*


“What grief displays … is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”


*


When she sees him walking down Polk Street, she thinks to herself, No, it can’t be, it’s not.

When she sees him in Golden Gate Park, playing chess with an older Chinese man, she thinks, What are the chances, there’s no way, it’s just an old man, you really are going crazy, Jesus.

When she goes into Bob’s Donuts at midnight, hungry, lonely, half-ready to lie down in traffic but distracted by the fragrance of fried dough and sugar, she sees him sitting alone at the long bar, a half-eaten pastry and a cup of coffee in front of him, watching a police drama on the old television mounted on the wall.

And when turns his head towards her as if she has called him by name, she stops, startled, wondering if she had.

They stare at each other, until he gestures to the seat next to him and she moves towards him as if pulled by an invisible wire. On the countertop, she places her own plate, her own cup of coffee, then sits down.

She thinks, idly, Were his ears always so big?

He glances at her plate, sees the apple fritter on it, then looks down at his plate. Then he picks up what is left of his own apple fritter and, before taking a bite, he says, in a voice that not so long ago apologized for her impending death, “Well, you have very good taste, my dear.”


*


She spends less than a month at the mansion after taking the cure. Enough time for eight disappointing sex acts with Bobby before they sheepishly agree to be friends; enough time for every encounter with Storm to end in a throat-clearing and a suddenly pressing obligation to get to some classroom, some training session¸ some meeting.

Enough time to watch the Italian prime minister make a tight-lipped public apology for the comments a microphone had recorded him making during the U.N. General Assembly, describing the new U.S. ambassador with a series of racial slurs, then wondering whether ‘it’ can be ‘caught through contact.’ Enough time to join the chorus of outrage the young students direct towards the common room television, as CNN replays the recording, the apology, and Hank’s official statement, over and over again.

Enough time to notice the half-beat of uneasy silence that falls over the room when she, too, chimes in with an angry protest—until Kitty finally says, too earnestly, too helpfully, “Yes, exactly, exactly, Rogue,” while everyone avoids looking at her gloveless hands.

Only Logan talks to her as if she has not changed. If they had naturally grown apart somewhat since his first return from Alkali Lake, he seems resolved to make up for that time by way of near-constant chatter. Sitting down next to her in the cafeteria for every meal, he speaks at shocking length about the new mini-refrigerator in his room, which he has obviously filled with beer; about his disdain for the World Cup fever sweeping the mansion; about what nasty injury his balls could have, might have, incurred during a judo training session with a new student, whose ability apparently consists of being able to throw skyscrapers like baseballs.

Indeed, if anyone has changed, it is him. And she is not sure if she likes this new Logan, who no longer stalks the mansion in silence but makes sarcastic quips that relax even the most fearful new children; who does not run away in the middle of the night on someone else’s motorcycle, but shows up to breakfast every morning and complains about the eggs; who is fast developing a gruff fatherly affection for some of the other female students—especially Jubilee, the only person in the mansion capable of telling a filthier joke; who never visits the garden where Jean Grey’s very specifically wounded body is buried next to two empty graves.

This Logan has thrown himself into the making of an honorable life with a determination that pains her, a determination that looks and sounds and feels more like penance.

The only thing he does not talk about is Alcatraz. At dinner they overhear someone say “Golden Ga—,” and Logan’s fists tighten around his fork and knife, and she thinks she can see three points on each hand raising, until the person finishes the sentence: “—rdens Palace, the new Chinese restaurant in town, is pretty good.”

But then, no one talks about Alcatraz. She was not there; she didn’t go through what they went through, she would not understand—no one has to say these things for her to know them.

In fact, she thinks this is the reason that Logan now spends so much time with her: because she does not know, because she was not there, because she would not understand and more importantly, would not try to. He has always trusted her to be someone who knew the importance of respecting boundaries.

But twenty-four days after she has returned to the mansion, they are in the garage surrounded by several million dollars worth of cars no one wants to drive anymore, and she asks if she can try his cigar, just to see what it’s like, and he shrugs and hands it to her.

And their fingers brush, and she feels a shiver, a buzz; less sensation than touching a hairy or callused knuckle, weaker than a static shock, and at first she thinks that is exactly what has happened, that is all that has happened.

