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  Blocked

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  Seanan McGuire

  “We don’t always grow into the lives we thought we’d have when we were children. That’s not a bad thing. It’s nice to meet the people we never expected to become.” —Alice Healy

  The athletic field of Lewis and Clark High School, Portland, Oregon

  Three years ago

  “Everybody scream! Everybody shout! We’re gonna light it up and BURN THEM OUT!” The entire Trailblazer cheer squad shouted in unison, bodies moving together with the kind of effortless fluidity that only came after long practice and longer struggle. Most of us had been working as a team for four years. We formed a tight enough core group that we had been able to assimilate our underclassmen with a minimum of effort, folding them into the squad so quickly that most people didn’t even realize our lineup had changed. That was part of what made our squad so good: we put the needs of the group before the needs of the individuals. Once you put on the uniform, you were a Trailblazer, now and forever.

  The crowd hooted and clapped as we shook our pom-poms in the time-honored way of high school cheer squads everywhere. Sophie did a cartwheel across the front of the line, which elicited even more cheering. By this point in the season, people knew what it meant when one of our flyers started lining herself up that way: it meant the real show was about to start. Finally. If I had to spend one more minute shaking my ass like a glorified pep rally prop, I was going to scream.

  The largest girls on the squad flung themselves into position like they were driving their heels into the ground, creating the foundation of our human tower and providing the anchor that would keep the rest of us from toppling. If a single base at the bottom of our tower lost her balance, it was all over. We didn’t wait to see if they were stable: as much as we had practiced, we trusted each other. The second tier swarmed the line of girls, hooking our feet into the joined hands of the first tier and using them to launch ourselves up onto their shoulders. We spun to face the bleachers, locking ourselves into place with nothing more than our ankles and our will to hold the line. The cheering from the stands got louder—and then Sophie was running in our direction, legs pumping, ponytail flying, ready to soar. She skipped up the tiers of girls like gravity no longer applied to her, stopping only when her feet were on the shoulders of the girl standing next to me: Wendy, who was a senior like me and Sophie and all but two of the girls in this tower. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, at the crowd, and I tried to keep my own eyes pointed forward. Anything would have been better than seeing Wendy cry.

  Her tears weren’t eroding her stability. Then, as always, Wendy was a rock. And then my hand was under Sophie’s left foot, holding her up, raising her into the air, and I knew that on the other side of Wendy there was another girl, one of the Juniors, holding Sophie’s right foot equally high.

  I used to want to be a flyer, back when I thought that puberty would somehow turn me into a typical member of my family. I’d been taller than my sister Verity since I was twelve, but I’d expected it to stop. Surprise. I was one of nature’s bases, and nothing was going to change that.

  The girls at the bottom of the tower clapped their hands. We thrust Sophie up into the air, holding her stable as she rose. Wendy put up her hands, and Sophie transferred her feet, resting her weight entirely on Wendy’s palms. I clapped. The Junior girl on the other side of Wendy clapped. Behind me, almost drowned out by the sound of the crowd, one of the spotters shouted, “One-two-three—”

  On “four,” Sophie was flying, her diminutive frame soaring into the air and flipping once, twice, three times before she jackknifed in on herself and plummeted like a falling star into the waiting basket formed by three of our spotters. Wendy, the Junior girl, and I all flipped backward off the tower, spinning twice before we touched down. As soon as our feet left the shoulders of the girls at the bottom, they were tumbling forward, heading for their own marks. The crowd was cheering wildly, like they had just seen us all pull rabbits out of our nonexistent hats. That was the power of cheerleading.

  Halftime was coming to an end, and the football team would be retaking the field in a matter of minutes. We flung each other from place to place, tumbling, spinning, flying, throwing each other into the air like confetti and coming back down seemingly without effort. The laws of physics didn’t apply to us in that moment. They would never touch us again. They weren’t allowed.

  Glitter hung around us like a cloud by the time we finished, hitting our final marks and striking our own versions of the football team’s touchdown poses. In that moment, we became individuals, splitting the squad back into its component parts. We would never be a single body again. Most of the Seniors were crying, blinking rapidly as they tried to keep their mascara from running. For four years, we had been a single organism, strong and fast and willing to fight to protect our own. Now…

  It was over. Some of the girls might cheer together again at camp, or at college if they wound up in the same schools, but it wouldn’t be the same. It never was. My own eyes were dry. I had loved my squad as much as anyone. Unlike most of my teammates, I had always known that love wasn’t enough to change the world.

  “I’m gonna miss this, Melody,” said Wendy, still holding her pose next to mine. The floodlights made the glitter in her hair sparkle like she was aspiring to become a Disney Princess after graduation.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

  *

  So my name’s not Melody, and this isn’t a story about cheerleading, although I sort of wish that it was. I loved cheerleading. Every day that I spent on the squad was a gift, because I wasn’t the sort of girl who belonged there. I was more Wednesday Addams than Marcia Brady, more sarcastic than sunny, and more cynical than cheer-tastic. And none of that mattered to the girls on the Lewis and Clark High School cheer squad, not once I’d crushed my tryout into tiny little pieces under my tennis shoe-clad heel. I could do a standing back-tuck with the best of them, and even if I was never going to be a flyer, I had a stability and confidence that girls with three times my training could never hope to match.

