Close to Home - chapter 4
Thursday
The plan sounded simple, in theory. Matt's friends went to Kon's school, and Delilah was even in his English class. It should have been easy for Conner Kent to befriend them, win their trust, and get them to open up a little about the friend they'd just lost. There was one tiny flaw in the plan, though - somehow, he'd forgotten just how awful Conner Kent was at making friends.
"Wait," Kon called, as he hurried down the hall after Clarence Moore, who was weaving in and out of the class-change crowd. "Look, I just want-" Kon paused to dodge a line of girls holding hands, and then to give a little surreptitious support to a kid with a dangerously leaning tower of books. "I just want to talk to you!"
Clarence froze in the middle of the hall, and then slowly turned around. "Well," he said, "I don't want to talk to you. So fuck off, cowboy."
"Cowboy?“ Will you just listen to me?" But Clarence was already walking again, fast enough that Kon had to jog a little to catch up. They turned the corner onto the locker hall, and Clarence stopped again. "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry about Matt. He seemed like a really nice-" Kon trailed off. The locker Clarence had stopped in front of was covered in crudely drawn stick figures with enormous penises. Someone had spray-painted 'ur next nigger faggot' across most of the top row, and now that he was paying attention, Kon noticed an all-too familiar smell in the air.
"Just-" Clarence said quietly, as he reached for the combination dial, "just leave me alone."
Kon caught his wrist. "Don't open that," he ordered.
"Get the fuck off me, man!" He pulled wildly against Kon's hold until Kon had to let go so he wouldn't hurt himself.
"Get a teacher, or something," Kon protested, "don't just-"
But it was too late. Clarence threw the locker open with a bang, and then quickly stumbled back. There was a dead chicken inside, hanging by its broken neck from a tiny noose, dangling from the cross-bar. Everything inside the locker was smeared with blood, completely ruined.
The students milling around them stopped and stared, suddenly silent, and then the whispering began. Clarence made an awful, broken sound and pushed through the circle of onlookers to run, head bowed, for the nearest exit.
Kon was torn, but in the end, there was only one decision that made any sense. Clarence wasn't going to talk to him anyway, so Kon let him go and pulled out his phone. He needed to get some photos before the teachers came to see what was going on.
*
English didn't go quite as badly - there was no blood, for starters. Kon lingered at the front of the room until Delilah took her seat, and then sat down at the desk next to hers. "Hi," he said, and she looked up from her notebook to stare blankly at him. She was really kind of hot - shorter than the girls he usually went for, but nice and curvy. Her dark hair was cut in a short, severe bob, and streaked with a dark red that hadn't been in the Christmas pictures. Unfortunately, Kon couldn't really think of what to say next. "Um," he finally said, "do you know when the Hawthorne thing is due?"
She flipped back a few pages in her notebook to check. "Not ‘til the tenth." She didn't look up at him again though.
"Have you started it?" he asked, hoping to keep her attention.
"It's only two pages," she said dismissively, her eyes locked on her notebook.
Kon clicked his pen a few times and frowned at his own binder, but he couldn't think of a way to prolong the contact. Did Rao grant requests for the sudden assignment of group projects? He was a little rusty on his Kryptonian theology.
"Hey," someone said. Kon looked up in time to see Miller put his hand on Delilah’s desk and lean over her.
“Go away, Pete,” she said, without looking up.
He braced his other hand on the back of her chair, effectively trapping her in her desk with his considerable bulk. “I just wanna talk.”
Kon saw Delilah’s fingers close around her pen, saw the muscles in her forearm tighten and bunch, but he hadn’t decided what to do about it until it was way too late to react at human speed. Her arm jerked, and for a second, he thought she actually had stabbed Miller, until he realized the red stain splashed across their hands was from the pen shattering when the tip hit the desk.
Shit,” Miller hissed, jerking back. “Bitch, you are psycho!”
“Yeah, I am,” she said, calmly and quietly, in a controlled voice that reminded Kon an awful lot of Tim, “which is why you ought to pay attention when I say if you come near me again, I will kill you.”
“You can try, you little-“
“Don’t,” Kon said, as he slid out of his desk and got to his feet, “finish that sentence.”
“You fuck off, Kent, this isn’t any of your-“
Delilah’s sudden scream of rage and frustration brought everything in the room to a standstill. Even the few people who hadn’t already been watching the confrontation turned in their chairs to stare as she shoved her things into her bag and pushed past Miller to hurry out the door. Ms. Harris entered a few seconds later, holding her coffee to her chest and looking concerned. “Did something happen to Delilah?”
Kon looked down at the desk. “She went to clean up,” he said, gesturing at the mess. “Her pen broke.”
*
The first thing he did when he got home was call Cassie. He hadn’t talked to her since they'd left the tower Sunday, so after she finished telling him about the minotaur she'd taken down in Portland that morning, he sat down on his bed with a plate of Martha’s cookies and filled her in on everything that had happened since then. He told her about Matt, and about the case, and about his absolute failure to accomplish anything, and it felt good. Cassie was a good listener, and unlike Tim, she made all the right sympathetic noises in all the right places and didn’t ask for useless details.