But she knows the difference between a static shock and—something that is not a static shock.

If Logan notices, he doesn’t show it; he only looks at her hand, frozen around the cigar, and says, “Generally, people smoke it with the mouth.”


*


When it happens again two days later with Bobby, towards the end of disappointing sex act number eight, just before their final break-up, she knows for sure.

She does not know how much time she has. A month, several months, a year? Listening to her body, she would not give herself more than six months.

Six months of rapidly disappearing touch. Six months until this flat and still flesh will start to hum and buzz with hunger, and she will once again have to shroud it like a corpse. She has a bag half-packed before she realizes what she is doing or where she is going.

In Xavier’s former office, she tells Storm that she is leaving for a few months. She lies badly, shamelessly: she says that she has been in contact with her parents, that she has told them what she has done, that they want to her to visit again, and since it’s been so long, she’d like to see them.

Storm says nothing, but stares at her for a long time. It is the first time the older woman has looked at her without disdain or pity in weeks.

At first, she thinks Storm is going to apologize for her reserved behavior these past weeks, and she is not sure if she is pleased or annoyed by the possibility. But when the apology does not come, she opens her mouth to finally ask the Storm what the hell the matter is—until it hits her like a bullet, what the hell the matter is.

She says only, “You know, then.”

Storm hesitates, presses her lips together, and finally says, “I talked to Hank a couple days ago. He mentioned a couple days ago that a friend of his, who, who, who also chose to—”

And here she makes a gesture with her hands, instead of saying the words. As if they are profanities.

“This friend has experienced some weakening of the cure’s—effectiveness.”

She does not know how to respond to this. She looks past Storm, at Xavier’s old desk, where a vase of white lilies stands next to a framed crayon drawing of a thundercloud and a lightning bolt. Where an ergonomic desk chair with a small white suede jacket draped over its back sits instead of a wheelchair.

Finally, Rogue says, “I’ll be back in a few months. Maybe half a year.”

The number seems to match the one Storm already has in her head, and her face softens in joy and relief. “In a few months,” she repeats softly.

“Maybe half a year,” Rogue adds, not softly at all.

Storm clears her throat, starts making suggestions, recommendations, assurances. She tells her to feel free to use the ATM card she was given as a student a couple years ago; tells her that she will make sure there are enough funds to support her; waves a hand when Rogue protests. She tells her to take her cell phone, to keep in touch, to call if she ever needs anything or if she encounters any trouble.

Rogue says she will, though she was not planning to take the cell phone at all; now she knows that, having made this promise, her conscience—along with some twisted sense of filial piety—will force her to put the phone in her bag, even if she never brings herself to turn it on.

Then Storm steps towards her and, unexpectedly, hugs her. Rogue can feel the woman’s cheek on her ear, through her hair. She wants to hug her back, wants to slap her hard across the face. Instead, she remains still and silent in Storm’s circle of arms, breathing in her perfume of gardenia and jasmine and sandalwood, realizing for the first time that Storm is now shorter than she is.

“You come back to us when you’re ready,” Storm says, and the gentleness in her lovely voice now hurts far more than the distrust and regret in her lovely voice last week.

Rogue turns to leave, and just as she opens the door, Storm asks, “Are you taking Logan with you?”

She chokes on something that could be laughter, but isn’t. She swallows, then says, “No, of course not. Why would I?”

Then something passes over Storm’s face that is not joy, not relief, not distrust, not regret, not disdain, not pity; something Rogue cannot read, and from which she turns away before she is tempted to try.

She tells Storm, “I’m not even planning on telling him before I go.” She turns back around and opens the door to leave. “And I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell him where I’m going.”

“But I don’t know where you’re going,” Storm calls after her, but Rogue is already shutting the door.

She goes to her room, and, using a laptop bought for her four months ago by Xavier and which she then packs into her bag, she books a one-way flight, leaving early the next morning. It is terribly expensive. Last time she checked, there was at least ten thousand dollars on this checking account, much of it old cage-fight money contributed by Logan as a vague gesture towards ‘college.’

At dinner, she meets Logan, as usual. This evening the cafeteria is serving chicken teriyaki or stir-fried tofu and vegetable noodles. Logan is always in a good mood on teriyaki days. He takes two servings and by the time he has finished the first one, he has already described three defensive failures witnessed during his afternoon lessons.

