Brenda Vasquez was my third sibling. She was also a handful because Brenda was a talker. You would be hard pressed to stop the barrage of unfiltered thoughts that would come out of her mouth. She wasn’t all that great at stopping herself either. Many of her likes and interests didn’t go so well with her parents’ brand of Christian faith. Brenda’s secret rebellion specifically started with not understanding why she couldn’t have a birthday party and why everyone else got Christmas and Halloween. Kids and teens sometimes can’t see or process the nuances and meanings of their faith. Then again some adults can be pretty clueless about their chosen religions as well. But that’s a different conversation.
Her world really began to turn upside down when she was fifteen. Brenda started walking home with the girl from the apartment next door, Natalie. Nat was a year older. Her family had just moved in and both families ended up going to the same church. Natalie never talked about her home life, but sometimes Brenda could hear yelling through the apartment walls. She liked talking to Nat. They could only really talk on the way to school, at school, and on the way back home. Sometimes at church. Neither was allowed to go anywhere alone.
One day, on the way home, Nat passed Brenda an old smartphone. It didn’t have service, but it could connect to WiFi. She showed Brenda how to use a chat app on the phone and explained how to connect to the WiFi from different apartments in range. The passwords to those wireless networks were already programmed into the phone. Brenda asked how Natalie got those and the only answer was a mischievous smile. Now they could talk to each other when they were locked away in their rooms. Sometimes they stayed up too late talking to each other and paid for it trying to stay awake at school. Then paid for it again with their parents when they got home with suffering grades.
As they got closer, Brenda started to get the feeling that she liked Natalie as more than a friend. Nat of course helped these feelings along by being vaguely flirty, but in a playful enough way that Brenda didn’t know if she was kidding around. Brenda wasn’t sure how to handle those feelings for two reasons. Primarily, Brenda wasn’t supposed to like girls. Secondly, Brenda was self-conscious. She didn’t have a weight issue, but she was a little shorter and a bit stockier than most of the girls in her grade. Brenda felt like she didn’t look like she was supposed to. She never used the F word but sometimes she felt it applied. She wanted to look like Nat. “Tall and beautiful.” Natalie repeated that Brenda was beautiful too, though Brenda found it hard to let herself believe it.
Their not exactly but sort of unofficial unrequited romance was exciting for Brenda. It was also scary. She never had the courage to ask Nat if they were only being playfully flirtatious. She wished it could be more. In the end, Brenda just tried to bury those feelings and enjoy the friendship. Before the beginning of the new school year, Nat’s family moved. It was sudden. They were just gone one day and Brenda never heard from Natalie again. Brenda asked her parents but all she got in return was that it was “none of her business.” It was a heartbreak. Brenda’s first. Worse was that it was a heartbreak she had to hide. Brenda didn’t have a choice but to get on with her life. She would miss Nat and be forever grateful that she was a part of her life. Moving on was a struggle but the old phone helped. Brenda began to find a world online that had been denied to her. She found beautiful women that looked like her and felt better for it. But more importantly, she learned that liking another girl as more than a friend was not the pathway to hell that her parents believed it was.
Brenda quickly began to feel more and more disconnected from her parents’ religion. She went through the motions of being a good pious and faithful daughter, but she didn’t feel God in any of it. She did have a feeling that there was a god, but it somehow didn’t feel right that there was only one way to be deserving of his love. Love being forbidden because it was someone of the same gender didn’t feel right either. She also came to the opinion that it was weird referring to an intangible, omnipotent, and omnipresent celestial being by a single gender. Or by any gender. Logically, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to her.
“If God was limitless, then how could God possibly be limited to a gender?” she wondered.
Jesus didn’t count. As a corporeal representative from God way back when, it was just easier to be a guy. Brenda also learned about a lot more than just sexual orientations and her faith. She learned a lot about other religions too. She didn’t feel the pull to embrace anything else, but she opened her mind.
Since “good music”, among other things, wasn’t allowed at home, she did a deep dive into the songs and bands an uncle once exposed her to. She ended up being moved more by the sounds and voices of rock, metal, and punk music than she was by the verses and hymns she had been forced to commit to memory. In her heart she knew that she was a rebel girl and could in fact be the queen of the neighborhood... if she had the courage to do so. She kept that a secret too, of course. Brenda would tell you that she was the only one she knew that was into punk and metal music. That most likely wasn’t true. It just seemed that way to her.