If he’d called Tim, he’d have had to explain why he didn’t have any new information. He hated telling Tim when he'd screwed up - not because Tim was an ass about it, but because he usually wasn’t, even when they both knew Tim could have done better.
“Does it say something awful about me that I can’t make friends with people who don’t know I’m a superhero?” he asked.
Cassie was painting her nails. He could hear the tiny brush-strokes in the silence while she was thinking. “I don’t think so,” she finally said. “It’s easier to bond with someone you already know you have stuff in common with, right? So it makes sense that you mostly get along with other heroes when you meet them. And when you meet normal people while you’re in costume, well, they want to get close to you, so you don’t have to work very hard at making a good impression. I think it’s just normal - making friends is slower when you don’t meet people in a team-up or a rescue.” Kon listened as she carefully screwed the cap back onto the bottle. “Gods, before I let my ID out, the girls were always so catty. After, too, but only when they thought I couldn’t hear, you know?”
Kon made his own sympathetic noise around a mouthful of snickerdoodle. “I really hate my hearing, sometimes.”
“I bet. I can’t even imagine…It’s bad enough when someone doesn’t know you’re in the bathroom stall.”
“You think there’s a trade off?”
Cassie blew across her nails. “A trade off?”
“Well, look at us,” Kon said as he laid back to stare up at the faded scorch marks on his ceiling. “You, me, Bart, Tim… We kick ass, yeah, and we’re all great friends, and I wouldn’t trade my life for anything, but I don’t think any of us was ever happy being a normal kid - except maybe when you were with Cissie and Traya, but that’s kind of different.”
“I don’t think it’s got to be either-or,” Cassie argued. “Some people do really well with both. Superman does."
But Kon wasn’t Superman. There were some pretty fundamental differences between him and Clark, and most of them didn’t even have to do with the Luthor genes. “I wonder sometimes if maybe they didn’t give me all the right programming, when I was back in that tube. I broke out early, right? I wasn’t done. They hadn’t put their fail-safes in. There might have been more they missed. Or maybe…I don’t know. Me being a happy, well adjusted dude with lots of friends really wasn’t their top priority, you know?”
He could hear the smile in Cassie’s voice when she spoke. “I think you do all right.”
“But - think about how long it took before me and Tim could get along. We were saving each other’s bacon, like, once a week, and we never stopped fighting-“
“Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and blame most of that on Tim,” Cassie said, dryly. “You wanna talk about social issues...”
“Which I really don’t. You know what his family was like. You know what Batman’s like. It’s really not fair to rag on him when he’s not here to defend himself.”
“Like he doesn’t have our lines tapped?” Cassie said, with a hard little laugh. “All I meant was, you two settled out pretty quick once he stopped being so damned secretive. It’s hard to be best buds with someone whose name you don’t even know.”
“Yeah, maybe -“ Kon glanced over at the clock. It was after three. “Shit, Cassie, I’ve gotta go. Chores and stuff.”
“Okay. See you Friday?”
He got up and started digging through his dresser for a change of clothes. “Can’t,” he said, “there’s a lot to get done, and I blew off yesterday when Tim was here. Anyway, I’d just have to fly back for the funeral. I’ll see you Saturday afternoon?”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, “but you owe me dinner.”
“Done deal, babe.”
She made a kissy noise at the phone, but hung up without waiting for him to return it. Kon tossed the handset aside as he finally found his ratty old work-clothes, and sat down to yank off his boots.
*
“You could have told me how late it was!” Kon shouted as he skimmed out onto the lawn. Martha was kneeling in the onions, carefully pulling spring shoots and adding them to her basket.
“You’ve got plenty of time,” she said, and then clapped her gloved hands together a few times to shake some of the dirt off of them.
“I’ve still got to go pick up your order from the feed store.” Which took way longer than it really had to, since Kon could have been there and back with a few hundred pounds of fertilizer and compost in the time it took just to get there in the truck.
“Mr. Jenkins has got his boy working with him, this season,” Martha told him as she carefully got to her feet and picked her way through the rows of beets and peppers, “doing delivery.”
“For how much?” Kon asked.
“No charge for that nice old widow woman,” she said, grinning as she hefted her basket to her hip. “I think Mr. Jenkins is a little sweet on me. Scandalous, really.” She stepped over the broccoli, and Kon suddenly realized where she was headed.
“Oh no,” he said, moving to cut her off. “No. You want carrots, I’ll get your carrots.”
Martha frowned at him. “If you keep treating me like an old woman, I’m going to start feeling like one.”
“I’m entirely motivated by enlightened self-interest,” Kon insisted. He took the basket out of her hands. “The sooner the vegetables get pulled, the sooner we eat. I am a growing boy, you know.”
“Well,” she said, with a sly smile, “in that case, you can pull those turnips, so we can put that corn down tomorrow when we do the rest. And if they’re ready, that whole first row of carrots. Give me something to do while you’re off at school tomorrow.”
Kon shook his head in amusement and zipped inside to set the basket on the kitchen counter. He’d walked right into that one, but he didn’t mind. It was easier to do it all at once, anyway.
Martha was pulling off her gloves and hat when he got back. “Sacks for the turnips are in the barn."