She must be looking at him strangely, because he interrupts his own story to say, “Food on my face or something?” She shakes her head.

She is thinking of something she overheard Scott saying to Logan, just before he disappeared. Not everybody heals as fast as you, Logan.

When Logan is finally quiet again, or quiet enough to chew a mouthful of chicken, she comments, “You’ve been talking a lot more recently.”

He retorts, “Seemed like you forgot how. I like to teach by example.”

She snorts. Then she thinks, I’ve never thought of you as a teacher, either.

What are they to each other now? She has watched him trade affectionate insults with Jubilee and Kitty, but it has never made her feel jealous, the way she felt jealous when she saw Kitty skate into Bobby’s arms. Watching Logan not-so-reluctantly play the cool older brother to the other girls has only thrown into sharp relief the singularity of their relationship; has only made her feel ever more separate, more different, and more perplexed about what it is that bonds them, and why that should continue to be so.

Across from her, Logan is sighing, now fully wearing his annoyance in an expression she finds infinitely more comforting than the dutiful-leader one he has been wearing all month.

“All right,” he says. “What the hell. What’s going on with you? It’s like you’re in another dimension, it’s starting to piss me off. You break up with the Iceman, or something?”

“Yeah,” she says bluntly, easily, with a half-chewed chicken breast in her mouth. Logan coughs on his rice, sending a few grains flying.

“Graceful,” she says.

“Fuck yourself,” he says, wiping his mouth. Then his face darkens. “You okay? What happened? He do something?”

She laughs, says, “It just wasn’t mean to be.”

Logan looks uncomfortable. If she had been Jubilee or Kitty, he would have threatened to make a nasty kebab of Bobby’s testicles; he would have stabbed theatrically at a piece of chicken and growled, until the resulting laughter carried them to another conversation topic.

He does not do any of those things now. He shovels a slightly too large bite of chicken in his mouth. “Sorry,” he mutters after several chews. “That’s a real shame.”

She raises an eyebrow at that. “I told you,” she says. “I didn’t do it for a boy.” It is the first time she has ever referred to the cure in conversation with him since taking it.

He looks at her, and she knows this look well; the look he wears when he is trying to figure out what secret she is keeping from him, and how dangerous that secret is. The way he looked at her when she first told him about her skin; the way he looked at her before he gave her the dog tags; the way he looked at her when he released his hand from Bobby’s frozen handshake; the way he looked at her when she gave the dog tags back, fleeing their home, before John wedged himself between them to fiddle with the radio. The way he looked at her just before she left to take the cure, asking if she needed a lift, already knowing exactly where she was going.

She feels him evaluating her heart rate, her breathing, her scent. She looks back at him calmly. She does not feel shy in front of him. Has not felt shy in front of him in some time.

“Fair enough,” he says, and it is the second time he has said those words to her in that tone.

It is strange to think that this will be the last conversation she will have with him before she leaves the mansion tomorrow morning. But she is almost certain she will come back. She is almost certain she will come back.

Then his voice breaks into her thoughts, and for a moment it sounds as rough and pained as it did when she first asked him if it hurt when the claws came out. He is saying, “I’ve been wondering for a while now.”

He seems to be waiting for her to say, Yeah, so she says, “Yeah?”

He clears his throat, and he almost manages to sound like the new, collected Logan again when he says, “You still have people in your head?”

She looks at him. Something in his face right now makes him look young, nearly as young as her. She thinks, if he only remembers the last eighteen years of his life, in some way I am older than him. She is going to turn twenty-one in a few months. She already knows she is not going to spend that birthday with him.

“No,” she says, more or less honestly. “You all disappeared, mostly. I still have a few memories of what I learned from back then; but I remember them like anything else, like they’re stories someone told me. Not like it’s my own memory. Which is how it used to feel, just afterwards.”

She eats a large spoonful of rice. “Not so special, really.”

Logan is still giving her that look. With his young, perfectly human face. “Oh,” he says.

They go back to eating. She thinks again that this will be the last conversation they have before she leaves. She does not know why, but she wants to give him something, a small something, a kind of parting gift, and she almost reaches out and touches his knuckles with her bare hands before she realizes that she does not want to touch him, not at all, not even a little bit. She does not want to see what the expression on his face will be if she puts her hand on his.

