Chapter 38: Press Nightmare
The newspaper felt cheap and greasy in John’s hands. The headline was a punch to the gut: LOCAL MENACE CAPTAIN BIMBO’S LATEST HUMILIATION. Below it, a photograph taken from a low, unflattering angle dominated the front page. It was all fishnets, stiletto heels digging into asphalt, and the perfect, moon-like curve of his own rear end, mid-fall, as he’d tripped over a stray sewer cap during last week’s confused chase with Mister Midnight’s goons. The caption read: “Grace Under Fire? More Like Glitter Over Failure.”
His throat tightened. “Chloe. Where did you get this?”
“Hmm?” She was across the room, wrestling a bolt of iridescent sequin fabric out of a plastic bin. “Oh, the front page? The newspaper box was empty, so I had to pay a guy ten bucks for his copy. Totally worth it. I got it framed!”
She gestured with her chin toward a small side table. There, in a cheap black frame, was the same newspaper. She’d even put a little heart-shaped sticker next to the photo.
‘The mortification is palpable,’ Amy observed, her voice a crisp, amused note in the center of his skull. ‘They’ve captured your essence. The profound clumsiness, the aesthetic defiance of physics. It’s Baroque.’
“You framed it?” John’s voice cracked. He let the paper fall to the floor, where it settled among the dust and glitter. “This is… this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Chloe paused, finally registering his tone. She let the fabric slump. “John. Babe. Look at it. Really look.” She walked over and tapped the glass of the frame. “This isn’t a picture of failure. It’s a picture of continuation. You fell. And what did the article say you did next?”
John didn’t want to remember. He’d gotten up, dizzy, one heel broken, and had unleashed a burst of unintended sparkle-energy that shorted out every traffic light for two blocks, allowing the goons to escape. It had been a fiasco.
“You got back up,” Chloe said, her voice losing its manic edge, becoming startlingly firm. “In six-inch heels, on a broken ankle—Amy told me later it was hairline, but still—and you kept going. The article mocks the fall, but it doesn’t mention the getting up. That’s our narrative. We’re just… editing the highlights reel for the public.”
‘The chaotic one has a point,’ Amy conceded, a begrudging note in her psychic timbre. ‘Mortals record the collapse, not the resilience. A fatal editorial bias.’
“I don’t want a highlights reel,” John muttered, sinking onto the floor beside the discarded paper. “I want to not be a meme. I want to not turn into a… a sparkly distress signal every time I see a remotely attractive person or have a vaguely pleasant thought.”
“Too late!” Chloe chirped, back to her energetic self. She threw the sequin fabric at him. It billowed in the air, a cascade of cheap, rainbow light, before settling over his head like a ghost. “So we work with what we’ve got. Amy Smith can’t just be a girl who waits tables. She has to be a statement. Someone who, if she were Captain Bimbo’s secret identity, would make a twisted kind of sense.”
From under the fabric, John groaned. “This is your plan? Camp as a defensive measure?”
“Camp as armor,” she corrected. “Now, stand up. We’re taking measurements for the non-spandex parts of your life.”
John peeled the fabric off his head. The apartment’s single large mirror, propped against a wall and covered in sticky notes and dried paint smears, seemed to watch him. Chloe brandished a measuring tape that looked like it had been salvaged from a grandmother’s sewing kit.
‘Allow me,’ Amy said. And then John’s body was no longer his own.
It was a deeply unsettling sensation, like being a passenger in a car he’d never learned to drive. He felt his legs straighten, his posture shift from a defeated slouch to something poised and unnaturally still. His hands, his hands, rose and took the measuring tape from a surprised Chloe with a graceful, efficient motion.
“Whoa,” Chloe breathed, taking a step back. “Amy-time?”
“Precisely,” John’s voice said, but the cadence was all Amy—clipped, precise, faintly archaic. “John’s proprioception is for shit. You’ll get inaccurate readings. Now, what is the purpose of this garment? Blending? Intimidation? Bait?”
Chloe recovered, a wild grin spreading across her face. “Yes.”
Amy, using John’s face, smirked. It looked foreign. “A multi-purpose disguise. Ambitious.” John’s body turned to the mirror, arms held out slightly. “Begin with the shoulders. And do try to be precise. I am tolerating this interference only because your previous sartorial advice, while garish, did increase survivability by approximately seven percent.”
As Chloe wrapped the tape around John’s bicep, frowning at the numbers, John watched from inside. He watched his own face, calm and superior, in the mirror. He saw the reflection of the framed newspaper over his shoulder. The two images—the humiliating public spectacle and this controlled, private strangeness—collided in the glass.
“So, Amy,” Chloe said, marking a number down on her arm with a Sharpie. “What’s it like in there? Cozy?”
“It is a perpetual state of being mildly annoyed,” Amy replied through John’s mouth, turning so Chloe could measure his back. “Imagine being strapped to the hull of a ship during a storm, except the ship is also, inexplicably, constantly worried about its GPA and whether it remembered to feed its goldfish.”
“Hey,” John thought, but had no way to voice it.
Chloe chuckled. “And the transformation? Is it… weird for you?”
A pause. John felt a flicker of something complex from Amy—a sensation like ancient dust disturbed. “It is an activation sequence. A key turning in a rusted lock. The mechanism is juvenile, but the resulting potential is… operational. My consciousness expands to fill the new form’s parameters. He becomes the engine. I become the steering. It is not pleasant. It is simply fact.”
The measuring continued in silence for a moment, just the sound of the tape sliding and Chloe’s focused breathing. Then she spoke, her voice quieter. “You look out for him, though. In your own, mega-bitchy way.”
John’s body went very still. In the mirror, John saw his own eyes—Amy’s eyes, now—narrow slightly. The sardonic mask slipped, just for a microsecond. What looked back was something old and tired and terrifyingly sincere.
“The vessel is frustratingly fragile,” Amy said, the words softer now. “And inconveniently kind. It is a liability. And one does not invest this much time in a liability only to see it shattered by carnival-barker villains with a flair for the dramatic.” The mask snapped back into place. “Now, the inseam. And do not get ambitious; he has the equilibrium of a newborn giraffe.”
Chloe laughed, but it was a softer sound. John, trapped inside, felt a confusing surge of gratitude. The framed newspaper headline still glared from the table, but somehow, in the cluttered, neon-drenched warmth of Chloe’s apartment, its power began to leach away, replaced by the mundane strangeness of a friend marking his measurements on her skin.
As Amy relinquished control, leaving John swaying slightly with the familiar dizziness, Chloe capped her Sharpie. “Okay. I have a vision. Think ‘utilitarian punk librarian who might curse in Aramaic.’ It’s a vibe.”
John just nodded, his eyes drifting past her to the large mirror. For a second, he didn’t see his own pale, anxious reflection. He saw a flicker, something moving in the deep background of the glass that wasn’t in the room. A shadow that whispered.
Then Chloe flicked the fairy lights on and off, and it was just a mirror again.
“First thing,” she declared, snapping him back.