Uneven Parallels

[Diya Behari]

(Long story ahead. Thanks in advance for reading!)

Saturday afternoon, before the Mustangs vs. Buccaneers game

Since it was a game day, Diya was supposed to take it easy. Relax, watch TV, hang out with friends. Normal stuff, so she wouldn’t be exhausted for the game against the Buccaneers that night. But it wasn’t just a game day - it was the day her parents were coming in to town. Luckily they weren’t going to be in until just before the game. There was no way Diya could “take it easy” with the prospect of her seeing her mom lying ahead of her.

So she spent most of the morning in the gym. Light weight lifting and jogging on the treadmill. Just enough physical activity that she didn’t have to think very much.

As she was about to start some yoga, she heard her cell phone chime in her bag. Digging for a minute, she pulled it out to see a text from Lauren, double checking to see if Diya still planned on meeting her parents and showing off their new powers. Diya had been debating whether or not she was really up to it, but it seemed like a better way to waste the afternoon than more gym time. She responded she would be there, then picked up her stuff to go hit the showers.

When she was drying her hair, another text came in. She figured it was another one from Lauren, but the ID made her pause. It was from her dad. Surprise! We’re here! Where can we meet you?

Diya fired a frantic text off to Lauren. OMG. Rents here erly. Surprise? She hesitated before adding Still want 2 meet thm?

Lauren’s response was quick. Sure! Bring them by!

The Beharis were waiting for the daughter in front of the school, where she’d met them last time they’d come to visit for Parents’ Day. Jack Behari greeted his daughter with a tight bear hug, while Marie briefly circled her arms around Diya’s shoulders.

“So what’s the plan, Dynamo?” Jack asked after the greetings were out of the way. “You gotta show us all the excitement Westbrook has to offer!”

“Uh, well, actually I was planning on meeting a friend and her parents. It’s, uh, Lauren? The girl that I kinda switched with? We were going to, y’know, demonstrate what we can do now for her parents.”

“Really, Diya, is that such a good idea?” Marie asked. “Should you be getting so comfortable with these ‘abilities’? You mentioned some students had lost their abilities in this debacle, correct? Perhaps that could still happen for you?”

Diya looked down at the cracked pavement rather than meet her mother’s cool gaze. “The whole point of being at this school is to learn how to use my abilities, Mom. Just because those abilities have changed doesn’t mean they’re gonna let me stop that work.”

“I suppose,” Marie said, though she sounded skeptical.

“I think it’d be brilliant to watch,” Jack said. “See what sort of stuff they’re teaching you here, right? And see this new ability in action. Are we invited, or you gonna send your old parents off on their own?”

Diya shrugged. “If you wanna come, yeah, sure, come on.”

Diya led her parents on a round about path through the school, trying to avoid as many other students as possible before reaching the bunker where Lauren was already waiting with her parents. She stood with her shoulders slumped and her hands jammed into the pockets of her track pants as she greeted Lauren and introduced her parents. “Lauren, these are my parents. Marie and Jack.”

Lauren, ever cheerful, stepped forward with a bright smile and an outstretched hand. “Hi, it’s nice to meet you!” Jack returned the handshake warmly. Diya cringed slightly as she waited for her mom’s reaction, but Marie gave Lauren a polite-enough handshake, even if it was very brief.

Lauren stepped back to stand by her parents. “This is my dad, Darryl, and my mom, Jackie.” The dads stepped forward to greet each other first. Jack just as warm with Darryl and Jackie as he had been with Lauren. Marie was much more comfortable with Lauren’s parents than she had been with Lauren - Diya wondered if they had any idea why.

Diya stood back and just waved at Lauren’s parents. Darryl seemed to understand and nodded politely to Diya. Jackie, however, stepped forward to offer a hand to the sullen teenager. Diya took Jackie’s hand limply, only tightening her grip and standing up straighter when she caught a glare from her mother.