  Too bad Melody West—my nom de plume in high school, a cheerleader’s name if there ever was one—didn’t actually exist. She was just a way for Antimony Price to get the vital social skills that homeschooling might deny her…deny me, I mean. Melody was a persona, not a person, and while she and I shared a lot of things, there was one major thing we could never share with each other, no matter how much I might wish for it:

  We could never share a future.

  That day on the field, with the lights burning my eyes and the air burning my lungs, until it felt like I was going to pull a Jean Grey and ignite from within—and if you don’t get the X-Men reference, well, there’s one more piece of evidence that I should never have been considered for the cheer squad—that was my last game. All the girls who’d shared my sphere of influence for the last four years were going on to bigger and better things, or at least college cheerleading, which meant shorter skirts and more dangerous stunts. It was a trade worth making as far as all of them were concerned. As far as I was concerned, too, but the only way I could have made it was by running away from my family, becoming Melody West in truth as well as name, and forsaking the duty I’d been raised to fulfill.

  My name is Antimony Price, and it’s my job to protect the monsters of the world from the most dangerous things in existence: humans. And sadly, that’s not a job you can do from six feet in the air, no matter how much you might want to fly.

  *

  I was sitting on my bed, paging through the latest issue of Astonishing X-Men, when someone knocked on my bedroom door. I looked up, scowling at the brightly colored comic posters that covered the boring white wood of the door itself, and shouted, “If this is about dinne
r, I’m not hungry.”

  “Good thing it’s not about dinner, then,” said my father. The door swung half-open, and his head poked around the edge, revealing his pointed, foxlike face, crowned by his shaggy, unkempt mop of off-blond hair. He pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, taking in my cross-legged position and the welter of comics that surrounded me, and asked, “Is this a bad time?”

  “No worse than any other,” I conceded, leaning back on my hands and looking at him. “What’s up?”

  “It’s been six weeks since you graduated from high school, and your mother and I were just wondering when you were going to find some sort of training activity to occupy your time.” He stepped the rest of the way into my room, leaving the door open in case he needed to beat a quick retreat. “You can’t spend the whole summer sitting in your room reading comic books. We’re not asking you to get a job or anything—”

  “That’s good, since I already tore up Melody’s social security card, and Uncle Ted hasn’t supplied me with new ID yet,” I interjected.

  Dad kept talking like I hadn’t said anything. “But we do want you to get out and socialize. Be where there are people, keep putting yourself out there. Be part of the world.”

  “You are coming dangerously close to reciting lyrics from The Little Mermaid,” I said.

  “I raised two daughters. You’re lucky I don’t spend more time reciting lyrics from Disney movies,” he replied. “I’m serious, Annie. We want you to get out of the house and find an activity.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What do you suggest, O Father?” I asked, uncrossing my legs and sliding into a standing position. “I can’t cheerlead, because I just graduated from high school and I’m not going to college for at least a year. I can’t go back to gymnastics—you pulled me out when I was twelve, remember? Now why was that? Oh, right: I was attracting too much attention by refusing to fail in order to stay out of the regional competitions. I could go back to circus school—I still have that ID around here somewhere—but you pulled me out when I was fourteen. Hmm. I wonder why that could have been?”

  “You’re not being fair,” said Dad, in a hurt tone.

  “I’m not being fair?” I echoed, taking a step toward him. “Everything I have ever been good at, you’ve taken away from me because it might attract attention. You let Verity go to international dance competitions, but if there’s a chance my picture might wind up in the local paper, that’s it, sorry Annie, you’re out. Don’t you think you’re showing a little bit of a double standard where your precious daughters are concerned?”

  “The risk of someone finding out that we’re here—” he began.

  “I don’t even look like the rest of you!” I shouted. His mouth snapped shut. I took another step forward. “Verity looks like Mom, like Grandma. Alex looks like you. Even Elsie and Artie at least look like they belong. I’m a throwback. The Covenant is never going to find us because I stick with something. Don’t you get that? Stop protecting me so hard that I can’t breathe!”

  He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. That had always been Dad’s most powerful weapon in our arguments: silence and sadness. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and so most of the time I would wind up apologizing for whatever I’d done that he hadn’t liked, even if I felt I was completely in the right. Little girls weren’t supposed to make their fathers look so disappointed that they couldn’t breathe. My resolve splintered under that look, but for once, it didn’t break: the bulwark of my anger was strong enough to hold it in place.

  I took a deep breath, and said, as carefully as I could, “I understand why it’s so important for us to stay hidden, Daddy, I really do. But you close every door I try to open because it’s too dangerous, and then you wonder why I never do anything. Cheerleading was amazing. I got to be myself—or at least, a version of myself—with the same girls for four years. I got to be part of a team. And you didn’t take it away from me this time, and I can’t even start to say how much that meant to me, but time had to go and ruin everything, and now you want me to get over it instantly, just because you’re worried about me being isolated. I’ve always been isolated. You isolated me, for my own good.”

