Chapter Five Page Four, Bren, Downtown

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“Maybe you can handle someone, one on one,” Bren said, “But they won’t come at you like that. They’ll come at you in a group. Or they’ll find out where you live and come after you there.”

            “Has this happened a lot?” Frank asked, “Are these guys keeping this town afraid or something? Maybe they’ve never dealt with someone who fights back.”

            “Look,” Bren said, “Just because I said I liked Batman doesn’t mean I’m going to like you if you try to sound like Batman.” She cracked a smile. It was a lame joke but she thought Frank wanted to hear her make a lame joke.

            “Yeah, don’t worry; I wasn’t going to do it,” Frank said, “As soon as you mentioned they were like gangs I knew to back off. I mean, duh.”

            “Good,” Bren said. She was happy that she wouldn’t have to deal with him getting himself killed. Or come to his rescue or anything. She hated when she had to do that. She still wasn’t fully sure he’d decided not to do it, though.

            When the pizza arrived, they ate. Frank supplied most of the conversation. He talked about his childhood some more and Bren began to wonder if he really had been a shy kid before college. Something in his life had turned around, it seemed; just what it had been, Bren never picked up on. Frank walked Bren out to his car and they got in together, and drove back to the college.

            Frank let Bren out at her dorms, without so much as a “some other time?” and drove on. Bren walked up to her room, affixed the gauntlet to her right hand, and slipped a glove over it. She knew it’d look strange and bulky, but she also was pretty sure Frank was going to make a run for it and she was going to have to cut him off somewhere and that she would have to worry about how strange it looked later. She wasn’t sure which place he’d visit for, though, she was pretty sure it’d be the one closest to the college, one on the north end of Downtown. The one that belonged to the Scanners.

            She walked across campus to the gravel parking lot and got into her car, a mid-sized sedan she’d inherited from an uncle. She drove with the radio off, desperately trying to remember exactly what she was supposed to do to get the gauntlet to activate when she needed it. On the road she passed Dani and Mary, and wondered what they were doing out so late at night, having not met them yet.

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