CALAMARI
The Lazaro Piscione Story
CompleteThe house was still dark when Lazaro padded into the kitchen, barefoot, hair pressed flat on one side from sleep. Fourteen. It didn’t feel any different yet. He grabbed an orange from the bowl on the counter and reached for the knife block without turning on the light — he could find his way around this kitchen blind.
He sliced into the orange. The blade skipped off the rind and bit into the pad of his index finger.
“OW—!” He dropped the knife. It clattered against the counter.
He braced for the sting, for blood, for the whole annoying process of finding a paper towel and holding pressure on it until his mom woke up and told him to be more careful.
None of that happened.
The pain vanished almost as fast as it arrived — there and then simply gone. No fade, no easing off — pain, then nothing, no transition between them. Lazaro stared at his finger. There should’ve been a line of red welling up. There wasn’t. The skin was smooth. Whole. No mark. The knife might never have touched it.
“What the—”
He turned his hand under the stove light, checking every angle. Nothing. Not even a mark.
From down the hall, his mother’s voice, thick with sleep: “Lazaro? You okay?”
He froze. “Yeah, mom — I’m good. Go back to sleep.”
A pause. Then the soft creak of her turning over, the conversation apparently over as far as she was concerned.
Lazaro stood there another second, heart going, and then — because some part of him needed to know it hadn’t been his imagination — he picked the knife back up.
He pressed the tip into the same finger. Small cut. Deliberate this time.
The sting came. The skin parted. And before a single drop of blood could rise to the surface, it closed. Sealed shut, seamless — the cut closing in reverse, skin knitting before it could bleed.
He did it again. Same result.
A laugh came out of him, short and disbelieving, more air than sound. He didn’t know if he wanted to scream or throw up or run down the hall and show somebody. Instead he just stood in the dark kitchen, orange forgotten on the cutting board, staring down at his own hand, refusing to recognize it as his.
Down the hall, his mother had already stopped thinking about it. She lay in bed a moment longer, eyes adjusting to the gray morning light, and reached for her phone on the nightstand. An hour earlier than she liked to be up — but her mind was already moving past the interruption, scrolling, planning.
Today was Lazaro’s birthday. And she had a surprise for him.
By the time Lazaro made it to the living room, the orange sat forgotten and unpeeled on the cutting board. Carlos was sprawled on the carpet in his pajamas, controller in hand, eyes glued to the TV, thumbs going.
Ana emerged a few minutes later, wrapped in her robe, hair a mess, phone already in hand. She looked more awake than she had any right to be for someone who’d been startled up an hour early.
“There’s my baby,” she said, pulling Lazaro into a one-armed hug and kissing the side of his head. “Fourteen. I can’t believe it.”
Carlos glanced over just long enough to catch the word. “…birthday,” he mumbled, mostly to himself, then turned straight back to the screen.
“Mom—” Lazaro started, still half-thinking about his finger.
“Get dressed,” she said, already moving past him toward the coffee maker. “We’re doing something for your birthday today. Something good.”
“Like what?”
“You’ll see. Wear something you don’t mind getting wet.” She glanced at him over her shoulder, smiling, sitting on a secret and clearly loving it. “Oh — and I already called Cindy. Luis is coming.”
Lazaro blinked. “Wait, you called Luis’s mom already? I was gonna ask him myself.”
“I know you were, baby, but I wanted to make sure it was a surprise for both of you.” She waved a hand, already scrolling her phone again. “Go text him. Get ready.”
Lazaro went back to his room, pulled his phone off the charger, and fired off a text.
bro wake up i gotta tell u something CRAZY
No response. Not even the three dots.
He waited two minutes, phone-stared, then gave up and called instead.
It rang four times before Luis picked up, voice thick and wrecked with sleep. “…‘lo?”
“Bro. Wake up.”
“Mmwha—” A long, groaning yawn, then, the words dragging up out of half-sleep: “…happy birthday, bro.”
“Thanks, man. Listen, something happened this mor—”
“I know, my mom already told me. Y’all picking me up?”
“No — I mean, yeah, we’re picking you up, but that’s not what I—”
“Bro.” Luis’s voice dropped, suddenly serious with the particular gravity of someone barely awake. “Can’t be crazier than the dream I just had. I died. Like, actually died. There was this guy, he had like six eyes—”
Lazaro opened his mouth to cut back in, then stopped himself. This wasn’t a conversation to have over the phone.
