Girls Just Want to Have Fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRr5EasAq84

“Ms Kim? I’d like your group to stay behind for a bit.”

Minnie’s smile froze on her face. Hailey blinked, slowly and languorously. Faith’s head hit her desk with a thunk. Max slouched in her seat. Edie, who had been doodling in her notebook for the entire lecture, shot upright, eyes wide with outrage. “Uh, Professor Morrow, we’ve actually got a flight to catch –”

Professor Morrow smiled. It was not a nice smile. “Book another one, Ms Lee.”

The lecture theater filled with whispers as their classmates packed up their things and rose to their feet. A handful of them seemed on the verge of hanging around to watch the show but thought better of it. As the room emptied out, the five of them trooped to the front, bags already packed and slung over their shoulders.

Professor Morrow interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles one by one, visibly savoring the looks on their faces. “Now, girls,” he began, “I’d like to check on the status of your project. The deadline was last Thursday, but you have yet to submit a brief.”

Max cleared her throat. “Uh, we did submit a brief,” she pointed out. “You rejected it.” She thought for a moment, then added pointedly: “Professor.

“We don’t want any accusations of nepotism, do we?” Professor Morrow disentangled his fingers and leaned back, sighing. His chair groaned. “Look, girls. As your assigned advisor, I obviously want us to get along, but you’re not making it easy for me…”


“Remind me again why we didn’t just fucking walk out,” Max growled.

Morrow had kept them for half an hour. If they’d been cutting it close before, they were almost definitely going to miss their flight at this rate. As they piled into the car, Hailey clenched her fist, causing it to lurch away from the curb even before Edie’s driver could fully release the clutch.

“He threw the book at us,” Minnie answered, voice tight. “If we miss one more lecture, we’re going to have to repeat the course.”

“This is such a waste of time,” Faith groaned. “What’s the point of college?”

“We should total his car,” Hailey said.

“You can do that yourself,” Edie muttered. She glanced down at her watch. “Crap.”

“Can’t you tell him to go faster?”

“He’s already going as fast as he can.”

“There goes the weekend.”

“We could always go to Boston,” Minnie suggested, momentarily breaking away from her halfhearted argument with Max. The others considered it.

“Seems a bit close by.”

“Oh, wait.” Max snapped her fingers. “Let’s hit Harvard and MIT.”

“What would we be doing there? We’ve always been more focused on grabbing something. If it’s just, like, a random, indiscriminate attack, I feel like we might end up hanging around for longer than we should.”

“An hour? We’ll split up from a certain point, go and do our own thing, then meet back up there once it’s done.”

They threw ideas around until the car came to a halt. The trunk popped open before Edie’s chauffeur even left the car. As Minnie slapped her passport on the counter, panting, the clerk took one look at them and sighed. “Bahamas?” he asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. “Sorry, ladies. Just took off.”

Max argued with him for a while futilely. They dragged her back to the car, loaded their stuff back in the trunk, and settled into the back as Edie’s chauffeur drove them back to their dorm. (It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a dorm, but neither was it a sorority house, but it could probably fit close to fifty students if Edie decided to sublet and fitted out the rooms with bunk-beds and stuff.) Edie stuffed a handful of banknotes into her chauffeur’s hands and told him to grab them some food. They made a show of dragging their baggage back into the house, but once the door shut, Hailey waved a hand and sent them flying up the stairs. There were a few bumps along the way as they knocked into walls or scraped against the floor, but that was just the way it was.

They collapsed on the couch. Faith fumbled for the remote and switched the TV on to Nickolodeon. Rugrats was on.

“So, I guess we’ve got to cancel.”

“Yeah.”

“M-hm.”

“Boston?”

“I’ll settle Boston first,” Edie decided, and headed for the phone. She was patched through to her father’s secretary. The four of them listened in as she explained the situation to her father. A dozen of his employees were put to work scouring the Yellow Pages, dialling travel agents, and calling hotel chains. It took ten minutes for them to get a reservation. After that, it was simplicity itself to cancel their bookings in the Bahamas.

//

At around ten at night, five girls sat in the penthouse of the Boston Howard Johnson’s. Really, it wasn’t much of a penthouse, but it was something.

Minnie looked around at the others. Like her, Hailey and Faith had clothed themselves in all-black, the better to blend in with the darkness. Max and Edie didn’t need to hide, so they were dressed normally. They’d been sitting in front of the television for the past few hours, sipping from cocktails brought up from the downstairs jazz bar and buzzing with nervous energy. She checked the clock on the wall, tapped her foot on the rug, and decided that if no one was going to start, then she would.

“Okay,” she began. “It’s almost midnight. Wanna go?”

“Yes,” Faith said immediately.

“Thought you’d never ask.”

Minnie rolled her eyes. A map of Boston had been spread out on the coffee-table before them. Grabbing one of the guidebooks that had been used to weigh it down, she turned to a bookmarked page and showed it to them, rehashing the finer points of the discussion which they’d just had. It was a small restaurant with what was supposedly a storied history. More importantly, it was almost equidistant between Harvard and MIT. “We’ll meet here. If not, we’ll meet back here, just outside the fence.” She was referring to the hotel.

“K.”

“K.”

“K.”

Hailey nodded.

They stood up without ceremony. As Edie and Max went around switching off the lights, Minnie, Hailey and Faith threw on some cheap jackets to make themselves look less suspicious. They’d done this dozens of times – disguising themselves like spies before going out to wreak havoc. What else were powers for, anyway? That way, they could have the best of both worlds. They could live as normal college students in the day while going out at night to do whatever they wanted.

