Look Out, Mini-Flash Robin! Chapter Two

The first thing Neetra looked on was her own face.

One cheek’s swell was tinted with firelight which danced from the darkness of her eyes. She was near enough for Robin to see there were indeed teardrops on the lashes. Seems she hadn’t done a such great job fluttering them away. Through the telepathic rapport she sensed everything that her slightly parted mouth, the lips damp and minutely shimmering under the moving flame, entailed for her observer. Yearning impossible hope was what defined this particular timestamp. The sweetness which suffused it was in knowing that hope had been fulfilled.

This memory was so new, so recent, as to be imperative.

He couldn’t rightly have started on anything else.

Um. Chances were Neetra had slightly overdone that goodnight kiss. This was what you got for being worried about people.

Only, it wasn’t as if she never thought about him when she was similarly occupied.

Turnaround was fair play. Surely here, if nowhere else.

When her moist lips finally made landfall, it had never been so clear to Neetra why filmmakers abstracted that sort of thing with fireworks or flowers opening. There was something of both in the way that kiss steered Robin’s train of thought. Our heroine was getting the hang of this – she’d always been a fast learner in matters telepathic. By now she could detect some kind of narration for this strange midnight matinee, whose star she’d seen in quite a few things before. Times she and Robin had spent together lately on Flaban. Her short stint as his supply-teacher. Including PE class, and jeez. Did she really show them off that much when she had her gym skirt on? Evidently Robin’s eyesight was pretty keen. And all throughout, as sinking into the groove of a well-worn long-playing record, the verbal commentary faithfully re-ran:

Oh, why would any male Mini-Flash stay at Headquarters? Who wouldn’t go to Nottingham instead if it meant just being near her, just the chance for this? I totes couldn’t have sat still in The Flash Club, chap would have gone out of his pants over what he was missing out on. Even days I don’t see her I know she’s there, and that I’m following her cause which I’ll always do, it’s totes the only thing just as long as it makes her happy…

They were in a gym lesson of which Neetra held no more than the vaguest recollection. For Mini-Flash Robin however, Nottingham’s sun lit every last detail of those courts on a glorious summer day. She was fondly smiling and poking her T-shirt at him as she said not to feel bad but just do his best, and all creation was her pink-flushed sock-sweaty radiance.

If she granted me one wish I’d totes want to be in this moment smelling her forever…

That would be his heightened sensual awareness, the Neetra who was watching decided at once. It did happen. You knew boys.

I’d totes love to have a pair of her socks. Or better yet, a pair of her –

Neetra lurched right along with Robin, even gasped for breath with him, through the near-miss sensations of emergency brake or sudden swerve to avoid a heavy stone wall which Robin himself had abruptly dropped in their path. What ensued was the utter hush of mid-track or roadside as everyone gradually came around to being alright after all.

And it was alright. Oh, but that was totes a close one.

Still Neetra scarcely dared flinch.

Too soon would totes have been a pity. Ought to be more careful. Not like a chap doesn’t know full well which ones do it every time.

And privately Neetra thought again, jeez. Talk about an unexpected Four Heroes power.

It was odd for her. That rather went without saying, after what had just happened. There were girls who boasted they’d got boys figured out, but Neetra had never been one. Moreover, she doubted they were basing their claim on having ever tried this.

Be that as it may, Neetra’s only means of processing some of it was to translate it to something she did know, as with the derailment or car-crash. Now as Robin commenced anew, the closest correlative within her experience had to do with sitting at table for an evening meal. If a whole cheesecake had been served as starter and somehow it had functioned like one, sharpening the appetite instead of filling you up, then that was what Robin’s memories of Neetra herself had been. Now she shared his craving to embark on the main course.

Which, apparently, was pickled onions.

No question about it. Having stuffed his face with her own creamy innocuousness, Robin was ready for food that hurt. Through him Neetra wanted that sere vinegar essence to catch in her throat, choking her, and then to crunch down on a mouthful of the things until her tastebuds cramped in vain.

Wow, boys were weird.

She watched on, with more than a feeling she knew who was on the way.

Mini-Flash Juniper was the acid tang with which those onions jerked tears from your eyes. She dried up the tongue. There was too much of her, and it was too much to want. How the muscular seismic motion of what went on under that membrane made you long to slip into a motion of your own, the one frantically underway this moment, so much so it left you light-headed as though that work were spontaneously starting up even as you stood witless and witnessed her passing by. Acid. The sting of those sinews, those planetary crescent-curves.

And she totes knows it. No other reason she’d dress like that for a class that was all chaps.

Neetra was troubled. She’d never heard Robin talk that way, least of all about Jen.

Now he was recalling how the latter, in that stretch when they had indeed been schoolfellows, used to change membranes on her arrival each day and hang up the damp one to air. As the pegs were by Robin’s desk, this had meant Juniper squeezing herself in briefly between the wall and him to do so. Apparently it also meant a sudden pickled onion overload which Neetra thought would have spelled indigestion for a boy twice Robin’s size.

Just because she knows a chap wants to steal it. That’s totes why she only hangs it there and takes it away again when everyone else is in the room. So I can’t.

This time it really pained Neetra. OK, putting Special Program Jenny in that class full of boys had been her mistake, but they’d all learned from it and moved on. No-one now believed Mini-Flash Juniper was that kind of girl. So why was Robin acting like he’d missed the news?

Er, name a food that leaves an aftertaste you can’t get rid of.

How about pickled onions?

He couldn’t keep up with her at Flashball, and he was fuming.

Reasonably good. Reasonably good, she says. Because of course everyone totes loves false modesty. Not like that ever gets on a chap’s pants.

Neetra didn’t like this. He was frightening her. That voice she’d heard every day on Flaban had never sounded so spiteful.

She totes planned that little handstand of hers from the moment she got up that morning. Why else would she have brought her tunic? Tell me one other day she wore it.

Gnashing at those pale slick glistering bulbs. Heartburn and their crippling juice. Nothing else would do.

Special Program totes thinks she’s too special for us chaps.

Only now it was more like glugging down straight from the open jar. It was horrible. Neetra couldn’t bear it.

Her membrane, dangling in his face.

The Flashball, inches from his fingertips.

She herself, before his eyes.

Just like that infuriating Flaban girl’s limpid little feet, treading nothingness under his nose. All of it right there on show, and none of it for him. Look but don’t touch.

Chap could feel totes poorly from it.

Something else was here. Not immersed in Mini-Flash Robin, not even in his hotel room.

In Neetra’s.

Where she was.

Our heroine hurled herself through the partition wall to dive back into her body, just in time for a third and all-too physical fling that carried her tucking and rolling to the carpet while one of those pterodactyl robots, coloured differently to the last, swooped and sawed her bed in half.

Neetra’s new friend was wise to her alright. This time he was dealing with her first.

There were two of them again, both airborne. The other flapped vampiric on polymer wings. Telekinetically Neetra batted that one aside, but her reaction-times were a joke. Slow even for cheer-practice. Her arms and legs felt like they were moving through cheesecake. She still saw Jenny’s butt when she blinked, still tasted the pickled onions.

Got to get it together. Those birdy ones don’t just have serrated beaks, they’ve got –

Neetra turned to see the brute light its eyebeams, before it cut loose and she knew no more.

When our heroine clawed her way back to consciousness it was later that night and she was alone. A teleport was all it took to confirm what she most feared.

Mini-Flash Robin was gone, pants and all.

NEXT: "THE ENEMY WITHIN"