It was her. Erica. For real. Standing silently, just over Mandy’s shoulder.
Time crusted to a standstill then, just for the length of a couple inhales. Peter locked eyes with his towering sister. Her pretty face, weary and furrowed to a stressed-out mask after a whole night awake searching for him, remained almost unchanged after she’d successfully snuck up on Mandy. Only the elder Clark sibling’s eyes changed, widening and lighting up with recognition of her brother, the fact that he was alive, and the exact activity he’d just been through. In an instant she understood everything.
Erica’s mouth opened, not to scream out in horror, but to let loose a focused war cry the likes of which her tiny brother had never heard, let alone thought possible to come from his sister. In the same moment, the seventeen-year-old angel’s hand took a death-hold on Mandy’s omnipresent ponytail, a feature as characteristic of the psycho as her actual facial features, but which now betrayed the girl; Erica yanked Mandy back by her long hair so hard that both teens were thrown onto the path, and intentionally on Erica’s part, well-clear of Peter. Disbelieving what he was seeing, even while his heart sang, the boy scrambled to his feet. He watched them rolling over one another, a pair of mighty titans in comparison to him.
Mandy, junkyard scrapper though she was, got a handle on the situation fast enough to start throwing all four of her limbs every which way, indiscriminately punching and kicking the air. Like an infant, she wailed for blood. The sight of Mandy, the monster in a state of screechy panic as though something had threatened her young, made Peter afraid for his sibling for just a fleeting gasp.
At least until he decided to focus on Erica instead. His sister didn’t make another sound, but moved efficiently and brutally, pinning the younger girl’s legs down, then crossing her arms over her chest to prevent further retaliation. Only then, Peter’s sister took a breath to look Mandy dead in the eye before cocking back her fist and punching that same eye so hard that all three parties heard the bruising thud like a rock striking meat. When Mandy squirmed, Erica blocked her escape attempt with her own leg, then leveled six rapidfire slaps across the girl’s cheeks. Each contact of her palm generated a thunderclap noise that echoed across the still-deserted park.
These blows tranquilized Mandy considerably, but she hadn’t given up. Her shrill whines rang out in spooky non-patterns. She lifted her head, blearily shaking it, then looked straight in Peter’s direction ten feet away. Though dazed, her expression was one of forlorn yearning for him, perhaps even whatever mangled version of affection Mandy could personally conjure. Likely seeing this as her last chance, Peter’s chosen owner started trying to wrestle out from under Erica again, and actually succeeded in freeing her legs. And then she started crawling toward him.
Erica, while catching her breath, first noticed this glance toward Peter on Mandy’s part, herself darting glances between the culprit and the saliva-drenched boy. When she felt her opponent wriggling away, though, and reaching shakily out in Peter’s direction, Erica didn’t waste a moment and balled another fist. Just before Mandy could take the final lunge and snatch the tiny boy up again, Erica's right hook landed clean across the girl’s nose with the stopping power of a freight train. This time rendered a quiet pop and a lingering squeal of pain as the bone broke. After that, at last, the defeated madwoman lay still to whimper and nurse her face, while Erica massaged her own bruised knuckles.
Peter stumbled back in the cold grass, now with a closer view of the carnage after Mandy had made her last attempt at him, only to be stopped halfway by Erica’s finishing blow. His heartbeat, still railing, did its best to settle back down to a mere mach-3. Even when everything had come to a standstill, his body ached, expecting something else awful to happen. Trembling, welling up, the boy looked on in reverence and gut-busting love for his giant sister as she crouched over her brother’s kidnapper with a killer’s eye far more savage than any Mandy had ever pretended to have. The angsty creep may have professed to mean business, but having now seen the genuine article reflected in Erica’s face, Peter knew she was just a fraud.
“Listen to me. Hey, hey, hey, look at me,” Erica whispered to Mandy. Her voice was shockingly kind and mellow, the way one might talk to a half-asleep baby: a tone Peter had never heard unsullied by heavy sarcasm or distaste. This was the gentlest he’d ever heard his big sibling speak to anyone. “I’m gonna say this really slow, so you understand it, okay? Just listen carefully: If you ever come near my brother again… if you touch him, if you talk to him, if you look at him, I will break so many things in your face that you’ll be hooked up to machines for the rest of your life. And if you’re really, really, I mean really lucky, you will not wake up ever again. Do you understand? I need you to look at me, and tell me you understand what’s going to happen to you, what I’m going to do to you, if you so much as THINK about him one more time in your whole goddamned life.”