“Yes, ma’am,” Kon said, and pulled off his shirt. If he was pulling the carrots and the turnips and fixing up the summer patch, it was a lost cause, already. He threw it over into the cabbage and rubbed his hands together. The only human sound for miles was the creak of the screen door as Martha went inside, so he cracked his knuckles and knelt down in the turnip bed to thrust his fingers into the soil.
The dirt was warm from the sun, and pretty well packed from a wet winter. Kon wiggled his fingers to get a feel for it, and then concentrated, extending his aura through the ground and feeling the shapes of the roots all around him. The soil around his hands loosened, trembling as he shifted it, pressing and pulling until the tops of a few dozen turnips erupted from the ground. He pulled his fingers slowly into fists, dragging against the weight of the soil, and the turnips slid up and out of the ground and flew together to form a pile in the middle of the plot.
Kon stood up and wiped the sweat off of his forehead, and then cursed and stared down at his filthy hands. Oh well. It was going to happen eventually. He wiped his hands on his denim shorts and shook out his shoulders before heading to the barn for the feed sacks.
He had finished bagging the turnips, and pulling the oldest row of carrots, and burning out the newest weeds - which grew so fast that Kon had thought maybe it had something to do with the meteors until Martha had assured him that no, weeds grew like that everywhere - and was about to start reducing the pea vines to nice, fine ash, when he noticed a sound at the edge of his hearing. There was an older model diesel truck approaching, maybe two miles up the road.
Lowering himself to the ground, Kon looked around carefully. He'd probably filled the turnip sacks too generously for a normal guy to be able to move one by himself, so he gathered the stack of them and hurried them into the barn. While he was in there, he grabbed some of the rusty, dusty old tools from back behind the old tractor Martha mostly kept for show, and carried them back out to lean against the pea trellis. There. That looked normal, right?
He jogged over to the open kitchen window and flew up just enough to stick his head inside. “Hey, Ma?” he called.
Martha looked up and turned around. Her hands were covered in flour, which Kon felt was very promising.
“Your delivery’s - oops,” he said, dropping back down to his feet as the truck came into sight around a copse of trees at the fence line. They were far enough away he felt pretty confident they hadn’t seen him, but he walked back to the garden at human speed, just in case.
The wind shifted, and Kon caught a whiff of the fried-food smell he was starting to get used to around town. Some time after he died, the Pearsons had set up a business converting trucks to biodiesel and started up a co-op for refining used vegetable oil. Kon’s sense of smell wasn’t anything like as good as Clark’s, but he was still grateful. He smiled and waved at the truck as it rumbled to a stop, just as Martha came out the front door, wiping her clean hands dry on her apron.
Kon knew Mr. Jenkins from the store. He was a somewhat heavyset middle-aged man, maybe a little younger than Martha, dressed in blue coveralls streaked with dust. When he saw Martha on the porch, he grinned and climbed down from the truck to greet her. A few seconds later, Kon heard the passenger door slam, and a boy his own age came around the side of the truck.
“Oh, hey,” Kon said when he saw him. He recognized the kid from his art class, but he didn’t know his name. He was shorter than Kon, like pretty much everyone at school, but he was kind of broad-shouldered for his height, which Kon guessed made sense if he was delivering sacks of compost and stuff all day.
The boy glanced over at Martha and Mr. Jenkins and rolled his eyes. “Lock up your womenfolk,” he drawled, with a slight smile. “My dad’s on the loose.”
Kon laughed as he turned to look - and stopped abruptly, because, yes, that was definitely flirting going on over there. Kon knew flirting when he saw it, and he was seeing it now, between Ma and some guy in coveralls and…that just wasn’t right.
“Your face,” the kid said, with obvious delight. “Oh, god, that was worth the drive out here. I guess your aunt doesn’t date much?”
“Try at all,” Kon said, still flabbergasted. “She - no,” he said, forcing himself to turn away, shaking his head all the while, “okay, I’m not watching that. I'm Conner." He stuck out his hand.
The kid smiled. "Yeah, I know, we have class together," he said, but he shook Kon's hand anyway. His grip was strong, and his hands were rough with calluses - even worse than Tim's. "I'm Jake. Jenkins, but you probably guessed."
"Do you know what she ordered? Or do we have to wait for…” Kon glanced back over his shoulder.
“I can get the list,” Jake offered, and then stepped up onto the running board to grab a clipboard off the truck’s front seat. “Let’s see…” he shook his sandy-brown hair out of his eyes and skimmed through a few pages until he apparently found what he was looking for. “Mostly compost. Some rock sulfur. Fish meal. Chicken feed, mixed grain. You guys all organic?”
“Pretty much, yeah.” It was trendy now, to go all natural, but Kon was pretty sure the Kents had stopped buying pesticides and antibiotic-laced feeds around the time Clark's senses started kicking in.
The boy smiled broadly, and his white teeth were almost shocking against the tan of his skin. “Cool. You get enough eggs to sell? My sister’s got a place in town. She’d pay good price.”
“Nah,” Kon said, with a grin of his own, “I pretty much eat whatever they lay. I’ll tell Ma, though. If there’s a market, she might be interested in raising up some more chickens.”