And what did they want, anyway? Minnie wasn’t sure. There wasn’t much that any of them wanted. They were hot and rich. That was all that counted.

They took the lift down to the lobby and walked out into the balmy Boston night. Hailey flagged down a taxi; four of them squeezed into the back, while Edie sat beside the driver. He dropped them off just after the Boston University Bridge. The five of them strolled over to MIT, a random gaggle of Asian girls on their way back to their dorm. Max pointed out a public bathroom as they ambled aimlessly down the street, and they all ducked inside. It was empty.

“Why don’t we meet back here?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Hums of agreement from Hailey and Edie. Minnie could tell that no one was really paying attention. They just wanted to get out there and start messing around. Obligingly, she reached for one of the switches on the wall. Sparks flew from her hand as she connected to the university’s electrical grid, and her eyes began to glow as the lights in the restroom began to flicker. There were a few scattered screams and shouts from outside as she drained the grid dry, finishing off with one last power surge that fried as many circuits and cables as possible.

“All right,” Faith whispered. “Don’t forget your jacket.”

“Oh, yeah.” Minnie shrugged off her jacket and released it as Hailey compacted their disguises into a tight ball, then pulled on the balaclava and goggles in her back pocket. The whole world seemed tinged with a strange yellow light. With her being as charged-up as she was, she could see the cabling in the walls and sense the backup generators struggling valiantly to come online. She clenched her fists and felt them hum with power. “Have fun.”

“Have fun,” the others echoed.

//

The first thing Hailey did upon exiting the bathroom was to rise into the air.

She hated being tied to the ground. It was one of the worst feelings in the world – to know that you could fly, yet not being able to do it in public. If she had a choice, she’d fly everywhere. Faith was headed in the same direction as her (the carpark) and Hailey lifted her into the air, coaxing a squeal out of her. “Half-half?” she shouted.

Faith nodded. They soared towards the carpark, Hailey pulling up random projectiles as she did. Fire hydrants shot into the air, followed by jets of water. A bunch of dogs rose into the air, barking as their frantic owners pulled at their leashes. Hailey pointed at a streetlight, bent it in half like a toothpick, and giggled.

The real fun began once they reached the carpark. Hailey lifted cars into the air, head throbbing as they revolved gently in the air around her. Below, Faith was transforming her half of the carpark into her drones, enormous, blocky humanoids at least twice the height of a regular human being. One of them had a cavity for her; she stepped inside and waved at Hailey as it sealed up.

Hailey waved back and checked her watch. She’d forgotten to set a timer. But thirty minutes was a long time. And she had plenty of stuff to throw at anyone who tried to keep her from her fun.

Humming under her breath, she looked up and rose even higher into the air, a dozen cars in tow.

//

“You going to Harvard?”

Edie shrugged. The taller girl was crawling up the side of a building, her slender form warped into a bulky, barely-human silhouette with rows and rows of glittering fangs and slick, light-absorbent skin. Every few seconds, she’d reach to the side and casually punch a hole in a nearby window, startling a scream out of whoever was inside. Max found it incredibly funny.

“I feel like we should stay here,” Max continued. “Like, isn’t it a mile away?”

“Yeah, good point.”

Max shrugged. “Anyway, have fun playing Jason Voorhees. I’m off.”

She spun away, propelling herself towards MIT’s central field. A trail of what looked like sand spread out behind her. It wasn’t really sand, though, not really. Faith thought it was actually some kind of “esoteric particulate matter”, but to Max, it was just her sand. Max-sand. Sand-Max. Whatever. She was constantly producing more of it, storing it up within herself, but if she wanted, she could let it out. It was strangely freeing. She always felt refreshed when she did it.

She landed with a thump. A few moments later, a tidal wave of sand engulfed the field, flooding outward in all directions as Max abandoned her pint-sized human form and sent thick, lumpy tendrils out in every direction. The rickety bleachers erected beside the track collapsed as one large tentacle swept through it. Boulders crashed into buildings, dissolving on impact. Oh, Max enjoyed subtlety as much as the next person. They’d stolen plenty of shit over the past few years in meticulous, intricately-planned-out heists. But sometimes, a girl just wanted to cut loose.

//

They reconvened back at the public bathroom. The cops had been called, and the Boston Protectorate had just arrived on the scene. Faith was the last to reach, having sprinted the last few hundred metres from the scene of her clash with a random cape who had the grossest power ever, like totally. As she skidded to a halt, Hailey threw her jacket at her. Faith caught it in one hand and put it back on as they ran back out into the street, past throngs of traumatized students. They managed to maintain their composure until they were halfway across the Boston University Bridge before bursting into nervous, exhilarated laughter.

“I threw a car at a guy with a diamond sword,” Hailey whispered.

“I blew up a PRT truck,” Minnie retorted.

“I took over, like, most of the campus,” Max interrupted. “Beat that.”

“I killed someone.”

The others turned to look at Faith. She grinned. “He got better, though. It was weird! He took one punch from me and his head exploded. Then, he started dissolving into, like, some gross, fleshy puddle. My drones couldn’t take it! So I ejected.”

“So he was, like, weirdly fragile?”

“I think so. Anyway, it’s whatever.”

They crossed the bridge and hailed a taxi back to their hotel. Behind them, MIT burned.

Edit Report
Pub: 16 Sep 2023 05:21 UTC
Edit: 24 Sep 2023 03:37 UTC
Views: 454