Part 79
Epilogue Part 3
I walk in and plop down on the recliner, throwing myself back, mindless of the paint, blood, dirt and grime I am no doubt transferring to the delicate fabric. My clothes look like I live in the woods. I knit my hands behind my head and put my feet on the desk.
“You should be a little more mindful of other people’s belongings,” Kara hisses, turning sharply to the left. “Seph?” Kara asks.
“Would you kindly be quiet?!” Persephone orders in a manufactured Puerto Rican accent at the top of the stairs. “You are going to wake my husband!” Persephone comes down to us.
In every sense of the word, Persephone and I were friends. We worked together, we partied together, and we had many mutual friends that genuinely liked both of us. We were friends, but I never really liked her. We’d known each other since high school when we both decided to become superheros. Despite a legal name perfectly good for superheroing, she had gone through a string of identities.
First she was ‘Sprite,’ and wore sparkly fairy wings. At times, she rivaled me for size, so that secret identity quickly became a joke. Also, that identity was a lesbian, and Persephone herself was very much into boys. She became a punk rocker and sang in a band, adopting the new identity of The Voice of Morality. The band joined up with the group Recycle! Reduce! Revolution, who were fervent eco-terrorists. They were technically heros, but there was always tension between Triple R and the Superhero Gang.
Persephone’s superpower was unbearable self-righteousness. Around the breakup of the band, she grew closer to her Puerto Rican roots, and though she had no accent her entire life, it became so thick she was barely understandable. She took the name ‘Leading Latina,’ but found this to be easily parodied as well. Eventually she settled on the name Rikanstructor.
“You didn’t say this is what the garage door opener is for,” Persephone says. She gets into the light a little more and my eyes squint with the working of my brain, trying to recognize that face. The fire-engine red dreadlocks look familiar, but she’s so cleaned-up and unpierced I barely recognize her.
Kara shakes her head. “Sorry, Seph, we just got out of SpectraCom Mansion, I’m a little juiced.”
Seph reaches the bottom of the stairs, her eyes snapping wide. “You were in SpectraCom Mansion? What were you doing there?”
I stand up from the desk and for the first time she sees me.“I killed Joshua Solomon,” I say. “He was trying to perform a sacrifice. Some kind of black magick.”
Her whole body contorts, her arms bowing in and her mouth dropping open to resemble a large-mouth bass. Persephone, the one I remember, would not be caught dead in Calvin Klein black slacks, not even this late at night. She drops in a chair beside me and covers her face with her hands. The sleeves of her white blouse fall back and reveal song lyrics tattooed on her arm.“Dr. Filth, why is it not surprising to find you in my rumpus room?”
I shrug. “I don’t really know what a rumpus room is.”
Kara is frustrated. “You said you would help us out!”
“I vote Democrat, what more do you people want?” Persephone says. “I’m done running the streets playing Superhero. I thought you were too, Tod.” She drops her hands to her side and lets out an absurdly dramatic sigh that I think is completely serious. “Someone on the faculty needed to die before I could get in this apartment!”
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