He was wrong, that night before she left. He is not her father, but he is not her friend, either. Two strangers who have saved each other’s lives. Knowing each other without knowing anything about each other. Sharper than love, starker than passion. Between them they have only a sort of charged distance, quiet and tense as the time inside a prayer. She wants desperately to protect that distance, without knowing exactly what it is she is protecting, like a monk watching over a relic whose original meaning has become more and more distorted with each passing generation.

So she does not touch him, but instead, says, suddenly, “You like teriyaki because I think you lived in Japan for a while.”

He stops chewing. An expression she cannot read passes over his face and she panics, thinking it looks like the answer to the look on Storm’s face that she had to turn away from, and she doesn’t want it, she’s said too much, the quiet is broken, and she hears Scott’s angry words again, Not everyone heals as fast as you, only in her head it sounds like she is now the one saying the words, and instead of a taunt, it sounds like a lament.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay.”


*


The next morning she considers leaving a pair of gloves, with a note for Logan that says simply, I’ll be back for these.

The idea makes her smile. She might have done it, even six months ago. But she does not know if it is the truth. And it is not six months ago.

So instead, she leaves a duller, less poignant note on her dresser. It says: Sorry I didn’t tell you. It’s just something I had to do. Don’t be too pissed at me. Storm already knows. Don’t worry about me. I’ll try to keep in touch, so check your email once in a while; ask Jubilee to help you figure it out. Don’t be too hard on the kids—but don’t be too easy on them, either. Take care of yourself.

She doesn’t sign her name, because he never really calls her by it naturally, and she has come to accept and even appreciate that. The name Marie seems to be slipping off, like a weathered cocoon. Before taking the cure, she had entertained the sentimental notion that she would be able to go back to that name, and the girl who once wore it. It has taken her less than a month to realize her mistake. She hasn’t been Marie since Laughlin City.

And while she likes the name Rogue, it feels too formal, too distant for this note. So she leaves the note unsigned. Upon the words “care of yourself,” she has smudged the ink a little with the sweat of her bare hand, and she thinks that will be enough of a signature.

Storm has arranged for a shuttle van to pick her up and drive her to the airport, and it arrives early in the morning, when the day still looks like night, and she feels as though it is a month ago again, and she is slipping out of the house to rewire her entire life. Only then it was onto a bus that smelled of tobacco, on the way to a dank, overcrowded public health center in Washington D.C.

When she goes down to meet the shuttle van, she half-expects Logan to be waiting for her, to have smelled her, heard her; to have sensed, inexplicably, the change in the air. But at four in the morning, she is the only one awake, and the drive from upstate New York to JFK is nearly wordless, and when she sees the sun rise, she is already wondering what the sunrise will look like on the West Coast.


*


In San Francisco she stays at a Holiday Inn for a couple of weeks while she looks for a studio to rent at a price that doesn’t make her want to kill herself. She finds one that gives her only a mild rage blackout, with a building manager whom she suspects is also either a former or current mutant, if the tattoos on his neck are anything to go by. The apartment is near a street where cable cars pass, a fact which delights her like the tourist she is.

The first thing she does after she signs the lease on her apartment is purchase an economy pack of condoms, along with a box of brown hair dye to dye the white streak out of her hair. She has come to love the look of it, but it does not belong on her head right now.

She has enough money to live on without having to find a job right away, but she doesn’t know how long she will be able to tolerate living solely on other people’s money. But then she thinks, now is a good time to use up everything given to her in childhood.

It is as she is in a vintage store shopping for sleeveless tops that she sees him for the first time, walking slowly down Polk street. She sees his profile, the tweed beret he wears even in May sunshine, and she convinces herself she is imagining things.

And later that night, she orders a pizza, and when she opens the door to her new apartment, she has a terrible impulse to live out an actual porn scenario—and it works, to her simultaneous dismay and pleasure. And the first time with a stranger is already better than all the times with Bobby combined.

A week later, she sees that tweed beret again—not a beret, more like a newsboy cap—playing chess with an older Chinese man in Golden Gate Park. She hurries out of the park so quickly she practically topples a young man with glasses, walking his dog. He, like nearly everyone else she meets, is extremely charmed by her accent. When he says he lives just across from the park, she says she’d like to see his place and his face turns red, and she likes that very much.

