"Got costume jewelry, the costumes, wigs," Kitty pecked at a list on her phone in one hand while pressing her empty hot pink thermos and a load of library books into her person with the other. "Even got a tall weird one that I gave a long white stripe for your girl Frankenstein costume, An."
Evan snorted with his face buried in his phone as they walked shoulder to shoulder along the walkway running the perimeter outside of the school campus. "She's going as the Bride of Frankinstin Monster, not Frankinstin."
"Whats the dif?"
"Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster."
"So?"
"So, they are two completely different characters! One was a dick-head scientist and the other was his creation."
"His name is seriously just 'Frankinstin's Monster?' That sounds like some hella lazy writing."
"Isn't that the point?" Kurt interjected as he walked along Anna's left side and opposite to the others. "He's the one stripped most of his humanity, but in the story, he's ironically the most human out of all of them."
"I don't know. I'll leave this to the one who has to suffer through Mrs. Crane's insane English class." While Kitty scrolled through her phone, she heard only the sounds of their footsteps on the craggy asphalt underfoot. She eventually looked up at the taller girl to her left. "Calling Anna…An? You there?"
Anna had her history textbook clung to her chest. It was the same spot from where she had picked it up and held it after reviewing that night's homework in the latter part of her last class. Her chin was pointed towards the cloudy gray sky where she could just spot a plane passing overhead through a particularly whispy patch of flying cotton. Despite her eyes feeling tired and dried, she could seem to pull her gaze away from the gray sky.
"Earth to Anna." Kitty shook her shoulder.
Anna blinked and sucked in a spike of cold air. The world around her suddenly came into view like a video game being rendered. The patchy rectangular sod around them, the black crack-filled asphalt before them, and the red brick of the school to their right. "Sorry. What's up?"
"You've been so dang spacy today. You having weird dreams again?"
"No - no, sleeping alright. Just guess I have a lot on my mind."
"So, is Frankenstin's monster an analogy for humanity's loss of humanity or what?"
"Try replacing 'analogy' with 'allegory' and 'humanity's' with a 'person's' and you might actually have a sentence that makes sense, Kitty."
Kitty turned on Evan. "Why don't you try replacing that mouth of yours with shutting up before I replace your nose with my fist for correcting me every two seconds, Evan!
"Well, we haven't actually read Frankenstein yet in class," Anna brushed her hair behind her ear. "But Miss Crane still likes to go on weird random rants about books and movies sometimes. Usually, they end up circling the drain about how horrible men are in some way or another. I think she said something about the book being Mary Shelly's way of coping with a lost child and Lord Byron being a tool… or something like that."
"Byron," Kurt stuck his thumbs through the straps of his backpack. "Wasn't he a poet?"
"Yeah. He and Mary Shelly knew each other. Miss Craine seems to hate him for whatever reason. I think she said he was essentially the 'fuck boy' of the time."
"Huh. Weird to think of anyone from that long ago being a 'fuck boy.'" Kurt finger quoted.
"There was plenty of them. In Mr. McCoy's class, we've been learning about Lindon B Johnson." Anna shrugged a shoulder. "Well, he wasn't a 'fuck boy' exactly, but he was a ragging piece of shit. He was so eager to be sworn in after JFK's assassination, that JFK's wife still had the dude's brains on her dress during the inauguration." Anna blinked. "Oh speaking of JFK," She looked at Evan, "You learn anything more about Xavier's code?"
Evan plucked away at his phone. "Not really. I read through those notes you gave me about JFK and stuff, but it didn't really help me figure out why those numbers are there. As for the rest of the code he uses for his calendar… I don't know. It's kinda above my head. The only thing I've put together is there is a common thread with the letters. They seem to follow the first letter of code names."
"How's that?"
Evan pulled up the picture of Xavier's desk calendar on his phone and passed it to Anna. "The JFK date isn't the only consistent thing. On Monday through Saturday, he has the letters 'DR' after a bunch of different numbers, but there is always the letters 'DR.' What do we have in the evenings Monday through Saturday? The Danger Room.
"Then, if you look at the days you and Kurt were working on your powers together, the letters RN appear. Rogue and Nightcrawler."
Anna pointed at a date on the screen. "The letter P shows up a lot too."
"Pheonix," Kurt whispered.
"She does do private sessions in the Danger Room sometimes." Anna zoomed in closer. "I see S for Storm… W for Wolverine… Then there is that date and a J after it."
"Do we know anyone with a 'J' name?"
"J… Jeremy," Kitty mumbled.
Evan sneered. "Yes, Kitty, Jeremy. That's super helpful.
"Evan! I'm seriously going to punch you in the pants if you don't stop picking on me!"
Kurt pursed his lips and tucked his chin towards his chest. "Anyway…" He looked up at Anna, "You try talking to Logan?"
She rolled her eyes. "'Tried,' is the keyword." Tilting her head from left to right she waited for a crack that never came. "He looked like shit, smelt like shit, and was full - of you guessed it - shit."
"What do you mean?"
"His place was a wreck and all he seemed to want to do was chop wood with an axe. I doubt he's left that spot for the whole time he's been AWOL, but apparently, he found time to go joyriding in his jeep and wrecked it on a tree. When I tried talking to him about anything, he was just evasive and talked to me like I was an annoying fly."
Kurt scratched the spot where his scalp met his forehead. "He has a Jeep out there? I've only ever seen him drive motorcycles."
