Saving a Superhero

18: Overalls+Names

Important Author's Note At The End Of This Chapter!

"You were really staying at this hotel?" Grace asked as we turned the corner to the motel.

"Of course, it has free breakfast," Rory joked.

Grace chuckled, but it wasn't at the joke. "I'm staying at this hotel."

Part of me was irrationally angry that we hadn't run into Grace before getting arrested, but the majority of me wanted to laugh because, dang, the world really was conspiring against us.

We waved to the desk manager, a curly-hair guy no older than us with an amazing smile, before hopping into the elevator and riding it up to the third level. Amazingly enough, Grace's room was also on the third level, but when we turned right, she turned left.

"You aren't coming?" The question was on the tip of everyone's tongues. We'd been through how much and now she was leaving. "I think we all want to know how you charmed our way out of a death sentence."

"There wasn't going to be a death sentence," Kennedy reminded me.

"I've got to cancel a few plans. Not everyone knows that my fake kidnapping is off." Then she disappeared down the hall.

Less than five minutes later, she was knocking on our door swaddled in a giant fluffy comforter. "There's a serial killer dressed like a polar bear at our door," Harper called from the hallway, only to be followed in by Grace.

The little girl, twice as big wrapped in the blanket, flopped down on mine and Harper's bed without it wiggling at all.

"So, what'd I miss?" Now that her neck wasn't on the line and all was forgiven, the girl was talking almost as much as Rory. She wanted to be filled in on everything and anything that had transpired while she was MIA, which included hours of train rides, taxi rides, and metro rides. Then Kennedy pulled out the sunshine yellow overalls that had managed to follow us from Philadelphia all the way to Baltimore. I covered my mouth to keep the laughter in that was bubbling in my throat like soda.

"You found my overalls!" Grace grabbed them out of Kennedy's hands and hugged them to her chest like they were her favorite puppy and not a ridiculously bright article of clothing. "I was afraid I was going to have to live in Europe without them."

"You mean, you wear them?" Even Rory, Rory with the ridiculous camo pants that she was still wearing, knew the overalls were straight out of the '90's, if they had even been popular then.

"These are the most comfortable overalls that had ever come into existence," Grace scolded her. Wisely, the rest of us held our tongues as she flounced to the bathroom to change.

"She still doesn't know what her power is, huh?" Harper asked in a quiet voice.

There was a moment of understanding that came over all of us.

"We should probably tell her," Kennedy suggested, always the responsible one, telling us not to play practical jokes and not to jump off fire escapes.

"Or we could not," I countered, which I thought was a pretty convincing argument.

"You figured out who does what?" Grace was standing in the hall, rocking the luminescent overalls over her loose t-shirt. "I thought that stuff didn't work unless we, you know, blacked out."

That was what we had all thought, actually. Granted, we hadn't known much about our super secret abilities, but the thought that we could use them on our own had never occurred to us.
Then, all plans of a practical joke smashed, we told Grace everything we knew about our missing memories.