And in less than fifteen minutes they are fucking on his couch while his Alaskan husky watches. She touches his arm and feels the ghost of a buzz, but he does not seem to feel anything, and she wonders to herself if it really is just static.

Afterwards, he says he wants to see her again, and she says she doesn’t have a California number yet, but gives him her New York number, changing just the last 7 into a 9.


*


She has had sex with six other people before Erik Lehnsherr meets her gaze in the Bob’s Donuts on Polk Street.

She has expected many things, coming to San Francisco. If anything, she had perhaps expected to see Logan here, furious, half-mad with worry, ready to throw her over the back of his bike. She admits the thought is a guilty turn-on, albeit also a terrifying one. She had dreamt of it, often, in the early months, after he had first left the mansion. But she knows it will not happen. They are not those people. She is not that girl.

She had not, however, expected to see Erik. Wrinkles on his face, white hair growing out of his ears. She had heard that he had been hit by a dose of the cure; someone told her it was Hank and Logan, but she had never asked for the details. They all assumed he was dead, disintegrated, along with the many others Jean had destroyed. More details she doesn’t know, because she wasn’t there.

So she sits down next to him and sees that they have ordered the same fried pastry, and she thinks, a little crazily, Of course. Of course.

“So the untouchable girl took the cure after all,” Erik says, smirking, taking in her bare arms, her dyed hair. “I seem to remember Pyro mentioning that.”

She looks at him carefully. She wonders how he can be here, how he has not yet been recognized, and then she thinks that if she were anyone else, she wouldn’t have recognized him, either. His face, now like a cartoon sketch of old age, weary and beaten. Wearing a newsboy cap instead of a helmet. Only his voice sounds the same. Bored, haughty, warmed by decades of rage.

He sees her looking at him and says, “Relax, child. I have no plans to hurt you.” And someone else said something like that to her, long ago.

And then she sees herself on top of the Statue of Liberty, back from the dead, seventeen years old, staring down at Logan, bleeding and unconscious; then a level lower, Erik in black, also unconscious, and they are both inside her, they have replaced her, she has been burned away.

She says, “You know it’s supposed to be temporary.”

Erik says nothing, only looks down at his hands. “Ah, yes. I’ve felt something to that effect.” He takes another bite of his apple fritter, chews, swallows. “But if you’re concerned about your noble comrades, I assure you, my dear, one lonely old man is the least of your problems.”

“I’m not so sure,” she says, and isn’t.

Erik leans on one elbow, partially covering his smiling mouth with a hand. It is a habit of his, this gesture. She knows it because she has done it too, in the days following the Statue of Liberty incident. She had looked at Xavier that way, smiling forlornly behind her hand, and she had seen the professor’s face shift and heard his breath hitch in his throat, like someone hearing beloved but nearly-forgotten music coming from faraway room.

The effect is even more charming when Erik does it. She wonders if he is going to say something about her hair, which he is studying with great amusement.

Instead his gaze moves to dart lazily around the room and he says, “Isn’t it a bit late for you to be wandering about alone like some sort of urchin? Where’s your Wolverine?”

It takes her a few moments before she is able to say, “I’m here alone. I’m living here in San Francisco for a little while.”

She wants to add, not mine, not mine, but saying it would draw more attention to it.

“Another disenchanted convert from the Xavier school of philosophical hand-wringing and physics experiments?” Erik laughs. “If you were looking for a new team to join, dear child, you’re a touch late. I’m afraid I’m done with fraternity.”

She knows this laugh, too; it is the laugh meant to anger and distance Xavier, the laugh meant to cancel intimacy. The laugh that says, like an outstretched knife, You are not better than me, you do not know me.

She stands from her stool, leaving her own apple fritter almost entirely uneaten. “I wasn’t,” she replies. “Good night, Erik.” She leaves before she can see the disappointment settle into his features.


*


She doesn’t set up an Internet or a phone account in her apartment, but when she opens her laptop, she realizes she can leech Internet off one of her neighbors’ open wireless connection, so she does.

