Evan had never been much of a mall person, even in his younger days when he had more time to waste, and a little more money, too. For one thing, the City didn’t have much in the way of actual shopping mega-complexes, and for another, why the hell would he want to spend a perfectly nice afternoon indoors, dodging soccer moms and their whiny brats or packs of gum-chewing, pony tailed mallrats when he could be on a perfect slab of asphalt, running the latest board routines?

In Bayville, though, the mall was it – the social center for the town’s teen set. It was a one-stop funfest – two arcades, a food court that took up a whole floor, and two movie theatres, in addition to an ever-changing selection of specialty shops and anchor stores like Macy’s. The Mall had everything a person could want under one roof. There was no need to go elsewhere, and that was a good thing, ‘because there was nowhere else to go.

At the moment, that was the problem. “Yo, man – slow down a minute.” Evan huffed through the packed mall, struggling to keep in step with the white-haired boy, who was, at present, several steps ahead of the blond. And, judging by the way Pietro was moving, those several steps quickly threatened to become several feet.

The silver-haired boy shot a glance full of teasing disdain over his shoulder. “C’mon, Daniels, don’t tell me you’re winded already. You’re supposed to be an athlete. Get the lead out.”

Glowering, Evan quickened his steps, and noticed that Pietro was subtly slowing his until they fell in beside each other. “How much you wanna bet half these people cut 7^th period to come here.” He looked around at the masses that crammed the Bayville Mall. “No way could they’ve gotten here before we did otherwise.” The blond’s head was still a little woozy from the shock of being whizzed along the ground at 110 miles an hour – or however fast it was Pietro was able to run.

“Pity them, Daniels. Not everybody gets a chance to ride the Quickie Express. The only way to travel.” Pietro steered them in the direction of the food court. “Heylet’sgetburgersI’mhungryI’llpay.”

Evan found that the easiest way to decode Pietro’s speed-speak was to focus on the first couple of words and the last couple of words. If he could understand what they were, filling in the bit in the middle was relatively easy. “Yeah, sure. Isn’t it cool they opened up a Burger Barn stand here? Blows that they took out Terminal Taco, though.”

He tagged behind Pietro and squinted at the menu. He would, he decided, order something cheap enough not to put a dent in Pietro’s likely meager funds, but not so cheap that Pietro would realize what he was doing. The speed demon rarely had money – from where, Evan didn’t know and was almost afraid to ask, though once Pietro had mentioned that his foster family back in the City, the Maximoffs, sent him a few dollars here and there on occasions like birthdays and Christmas. But Christmas had passed, and Pietro’s birthday was months away, so that couldn’t be the source of his sudden income.

Forget it. Evan waved away his worries as he decided on the Atomic Junior special. He probably saves his money. It’s not like we go out a lot . . .

His train of thought quickly jumped the tracks, however, when they got to the cashier and, before Evan could say a word, Pietro ordered two Super-Detonator Specials and Subzero Shakes. “Make one extra large,” Pietro demanded, with a sly look at Evan.

“Uh, ‘Tro, that’s a lot of . . .” money . . . “uh . . . food. Maybe we should share . . .” Evan’s eyes nearly rolled out of his head when Pietro casually pulled out his wallet and separated a $20 bill from a large stack of them, passing it to the bored-looking girl behind the counter. Holy . . .

Pietro took the order ticket the girl handed him and, oblivious to Evan’s dying-fish expression, moved down to the ‘Pick-up Order’ window.

Evan searched vainly for his voice, as Pietro leaned idly against the counter, making a ‘condiment’ pyramid out of salt, pepper and sugar packets. Finally, after groping uselessly for air and words for a moment, Evan found some. “You have money.”

They were words, all right, but judging by Pietro’s odd look as he turned to stare at the blond, Evan reasoned that he probably could have chosen better ones. “I mean, um, you have a lot of . . . um . . . you never really . . . uh . . . I mean . . .” He squirmed under Pietro’s unwavering gaze, trying to heed the voice inside his head that was screaming at him to just shut up and let it go. Pietro had promised him that he wasn’t liberating money from unsuspecting wallets. “Uh . . .”

“Yep, my cut of our new boarder’s rent.” Pietro peered into his wallet. “May seem like a lot of money now, but I have to make it last three months.”

Evan said nothing, but he thought that over. “Don’t you guys have to pay bills and stuff? How do you have anything left?”

“Fred is taking care of that stuff.” Pietro was looking at the plastic menu advertising the day’s specials. “He’s got some head for math and stuff. Figured since the lights are on and the water’s running, everything’s OK. It’s not like we’re at home using up everything all the time. Some of us have lives –”

“Hey.” The laconic voice of the cashier drew their attention and gave Evan a slight reprieve from his fumbling. “Shake machine’s broken.” She jerked her head back toward the shadowy recesses of the burger assembly line, the deep fryer and beyond. “Want soda? We got Coke, Sprite, JambaJolt . . .”