Jake walked around to the back of the truck, and Kon followed. They pulled the gate down, and Jake climbed up onto the sacks in the back and set his clipboard on the roof of the cab. "You want 'em on a trailer or something? There's kind of a lot."
Kon wracked his brain. Did they have a trailer? Should they? "Uh…no, just…we can pile it up, here. It's not supposed to rain again until next week, and Ma'll start withholding baked goods if I'm not done by then."
Jake frowned. "You sure?"
"Yeah," Kon said, and climbed up after him. "What's ours?"
"All the green ones, for starters. Here, you get that end -" Jake directed the operation, for which Kon was grateful. It was easier to play normal when someone was giving you instructions. Together it took maybe twenty minutes to get all the sacks on the ground, which must have been within acceptable limits, because Jake just collapsed with his legs dangling from the gate after the last sack hit the ground. "Hoo," he said. "You're in better shape than me. Look at you, you're barely sweating." He poked Kon in the center of his bare chest with one tanned finger.
Kon shifted, self-consciously, and fidgeted with a hole in the thigh of his shorts.
"You do all the work around here? That's a big patch, for one guy."
"Uh," Kon said, "Ma's tougher than she looks. And my cousin usually comes by to help out, for planting and harvesting and all, but he's been really busy lately."
Jake cut him a thoughtful look. "Your cousin. You mean Clark?"
"Yeah," Kon said, settling down onto a sack of rock sulfur. "You know him?"
"Met him a few times," Jake said. "When I was a kid. Mostly around the store."
There was a somewhat awkward silence, of the sort that Kon had mostly gotten when he'd first moved from Hawaii - all small town nosiness and 'I didn't know Jonathan had a brother.' No one ever asked directly, of course, but they gossiped behind their hands.
"Uh," Kon said. "Lemonade?"
"What?"
"We've got fresh lemonade, inside, and it's cooler." Kon got up and headed for the back porch.
Jake jumped down from the truck bed. "Yeah, thanks," he said. "I'm pretty gross, though. You sure you want me in your house?"
Kon shrugged. When they got to the back steps, he picked up the hose and turned on the water. Jake jumped back, out of the way of the splash, so Kon laughed and sprayed his feet a little to get the dirt off. He toed his own shoes off and kicked them up onto the steps, and then sprayed himself in the face with deliciously cool water for a few seconds before washing down his arms, legs and chest. He handed Jake the hose and shook out his hair while the other boy washed his hands clean. "There," he said, "all better," and jogged up the steps and inside, leaving Jake to shut off the water and shove the hose back underneath the steps.
When he walked into the kitchen, Ma already had two glasses of lemonade waiting for them on the counter. She and Mr. Jenkins were sitting at the table with glasses of their own, and Kon joined them, carefully wedging himself between them. "Hi," he said, and drained his glass in two gulps.
"You boys done already?" Jenkins asked. Kon figured he was trying pretty hard not to sound as disappointed as he was. He glanced at Jake when he came in, and then looked Kon up and down. "Didn't take you long. You looking to pick up a little cash, Conner?"
Kon glanced at Martha in a panic, and then decided to focus on pouring himself another glass. "Uh, I'm kind of busy right now. School and stuff."
"Shame," he said. "Martha's just been telling me what a good worker you are. Maybe this summer, if you get some free time? Used to have my Eleanor working the front, but she's gone and opened up a restaurant down the way, so we're sort of short. I'm sure Jake wouldn't mind getting out of the back a bit, getting to talk to people, handle more of the business side."
"I don't mind," Jake said. He didn't sit down at the table, leaning on the counter instead and pressing his glass to his damp face for a long moment before taking a deep swallow. "Mmm," he said, as his eyes drifted closed. "Oh, I needed that. Thank you, Mrs. Kent. This is really excellent."
"Thank you, Jacob," Martha smiled at him, and then shot a faintly exasperated look at Mr. Jenkins that made Kon's heart soar. "I imagine you boys had better get home for dinner? It's nearly sundown."
"Nell's expecting us," Jake said, in the face of his father's disappointed frown, "and we oughta get cleaned up." He drained his glass and set it in the sink. "Thanks again for the lemonade, Mrs. Kent. I'll see you at school, Conner?"
Kon nodded, and smiled. Score a point for Conner Kent, who maybe wasn't a complete loser. He watched them go, and then turned to stare at Martha incredulously. "That guy?"
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Martha said, but she smiled into her lemonade.
"You know I don't like you by yourself up here at the house all day," Kon said, "but that guy?"
"Oh, Conner, he's harmless," she said, and flicked her fingers dismissively. "I'm not looking to get married again, just so you know."
Well good, Kon thought, but thankfully his brain-to-mouth filter seemed to be functioning for once, because he bit it back. "Do I need to start running off strange men?" he asked instead. "I always figured it would be Kara-"
Martha laughed so hard she spilled lemonade on the table. "I should hope Kara could handle any strange men she might want run off, all by her own self. And I certainly know I can. Lord, for all you tease Clark about being old fashioned…"
Kon ducked his head, suddenly sheepish. He was a superhero, damn it. It was instinct. Though maybe he did need to try a little harder to remember that 'damsel-in-distress' never really applied to his family.