When she checks her email, she has several messages from Jubilee, from Kitty, from Bobby, from Storm, and from Logan. She responds to all of the messages except for Logan’s, with brief assurances of good health and comfort. She still does not say where she is.

Logan has written two emails. The first one says, Hey, kid. Definitely pissed at you. And I know how to work an email account with Jubilee’s help. You ever gonna tell anyone where you are? Storm swears she has no idea, and I’m starting to believe her. The kids are becoming slightly less useless. Did you get my phone message? Take care of yourself.

The second one says, Hey, kid. Still pissed at you. I’ve been thinking about what you said about Japan. I think you’re right. Feel free to let me know if you remember more. If you want to. At least send us a sign to let us know you’re alive. Take care of yourself.

Rogue thinks she is going to respond; she even opens a reply message to Logan’s latest email.

She wants to write, yes, she remembers more about Japan; she remembers wary happiness then hysterical grief; a poisoned fiancée; another young girl who was entrusted to his care after her mother died in a collapsed building. She wants to write, it wasn’t the first time you’ve had to kill the woman you love with your claws. It wasn’t the first time you had a young girl’s life thrust into your hands.

But after staring at the screen for over an hour, she writes nothing. She sends a blank email, and hopes that can be sign enough.

Just before she goes to sleep, she remembers that Logan mentioned a phone message. Without thinking, she slips back out of bed, towards her bag. She takes the cell phone out, turns it on. The background picture is still one of Bobby in ice form, pantomiming licking her face. In the photo she is eighteen years old, grinning with her eyes closed.

She has one voicemail message, from Logan. The sound of his voice in her ear shocks her after nearly a month without it.

“Hey, kid. It’s Friday morning. Storm said you left a few hours ago. Thought I might catch you before you got on the plane. Just wanted to say safe flight. You can call if you get this. You know my number. All right. Later.” Every word is clipped, cautious, determined to conceal his anger from her.

She lets herself play the message two more times before she turns the phone off again and tries to sleep. In her head she lets herself play the message as many times as she wants.


*


The second time she runs into him is in a grocery store near her—and therefore, she realizes with great alarm, his—apartment; he, endeavoring to read the label on a jar of black cherry jam; she, in search for crunchy peanut butter. He smiles when he sees her, says, “Hello, dear girl, you look well,” as though they are old friends.

She grabs the first peanut butter she sees, rushes out. She has sex with a young man she meets in the elevator of her building, and whose apartment is two floors above hers. She is giving him a handjob when she feels the buzz again, and he yelps in pain, saying she tugged at his foreskin a little too hard. It doesn’t seem to put him off for long.


*


Several days later, she is going down on a young woman named Maria or Marisol or Marisa when she feels the buzz in her tongue, and Maria or Marisol or Marisa starts screaming, and Rogue is about to pull away in terror, until she realizes the woman is coming.

Afterwards she pops into the convenience store with a sudden craving for cigarettes and maybe a tabloid magazine, and Erik is already there, buying a newspaper. He sees her enter, greets her, “Hello, my dear.”

She ignores him, asks for a pack of Marlboro Lights and picks up an issue of Us Weekly. Some famous pop singer is coming out as a mutant.

Erik clucks his tongue, says, “Those things will kill you, dear girl.”

“If I’m lucky,” she mumbles under her breath. The shop-owner asks to see some I.D. She shows him her New York driver’s license. He looks at her, at the I.D., then back at her.

“Nice hair,” he says, pointing at the old picture. Erik bursts into hearty laughter. She scowls, slams her money on the counter and doesn’t wait for her change.

“Good night, dear,” Erik calls after her as she leaves, still laughing.

She can hear the shop-owner asking, “That your granddaughter?”


*


Then, for the first time, on a foggy day, she sees the new bridge being built where the old Golden Gate Bridge used to be, and the strange skeleton of the old Golden Gate Bridge, still partially and haphazardly collapsed onto Alcatraz. Tourist visits to the site have been completely stopped; she can only see it from afar, her eyes following the path the broken red bridge makes towards a gray speck that the fog obscures almost completely. She is not sure it is really there at all.

Fitting that she should come to San Francisco and still not be able to see it; where they fought, what they paid, what they saw when it seemed like the world was falling apart around them. She remains outside of it. The lacuna remains a lacuna.