Struck so dumb he could barely stay standing, Peter watched Mandy, the girl who’d spent the better part of a semester and particularly this previous day tormenting him like a bug under her boot, reduced to a blubbering pleading cretin. Through the tears, snot, and deviated septum, she mustered just enough gusto to bob her head and squeak out a yes to Erica’s crystal-clear question.
“Yes, what?”
“I… u-understand.” Her words were barely audible through the sobbing, but there.
“Good,” Erica murmured. She patted Mandy’s cheek, then stood up, nudging the girl in the ribs with her shoe while climbing off of her. Though the victor didn’t totally turn her attention away from the snake in the grass behind her, too aware of what she was capable, Erica now devoted most of her attention to her tiny sibling cowering a short distance away. She crouched slowly, as though approaching a wounded bird, and extended both hands out to Peter. Her stern tight-lipped expression had yet to alter itself.
More grateful than he could ever remember feeling in his life, Peter stumbled forward, practically tripping into the warm sanctity of Erica’s palms and fingers. Her hands curled around him in the heart-breakingly familiar way, and then they rose, side-stepping around Mandy’s prone form with plenty of space, just in case the wild child tried any last-ditch resorts. But she didn’t. On the brief passage out from under the bridge, Peter crept toward the edge of his sister’s hands to witness his fallen foe. Below, he saw the purple bruise forming around the girl’s eye, her nose angled slightly to the side, and tears streamed on her raw cheeks. Even once they were clear, Erica had the foresight not to turn her back on Mandy. Somewhere behind them on the trail, Peter could hear multiple police sirens entering the park beyond, though he didn’t need to see the red-and-blue lights to feel safe; he trusted Erica alone more than a whole battalion of cops.
Having escaped from the literal jaws of death, Peter cuddled to Erica’s thumb and braced himself happily for the inevitable stream of curses and scoldings he was about to receive from his snarky, no-nonsense sister. After all, much of what she’d warned him about long ago had finally come to pass, and while he’d gotten through in one piece thanks to his own wits plus a “little” help, he’d still landed himself in the deepest trouble of his whole miniature life. There was no way to sugar-coat that. He’d seen the look on her face a minute ago, the anger and resentment and exhaustion; that couldn’t have all been reserved for Mandy. Whatever it was she had to yell at him, though, he was prepared to take, and then some. He deserved it, he knew, and any amount of her punky wisdom was worth enduring instead of another instant in Mandy’s claws. Erica could hate him from now on for his stupidity, and he’d still love her forever. Feeling her hands rising and lifting him up toward her stone-cold face, Peter knew it was time.
“I’m so sorry,” he wheezed. He felt a good hard cry rising in his throat, and wanted to say his piece while he still could. “I should’ve listened to you. I couldn’t do anything, and then I… I…”
When the boy turned in his sister’s palms to look at her, though, he wasn’t met with a wall of foaming rage or I-told-you-sos. Erica wasn’t even frowning anymore. Instead her eyes, ordinarily the first to roll in annoyance, were glistening with moisture. Peter almost couldn’t believe it. She was…
“Don’t you dare say it. Shut up. Shut the fuck up right now, you stupid… little… beautiful… amazing… perfect… twerp,” Erica cooed in an angelic low, but could hardly get the last syllable out, as she yanked her tiny brother toward her puckered lips. Her voice had cracked anyway when the gathered tears started pouring down her face.
Having never actually kissed Peter before, at least as far back as the boy’s memory reached, Erica now hammered him with a lifetime’s worth of pent-up wet smooches. It was as though she had lost control, going entirely on autopilot, while her benevolent yet stiff pecks hit a rhythm, each one entirely coating Peter’s head across both huge lips. Between sloppy kisses, Peter could’ve sworn he heard her adding more irritated adjectives to the list of descriptors, all spoken in a confusingly loving voice. None of those words, though, were heard through the desperate smacking of Erica’s mouth, with each plush impact silently giving thanks.
The sirens blared louder. Officers rushed to Mandy, while two paramedics cautiously approached Erica and Peter. Upon their offering, though, she grunted a flat refusal to surrender her little brother to anyone else’s hands, which the boy was just fine with as he let himself enjoy the surreal, sappy aftermath of all the madness. He’d been through so much in the past day, it almost seemed inhuman to smile, but he couldn’t suppress it anyway, even laughing despite himself. Meanwhile the boy’s sister carried right on unabashedly kissing his head until it was just as damp as before, a fact that Peter didn’t mind in the slightest, either.