  “And for the good of others,” he said, his gentle tone not quite concealing his distress at my words. Good. I wanted him to be distressed. I sure as hell was. “You always played too roughly for the other children. You weren’t as good at hiding yourself as your siblings were.”

  “I was five,” I said. “Give me a little credit for improving since then.”

  He sighed. “All right. I’ll give you a little credit, and I’ll give you my word: whatever you decide you’re going to do next, your mother and I will not interfere unless it poses a real and immediate threat to our security—and we will consult with you and discuss that threat before we make any decisions about whether or not you can continue. You’re an adult now, Annie, legally at least, and while I’m tempted to say that while you live under my roof you’ll live by my rules, we both know that isn’t going to happen. We have to learn how to work together, and you have to keep getting out there and learning more about fitting into the world without leaving a Price-shaped hole for the Covenant to find. All right?”

  “All right,” I said. He stepped forward, closing the distance between us, and folded me into a paternal hug. Somehow, despite his having admitted to being wrong—at least a little wrong—about the way I’d been handled, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been played.

  I was going to have to find something to do with the rest of my summer.

  *

  “Not seeing the problem, tiny cousin,” said Elsie, slouching comfortably back in the red vinyl booth. If I’d attempted that angle, I would have hurt myself, but she made it look like the only way anyone should ever sit in a burger joint. Her naturally blonde hair was styled in an array of rumpled waves, the bottom inch or so of each one dyed a bright cherry red that almost matched the vinyl. She looked like a pin-up advertisement for fries. Which were supposedly mine, since she claimed to be watching her weight, but half of them had already disappeared down her throat, and the other half seemed destined to follow. “Your parents want you to get out of the house and they’re willing to give you cash money rather than expecting you to get a job, so why not take advantage? We could road trip. See the sights. Head up to Vancouver and enjoy the glories of legal marijuana and hot Canadian girls.”

  “Okay, one, I don’t smoke pot—and neither do you, so stop trying to impress me with your edgy ways—and two, the last hot Canadian girl you tried to pick up turned out to be a waheela. You could have gotten eaten.”

  Elsie propped her chin in the heel of her hand, expression turning dreamy. “Yeah, but what a way to go.”

  I threw a fry at her. “Will you please take this seriously?”

  “I am, I am,” she protested, sitting up straight for the first time since we’d sat down. “I just don’t get why you’re discussing this with me instead of with Artie. He’s your go-to guy for complicated life problems. I’m the girl who gets you into the good parties.”

  “You’re more important than that, Elsie,” I said. “And besides, Artie and Sarah are at a comic convention this weekend, and she’ll kill me if I distract him.”

  Elsie sighed heavily. “Little brother is never going to admit that he has it bad for that girl. You know that, right? They’re both going to be in their eighties, still freaking out when their hands accidentally touch above a box of back issues, still pining for one another. They’re going to pine so hard they’ll reforest Mount Shasta.”

  “Mount Shasta hasn’t been deforested,” I said.

  “I’m thinking ahead.” Elsie picked up her milkshake—somehow exempt from the “watching my weight” embargo that was causing her to eat all my fries—and took a healthy slurp before waving it like a conductor’s baton, asking, “So what do you want to do? You can’t cheerlead unless you start college.”

  “Yeah, and college cheer squads are real
ly serious about their competitions,” I said glumly. “Any squad worth joining would want to go and show off their skills, and I’d wind up pulled off the team before I had time to do a double back-tuck.”

  Elsie cocked her head, expression going thoughtful. I shrunk back against the booth. A thoughtful Elsie was a dangerous Elsie. “So you need something to occupy your time—preferably some kind of team sport, since you’re supposed to be learning how to play nicely with the other children, and absolutely something physical, since you’re also supposed to be staying in shape. And it can’t be the sort of thing where you wind up in televised competitions, or where your face is really recognizable all the time. Am I basically getting this right?”

  “Pretty much, yes,” I said.

  Slowly, she began to smile. “I’m going to need you to trust me, hard as that might be…but I think I have just the thing.”

  *

  Half an hour later, we were standing in front of a deserted-looking warehouse in a part of downtown that I had never visited voluntarily (although I had chased a few misbehaving bogeymen through the area, since they thought that a fear of tetanus would slow me down). The warehouse doors were closed, but there were multiple cars parked around the area, some battered and rusty with bumper stickers and duct tape holding them together, others new and shiny enough to be tempting targets for car thieves and vandals. It didn’t make sense. Neither did the shouts and occasional shrill bursts of whistling coming from inside the warehouse.

  “So your solution to my needing to get out more is to take me to an isolated location and get me murdered,” I said slowly. “That’s…well, it’s a creative approach to the problem. I have to give you credit for that much, even as I fall back on my natural desire to keep breathing and suggest that we go see a movie or something.”

  “Chill out, Annie,” said Elsie, taking my arm in one hand and pulling me with her as she started toward the warehouse door. “These are good chicks. You’ll like them.”