With the introductions out of the way, Lauren took charge. “So! This is the bunker. At least that's what we usually call it. Formally it's the Amanda Acker Training Facility. Ms. Acker is a heroine.” Marie frowned at that, but Diya didn’t think anyone else noticed. “She goes by Lady Hercules. She helped design and test it.I could probably bore you with details on how it's built, but honestly I don't remember a lot of it. Basically, it's built to stand up to just about anything we can throw at it so we have a safe place to practice.”

Jack stepped forward to peek his head into the bunker. “Fascinating. I’d love to get a look at what makes it tick some time.”

Diya rolled her eyes. “Daaaaaaaaad,” she whined.

Both Lauren and her father smirked at the interaction between Diya and her dad. “I’m sure the faculty wouldn’t mind showing it off some time,” Lauren said.

“Don’t encourage him!” Diya hissed at Lauren. Jack chuckled, but it wasn’t entirely obvious to anyone else whether or not Diya was joking.

Darryl piped up then, saying, “I think in the meantime the two of you wanted to show us something?”

“Yeah,” Lauren said. “There’s an observation deck up here where you guys can watch,” she added, before leading the way up the stairs. Her parents followed first, then the Beharis, with Diya taking up the rear. Jack was craning his neck to look every which way, taking in everything. Marie pulled out her Blackberry halfway up the stairs.

On the observation platform, the two dads stepped up to the window to get a look inside of the bunker. Jackie stood to one side to look around the observation deck itself, while Marie stood to the other, tapping out an e-mail on her phone. Diya and Lauren hung back near the stairs. Diya whispered to Lauren, “Sorry this is awkward. I warned you.”

Lauren shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. Are you okay?”

Diya was fidgeting with her gloves, pulling on the wristband to tighten the gloves against her fingers, then flexing her fingers to loosen them back up again. She just nodded to Lauren.

The observation deck had lapsed into silence when Marie finally spoke up. “So. Darryl. Jackie. What do you do?” If Diya hadn’t been so distracted she would have laughed - it was the exact same question she’d faced a dozen times her first day at Westbrook, the one she’d practically done backflips to avoid. Maybe it really was a totally normal question wherever you were.

The adults engaged in small talk about their careers - Darryl and Marie discovering their related careers in medical research, as Darryl ran Jenner Research, working on vaccines while Marie worked as a pharmaceutical researcher. Jackie downplayed her work with charitable organizations, while Jack worked as one of the lower men on the totem pole in IT.

Finally, even though she had started it, Marie interrupted the conversation. “I do believe there was to be some sort of demonstration?” She frowned, as if the last word left a bad taste in her mouth.

Lauren glanced at Diya quickly, then looked back to the four parents. “Yeah, we’ll go get set up. Ready Dee?”

Diya took a deep breath and adjusted her gloves one more time. “Yeah, I guess so,” she said, before leading the way down the stairs.

“So far so good, right?” Lauren asked quietly as they descended out of their parents’ sight.

“Famous last words.”

“Come on, we can do this!”

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Diya glanced back up at the observation deck. “Yeah, I know.”

Lauren leaned in close, keeping her voice low. “If you’re not up for this, I’m sure we could call it off. Technical difficulties or something.”

Diya grimaced. “No, no. This’ll be fine. Really.” She pulled off her Westbrook Letterman jacket, to keep it from getting scorched or ripped. Lauren followed suit, taking off her own jacket.

“Alright. Just try to enjoy yourself!” Lauren took another moment to stretch. “All set to wow them?” she asked with a grin.

Inside the bunker now, Diya glanced up again, feeling nervous. Her dad was standing at the window and gave Diya a thumbs up. Marie stood behind him, observing the scene below dispassionately. “Sure. What should we do to show off?”

“Turn on a drone or two?” Lauren suggested. “You can keep them distracted and let them see how invincible you are. If there’s one with a flame thrower, that should impress them. Then we can smash them together. Oh, just so you know, my parents have never really seen me use my...well, now they’re yours, so your powers in action.” She grinned.

“Your parents are going to be disappointed. You’re going to look unimpressive next to me.”