Index | 5
The plan sounded simple, in theory. Matt's friends went to Kon's school, and Delilah was even in his English class. It should have been easy for Conner Kent to befriend them, win their trust, and get them to open up a little about the friend they'd just lost. There was one tiny flaw in the plan, though - somehow, he'd forgotten just how awful Conner Kent was at making friends.
"Wait," Kon called, as he hurried down the hall after Clarence Moore, who was weaving in and out of the class-change crowd. "Look, I just want-" Kon paused to dodge a line of girls holding hands, and then to give a little surreptitious support to a kid with a dangerously leaning tower of books. "I just want to talk to you!"
Clarence froze in the middle of the hall, and then slowly turned around. "Well," he said, "I don't want to talk to you. So fuck off, cowboy."
"Cowboy?“ Will you just listen to me?" But Clarence was already walking again, fast enough that Kon had to jog a little to catch up. They turned the corner onto the locker hall, and Clarence stopped again. "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry about Matt. He seemed like a really nice-" Kon trailed off. The locker Clarence had stopped in front of was covered in crudely drawn stick figures with enormous penises. Someone had spray-painted 'ur next nigger faggot' across most of the top row, and now that he was paying attention, Kon noticed an all-too familiar smell in the air.
"Just-" Clarence said quietly, as he reached for the combination dial, "just leave me alone."
Kon caught his wrist. "Don't open that," he ordered.
"Get the fuck off me, man!" He pulled wildly against Kon's hold until Kon had to let go so he wouldn't hurt himself.
"Get a teacher, or something," Kon protested, "don't just-"
But it was too late. Clarence threw the locker open with a bang, and then quickly stumbled back. There was a dead chicken inside, hanging by its broken neck from a tiny noose, dangling from the cross-bar. Everything inside the locker was smeared with blood, completely ruined.
The students milling around them stopped and stared, suddenly silent, and then the whispering began. Clarence made an awful, broken sound and pushed through the circle of onlookers to run, head bowed, for the nearest exit.
Kon was torn, but in the end, there was only one decision that made any sense. Clarence wasn't going to talk to him anyway, so Kon let him go and pulled out his phone. He needed to get some photos before the teachers came to see what was going on.
*
English didn't go quite as badly - there was no blood, for starters. Kon lingered at the front of the room until Delilah took her seat, and then sat down at the desk next to hers. "Hi," he said, and she looked up from her notebook to stare blankly at him. She was really kind of hot - shorter than the girls he usually went for, but nice and curvy. Her dark hair was cut in a short, severe bob, and streaked with a dark red that hadn't been in the Christmas pictures. Unfortunately, Kon couldn't really think of what to say next. "Um," he finally said, "do you know when the Hawthorne thing is due?"
She flipped back a few pages in her notebook to check. "Not ‘til the tenth." She didn't look up at him again though.
"Have you started it?" he asked, hoping to keep her attention.
"It's only two pages," she said dismissively, her eyes locked on her notebook.
Kon clicked his pen a few times and frowned at his own binder, but he couldn't think of a way to prolong the contact. Did Rao grant requests for the sudden assignment of group projects? He was a little rusty on his Kryptonian theology.
"Hey," someone said. Kon looked up in time to see Miller put his hand on Delilah’s desk and lean over her.
“Go away, Pete,” she said, without looking up.
He braced his other hand on the back of her chair, effectively trapping her in her desk with his considerable bulk. “I just wanna talk.”
Kon saw Delilah’s fingers close around her pen, saw the muscles in her forearm tighten and bunch, but he hadn’t decided what to do about it until it was way too late to react at human speed. Her arm jerked, and for a second, he thought she actually had stabbed Miller, until he realized the red stain splashed across their hands was from the pen shattering when the tip hit the desk.
Shit,” Miller hissed, jerking back. “Bitch, you are psycho!”
“Yeah, I am,” she said, calmly and quietly, in a controlled voice that reminded Kon an awful lot of Tim, “which is why you ought to pay attention when I say if you come near me again, I will kill you.”
“You can try, you little-“
“Don’t,” Kon said, as he slid out of his desk and got to his feet, “finish that sentence.”
“You fuck off, Kent, this isn’t any of your-“
Delilah’s sudden scream of rage and frustration brought everything in the room to a standstill. Even the few people who hadn’t already been watching the confrontation turned in their chairs to stare as she shoved her things into her bag and pushed past Miller to hurry out the door. Ms. Harris entered a few seconds later, holding her coffee to her chest and looking concerned. “Did something happen to Delilah?”
Kon looked down at the desk. “She went to clean up,” he said, gesturing at the mess. “Her pen broke.”
*
The first thing he did when he got home was call Cassie. He hadn’t talked to her since they'd left the tower Sunday, so after she finished telling him about the minotaur she'd taken down in Portland that morning, he sat down on his bed with a plate of Martha’s cookies and filled her in on everything that had happened since then. He told her about Matt, and about the case, and about his absolute failure to accomplish anything, and it felt good. Cassie was a good listener, and unlike Tim, she made all the right sympathetic noises in all the right places and didn’t ask for useless details.
