8.
Jamie
Jamie hadn’t picked the name Gravity Gal, but there it was. She had an image in her mind of a cigar-chewing fossil, a walking, perpetual human sexual harassment defendant from the olden days of news hoping to sell more papers by assigning the moniker and trying to get it to catch on. And catch on it had, because nobody seemed to have a better name for her or her power over gravity, and all the other options seemed to have been either already trademarked. Not that they’d ever asked her, or that she’d ever have commented, because she didn’t talk to reporters.
And so she’d become Gravity Gal, which was about as stupid a moniker as she could have imagined.
“Gratitude is difficult for you, isn’t it?” Jamie asked Nadine Griffin. The Wall Street maven was just standing there inside the room, the bad guy down behind her. It was never an easy swing over from Staten Island; she felt drained after that long pull, tethering herself to Freedom Tower and creating a gravity channel that tugged her along until she’d reached lower Manhattan and let it go above Wall Street. She’d reversed gravity on a couple channels, like creating invisible legs and “walked” her way to the scene of the crime, where the cops had set up their cordon and the crowds had gathered around to see Nadine Griffin, villain of the day, get her just desserts.
That idea of street justice—even on Wall Street—didn’t sit too well with Jamie.
“Thank you,” Nadine Griffin said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“You’re welcome,” Jamie said. Griffin was young, slender, attractive, wearing a skirt that was tasteful but showed off her legs enough that Jamie was feeling the envy. She put it aside, though, noticing the fund manager as she took a step forward and clomped awkwardly as her heel broke. “We should get you down to the police.”
Griffin had a sour look that reminded Jamie of Kyra just before she’d stormed out. “Oh boy. I can’t wait to get down to them, since they pretty much just left me for this maniac to kill.” She hobbled forward on that broken heel, looking expectantly at Jamie. “I suppose you want to carry me down like you’re rescuing me.”
“It’s safer than letting you make your way through the building, isn’t it?” Jamie asked. She expected this kind of crap attitude from her daughter, but from someone whose life she’d just saved? It was a bit much, but she held it in. “In case the police mistake you for—”
“Oh, they’d mistake me, I’m sure,” Griffin said, face like she’d taken a long drink of pickle brine. She walked over to Jamie and extended her arms. “How do you want to do this? Firema—err, person style? You going to carry me like a bride?”
“How about you just put a hand around my shoulder?” Jamie asked, keeping a polite veneer up to try and disguise the fact that she’d already had enough of this lady.
“Sure. Why not?” Griffin said, and did exactly that, threading a thin arm around her shoulder as Jamie snugged her own around Griffin’s waist, as though she were going to help her home after a long night of drinking. Griffin’s hair had a perfumed smell that Jamie suspected hers lacked; it probably smelled like sweat after the long pull from Staten Island.
Jamie pushed off the wall with a gravity channel, reversing it to shove them out the window and then shot another one down into a blank space in the street, setting it to gently push up at them so that they didn’t drop like a stone into the middle of Wall Street, instead descending as slowly as if they were on an elevator.
They landed softly on the street, the crowd of reporters and onlookers parting to give them a space to land. Jamie could hear jeers from the assorted masses, see fists shaking in the air toward them. An NYPD Lieutenant watched them warily, and a host of other police officers edged forward from where they’d been holding the line at the cordon, ready to rush into the situation in case it turned worse, Jamie supposed. She could hear the crowd:
“Shoulda let her die!”
“—wouldn’t have been much of a loss—”
“Yeah,” Nadine Griffin said sourly, “thanks a whole bunch for saving me.”
“It’s not my fault these people hate you,” Jamie said as a reporter rushed in and thrust a microphone in her face.
“Yeah, well … you suck anyway,” Nadine said.
Jamie felt her entire body freeze, a ringing in her ears as a hard flush ran through her cheeks. The whole of the argument she’d had with Kyra not a half hour earlier came flooding back to her as she stood there, the hot morning sun hitting her and adding to the heat in her face. “You know what?” she said, as something inside her snapped and she rounded on Nadine, “if you don’t like people treating you this way, maybe you shouldn’t have ripped off your customers, cheated by insider trading, and in general misled everyone into thinking you were something that you weren’t.” She watched Griffin do a flush of her own, but the woman stayed mute, the fury building behind her eyes. “You built yourself up as some sort of hero in the press, but you did it on a foundation of lies. People don’t like being lied to. They don’t like being stolen from. And they certainly don’t like it when someone expects them to continue playing the fool while she denies everything in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
There was a silence around them, and Jamie looked to see the news cameras rolling and a hundred cell phones held aloft, their camera lenses sparkling as they captured her telling off the former Queen of Wall Street.
Jamie froze. Naturally, that’s the first time Gravity Gal speaks in front of a camera. Oh, well. Maybe it’ll disappear quickly? She knew it wouldn’t, though.
“What were you thinking, saving her?” came a voice out of the crowd and a few of the cameras parted to let Captain Frost push his way into the circle. He was a big guy, his muscular chest showing through his tight-fitting costume. Jamie made the mistake of looking down and found that it was form-fitting below the waist, as well. She fought to keep the look of distaste off her face. “You went against the will of the people!” Frost said, and a chorus of jeers followed from the crowd, like trained seals clapping along.
Jamie stood her ground, chin held high. “If your moral compass involves taking a survey in order to decide what’s right, you’re doing it wrong.” And with that, she set a gravity channel against the ground beneath her and then pushed hard, vaulting into the air a hundred feet. From there, she set another to push against one of the stone facades behind her and shot off toward the waterfront.
She was almost to Battery Park before she remembered that she was supposed to be meeting with her banker right now, securing credit for her company to keep the doors open and the employees paid.
“No one said this was going to be easy,” Jamie whispered to herself, trying to find reassurance as she launched out over the water toward Staten Island as she anchored on the Statue of Liberty’s hand in the distance and pulled herself toward it.
But no one ever said it was going to be this hard, either, a little voice followed. She ignored it.