“You know what,” he said instead, “just get up, get dressed, be ready. I’ll tell you in person.”
“Tell me what?”
“You’ll see. Trust me.”
He hung up before Luis could argue, staring at the phone in his hand — the same hand that, twenty minutes ago, had been bleeding.
The car smelled of vanilla air freshener and the leftover fries Carlos had left in the cupholder days ago. Lazaro sat up front with his mom; Luis sprawled in the back next to Carlos, already deep into a story before his seatbelt was even buckled.
“—so then Beerus wakes up, right, and everybody thinks they’re finally about to get destroyed, but then Whis is like—”
“Who’s Whis?” Lazaro asked, half out of habit. He never actually knew who was who. He just liked the sound of Luis getting excited about something.
“Bro, I just told you last week. Whis is Beerus’s teacher. He’s like way stronger than Beerus, but he doesn’t even care about fighting anybody.”
“Right, right.”
Luis kept going, hands moving as he talked, mapping out some tournament arc, some multiverse thing, some villain whose name Lazaro usually let wash over him, background noise he never bothered to catch. Normally by now Lazaro would’ve zoned out, made a joke, changed the subject. Today, something different happened.
The names started arranging themselves. They were landing and connecting. Luis mentioned an episode number and Lazaro’s brain supplied, unprompted, exactly what happened three episodes before it, and two after. A throwaway line Luis made about a “power scaling” argument suddenly unpacked itself in Lazaro’s head into six other examples, contradictions, half a theory about how the whole tournament arc was structured.
“—wait, no,” Lazaro said, before he could stop himself, “that doesn’t even make sense with what happened in the tournament arc, because if Universe 7 already showed that power level doesn’t scale linear, then Beerus letting Goku go early was never about strength, it was about testing loyalty, that’s literally foreshadowed like four episodes before the reveal—”
Luis stopped mid-sentence.
“—and if you follow the whole angel-hierarchy thing to where it’s actually going, the real threat was never gonna be a person, it’s gonna be a system, which is way scarier because you can’t just punch a system—”
“…bro.”
Lazaro kept going another few seconds before he noticed Luis just staring at him.
“What?”
“How do you know all that?” Luis said slowly. “You don’t even watch the show.”
Lazaro opened his mouth — and for a second the words were right there. Something happened to me this morning. I cut myself and it healed in like two seconds and now I can’t stop thinking and I don’t know why—
“I don’t know, man, I just—” he started.
“No, for real,” Luis said, leaning forward between the seats now, eyes narrowed, searching Lazaro’s face for something underneath it. “That’s not normal. You just said stuff I’ve never even thought about, and you don’t even watch it. Who are you right now?”
Lazaro felt it rising in his throat — the whole morning, the knife, the blood that never came.
“Luis, I need to tell you something. Something happened—”
“We’re here!!” Ana called from the front, already pulling into the lot, craning her neck to find parking. “Everybody look — Six Flags, baby!! Happy birthday!!”
Carlos shot upright in his seat, spine snapping straight. “SIX FLAGS?!”
The car dissolved into noise — Carlos shrieking, unbuckling before the car even stopped, Ana laughing, pointing out the entrance gates through the windshield.
Whatever Lazaro had been about to say got swallowed whole.
The parking lot was already packed, heat shimmering off the rows of cars. Ana walked them all the way to the entrance, one hand on Carlos’s shoulder to keep him from bolting toward the gates.
Once they were through security and past the ticket booths, she stopped them at the big fountain just inside — water shooting up in lazy arcs, some park mascot statue standing in the middle of it looking vaguely unbothered by the heat.
“Okay. Listen to me.” Ana crouched slightly to get level with the boys, suddenly all business. “Stay together. Don’t wander off with anybody you don’t know, I don’t care how nice they seem. Stay out of trouble. And look—” she held up her phone, then Lazaro’s, setting an alarm on his screen with quick, practiced thumbs. “Three o’clock. Right here, this fountain. If your phone’s not buzzing, you’re not paying attention.”
“We got it, Ma,” Lazaro said.
