Superpowers by David J. Schwartz

of crackers and cheese.
    Caroline cleared her throat, which was—either from the lingering dust or from the thick silence between her and Charlie— clogged with phlegm. "Has your roommate been around?" she asked.
    Charlie played with the brim of his cap before answering. Looking at him now it was easy to be angry at herself for sleeping with him. His hair stuck out from beneath the cap in brittle tufts, and his thin beard made him look unwashed, which Caroline was almost certain he was. He wore stained red sweatpants and a T-shirt torn in several places.
    He had looked good enough that night, despite his lack of fashion sense; it was actually sort of endearing, how utterly oblivious he was to his appearance. That, and the beer, had gotten her into trouble. It was too bad, because she liked Charlie. But in her experience, sex and friendship didn't mix. It was simpler, and safer, to sleep with guys she didn't particularly like and to dump them when they became insufferable—or, in rare cases, when she actually started to like them.
    He was answering her question, and she had to think for a second to remember what she had asked.
    "I haven't seen Scott," he said. "Actually, I heard someone moving around in his room last week, so maybe he was here. I didn't go out to look."
    "You couldn't tell?" Caroline asked. "I mean, with the, the mind thing?"
    "No. I have to be pretty close to someone for it to work."
    "So that morning after we . . ."
    Before she could go on she heard someone tramping up the stairs behind her. Mary Beth climbed into view, followed by Harriet and Jack.
    "Sorry I'm late." Mary Beth handed Caroline a stapled stack of paper. "Took me longer at Kinkos than I thought it would."
    "Kinkos?" Caroline looked down at the document she was holding, OPTIONS FOR SUPERPOWERED INDIVIDUALS, it read.
    Mary Beth handed copies to Harriet and Jack, who blinked at the changed appearance of the attic before taking their seats. Charlie held up a hand as Mary Beth started to approach him.
    "Could you just toss it to me?" he said.
    Mary Beth flung a handout in his direction. It spun, and the pages flared out to fall in a heap a few feet short of Charlie's chair. He sighed and stood to retrieve it, retreating again quickly to his seat.
    Mary Beth took her place in front of the easel. "The handout is just a survey of the different routes I think are open to us, based on my research. Maybe we should take a few minutes right now to look through it."
    "Let's just get started," Caroline said.
    "All right," Mary Beth said. "The first issue is that of going public or not." She wrote IDENTITIES: PUBLIC OR SECRET? on the easel pad. "I see a lot of problems with revealing our identities, but it's worth discussing."
    "No it's not," Jack said.
    "It might not be a bad idea," Harriet said. "We could control our own destinies that way. No shady government outfit would be able to kidnap us and do tests on us, because they'd be toasted by the public."
    "You're assuming the public will love us," Jack said. "They might be terrified."
    "It's all in the spin," Harriet said. "I could handle press releases and interviews, minimize the negative publicity."
    "You can't control it all," Jack said. "And I don't want the press all over me and my family."
    "They'll be all over us anyway, and if we're confidential we'll have no way to answer back," Harriet said. "The police will be after us, too."
    "Why the police?" Jack said.
    "Vigilantism is against the law."
    "It's against the law to help people?"
    "No. But if we're going to be anonymous, we can't claim a citizen's arrest. We can't testify in court. We're not going to be enforcing the law, and we might as well face that right now."
    Mary Beth wrote USE PRESS TO ADVANTAGE? PRESS HARRASSING FAMILIES? and VIGILANTISM = ILLEGAL . Her handwriting was smooth, clean, and legible.
    "I have a question," Caroline said. "What the hell are you guys talking about?"
    They all looked at her. "We're trying to decide how to