“No way!” Lauren objected. “I’m sure I can get one of them to take a few swings at me or something. When they see how I can move? They’ll be impressed. Besides,” she added with a grin, “I told them I’d show the basketball trick later.”

“Well, let’s cue up the drones then,” Diya said.

“You got it!” Lauren approached the control panel and started keying in parameters for the drones. After a minute, three drones stood before the pair of girls. One with a flame thrower, one with an automatic weapon with rubber bullets, and one final hand-to-hand combat drone. Lauren took a position slightly behind Diya, and waited for the opening to strike.

Diya took a deep breath before starting up her fire shields, just a moment before the drone with the flame thrower started firing. Diya had no patience for subtlety in this fight. She approached the drone, ignoring the stream of flame it was shooting at her, and delivered a fast series of devastating kicks to the drone.

Lauren waited until the flame-thrower drone’s attention was fully on Diya before darting out from behind her to engage the hand-to-hand combat drone. She got the attention of its sensors and toyed with it for a minute, moving around to make sure the drone stood between her and the third drone with its rubber bullets. She quickly moved in and out of the drone’s range, grinning as she toyed with the drone.

Diya, on the other hand, was intent on causing as much damage as possible. Her face was set in a scowl, one that might even have been intimidating if she weren’t fighting a robot. She concentrated all her efforts on bringing down the flame-thrower drone, leaving deep dents and scorch marks in the metal, oblivious to the other drones around her until a half-melted rubber bullet hit the ground near her shoe. With the flame-thrower drone well and truly out of commission, she moved her attention to the gun-toting drone. She employed her own dodges and feints, though not as graceful and quick as Lauren’s, to turn the drone so no stray bullets would go towards Lauren. A few well-placed kicks of her own, combined with the heat of her flames, made short-work of the gun without actually disabling the drone yet.

With the threat of the gun removed, Lauren moved in for the “kill” on her drone, driving the palm of her hand into its chest to give herself more space to deliver a roundhouse kick to its head. She came down out of the kick with a wince. “Boots. I keep forgetting boots!”

Diya allowed herself a moment to grin at Lauren, which the gun-toting robot took advantage of. Apparently it was programmed with some hand-to-hand tactics of its own, as it took a swing at Diya and landed a lucky hit against Diya’s side. Diya winced and muttered “Stupid robots,” before returning her full attention to the drone, kicking it several times to back it into a corner.

“Careful , Dee!” Lauren called as she narrowly dodged a swing from her own drone. She reached up to grab the drone’s “head,” pulling it down to meet it with her knee. When the drone simulated a stunned reaction, she drove a few more blows into its head until it registered enough damage to shut down.

With two drones out of the way, Lauren jogged up to Diya and the remaining drone. “I’m here if you need a hand.”

Diya delivered an upper cut to the drone’s “chin,” finally getting it to register as stunned when Lauren approached. “Wanna finish it off?”

“Sure!” Lauren stepped up and waited for the drone to recover before starting a fast series of hit-and-fade attacks on it, having fun with the fight again. She kept the hits coming fast enough to keep the drone backed into the corner, but clearly wasn’t putting all her effort into the fight yet. After a minute, she finally went for the take down shot, knocking it several inches off the ground, causing it to hit the wall and register enough damage to shut down. “Three down!” she cheered.

Diya took another deep breath before bringing the fire shields down, shivering slightly in the relative coolness of the bunker. “I think that’s all I can do today. I do have a football game in a couple of hours.”

Lauren laughed. “I think three is enough right?” She turned to wave up at the quartet of parents gathered at the window of the observation deck. “Let’s go see what they think!”

Before following Lauren up, Diya glanced up at the window again and absently tugged on a pigtail.

When the girls reached the top of the stairs, Darryl nodded to them. “Pretty impressive.”

Diya nodded back to Darryl, but couldn’t help noticing with some trepidation that her mother’s attention wasn’t just fully focused on her, but Marie was actually smiling. “Diya, this is wonderful. We have so many new avenues of research to explore now. The mimicking thing was difficult to pinpoint, but something as basic as fire has decades of research behind it. I was worried we'd be back at square one, but truly I think -” She only stopped when Jack laid a hand on her arm and whispered “Not now.”