Without knowing why, she walks as if hypnotized to a payphone nearby and calls Logan’s cell phone, hating herself for remembering the number so easily. It rings, and she stares at the old red bridge while she waits.

He picks up on the fourth ring. “Yeah,” he says.

She can hear children in the background. It is one o’clock in San Francisco, four o’clock in New York. After-school activities must be in full-swing. “Yeah,” he says again, more loudly.

She wants to say, Hey. She wants to say, How are you. She wants to say, I didn’t know San Francisco is fucking built on like, twenty-four-hundred hills, I think my calves have doubled in size.

But she says nothing. Logan pauses. “Jesus. Is that you?” he asks, and she knows that she is that “you.”

Another pause and he says, “That last email you sent, it didn’t have nothing in it, was it supposed to be blank or was that a mistake?”

He waits, then continues, “Well, if it was a mistake, send it again, ‘cause it was blank, so I didn’t get what you wrote, if you did write something.”

Then he is quiet again, breathing steadily into the phone, and the noise fills her ear as if the breath itself has a form, as if it has crossed the country between them.

She wants to say, I did that trick with the tongue on a couple of girls last week; I remembered it, the way I told you I remember things, like it was a story you told me, but you never told me that story.

“God, is it just me or are teenagers getting stupider? There are some kids around here I wouldn’t mind reducing to a fine dice and putting into a sandwich. You weren’t anything like that, when you were their age.”

She wants to say, Magneto lives in my neighborhood, and we’re practically stalking each other.

He continues, “So I still don’t know where you are, and this phone call says it’s from Unknown. I guess if I really asked Storm, she could probably work some kind of trace on it, these phones are all so high-tech. But you don’t want that, do you?” She doesn’t respond. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

He adds, clearing his throat, “By the way, sorry I was asking about that Japan stuff, I don’t know if that was weird for you. I decided a little while ago that there was more important stuff to care about than what-fuck-all I did in my past. So just forget I asked.”

She enters another dime into the payphone. She doesn’t have much change on her; she hadn’t been planning to make this call. She only has pennies left; the phone does not accept pennies.

He continues, “Oh, by the way, I was reading some file the other day, and I found out your last name. I didn’t even know it before that. Ain’t that something?” He coughs, not a smoker’s cough. After decades of smoking, his lungs are pinker than a child’s. “It was weird. I don’t think it fits you.”

She wants to say, It’s coming back, it’s going to come back, and this might be the only chance I have to be something other than what a leap in evolution has made me.

The operator is now saying, Please enter twenty-five cents. She doesn’t have twenty-five cents.

Logan is saying, “Kid?” She places the phone back on the receiver, gently, as if she is placing it directly onto his ear, in New York.


*


She is still recovering from a spectacular orgasm in a public park, given to her by a talkative blue-haired girl, when she enters Miller’s East Coast Delicatessen and sees Erik sitting inside.

The orgasm has put her in a good mood and she is tired of avoiding him, so she orders her bagel “for here,” and crosses the restaurant to sit down in the empty chair across from him. He smiles bemusedly at her and she regrets her decision immediately, the afterglow receding from her body. “To what do I owe the—”

She interrupts him. “Are you alone here?”

He blinks. “Yes,” he replies, and there is no haughtiness or coldness in his voice, only a guarded calm.

“What about Mystique, John—the others?”

He looks at her. He seems to be surprised that she does not know. “Mystique instinctively protected me from a shot of the cure with her own body; we parted ways then. And Pyro; I lost track of him during the battle at Alcatraz. He may still be alive; I don’t know. I doubt it. Nearly everyone and everything was destroyed by Jean,” he says.

He looks older than death and young as a boy as he says, “The way she destroyed Charles.”

She swallows. She knows only that Xavier was killed by Jean, not how. She does not want to imagine, cannot imagine.

Erik continues, “I believe Mystique is still alive, and living somewhere in Southern California, at least according to recent activity on what was once our joint bank account.” He smiles. “We had several properties around the world; I live now in the one we bought here. She may live in one of the two we had in Los Angeles, or perhaps the one in San Diego. There was a particularly strong pacifist mutant community in San Diego, near the border.”

She tries not to think of Mystique’s mutation coming back, of a bare tanned leg flickering into blue scales. “And you’re not in contact with her?”