Anna's shoulders shot up to her ears. "That's what you got out of that?" She shook her head. "Yeah, he's got this old WWII-looking green jeep. It had four wicked-looking gouges in the side."
Kitty grabbed her arm "Like the gouges we saw behind the bust he broke?"
"Pretty close. Except there were four gouges, not three."
"Do trees… do that?"
"I don't know what trees do! I've never driven in a forest while being all broody and upset!"
"Maybe this is a weird thought but…" Kitty paused, "what if there is someone else like Logan?"
"Another old man who has a self-righteous stick up his ass?" Anna crossed her arms. "Probably."
"Nah, not that." Evan looked past Kitty. "Logan has three claws, right? What if there is another mutant running around like him but with four claws?"
"But, like," Kitty held her arm full of things even closer to her body. "Can that even happen? Copy cats? Are you telling me there other cute girls running through walls?"
Anna scrunched her brows and stared at the ground steadily passing beneath them as they walked. "When I watched you guys during your last mission at the gas station, I think I remember Logan saying something about that to the guy who attacked Kurt. Something like 'Super speed. It's been a while since I've seen one of you.'"
Kitty's shoulders dropped dramatically. "Why does everything in our lives have to be so dang ominous?"
"Oh," Evan pulled his backpack off his shoulder and dug around in one of the pockets. "An, I couldn't crack the code but I got something just as good." From one of the pockets, he produced a jump-drive identical to the one she used before.
"Nice, but I think we're done messing with Xavier's computer, Evan."
"This isn't for his office computer. It's for Cerebro."
"Huh?"
"I was thinking about it, we couldn't find much on Xavier's desktop, right? Well, that's probably because he keeps everything good on Cerebro! His fucking mega computer! Dude can use that thing to find mutants, monitor us on missions, who knows what else?"
Anna took the jump drive out of Evan's grasp as if were a sleeping wasp. "Cerebro…"
Kitty stared at the drive. "Won't we just hit the same issue as before? Just a bunch of coded nonsense?"
"Probably. The nice thing about this one though is after it hacks the login, it starts downloading the files. Then we can just decrypt them later."
Anna gingerly ran her thumb over the thin black plastic casing till she found the button to eject the USB port and pressed it. A little square rectangle jutted out of one end like a key. She looked at Kurt. "Gonna try to talk me out of it?"
He looked at the device, then up to her. "Would you listen to me if I did?"
"Probably not."
He dropped his head and when he raised it again it had a low-watt smile on it. "Then how can I help?"
"Your birthday party is tomorrow," Evan said with more excitement than Anna expected. "Everyone will be in the main hall or the dining room. You can use that time to slip downstairs!"
Anna's lips collected to one side of her face. "It's not like it's a big party. Won't someone notice that I'm gone?"
"Not if it's late enough. The adults will probably have something to drink and we can keep them distracted."
Kitty's frame got somehow smaller than before. "Can we… can we try to have a little fun before you do your super spy adventure? I just worked… kinda hard on your party…"
Anna felt a powerful spike of regret tear through her insides and pressure behind her eyes looking down on her friend. "Absolutely! I bet this thing won't even take long. Just plug in and unplug, right Ev?"
"That should do it. Just make sure it has enough time to download."
Anna stopped and hugged Kitty. "Thanks for working on my party."
Kitty dropped everything she was holding to wrap her arms around Anna. "You're welcome, roomie!"
"I wouldn't hug her! She'll steal your brain!" Shouted a wholly unpleasant squeaky voice.
Anna let go of Kitty "What in the actual hell?" She looked up and found The Brotherhood gang standing in the threshold of an open gate leading to the inner campus of the school. The short sallow-skinned boy with a flatrimmed hat, Toad, was the one shouting.
Anna stood in front of her fellows. "You want to go a second round, fuck boy?"
The impossibly large, impossibly fat, Blob appeared behind Toad. "I'd like to see you try in a fair fight, little girl." With his thick Texan draw, Anna could nearly hear a group of pigs cry somewhere nearby.
"Anytime - anywhere, wide load!"
Evan took her side. "I hear a whole lot of talk from a bunch of dicks who've done a whole lot of nothing lately!"
Avalanche, the boy who looked most put together, besides a greasy haircut and tattered blue jeans, pulled his hands out of leather jacket pockets. "The hell are you talking about Spikey? It's you and your little band of rejects that can't seem to figure out where the fight is."
"What?"
"We've been pulling jobs all over town! A few even in Brooklyn! But every time you've been a no-show. Was starting to get worried about you!"
Anna and Evan's eyes met.
"Yeah!" Toad rested an arm on Avalanche's shoulder. "We got a sweet one cooking too! Ever heard of Parkview Gen-" The boy was cut short as Avalanche elbowed him in the face.
"Dude! You ever heard of the word 'discretion?'"
"What?" Toad rubbed his jaw. "It's not like they're going to do anything about it."
"Whatever," Avalanche looked back down upon them from the top of the hill. "You grow some balls, you know where to find us." He turned and raised his chin at Blob. "We'll go the other way."
"Why? To hell with them!"
"Because I don't feel like explaining why you decided to go around punching people again!" Avalanche pressed his hands into Blob's ample fat till he eventually turned around and both walked back towards the school. Toad looked back down at Anna and her friends, flipped them the bird, then followed after his crew.
Kitty sighed. "I hate going to school here."