“I mean it.” She reached into her purse, pulled out a small fold of bills — two twenties and a ten — and pressed it into his hand, closing his fingers around it. “That’s cash for whatever’s cash-only.” She tapped through her own phone for a second, and his buzzed once in his pocket. “And I just sent you an Apple Cash request so you can pay with your phone too. Don’t blow it all in one place. Happy birthday, baby. Get food, get on rides, whatever you want. Call me if you need me.” She kissed his forehead and gave Luis a quick side-hug. “This one’s just for you and Luis today. Me and Carlos are gonna go do our own thing — he wants to meet the cartoon characters, God help me.”
Carlos, already tugging at her hand, perked up. “Can we find the raccoon guy first?”
“We’ll find the raccoon guy first,” Ana said, already being pulled away. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Three o’clock! Fountain! I mean it, Lazaro!”
“I got it, Ma!”
And then they were gone, swallowed into the crowd, Carlos already talking her ear off about something.
Lazaro looked down at the folded bills in his fist, phone still warm from the buzz in his pocket, then over at Luis.
“Alright,” he said, grinning. “Let’s go.”
They hit the water rides first — a log flume that soaked them both through, Luis screaming the whole way down, certain this was how he died. Lazaro laughed so hard he almost slid out of the seat.
But when the wave crashed over the front of the log and caught him full in the face, something happened that had nothing to do with the ride. A tingle raced down both arms the second the water hit his skin — quick, electric, not unpleasant at all. If anything it felt good, a warm buzzing hum spreading out from his shoulders to his fingertips, his whole body suddenly slack, some tension it hadn’t known it was carrying gone all at once. His grip on the safety bar tightened without him telling it to, and for a second the metal felt strange under his palm — not slippery at all despite the soaking, his hands gripping harder and cleaner than they ever had before.
He looked down at his own hands. Nothing to see. Just wet skin, same as always.
Weird, he thought, filing it away next to the knife and the two seconds and the orange that never got peeled. Add it to the list.
After that they dried off some on the Ferris wheel, taking the slow, creaking loop up over the whole park, pointing out rides they wanted to hit next.
It was somewhere between the flume and the Ferris wheel that Luis brought it up again.
“Okay but for real,” he said, squinting at Lazaro, studying him hard, trying to find the seam. “That thing in the car. That wasn’t normal.”
“Bro, I told you—”
“No, listen.” Luis lowered his voice like he was about to say something dangerous. “What if you got, like — possessed?”
Lazaro blinked. “Possessed.”
“I’m serious! Titi Angie said her cousin acted different for like a week after they went to this one botánica, and then he started speaking Portuguese out of nowhere and he doesn’t even know Portuguese—”
“Luis, I didn’t get possessed.”
“Then explain the whole Beerus thing! You don’t watch the show, and you just laid out, like, a whole theory, with foreshadowing and everything!”
Lazaro opened his mouth to explain — really explain, the knife, the blood, the two seconds it took to heal — and then he saw Luis’s face. Fully invested. Fully spiraling. Ready to turn this into an actual crisis if given one more piece of ammunition.
He shut it back down.
“Dude,” Lazaro said instead, easy, dismissive, “I’ve been listening to you talk about this show for like two years straight. I just had a flash of memory and put it all together. That’s it.”
Luis stared at him a long moment, clearly unsatisfied but unable to argue with the logic. “…That’s still weird.”
“You’re weird.”
“No, that’s — okay, whatever, but if you start speaking Latin or your eyes go black, I’m telling my mom.”
“Deal.”
A group of girls in bathing suits walked past on their way to the wave pool, and Lazaro’s whole posture shifted — shoulders back, easy grin sliding into place, instant and automatic. Luis, without seeming to notice he was doing it, took half a step behind him.
They got in line for bumper cars after that, spent way too long arguing over whose turn it was to drive, then found a claw machine that Lazaro was determined to beat on principle, dropping four dollars in quarters before finally hooking a stuffed frog by pure luck.
“For your girlfriend,” he said, tossing it into Luis’s arms.
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Exactly. So this frog’s about to be the longest relationship you’ve ever had.”
Luis flipped him off, laughing, and tucked the frog under his arm anyway.
By the time they wandered toward the ice cream stand, an hour or more had melted by without either of them thinking about the car ride again.
The line for ice cream wrapped halfway around the little striped stand, slow-moving in the early afternoon heat. Lazaro and Luis fell in behind two girls about their age, phones out, filming something — one of them holding the camera up at an angle, narrating in that half-whisper people use when they think they’re being subtle.