If he’d called Tim, he’d have had to explain why he didn’t have any new information. He hated telling Tim when he'd screwed up - not because Tim was an ass about it, but because he usually wasn’t, even when they both knew Tim could have done better.
“Does it say something awful about me that I can’t make friends with people who don’t know I’m a superhero?” he asked.
Cassie was painting her nails. He could hear the tiny brush-strokes in the silence while she was thinking. “I don’t think so,” she finally said. “It’s easier to bond with someone you already know you have stuff in common with, right? So it makes sense that you mostly get along with other heroes when you meet them. And when you meet normal people while you’re in costume, well, they want to get close to you, so you don’t have to work very hard at making a good impression. I think it’s just normal - making friends is slower when you don’t meet people in a team-up or a rescue.” Kon listened as she carefully screwed the cap back onto the bottle. “Gods, before I let my ID out, the girls were always so catty. After, too, but only when they thought I couldn’t hear, you know?”
Kon made his own sympathetic noise around a mouthful of snickerdoodle. “I really hate my hearing, sometimes.”
“I bet. I can’t even imagine…It’s bad enough when someone doesn’t know you’re in the bathroom stall.”
“You think there’s a trade off?”
Cassie blew across her nails. “A trade off?”
“Well, look at us,” Kon said as he laid back to stare up at the faded scorch marks on his ceiling. “You, me, Bart, Tim… We kick ass, yeah, and we’re all great friends, and I wouldn’t trade my life for anything, but I don’t think any of us was ever happy being a normal kid - except maybe when you were with Cissie and Traya, but that’s kind of different.”
“I don’t think it’s got to be either-or,” Cassie argued. “Some people do really well with both. Superman does."
But Kon wasn’t Superman. There were some pretty fundamental differences between him and Clark, and most of them didn’t even have to do with the Luthor genes. “I wonder sometimes if maybe they didn’t give me all the right programming, when I was back in that tube. I broke out early, right? I wasn’t done. They hadn’t put their fail-safes in. There might have been more they missed. Or maybe…I don’t know. Me being a happy, well adjusted dude with lots of friends really wasn’t their top priority, you know?”
He could hear the smile in Cassie’s voice when she spoke. “I think you do all right.”
“But - think about how long it took before me and Tim could get along. We were saving each other’s bacon, like, once a week, and we never stopped fighting-“
“Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and blame most of that on Tim,” Cassie said, dryly. “You wanna talk about social issues...”
“Which I really don’t. You know what his family was like. You know what Batman’s like. It’s really not fair to rag on him when he’s not here to defend himself.”
“Like he doesn’t have our lines tapped?” Cassie said, with a hard little laugh. “All I meant was, you two settled out pretty quick once he stopped being so damned secretive. It’s hard to be best buds with someone whose name you don’t even know.”
“Yeah, maybe -“ Kon glanced over at the clock. It was after three. “Shit, Cassie, I’ve gotta go. Chores and stuff.”
“Okay. See you Friday?”
He got up and started digging through his dresser for a change of clothes. “Can’t,” he said, “there’s a lot to get done, and I blew off yesterday when Tim was here. Anyway, I’d just have to fly back for the funeral. I’ll see you Saturday afternoon?”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, “but you owe me dinner.”
“Done deal, babe.”
She made a kissy noise at the phone, but hung up without waiting for him to return it. Kon tossed the handset aside as he finally found his ratty old work-clothes, and sat down to yank off his boots.
*
“You could have told me how late it was!” Kon shouted as he skimmed out onto the lawn. Martha was kneeling in the onions, carefully pulling spring shoots and adding them to her basket.
“You’ve got plenty of time,” she said, and then clapped her gloved hands together a few times to shake some of the dirt off of them.
“I’ve still got to go pick up your order from the feed store.” Which took way longer than it really had to, since Kon could have been there and back with a few hundred pounds of fertilizer and compost in the time it took just to get there in the truck.
“Mr. Jenkins has got his boy working with him, this season,” Martha told him as she carefully got to her feet and picked her way through the rows of beets and peppers, “doing delivery.”
“For how much?” Kon asked.
“No charge for that nice old widow woman,” she said, grinning as she hefted her basket to her hip. “I think Mr. Jenkins is a little sweet on me. Scandalous, really.” She stepped over the broccoli, and Kon suddenly realized where she was headed.
“Oh no,” he said, moving to cut her off. “No. You want carrots, I’ll get your carrots.”
Martha frowned at him. “If you keep treating me like an old woman, I’m going to start feeling like one.”
“I’m entirely motivated by enlightened self-interest,” Kon insisted. He took the basket out of her hands. “The sooner the vegetables get pulled, the sooner we eat. I am a growing boy, you know.”
“Well,” she said, with a sly smile, “in that case, you can pull those turnips, so we can put that corn down tomorrow when we do the rest. And if they’re ready, that whole first row of carrots. Give me something to do while you’re off at school tomorrow.”
Kon shook his head in amusement and zipped inside to set the basket on the kitchen counter. He’d walked right into that one, but he didn’t mind. It was easier to do it all at once, anyway.
Martha was pulling off her gloves and hat when he got back. “Sacks for the turnips are in the barn."
