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Caleb didn’t feel sorry for Chris. His dad’s rules—you fight your own battles—had caused him to get the shit kicked out of him by his older brothers on a weekly basis. No one ever stepped in for him.
“Can I ask you a question?”
That was Chris. Caleb must have been staring at him. Maybe Caleb was smirking a little bit, thinking about the misfortune that had befallen his brother. That was a mistake. It was always better to avoid eye contact in this house.
“What?” Caleb replied.
Chris took a swig from his bottle of beer. He’d gotten a bit of a potbelly since Caleb last saw him. Both his brothers were drinking, a small colony of bottles on the coffee table in front of them.
“Now that you’re a big-shot mutant or whatever,” Chris began, “can we still call you Gayleb?”
“You should never have called me that in the first place,” Caleb replied quietly. “Actually, my roommate Nigel is gay.”
Caleb wouldn’t have been able to explain why he said that. He always did that kind of thing when he was younger and getting stared down by his brothers—volunteered information, overshared, gave them ammunition. In his sessions with Dr. Linda—before they found out she was an evil spy for the Foundation—she had suggested that Caleb’s anxiety about his brothers was why he was so taciturn and repressed.
Charlie sucked his teeth at the mention of Nigel. “I’ll never understand how these goddamn aliens picked who got superpowers.”
“Legacies,” Caleb corrected.
“Whatever.” Charlie was much subtler than Chris when it came to insults; always had been.
“That’s sweet,” Chris butted in, leering at Caleb. “You and this kid make out all the time?”
“No. We don’t make out,” Caleb said flatly. “You’re ignorant as shit.”
Chris barked a laugh. “I’m ignorant? You hear that, dude?” He asked, nudging Charlie. “Little brother goes off to freak school in California and all of a sudden he talks like some liberal blogger. You going to lecture me about trigger warnings next?”
Before Caleb could reply, Charlie wrapped his arm around Chris and pulled him close, smiling slyly.
“Bro, do you remember the year of Santa Claws?” Charlie asked Chris in a stage whisper.
Chris clapped a hand over his face. “You mean the best Christmas ever? How could I forget that?”
Charlie grinned at Caleb. “You remember that?”
“Yeah,” Caleb replied. “I remember.”
Santa Claws. That was what the brothers considered to be one of their better pranks. It was Christmas Eve and Caleb had only managed to get to sleep after what felt like hours of tossing and turning, too excited about the morning to come. Chris had shaken him awake. Whispered in his ear, “Wake up, Caleb, I think I hear Santa Claus.”
How had Caleb been so stupid? He shook his head at the memory. He was young and hadn’t yet learned to be suspicious of everything his older brothers said and did.
“You were so damn excited . . . ,” Chris laughed, recounting the story. “Kept trying to hold my hand and shit . . .”
Caleb remembered. He was excited. It was like they were on a secret mission. He was almost more thrilled that Chris had thought to include him than he was to see Santa Claus. They crept through the house, towards the living room where Caleb sat now. They could hear the rustle of wrapping paper and booted footfalls. Caleb peeked around the corner and had to clap a hand over his mouth to stifle a gasp. Santa was really there, his back to them as he rummaged through the presents, a red suit and curly white hair, just like in the storybooks.
“I shoved him around the corner,” Chris said, wiping his eyes.
“And that’s when I turned around . . . ,” Charlie added.
Santa loomed over young Caleb. He’s wasn’t like the stories at all. Huge fangs filled his mouth and his face was smeared with blood. Instead of fingers, he had long claws that shone in the Christmas tree’s blinking lights.
“Ho, ho, ho!” Santa had bellowed. “You’re going to die!”
His brothers were cracking up now.
“Had all that fake blood and the vampire teeth left over from Halloween,” Charlie explained. “Took us a while to tape all the steak knives to my fingers.”
“Worth it,” Chris said. “Totally worth it.”
Young Caleb had shrieked and run upstairs, sobbing and hysterical when he launched himself into his parents’ bed. That was, as it happened, how he learned that Santa wasn’t real.
“You pissed your pants, too,” Chris said.
“I was eight,” replied Caleb.
“I think dad was madder about that than the prank,” Charlie said with a smirk. “They’d just gotten you over the whole bed-wetting thing.”
“How long did we get grounded for?” Chris asked, shaking his head.
“Oh man, so long.”
“Always telling on us,” Chris said to Caleb, taking a disapproving swig of beer.
“I thought there was a monster in the house,” Caleb replied.
And what had been the aftermath of Santa Claws? For starters, Caleb had to endure a stern lecture about how neither Santa Claus nor monsters were real, and how he needed to develop some backbone. The older boys had gotten grounded for a month, which, of course, they viewed as Caleb’s fault because he couldn’t take a joke.
“You guys beat me up almost every day for like a month after that,” Caleb said quietly.
“What else were we supposed to do?” Charlie asked innocently.
“It was boring being stuck in the house,” Chris said with a chuckle.
“I’d like to see you try that now.”
Caleb flinched and glanced over his shoulder. One of his duplicates had sprung loose. He stood behind Caleb with his arms crossed, glaring at the brothers.
Both Charlie and Chris had fallen silent. Their eyes were wide, Chris frozen with his beer bottle in front of his mouth. It occurred to Caleb that his brothers had never seen what he could do. The first duplicate had been an accident, but . . .
Caleb decided to go with it.
In a moment, there were six copies of Caleb, three on either side of his chair. They stood there cracking their knuckles or rolling their necks, like they were getting ready for a fight. Caleb sat back calmly, one eyebrow raised.
“Sucks to be outnumbered, doesn’t it?” he asked.
Charlie swallowed with some difficulty. “Easy now, bro. We were just messing around.”
At a mental command, each of the duplicates took one forceful step forward. Charlie yelped. Chris threw himself over the back of the couch.
Caleb laughed. He couldn’t remember ever openly laughing at his brothers like that.
Of course, the victory was short-lived.
“What in the hell is this?”
Caleb’s dad stood in the doorway, drawn away from his football game by the commotion. He looked from the gang of duplicates on one side of the room to his older boys cowering on the other. His thin lips curled in stern disgust, which he aimed directly at Caleb.
“Didn’t think I’d have to make this clear, boy, but I don’t want none of that alien shit going on in my house.”
“Or what?” one of the duplicates asked.
His father’s face turned red, all the way up through his buzz cut. He wasn’t used to insubordination in any facet of life. He glared at the offending duplicate, then at Caleb.
“I know that thing didn’t just sass me,” Caleb’s dad said icily. “In my own house.”
Caleb stared at his dad, whose face just got redder and redder. His palms were sweaty. He knew that he should back down and defuse the situation by absorbing his duplicates. He’d probably already gone too far by using them to intimidate his brothers. Garde weren’t supposed to use their Legacies against defenseless humans, even if they were total jerks.
But then—what could Caleb’s dad actually do to him? Caleb didn’t live here, didn’t eat his food, didn’t rely on him in any way. His dad di
dn’t have any power over him. Caleb hadn’t even wanted to come home in the first place, and tomorrow he’d be whisked right back to the Academy. Caleb was free of all this.
And yet, his father’s glare made him feel small again.