Luis hung back half a step, hands jammed in his pockets, going quiet around girls he didn’t know, finding somewhere else to look. Lazaro didn’t so much as slow down.
Lazaro caught the shot behind them in the corner of the screen and, without even really deciding to, leaned into frame and made a face — eyes crossed, tongue out, gone before either girl clocked it was happening.
The girl watching the replay burst out laughing. “Oh my god, wait—” She turned around, phone still up. “You’re gonna be in my video.”
“Only if you tag me,” Lazaro said, already grinning.
The other girl — cuter, quieter, hair pulled back — laughed too, shaking her head, still not quite believing him. “What’s your handle?”
She held her phone out. Lazaro typed his Instagram in himself, handed it back with a little flourish, an autograph he hadn’t been asked to give.
“Lazaro,” she read off the screen, testing the name.
“That’s me.”
Luis, behind him, just shook his head slowly, the stuffed frog still tucked under one arm.
The girls got their ice cream first and wandered off, still giggling, throwing one more glance back over a shoulder. Lazaro watched them go a beat too long.
“Bro,” Luis said, nudging him forward. “Order.”
They got their cones — Lazaro already scanning the crowd for a flash of the quieter girl’s shirt, the shape of her ponytail. He spotted them near a bench, now folded into a small group of guys who’d apparently just arrived.
“C’mon,” Lazaro said.
“C’mon what? We got our ice cream, let’s just—”
“I just wanna say bye. Two seconds.”
Luis sighed but followed, because Luis always followed.
As they got closer, one of the guys — tall, jaw set, arm already looped loosely around the quieter girl’s waist — clocked them coming and went still, and none of it was friendly.
Lazaro either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He held up the little rubber keychain clip he’d found on the ground near the stand, offering it toward the girl.
“Hey — didn’t catch your name, but I think this fell off your phone.”
The girl blinked down at it. “Oh — I don’t think that’s—”
“Ho,” the guy next to her said, flat, not even looking at her — looking at Lazaro.
The girl’s face went red. “Eric—”
“Whoa, hey.” Lazaro raised both hands, keychain still pinched between two fingers. “Chill, man. We didn’t do anything, she just dropped—”
“I didn’t ask you to talk,” Eric said, stepping forward, closing the distance fast.
“Bro,” Luis said quietly, somewhere behind him, “let’s just go—”
“Nah, it’s fine,” Lazaro said, still smiling, still not backing up. “We’re literally leaving, I just wanted to give her—”
Eric shoved him — both hands, flat into the chest, hard enough that Lazaro stumbled back a full step.
Lazaro’s jaw tightened. His eyes went flat and fast.
He caught his balance, planted both palms on Eric’s chest, and shoved back — and it landed with a force that seemed to surprise even him, sending Eric stumbling three full steps before he caught himself against the bench.
For a second nobody moved.
Then Eric came at him for real.
It happened fast and clumsy, all grabbing and no real punches, two fourteen-year-olds with no idea how to actually fight — shirts twisted in fists, both of them staggering sideways into a trash can that went clattering across the pavement. Someone screamed. A crowd was already forming, phones rising into the air. Samantha was yelling Eric’s name. Luis stood frozen for a full three seconds before he grabbed the back of Lazaro’s shirt.
“LAZARO! SECURITY!—”
Two men in yellow polos were already jogging toward the noise, radios crackling at their hips.
Lazaro got one more fistful of Eric’s shirt, shoved him hard enough to break the grip, and then Luis’s hand was yanking him backward, and the two of them were running.
They ran.
Not toward the exits — Lazaro didn’t even know where the exits were from here — just away, cutting hard through the thickest part of the crowd where two guys in yellow polos would have the hardest time following. Luis’s stuffed frog bounced against his side with every stride, one arm still clutching it — letting go never crossed his mind.
“This way—” Lazaro grabbed Luis’s sleeve, dragging him around a cotton candy cart, down a narrow gap between two gift shops.
Behind them, a voice on a radio crackled something they couldn’t make out.
They burst out the other side of the gap — and nearly ran straight into a second security guard jogging the opposite direction, radio pressed to his shoulder, eyes scanning the crowd.
Lazaro yanked Luis sideways, hard, off the main path entirely, past a rope line, behind a little cabana stand selling stuffed toys and glow sticks, and into the thin strip of trees and bushes that ran along the edge of the walkway — more decoration than actual woods, but enough cover if you got low and stayed still.