As soon as her mother had started to speak, Diya’s expression had darkened and her shoulders had slumped. Jack looked from his wife to his daughter and tried to smile. “Pretty impressive, Dynamo.”

The Lombardis shared a series of confused and concerned glances after watching the Beharis for a moment. Jackie finally spoke up. “I was worried when the first one attacked. I was sure one of you had been hurt by that!”

Lauren attempted a grin, but her cheerfulness seemed forced as she chimed in with a “No way!”

Diya took a deep breath to compose herself. “No, uh, Lauren’s adapted pretty well to the, uh, new abilities. She's really quick and gets out of the way before they can get to her.”

Lauren nodded emphatically. “And with Dee’s new powers, she can take pretty much anything those drones can throw at her. So for the first volley, I just hide behind her.” Lauren then pulled Darryl back to the observation window and gestured down at the first drone. “Check out the one Dee tore up. I guess my powers aren’t as rough on the equipment any more. I used to send more off to be repaired than to storage.”

Darryl nodded at his daughter. “I still think you were quite impressive in there. Both of you,” he added with another nod in Diya’s direction.

Diya tugged on a pigtail again. “Uh, thanks.”

Jack put an arm lightly around his daughter’s still slumped shoulders, while Marie stood stiffly to the side, tapping out another e-mail, clearly uncomfortable. Jack tried to keep the tone light. “Where did you learn your moves, Lauren? Did you fight the same way before this...incident? I recognized many of Diya’s moves from the martial arts she was practicing before coming to Westbrook, but yours were all new to me.”

“I think Dee applies her new powers to what she already knew. I never really studied any real fighting moves, so I used to just hit things as hard as I could. When Diya told me how mine work, I loaded up all kinds of videos from action movies and documentaries from the making of video games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Daddy's kind of partial to Chuck Norris movies,” here she paused to give her dad a friendly smirk, “so I tried to pick up a few moves from those, too. So, I guess a little of everything, mostly?”

Diya smiled slightly at Lauren. “And when she’s not watching action movies to beat up drones, she’s totally tearing up the cheer squad.”

Lauren grinned. “Oh absolutely! I can learn new routines as fast as Peyton can show them to me.”

Marie was frowning again. Jack noticed this and cleared his throat awkwardly. “Uh, so, Lauren, you have the cheerleading and the training. I know Diya has football now. What else do you girls do around here?”

Diya’s eyes widened in panic for a second. She stammered for a moment before coming up with “Uh, y’know, stuff?”

Lauren smirked slightly at Diya’s flustered response. “All kinds of things. But school keeps us pretty busy most of the time, and practice keeps up pretty busy a lot of the rest, both for sports and powers. I go the ice skating rink a lot. Plus there's always something going on in this town.”

Marie looked from Diya to Lauren. “Ice skating? When you set yourself on fire? That hardly seems prudent.” Her tone was icy, earning a glare from Diya, but no comment.

Lauren hesitated before answering, startled. “Oh, I don’t set myself on fire anymore. That's a major plus for the skating, I'll admit. But, really even before I lost those powers, it was pretty manageable. I had reasonably good control over it. Really the ambient heat bleeding off was way more problem than the actual fire ever was.”

Marie looked back to her daughter. “And you? How is your ‘control’ over this...thing?”

Diya shrugged and muttered, “I’m fine, Mom.”

Jack put a hand to Diya’s forehead. “You are a little warm, Dynamo. You okay?”

Diya ducked out of her dad’s reach. “I’m fine. Seriously. Just a side effect, you know? I’m not going ice skating, so I got nothing to worry about, okay?”

Lauren looked to Diya, concerned. “Firebugs just give off a lot of extra heat is all. It takes some getting used to.”

Darryl added, "It looks like you're handling it well, Diya. I'm sure Lauren told you all about the dining room."

Jackie nodded and smiled. "It was due for remodeling, anyway,” she joked.