Evan was about to put in for a Sprite, but Pietro got in ahead of him with a testy, “Broken, huh? Maybe that explains the last couple of shakes I had from here. Well, whaddaya have with milk in it?”

The girl blinked slowly as if she had to dig deep to recall what exactly milk was. Finally, she appealed to a figure that was bending over the French fry machine. “Drew. We got milk?”

Drew didn’t move. “Milk? Nah. Milkshakes. We have milkshakes.” He sounded as if he got that question a lot. “Chocolate, multi, straw-”

“No, machine’s broken.” She looked accusingly at Pietro. “This guy wants milk or something.”

“Or something.” Pietro muttered to Evan. “Well if this kinda intellect doesn’t show the superiority of the human race –”

“’Tro . . .” Evan began warningly, but was cut off by a startled noise Drew made in the back of his throat.

“Broken?” Drew seemed to turn green. “Since when?”

“Dunno. Couple of days, I guess. They have some weird chemicals in it, tryin’ to clean it out.”

The boy’s hands went to his stomach, and he doubled over, edging toward the back. “Uh . . . I’m, um, going on break. We don’t have any milk.” Turning, he ran, soon disappearing into the shadows, where a scary retching noise was heard.

“We don’t have milk.” The girl smiled fakely at them and turned to get their order together, ignoring the death glare Pietro was aiming at her.

“It’s all right.” Evan pulled Pietro a little ways from the counter. “I loaded up at lunch. I should be okay. Thanks for thinkin’ of me though.”

“Thinking of you? Ha.” Pietro folded his arms. “I’m going to be right there when you get the big prick. The other big prick.” Pietro grinned at Evan’s cough of embarrassment. “You making me into a dartboard would take all the fun out of hearing you scream like a little girl when they put that piercing thingy against your ear and pull the trigger . . .”

“Save the fantasies for later, Maximoff. I’m not gonna scream.” Evan shivered a little, pulling on the strings of his hoody to tighten the shirt around him. The air conditioning in the mall was cranked up way high. “It won’t hurt that much. It’ll be over quick. Easy. No mess.”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t know. I got mine the old-fashioned way.” Pietro grimaced slightly at the memory. “A needle and thread. And a block of ice to numb the pain. . .”

Evan started. He couldn’t even imagine. Well . . . he could, and it was making him sweat. Such a process seemed not only excruciatingly painful, but excruciatingly slow, as well. He couldn’t imagine Pietro sitting still while someone jabbed at his delicate lobes with a darning needle.

“Christ, man, what were you tryin’ to prove? Your ear coulda rotted or something. If you needed the money to go get it done professionally, you coulda asked me. We were friends back then.”

“Wasn’t about money. It was about tradition. My foster mom did it.” Pietro fingered the pierced lobe, his eyes softening at the memory. “It was . . . she said it was the way it was done in the old country, or whatever. A rite of passage. Boys becoming men, all that. If we’d been back in the old country, I would’ve been in the running to head up a caravan . . . be one of the big shots. Ready for marriage.” Pietro leered at him. “Y’know, it’s a good thing my foster parents aren’t here to see what you’re about to do . . . getting pierced the modern way.” The way he said modern, Evan knew the speedster meant sissy. “They might not let me marry you if they knew.”

Evan held Pietro’s gaze, smiling slightly himself. “Might not?”

“Yeah, well, they’re old-fashioned.” Pietro’s leer curled into a gentle smile. He reached out and gently stroked the side of Evan’s face, finger’s tracing along the dark-skinned teen’s jaw. “But I’m not.”

The very deliberate clearing of a throat startled them apart, and both turned to see the counter girl staring at them with saucer eyes, edging their order toward them. “Um. Here.” She looked from one face to the other, recognition flitting across her eyes. “Uh . . . I found some Stratosphere Smoothies in the back. Says there’s milk in them, so . . . yeah. Take ‘em.” She gave the tray an almost violent shove forward, frowning heavily at the floor as she edged away from them.

“Gee. Thanks.” Pietro packed a year’s worth of snark into those two words as Evan grabbed the food. The girl looked up then, her eyes cold with fear and hatred – an odd juxtaposition to the multicolored button she wore proclaiming, “We ::heart:: our customers” in bold, orange letters.

Turning to find an open table, Pietro chuckled beneath his breath, his laughter stripped of any real amusement. “We probably made her day . . . not every day of the week you get to wait on two mutie queers. Did you see her? Looked like her head was about to explode. Not like there was a lot up there, so if it had, there wouldn’t have been too big a mess.”

