Safe by S. K. Barnett

Author:S. K. Barnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

I met Tabitha because she wouldn’t stop staring at me and I returned the favor—like let’s have a staring contest and see who blinks first.

Let’s call it a tie.

I’d gone to the library to draw my very own Bizarro comic book. Because it felt like I’d been transported there—to the planet Bizarro. I needed to get out of the house so no one could peek over my shoulder. Besides, libraries felt like home to me—that’s what I’d used them as between families, ratty crash pads, and the occasional hour-rate motel (sorry, not going there).

Maybe it was that shitty teen job at the mall that taught me it was actually possible. To walk out of Father and Mother’s house and never come back. Or maybe it was Father getting sick—not sick enough to die, but sick enough to spend more than two weeks in bed and suddenly look frail, like he’d lost his superpowers. Like from now on he couldn’t ever hurt me again. Or maybe it was something else—the day Father offered a customer something besides crystal meth.

That day.

When my bedroom door swung open and there was a sweating man in a tracksuit standing there who asked me if I’d like to keep him company.

They’d stopped locking the outer gate a long time ago, but it still felt like I was locked in—like those invisible fences used to shock dogs. On the day I knew I wouldn’t be coming back, I stood staring through the iron slats at that world on the other side of it, the way you stare at the moon and say to yourself there’s no way anyone could’ve actually made it all the way there. I walked through the gate holding my breath, convinced it was going to slam shut in my face. That I was going to be dragged back inside and locked in the closet for eternity.

When I finally stopped running, I found myself in a place that stayed open late, where nobody bothered asking why you were spending every single second there. Where an old People magazine and a Google search of missing kids on the library computer led me straight to Karen Greer.

I was drawing my comic on the sketch pad Laurie bought me. She’d noticed me scribbling on a stained napkin and asked if I’d like one.

Sure.

I’d started drawing comic books for the same reason I’d started reading them. To be somewhere else besides that house. Tiptoeing downstairs late at night after Father and Mother fell asleep and strolling into the Daily Planet. Where super-evil villains were persona non grata, and help was just a phone booth away. The first comic I ever traced—over and over until I could just about draw it by memory—was the one where Superman saved this little girl from a burning house, crashing straight through the roof with the girl tucked safely into his arms.

Don’t worry, Jane, my cape will protect you from the flames.

When I came up with Super Invisible Girl, I decided to draw my own comic book.

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