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Phoenix is the little girl who doesn’t get along with anyone.
Maybe.
Scott is the little boy who like Jean, but whenever Phoenix asks if he wants to play, something about his gaze skitters away. She can tell, even when he’s wearing his tinted glasses. Sometimes when he does this, she’ll shout at him, fine, I hate you too! and knock over his toys because she can’t smash them into sawdust and tiny balls of plastic and metal like she wants to.
Sometimes she’ll go outside and sit alone and rage.
Sometimes she’ll stop thinking about stupid children who like Jean better than her, forgetting them, and she’ll lie on the grass and stare at the sky for a very long time.
She likes to dream that she’s among the stars.
She likes to be alone.
She forgets things a lot, and then she’ll remember them.
Sometimes she’ll want to use her powers to fly out to where the stars are, and she’ll ask the Hallers why they won’t let her. The Hallers are among the few people who really know about her and aren’t afraid, because they are very much like her, in some ways. There are many of them inside one body, and also they could break the world too, if they wanted.
Kostas Haller, and it’s usually Kostas because she gets along with him better than with David and Julia, he’ll chew his bubblegum and then say that she has to take her powers one step at a time. Besides, she’s going to have to learn how to compromise with Jean before she can just up and shoot out to the space. What if Jean came out and they were in outer space and then they died because Jean couldn’t breathe? Just imagine the pickle they’d be in.
“I hate Jean,” Phoenix, and it’s true she resents the other girl. Jean is the perfect, sweet little girl, and Phoenix has never met her, but it’s clear Jean is Phoenix’s handicap.
“You just don’t know her,” Kostas says, all reasonableness.
Phoenix wants to kick him, but then he’d just laugh at her, so she settles for glaring.
She thinks, she’d like to set him aflame with her eyes.
She thinks, she doesn’t actually.
He sits down next to her and blows a bubble with his bubblegum while Phoenix tears up handfuls of grass and shreds them up and pretends that she can set them on fire with her mind.
She could, too, if Kostas would let her. But what Kostas is always telling her, like he’s telling her now: the same way that Scott has to wear glasses, Phoenix has to have someone around to make sure she doesn’t blow up a small village just by thinking casually about it.
For now, it’s the Hallers.
The Hallers are her glasses.
Maybe someday it’ll be Jean. Jean will be her glasses, and Phoenix will be Jean’s glasses.
“What about your glasses?” Phoenix demands, suspicious at once.
“Goose, how many people do I share this head with?”
“Eight,” Phoenix says automatically, which is true, even if mainly only three come out.
“See, I have seven pairs of glasses. Some of those glasses steal the pie slice I’d been saving with my name on it in the fridge, the jerks, so count yourself lucky you’ve only got the one.”
“What if I don’t want glasses?” Phoenix asks again, and Kostas scratches his nose.
He probably wants to ruffle her hair, but he knows she hates that.
“Aren’t there are a lot of things in life you like?” he asks. “You’ll miss out on them if you always want to break them first before you get to know them. Like waffles. Or television. Or a nice day on a quiet lake. The world’s kind of delicate, you know?” When she doesn’t reply, he prompts, “Come on, you like waffles, don’t you?”
“I like pancakes,” Phoenix corrects. She likes to flatten the circles of them even flatter on her plate before eating them.
Kostas looks at her and then sighs.
He seems to be remembering her pancake ritual too, now.
Phoenix likes to take things apart, taste the heat of broken molecular bonds on her tongue without having so many words for the process of that—but she also likes the taste of pancakes. She likes things that are put together, too, maybe. The Phoenix is very good at breaking things apart—but perhaps not so good at putting them back together again. She thinks that maybe she wouldn’t care, but there are stones that are cool against her hand, and she likes them. There are clouds in the sky that look like froth, and she likes them too.
Kostas is popping bubbles with his gum, and Phoenix listens to the pop, pop, pop.
He turns on his walkman, and leaves the headphones on the grass with the volume turned up, and Phoenix can hear Cyndi Lauper singing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
It is a good song.
She stares up at the sky while she listens.
Sometimes, she likes to stare at the sky and forget things.
And then later, she’ll remember.
When she flops back against Kostas to use his side as a pillow, she tries to remember.
She tries to remember where she is.
She tries to be gentle.