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Cindy isn’t wearing a mask. And yeah—though her hair is up, and she’s armored in bright, beetle-iridescent oranges and greens—it really is Cindy Burman trying to kill her today. Cindy is cheer captain. She’s cruel and sharp-tongued, and she’d tripped Courtney over her foot in the school lunchroom—but she’s meant to be just a mean classmate. A classmate Courtney stares at from afar, lets Mary complain about. She’s not meant to be short circuiting STRIPE, not meant to be throwing brass knuckled punches in Courtney’s face.
So—Cindy—Shiv, doesn’t wear a mask. Courtney doesn’t know what to do with that.
There’s a moment, at the start of it all, face-to-face in the school hallway, that time freezes. Courtney pants, the air burning in her lungs. Her knuckles ache through the gloves. Shiv’s face is already mottling where she’d punched her—side of the jaw.
“Cindy—”
Something like recognition sparks. Shiv’s mouth twitches as they stare at each other. “Don’t call me that.” The way Shiv hits her has her head snapping to the side as her fist grazes the side of her face. Something sharp and cutting slits open her cheek with the follow through. Shiv’s armor has unfolded, sharp and paneled.
“First blood—” Shiv dives for her, “Courtney Whitmore.”
And time starts back up.
They slam into the row of lockers with the strength of two superpowered teenagers—the metal dents hard beneath them. Courtney sees stars in her eyes with how hard her head slams into the top edge of them.
“Hold—” She grabs blindly at Shiv’s braid, tugs hard, “fuck—hold still!”
Shiv makes an indignant, inelegant noise, bristling as she slashes at Courtney with an armored arm. It splits through even her suit like butter—blades cutting at her side and ribs so suddenly that she loses her grip, squirms sideways. With the advantage, Shiv slams them into the other side of the hallway. The viewing window in the wall—for the lap pool—doesn’t hold.
When they slam to the ground—a deafening crashing sound, glass shattering around them—it’s both of them scrambling through the sharp shards on the concrete ground. Courtney can feel the splinters sticking in the skin of her palms, her fingers. Something sharp wedges itself through her glove and underneath a fingernail. Behind her, she hears Shiv cursing.
Courtney manages to scramble up first. She puts distance between them—the whole pool. From across the water she watches Shiv pull something sharp from the sole of her shoe.
“Hey! Watch out, Star!” Shiv shouts into the echo of the room. Her voice is taunting, manic. And Courtney almost gets hit in the face by an actual shuriken.
“You—” It’s hard to predict where the little stars will go, and Shiv has a few of them. All Courtney can do is toss her sore body around until they’ve mostly embedded themselves into the wall. One of them had grazed against her shoulder at an angle just weird enough to get stuck . As Shiv, warily edges around the pool towards her, grimacing and prodding at her own cuts on the way, Courtney yanks it out in one go and hurls it back. The arc of it is all wrong and it sinks into the pool with a splash, joining the glass at the bottom.
Shiv laughs, mean like she always laughs. It shouldn’t make Courtney feel the way she feels—but it is Cindy’s laugh—and Mary is always saying Courtney should quit paying attention to her—to her mean, pretty laugh, her face, her hands, her hanging off of boys’ arms. Courtney still gets caught up—starry-eyed.
There are still bubbles, light in her chest when she aims the Cosmic Converter Belt’s shooting stars. They explode in sparkling, fizzing showers of color. Shiv’s whole arm gets caught up in the starbursts and she hisses, falls back against the wall. “What’d you fucking do to me?”
Courtney moves towards her, around the poolside in the opening but—Shiv just shakes her arm out, growling, and hurls herself at her. Getting knocked to the concrete again hurts, and Courtney can barely get a breath into her lungs before Shiv grabs onto her—fingers bruising— and throws herself sideways, full bodyweight tossing the two of them into the pool.
Shiv is dragging her under, holding her by the hair, and as she struggles, something in her brain gets, really, truly scared. She’s going to drown if she doesn’t do something. And the belt sparks. Her brain fills with stars. Her body fills with stars. Everything is bright around them. Courtney thinks both of them are screaming. The belt is electric—in a way—Courtney knows.
In a daze, she manages with the belt’s power to drag both of them ashore, sprawling onto the glass-covered concrete. Cindy doesn’t wake up when she taps her face. Courtney can hear her own breath echoing in the empty room. Chlorine is sharp in her nose. The ground around them stains bloody. Her hands shake.
Courtney wears a mask. Shiv still knows her by her hair, by her voice, by ‘Cindy—’. There’s a first blood cut on her cheek. It will scar.