Here’s my idea of pretty, in toon form, of course. It’s always been my idea of pretty, since we were eight years old.

Meegan looks nothing like Aurora. She dresses in combat gear, for one thing. And her face beneath her mask was smeared with dirt.

She has crazy hair. Dyed reddish-pink, half dreadlocked, and cut at all different lengths, some going almost to her waist. Her face is covered in piercings that look like wounds and make her hard to look at directly.

She has thin lips that look made for screaming, although I didn’t know why I thought it at the time, and I don’t know what color her eyes are, because she has in colored contacts, one blue and one red, that make her look fiercer than she already is.

I wouldn’t call her ugly, but the Throttler is definitely no Aurora.

I had this thought, then regretted it, because the way she was examining me made me realize that I was no prize, either. And why would it matter anyway? It wasn’t like this was a blind date.

My foot throbbed unpleasantly.

“Hmm, you’re younger than I thought you would be,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“You’re still in high school, aren’t you? At least we don’t go to the same school. That would be, just, embarrassing.”

“Sorry,” I said again. Why was I being such an idiot?

“Do you recognize me?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “I dunno. Why?”

Meegan made an annoyed sound, and her grandma came to my side and whispered, “She’s in a band! She’s very proud about it.”

Suddenly I remembered posters I’d seen plastered all over town all summer. Posters of a girl with pink hair. Screaming.

So that’s where the screaming mouth came from.

“Oh. Yeah. Um,” and then I pulled the name out of nowhere, “Kill All Humans, right?”
Meegan actually looked surprised. “Wow. Did you see any of our shows?”

“Nah. I just remember the name because it’s ripped from Futurama.”

“Hmph. Well, you’d probably hate us, anyway.”

We glared at each other.

And that’s how I became friends, or maybe a better word would be “allies,” with the Throttler.

Check this out.

I realized that in my last post, I didn’t say anything about what Meegan’s situation is. And it’s actually weirdly connected to mine.

Obviously, she decided to find a way to take down JoyTech, but the funny thing is, she didn’t decide what she was going to do until she went to this protest (ring any bells?), and saw this guy in a gasmask start a riot!

Holy *@#!

She said that. Serious. She said that I was who inspired her to take action, and that I was her big hero or something, until she snuck down into the cave and saw me get shot in the foot.

She asked me what I do to train and I said, “huh?” and she rolled her eyes.

And then she made a big point of saying how totally unimpressed she is by me now.

And then we were sitting there staring at each other, and I realized that we both still had our masks on.

Talking to people when you’re in a mask is really weird, because you don’t know if you should take it off or not. It’s strange and kind of embarrassing talking normally when you’re wearing the mask, but you can’t just reveal your identity out of the blue.

So throughout our whole Q&A, we’re both firing questions at each other in these masks, and grandma is puttering around the trailer like nothing unusual is happening.

And then there was this lull. We’re both totally exhausted and I think I’ll probably pass out in two seconds, and I notice that Meegan’s gasmask is a lot more modern than mine.

Mine is, I think, from the Crimean war, but hers looks like it’s straight out of the Gulf War. And I’m checking it out more closely, and I guess I kind of leaned in towards her, because suddenly she raised her hand and made as if to pull off my mask.

My first reaction was to jolt backwards, but she followed me with her hand, so then I caught the strap behind one of her ears, and pulled at her mask.

We both hesitated for a second, like we were waiting for the other one to be ready, and then the masks came off.