“Forget about it.” Evan heard the strained quality of Pietro’s voice, and knew that the speedster was dangerously close to going off on someone or something. “This stuff looks good. Not sure about these.” He held up one of the smoothies, turning the bottle over in his hand as if inspecting a rare artifact. “I think I had one of these once . . . I remember not liking it to much, but I can’t really remember why. I think I gave the rest to Bobby.”

He looked up, expecting some sort of response, but saw instead the side of Pietro’s face as he glared at the far end of the court. Following his gaze, Evan’s throat tightened. Two uniformed mall guards were combing the area, batons drawn and hands loosely on their holsters. Every few tables, the guards would stop and talk to the occupants, most of them wary-looking teens. The teens would take some sort of card out of their pockets or wallets, which the guards would barely look at before moving on to repeat the process a few tables later.

“Look at that.” The white-haired teen’s voice crackled with anger as his eyes followed the guards’ movements. “Goddamn norms can’t even let people eat in peace. Guess the hunt for mutie scum doesn’t take a lunch break.”

Evan bristled at that word. Norm. Thrown out in the open air like a grenade. Short for “normal,” as in a non-mutant, it was considered a slur – though a mild one – in response to the derisive “mutie” that was hurled at known mutants by various and sundry. Norm wasn’t allowed to be used at the mansion to refer to humans, as the Professor said name-calling would do little to help their cause, though Evan had caught some of the younger mutants muttering it beneath their breath whenever they were stared at in public.

“Don’t get all worked up.” Evan opened the bottle and took a hesitant sip of the smoothie. It wasn’t . . . bad. He frowned in thought. It was no milkshake, but it was fairly okay. It had a different taste to it. “They’re probably checkin’ for truants, or something.”

“Nice try, Daniels. School’s been out an hour.” Pietro reluctantly turned away. “No, they just wanna bash heads, all in the name of preserving the human race. And they’re gettin’ even more blatant – ya know that they’re not going prosecute mutant bashing as hate crimes.” The white-haired mutant picked at his food. “I heard it on the news – say that since mutants aren’t humans, they shouldn’t have human rights.” He took a vicious bite of his burger. “Fucking norms’ll get what’s coming to them . . .”

“Maximoff, can it with that.” Evan looked uneasily at a table of young, college-types that were eyeing them skeptically. “Not all people who aren’t mutants are against us. There’s some decent people out there . . . like my parents . . . your parents . . .”

“My parents weren’t norms.” Pietro’s eyes blazed like a curse.

“The ones who count are. The ones who raised you.” Evan stared hard at his boyfriend until Pietro dropped his gaze, unable or unwilling to refute that. “’Tro, my folks told me once about when they were young and black people were treated like shit. Couldn’t work where they wanted, couldn’t go certain places. Lots of people joined the civil rights movement to change things. And a lot of people who joined weren’t black. The only way stuff got done was because of people in the majority working to help people who weren’t.”

Evan took another swig of his smoothie. It tasted a lot better when chased with a couple of French fries, Evan found. “It’s gonna have to be the same thing with mutants. They’d still be hunting us down if people in power didn’t understand that a lot of us aren’t necessarily looking to hurt people. Yeah, it’s still hard, just like it’s still hard if you’re black, but the only chance mutants are gonna have to not be hunted down and dissected and shit is if we stop acting like there’s no humans that won’t help us.”

“That’s Baldy’s rhetoric. And it ain’t going to work.” Pietro shook his head. “Plus, no offense, but I’ll bet that civil rights woulda come a lot quicker for black people if they were able to blast asshole racists with their eyes, or mindfuck ‘em or use ‘em as pincushions.” The white-haired mutant looked Evan dead in the eye. “The norms are afraid of us, Daniels. They don’t understand us . . . or our powers, and since they can’t understand us or our powers, they want to control both. If they can go around with their pro-humanity shit, why shouldn’t we band together, too? It’s gonna get worse for us . . . and some of us are not gonna take it – I’ll tell you that now, Evan. I hope when it all hits, we’re on the same side.” Pietro spoke softly. “But if you still believe Xavier’s bullshit when it comes to war between us and the norms, then I won’t be able to help you – or be with you.”

Not sure how or even if to reply, Evan busied himself in the task of eating, noticing out of the corner of his eye that the table full of college kids that had openly been staring at them were now moving to a table farther away, whispering and casting accusatory and fearful glances at the two young mutants as they went. Evan lowered his eyes as he felt the gazes of those in the group hit him like so many missiles. Pietro saw them too and he glared contemptuously at them as they moved, as if daring them to say a word. They, wisely, did not, and with a shake of his head that was as much sorrowful as it was exasperated, Pietro fell to eating, too, and the two continued their meal in a tense, uncomfortable silence.