an exception." Eyeing her some more. "I never would have recognized you."
"Well, you know, we wear those wigs and the gold masks over our eyes so we all look the same." It was one of the things she liked about Roller Derby, the anonymity, the fact that no one knew who you were, what your skills were. It made her feel invulnerable, safe. No one could single you out for… anything.
Deputy Reynolds took his sunglasses all the way off now to look at her. "So you put on one of those red, white, and blue satin outfits? The ones with the short skirts and that cute cape? I'd like to see that sometime."
He smiled at her, right into her eyes, and her knees went weak and her mind started playing out a scenario involving him without his shirt but with a pitcher of maple syrup and a big-
"Well, there's my lady," he said. "Catch you." And then walked away.
— stack of pancakes. Miranda watched him go up to a woman in her early twenties-thick blond hair, thin but muscular-put his arm around her, and kiss her neck. The kind of woman whose bras had tags that said, SIZE 36c, not MADE BY SANRIO in them. Heard him saying excitedly, "Wait until we get to the house. I've got some amazing new toys, something special just for you," his voice husky, heart racing.
As he passed Miranda, he lifted his chin in her direction and said, "You stay out of trouble."
"Yeah, you too," Crazy Mouth told him. Miranda wanted to bang her head against the top of the car at how idiotic she was. She tried to give a Lite Laff (expression number four from the book) but ended up making herself choke instead.
When they were across the parking lot, she heard the woman asking who she was and heard Deputy Reynolds say, "The local Town Car driver."
"She's the driver?" the woman said. "Looks like one of those girls from Hawaiian Airlines you used to date, but younger. And cuter. You know how your judgment gets around cute young girls. You're sure I don't need to be concerned?"
Miranda heard him laugh, the genuine amusement in his voice as he said, "Her? Baby, she's just a high school student who has a crush on me. Trust me, you've got nothing to worry about."
And thought: Trap. Door. Now. Please.
Sometimes having superhearing supersucked.
Chapter Three
Miranda loved the Santa Barbara airport, the way it looked more like an Acapulco Joe's Cantina than an official building with its adobe-style walls, cool terra-cotta floor, loopy blue and gold tile, and bougainvillaea careening down the walls. It was small, so planes just parked where they landed and had staircases wheeled out to them, with only a chain-link fence separating people waiting for someone from the people coming off the plane.
Pulling the welcome sign out of the Town Car, she checked the name on it-CUMEAN-and held it up in the direction of the disembarking passengers. As she waited, she listened to a woman in the gold Lexus SUV four cars behind her talking on her phone, saying, "If she gets off the plane, I'll know. He'd better have his checkbook ready," then tilted her head to focus on the low srloop srloop srloop sound of a snail slithering across the still-warm pavement toward a bunch of ivy.
She still remembered the exact moment she realized that not everyone heard the things she heard, that she wasn't normal. She'd already spent the first half of her seventh-grade year at Saint Bartolomeo School-the part after the screening of the Your Body Is Changing: Womanhood video-puzzled by all the changes they didn't list, like uncontrolled bursts of speed and randomly crushing objects you were just trying to pick up and hitting your head on the ceiling of the gym when you were doing jumping jacks and suddenly being able to see dust particles on people's clothes. But since Sister A
That was how she'd first learned how dangerous powers were, the way they could make you an outcast.
And also that she was stronger than boys her age, and that they didn't think that was cool or even good. And neither did school administrators.
Since then she'd become expert at acting normal, being careful. Had mastered her powers. Or she'd thought she had, until seven months earlier when-
Miranda pushed the memory aside and turned her attention back to the people at the airport. To her job. She watched a little girl with blond ringlets sitting on her dad's shoulders standing next to the path and waving as a woman walked from the plane toward them, now shouting, "Mommy, Mommy, I missed you!"