Diya nodded and tried to smile, but it was strained. She tugged on a pigtail again. “So, uh, yeah, Lauren's handling the, uh, switch really really well, too. I mean, everyone's feeling a little weird now, but, uh, she's pretty good with it?” Diya trailed off towards the end, realizing she was babbling.

Marie took advantage of the lull after Diya trailed off to look to Lauren. “You know, Lauren, if you'd be willing I'd love to speak more with you about this swap. It could be very interesting to compare you and Diya in some of the tests she's participated in."

“What sort of tests?” Darryl asked as Lauren was hesitantly agreeing.

Marie waved her hand dismissively. “Oh nothing terribly intrusive, I promise. Just some demonstrations perhaps of her abilities, some blood work and the like. In case this isn't permanent, I believe it could be very interesting to compare how these abilities "work" in different individuals. It may give us the breakthrough we've been waiting for."

Darryl and Jackie shared concerned looks. Lauren opened her mouth to answer for herself, but for once was at a loss for words.

Marie was about to continue but Jack, having a better sense of the mood of the room, cut her off quickly. "I think that might be a conversation for another time, Marie," he said gently. Marie frowned, but nodded. “After all, we’ve got a football game, right Dynamo?” Jack clapped his hands in excitement.

Diya looked up from the inspection she’d been giving her shoes. “Oh, yeah, football.”

Jack nodded and looked to Lauren’s parents. “I’m looking forward to seeing Dynamo here score some touch downs!”

Diya sighed. “Field goals, Dad. Didn’t you read the Wikipedia link I sent you?”

Jack laughed. “of course, of course! Just forgot in all the excitement!”

Lauren grinned. “You did get into the end zone in the last game, Dee!”

Darryl smiled at Diya. “Lauren told us about that. It sounds like it was a phenomenal play. Congratulations!”

Jack checked his watch. “Hey, speaking of that game, I think we better get these girls on their way! Dynamo, you riding with us?”

Another fleeting look of panic crossed Diya’s face before she shook her head. “Uh, no. I”ve gotta ride with the team. Pre-game bonding and all that.” It was a blatant lie. Coach knew her parents were coming in to town, and it was never a real rule the team had to ride to or from the stadium all together. They just usually did. Diya just hoped Lauren would get what she was going for and not contradict Diya.

Lauren did indeed go with the lie. “We should probably go get ready and get to the bus, right Dee?” Lauren hugged both of her parents goodbye before offering a handshake to each of Diya’s parents again. “It was really nice to meet both of you!”

After the parents said their own good byes, Diya herded her parents towards the nearest exit, trying to subtly keep them away from the Lombardis so the adults couldn’t chat any more.

Once the adults were all gone, Diya and Lauren started heading back to the dorms in silence until Lauren finally quietly said, “Well, it wasn’t that bad.”

Diya shook her head. “I am so sorry about my mom.”

Lauren hesitated before saying “She wasn’t so bad. She’s a little...dedicated?”

“She is crazy. And such a bitch. Oh my god, don’t do her stupid test things. Say you're busy. Or something.”

“Is she really that serious about wanting to, you know, find a, uh, “cure”?” Lauren’s tone clearly indicated she didn’t like the sound of that.

Diya shrugged first, then hesitated, before she finally nodded.

“But you don’t need a cure. There’s nothing wrong with you!”

Diya shrugged again. “It’s, y’know, complicated. And now I’ve gotta go play a stupid game.” She sighed. “I never should have let them come.” It wasn’t obvious if she meant to the bunker or out to Westbrook at all. Diya herself didn’t know which she meant.

“Sure. Complicated,” Lauren said with a friendly smile. “But you know you can tell me. I mean, if you want. And don't let her get to you. You'll be out there on the field, in your element. Just do your thing. Forget about crazy parents. You'll be great.”

“Yeah, I’ll try.” Diya took a deep breath to calm herself as they reached the dorms. Diya ducked into her room quickly to grab her football gear and grab a handful of granola bars out of her desk drawer to eat on the bus. She already had a feeling this was going to be a long night.