“Yes, ma’am,” Kon said, and pulled off his shirt. If he was pulling the carrots and the turnips and fixing up the summer patch, it was a lost cause, already. He threw it over into the cabbage and rubbed his hands together. The only human sound for miles was the creak of the screen door as Martha went inside, so he cracked his knuckles and knelt down in the turnip bed to thrust his fingers into the soil.
The dirt was warm from the sun, and pretty well packed from a wet winter. Kon wiggled his fingers to get a feel for it, and then concentrated, extending his aura through the ground and feeling the shapes of the roots all around him. The soil around his hands loosened, trembling as he shifted it, pressing and pulling until the tops of a few dozen turnips erupted from the ground. He pulled his fingers slowly into fists, dragging against the weight of the soil, and the turnips slid up and out of the ground and flew together to form a pile in the middle of the plot.
Kon stood up and wiped the sweat off of his forehead, and then cursed and stared down at his filthy hands. Oh well. It was going to happen eventually. He wiped his hands on his denim shorts and shook out his shoulders before heading to the barn for the feed sacks.
He had finished bagging the turnips, and pulling the oldest row of carrots, and burning out the newest weeds - which grew so fast that Kon had thought maybe it had something to do with the meteors until Martha had assured him that no, weeds grew like that everywhere - and was about to start reducing the pea vines to nice, fine ash, when he noticed a sound at the edge of his hearing. There was an older model diesel truck approaching, maybe two miles up the road.
Lowering himself to the ground, Kon looked around carefully. He'd probably filled the turnip sacks too generously for a normal guy to be able to move one by himself, so he gathered the stack of them and hurried them into the barn. While he was in there, he grabbed some of the rusty, dusty old tools from back behind the old tractor Martha mostly kept for show, and carried them back out to lean against the pea trellis. There. That looked normal, right?
He jogged over to the open kitchen window and flew up just enough to stick his head inside. “Hey, Ma?” he called.
Martha looked up and turned around. Her hands were covered in flour, which Kon felt was very promising.
“Your delivery’s - oops,” he said, dropping back down to his feet as the truck came into sight around a copse of trees at the fence line. They were far enough away he felt pretty confident they hadn’t seen him, but he walked back to the garden at human speed, just in case.
The wind shifted, and Kon caught a whiff of the fried-food smell he was starting to get used to around town. Some time after he died, the Pearsons had set up a business converting trucks to biodiesel and started up a co-op for refining used vegetable oil. Kon’s sense of smell wasn’t anything like as good as Clark’s, but he was still grateful. He smiled and waved at the truck as it rumbled to a stop, just as Martha came out the front door, wiping her clean hands dry on her apron.
Kon knew Mr. Jenkins from the store. He was a somewhat heavyset middle-aged man, maybe a little younger than Martha, dressed in blue coveralls streaked with dust. When he saw Martha on the porch, he grinned and climbed down from the truck to greet her. A few seconds later, Kon heard the passenger door slam, and a boy his own age came around the side of the truck.
“Oh, hey,” Kon said when he saw him. He recognized the kid from his art class, but he didn’t know his name. He was shorter than Kon, like pretty much everyone at school, but he was kind of broad-shouldered for his height, which Kon guessed made sense if he was delivering sacks of compost and stuff all day.
The boy glanced over at Martha and Mr. Jenkins and rolled his eyes. “Lock up your womenfolk,” he drawled, with a slight smile. “My dad’s on the loose.”
Kon laughed as he turned to look - and stopped abruptly, because, yes, that was definitely flirting going on over there. Kon knew flirting when he saw it, and he was seeing it now, between Ma and some guy in coveralls and…that just wasn’t right.
“Your face,” the kid said, with obvious delight. “Oh, god, that was worth the drive out here. I guess your aunt doesn’t date much?”
“Try at all,” Kon said, still flabbergasted. “She - no,” he said, forcing himself to turn away, shaking his head all the while, “okay, I’m not watching that. I'm Conner." He stuck out his hand.
The kid smiled. "Yeah, I know, we have class together," he said, but he shook Kon's hand anyway. His grip was strong, and his hands were rough with calluses - even worse than Tim's. "I'm Jake. Jenkins, but you probably guessed."
"Do you know what she ordered? Or do we have to wait for…” Kon glanced back over his shoulder.
“I can get the list,” Jake offered, and then stepped up onto the running board to grab a clipboard off the truck’s front seat. “Let’s see…” he shook his sandy-brown hair out of his eyes and skimmed through a few pages until he apparently found what he was looking for. “Mostly compost. Some rock sulfur. Fish meal. Chicken feed, mixed grain. You guys all organic?”
“Pretty much, yeah.” It was trendy now, to go all natural, but Kon was pretty sure the Kents had stopped buying pesticides and antibiotic-laced feeds around the time Clark's senses started kicking in.
The boy smiled broadly, and his white teeth were almost shocking against the tan of his skin. “Cool. You get enough eggs to sell? My sister’s got a place in town. She’d pay good price.”
“Nah,” Kon said, with a grin of his own, “I pretty much eat whatever they lay. I’ll tell Ma, though. If there’s a market, she might be interested in raising up some more chickens.”