Erik looks at her. “While I was grateful for her extraordinary gesture, I was not especially sympathetic to her predicament, when she became human again before my eyes. I doubt she wants much to do with me now.”

He smiles again; he has a habit of smiling at every place in the story where she would want to drag a knife across her own neck.

She says, not knowing why she wants to know, “Weren’t you and Mystique—didn’t you—”

“My dear, are you trying to ask me if I was in love with Mystique?” His eyebrow lifted, he says, “Mystique and I shared an—arrangement.” He sounds infinitely pleased himself when he adds, “I shared a similar arrangement with your friend Pyro, when he joined us.”

Then he does that smile again, and now he mixes it with that hand gesture, hiding the smile behind his left hand, and she wishes she were Xavier, she wishes Xavier were sitting here instead of her.

He says, “As for love—I think you, dear child, ought to know better than anyone about that.”

She knows, she remembers. Whenever she masturbates, Xavier still appears in her mind more often than she can help.

She remembers the endless counseling sessions, especially just after the Statue of Liberty incident, with Logan still in the medbay, covered in scars, and the Professor in front of her in his office, wearing a silk tie that cost nearly half her rent here in San Francisco, hovering his hands at her temples, trying to separate the two men in her mind, trying to call forth the girl—

—And she would look at him and regret everything, want everything back, want another time, another world, want his legs again, broken or unbroken, again, again—

—And she would also know that all this was long over and would never be again, and hadn’t it always been more or less one-sided after all, and she must not wish for it anymore, she must put it away, she must put it away. And she would feel Erik clamping down on his own desire inside her head, Erik clamping down on every memory or wish or thought about Charles that might now be in her head, too. Erik in her head, wanting desperately to safeguard a past that he had already long-abandoned forever.

And during that first session she could only grit out, over and over, “Don’t say anything, Charles, just don’t bloody say anything in front of the girl.”

Xavier, weakly murmuring, “It’s all right, Rogue. You are here. You are here.”


*


Back in her apartment, she checks her email again. Messages from Jubilee and Kitty. In Kitty’s email, she mentions that she and Bobby have begun dating, that she tried to call, that she wanted to be the one to tell her, that her friendship means a lot to her, that she really looks up to her, that she hopes that she’ll be able to understand. It doesn’t take her long to write a short email assuring Kitty that no forgiveness is necessary, and that she thinks they will make a very good couple.

Jubilee tells her the same thing, only slightly more bitchily, and Rogue laughs, genuinely, for the first time in what feels like ages. Jubilee mentions that Logan is doing grumpily well, as always, and has fast become a beloved teacher in spite of himself, especially among the youngest kids. Jubilee says, The stick up his ass is now only maybe four inches in diameter, instead of six, so, improvements!

Then, two more messages from Logan. She wonders if he always sends messages in twos.

The first one says only, Was that supposed to be a reply? It was blank. Send it again. At least I know you’re alive.

The second one says, Hey, kid. Got your call. You really did forget how to talk. And apparently you forgot how to write, too. I don’t know how the hell you’re managing, wherever you are. Maybe you’ve joined some kind of mime troupe.

I didn’t trace the call, in case you’re wondering. So I still really don’t know where you are. By the way, I don’t know if this will bother you, but I thought I’d let you know anyway: seems like the Iceman and Kitty are an item now. You’ll probably hear it from one of the girls. Just thought you should know.

Teriyaki day today. Thought of you.

She sends another blank email, then leaves her apartment, takes the elevator two stories up, trying to remember the name of the man she fucked two weeks ago and is going to fuck again. By the time he opens the door and grins knowingly, she knows it is definitely either Byron or Brian.

Afterwards, he gives her the jar of peanut butter she left at his place the first time, and she hadn’t even realized she forgot it. She takes it back and decides to make a sandwich. She sees that the peanut butter is the natural kind; she has to stir the oil back into the dry, hardened nut paste, and as she is stirring hard with her spoon, she feels the sobbing come out of her as if from another person, and she stirs and stirs and stirs again, long after all the oil is evenly distributed and her hands are covered in grease and the sorrow that belongs to no one disappears and her swollen eyes can open and the peanut butter looks like peanut butter again.