Brenda’s powers manifested just before her sixteenth birthday. She didn’t have the usual reaction. All her internet explorations that had brought her to the realms of comics, sci-fi, and fantasy prepared her for this moment. It seemed like any other day except for the fact that she was feeling a little achy and feverish. She was taking a shower and accidentally made the water too hot. Brenda couldn’t help but notice that the water began to bend around her. But she wasn’t scared. She moved closer to the water and it continued to bend around her. She’d heard about people with powers and secretly hoped she would get some. And now here it was. She concentrated on keeping the water still and ran her fingers under it. The water was still hot. She pulled her fingers back and turned the hot water down. Then she focused on the water and willed it to come back to her. And it worked. Her hands shook with excitement. She half giggled and made a sound which could only be described as a squee.
“PV. I have the Powers Virus,” she said to herself, excitedly.
Over the next week she practiced manipulating water, making it take shapes, drying herself off without a towel, it was completely at her command. And she wondered what more she could do. One night, Brenda took a matchbook from the kitchen junk drawer. In her room she lit a match. She focused on the flame and thought of a bird. The flame took shape and began to beat its wings. She was so shocked, she lost her concentration and the fire bird went out. She knew what her parents would say. “This is the Devil at work.” They spoke of people having powers either being possessed by demons or having made some form of bargain with the Devil. Everything was the Devil. There really wasn’t any gray area.
Brenda knew enough that this was not the Devil’s work. At least she was pretty certain that was the case for her. Let’s say 95 to 99% sure. For certain she was not compelled to do evil things and that was the standard that she decided to go by. You could do evil things with your hands and that did not make your hands evil. In the end, her faith and religion studies online led Brenda to the conclusion that her church and parents were misguided. The resentment had been growing for some time. Exposure to more information didn't help. The revelation of her powers came as further evidence. But what would her parents think? She couldn’t lie to them. That was a sin. Would they love her or cast her out? She had to be sure. She made a plan. A hasty one. It might have been a bit much.
Okay it was more than a bit much.
Brenda’s parents got home from a prayer meeting. Her mom called out to her. Her mom and dad could hear her walking from her room but the steps sounded heavier than normal. To her parents’ shock, Brenda appeared wearing black boots, black jeans, a black Metallica shirt, black eyeliner, and her hair completely down. It was normally pulled back out of her face with a hair band. As expected. It didn’t go so well. There was yelling. Some things were said about going to hell and being corrupted. Brenda flipped her middle finger at her parents. She waited for her dad to approach with his hand raised to slap her. Then Brenda really dropped the real bomb. A flame appeared on her middle finger. It made her dad freeze in shock. Brenda smiled and focused the flame until it looked like a blowtorch. Then she turned her hand so her finger was pointing at her father.
“Me voy. Vete al la chingada,” said Brenda.
For those not habla inclined, she told her parents that she was leaving and that they could go to hell. Brenda actually planned on saying “vete al infierno” but the heat of the moment got to her and something with more sting flew out. She walked right by her parents while pointing the glowing flame at them and backed out of the apartment. She had stashed a bag outside. She was gone. No one bothered looking for her. Another confirmation to her about her parents' love. She never considered how her dramatic exit affected them. She left with a threat for them not to follow whether she intended it that way or not.
Brenda didn’t know of anyone in her family she could turn to. No one lived close and it’s not like there was much contact to begin with. She would have tried to connect with her uncle who showed her good music but he had passed away the year before. She ended up going in and out of foster homes a few times. When she could get away with it, she stayed up late and watched TV. She finally got to watch full shows now. That’s when she became a real sci-fi fangirl. The next generation of a space exploration show hooked her at a very impressionable time. They were reruns and the effects looked dated at times, but it generally held up pretty well. She would tell you it was all the fault of a young ensign who first came aboard as the son of the ships doctor. He wasn’t a girl which she found oddly interesting. He was the first boy she found appealing in that way.
“Maybe I’m bi?” Brenda wondered.
She didn’t dwell on it much. By the time she bounced around to families that might have been on the okay side, she grew a sarcastic shell that kept her from making any real connections and more often than not, caused a lot of fights. Brenda eventually embraced the “freak” persona that was given to her by other kids and adults. Some called her mental. A part of her sometimes enjoyed the conflict. She was smarter than a lot of the people who took her in and had very little trouble demonstrating that fact. For an outside observer, it could look funny sometimes. Sometimes. But it was not very funny to the people who tried to take care of her and wanted to care. Eventually Brenda would find herself homeless on the streets. She learned to survive just barely. Not being able to stay in people's good graces was leading her down a narrow path where she may have disappeared. Fortunately, someone found her before the darkness did.253Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡt8mJYAU4E5