Jake walked around to the back of the truck, and Kon followed. They pulled the gate down, and Jake climbed up onto the sacks in the back and set his clipboard on the roof of the cab. "You want 'em on a trailer or something? There's kind of a lot."
Kon wracked his brain. Did they have a trailer? Should they? "Uh…no, just…we can pile it up, here. It's not supposed to rain again until next week, and Ma'll start withholding baked goods if I'm not done by then."
Jake frowned. "You sure?"
"Yeah," Kon said, and climbed up after him. "What's ours?"
"All the green ones, for starters. Here, you get that end -" Jake directed the operation, for which Kon was grateful. It was easier to play normal when someone was giving you instructions. Together it took maybe twenty minutes to get all the sacks on the ground, which must have been within acceptable limits, because Jake just collapsed with his legs dangling from the gate after the last sack hit the ground. "Hoo," he said. "You're in better shape than me. Look at you, you're barely sweating." He poked Kon in the center of his bare chest with one tanned finger.
Kon shifted, self-consciously, and fidgeted with a hole in the thigh of his shorts.
"You do all the work around here? That's a big patch, for one guy."
"Uh," Kon said, "Ma's tougher than she looks. And my cousin usually comes by to help out, for planting and harvesting and all, but he's been really busy lately."
Jake cut him a thoughtful look. "Your cousin. You mean Clark?"
"Yeah," Kon said, settling down onto a sack of rock sulfur. "You know him?"
"Met him a few times," Jake said. "When I was a kid. Mostly around the store."
There was a somewhat awkward silence, of the sort that Kon had mostly gotten when he'd first moved from Hawaii - all small town nosiness and 'I didn't know Jonathan had a brother.' No one ever asked directly, of course, but they gossiped behind their hands.
"Uh," Kon said. "Lemonade?"
"What?"
"We've got fresh lemonade, inside, and it's cooler." Kon got up and headed for the back porch.
Jake jumped down from the truck bed. "Yeah, thanks," he said. "I'm pretty gross, though. You sure you want me in your house?"
Kon shrugged. When they got to the back steps, he picked up the hose and turned on the water. Jake jumped back, out of the way of the splash, so Kon laughed and sprayed his feet a little to get the dirt off. He toed his own shoes off and kicked them up onto the steps, and then sprayed himself in the face with deliciously cool water for a few seconds before washing down his arms, legs and chest. He handed Jake the hose and shook out his hair while the other boy washed his hands clean. "There," he said, "all better," and jogged up the steps and inside, leaving Jake to shut off the water and shove the hose back underneath the steps.
When he walked into the kitchen, Ma already had two glasses of lemonade waiting for them on the counter. She and Mr. Jenkins were sitting at the table with glasses of their own, and Kon joined them, carefully wedging himself between them. "Hi," he said, and drained his glass in two gulps.
"You boys done already?" Jenkins asked. Kon figured he was trying pretty hard not to sound as disappointed as he was. He glanced at Jake when he came in, and then looked Kon up and down. "Didn't take you long. You looking to pick up a little cash, Conner?"
Kon glanced at Martha in a panic, and then decided to focus on pouring himself another glass. "Uh, I'm kind of busy right now. School and stuff."
"Shame," he said. "Martha's just been telling me what a good worker you are. Maybe this summer, if you get some free time? Used to have my Eleanor working the front, but she's gone and opened up a restaurant down the way, so we're sort of short. I'm sure Jake wouldn't mind getting out of the back a bit, getting to talk to people, handle more of the business side."
"I don't mind," Jake said. He didn't sit down at the table, leaning on the counter instead and pressing his glass to his damp face for a long moment before taking a deep swallow. "Mmm," he said, as his eyes drifted closed. "Oh, I needed that. Thank you, Mrs. Kent. This is really excellent."
"Thank you, Jacob," Martha smiled at him, and then shot a faintly exasperated look at Mr. Jenkins that made Kon's heart soar. "I imagine you boys had better get home for dinner? It's nearly sundown."
"Nell's expecting us," Jake said, in the face of his father's disappointed frown, "and we oughta get cleaned up." He drained his glass and set it in the sink. "Thanks again for the lemonade, Mrs. Kent. I'll see you at school, Conner?"
Kon nodded, and smiled. Score a point for Conner Kent, who maybe wasn't a complete loser. He watched them go, and then turned to stare at Martha incredulously. "That guy?"
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Martha said, but she smiled into her lemonade.
"You know I don't like you by yourself up here at the house all day," Kon said, "but that guy?"
"Oh, Conner, he's harmless," she said, and flicked her fingers dismissively. "I'm not looking to get married again, just so you know."
Well good, Kon thought, but thankfully his brain-to-mouth filter seemed to be functioning for once, because he bit it back. "Do I need to start running off strange men?" he asked instead. "I always figured it would be Kara-"
Martha laughed so hard she spilled lemonade on the table. "I should hope Kara could handle any strange men she might want run off, all by her own self. And I certainly know I can. Lord, for all you tease Clark about being old fashioned…"
Kon ducked his head, suddenly sheepish. He was a superhero, damn it. It was instinct. Though maybe he did need to try a little harder to remember that 'damsel-in-distress' never really applied to his family.
Index | 5