“Down, down, down—” Lazaro hissed, dropping into a crouch.
Luis dropped beside him, chest heaving, frog crushed against his stomach. “What — the hell — is happening—”
“Shh.”
Footsteps passed close on the path just beyond the bushes — two sets, unhurried, a radio crackling again. Neither of them breathed. The footsteps slowed near the cabana, paused just long enough for Lazaro’s heart to climb into his throat, then kept going, fading back into the general noise of the park.
Luis let out a breath. “Okay. Okay, I think they’re—” He turned his head to look at Lazaro.
There was no Lazaro.
Just a bush. The same tangle of leaves and branches that had been there a second ago, except now it looked — wrong, somehow, too dense in one spot, a shape that, if you squinted, could pass for a shoulder.
“…Lazaro?”
Nothing.
“Lazaro.” Louder now, panic climbing fast. “Lazaro, where’d you—”
“LAZARO!!” Luis’s voice cracked, way too loud for where they were hiding. “WHERE ARE YOUUU?!”
The bush spoke. In Lazaro’s voice, low and urgent.
“Bro. Shut the fuck up. They’re gonna hear us.”
Luis scrambled backward so fast he nearly fell out of the crouch entirely, frog flying out of his arms. “WH— WHAT THE—”
Lazaro himself didn’t understand it until the sound of his own voice registered back at him, wrong somehow, coming from the wrong place. He looked down at what should have been his arm and found leaves. Found bark-colored skin, ridged and grooved, blending seamless into the hedge behind him.
He hadn’t done this on purpose. There’d been no decision, no thought like maybe I should turn into a bush right now — just the footsteps getting close, just the animal certainty that he needed to disappear, and his body simply conformed. An octopus doesn’t stop to think before blending into the stone; the camouflage triggers before terror can even register. His instincts had operated on that same primal frequency.
A hand emerged first — just a hand, fingers, the texture of skin rippling back into place, small circles smoothing outward and vanishing, water forgetting a stone was ever dropped in it — followed by an arm, a shoulder, and then Lazaro’s whole face surfacing out of the leaf-pattern, breaking through into open air.
It didn’t hurt, coming back. That was the strangest part. There was a pulling sensation deep under his skin, something settling back into a shape it had only reluctantly left, and for half a second everything felt too tight and too loose at the same time — his own face suddenly unfamiliar on his own skull, his fingers foreign until he flexed them and watched them move again, obedient, ordinary, his. Then it passed, fast as it came, and he was just a boy crouched in some bushes, breathing hard, wearing his own body again, nothing else it had ever been.
“I said shut up,” Lazaro whispered, grabbing the front of Luis’s shirt and pulling him back down into the crouch, still half-stunned at his own hands as they solidified back into skin.
Luis stared at him, mouth open, no sound coming out at all now — which, for Luis, was somehow more alarming than the screaming had been.
Somewhere past the bushes, the footsteps had gone quiet.
They were still catching their breath, walking fast but trying to look like they weren’t, when Lazaro’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
MOM
He almost didn’t answer it — his heart was still going, his shirt still damp with sweat — but letting it ring out felt worse. He hit speaker without really thinking about it, so Luis could hear too.
“Hey, Ma.”
“Lazaro, where are you?” Ana’s voice had an edge to it, not quite panic, but close. “I just heard there was some whole thing over by the food court, some fight, security running everywhere — are you and Luis okay? You’re not near there, right?”
He caught Luis’s eye. Luis, still slightly wild-eyed, shook his head fast — don’t.
“No, Ma, we’re all the way on the other side, we’re fine,” Lazaro said, impressively steady for someone who, twenty minutes earlier, had been an actual bush. “We didn’t even see anything.”
“Okay — okay, good. Just — be careful. Stay together.”
“We are.”
“Ok. Love you.”
“Love you too, Ma.”
He hung up, and both of them stood there a second in the sudden quiet.
“Dude,” Luis said, “she cannot ever know about this.”
“Obviously.”
They gave it twenty minutes before either of them said anything about what had happened.
They came out from behind the cabana slow, casual, two kids who’d just been looking at toys, nothing more. They melted back into the flow of the park. Nothing had happened. As far as anyone else was concerned, nothing had. Neither of them brought up the bush. Lazaro didn’t know how to start that conversation, and Luis — still carrying the frog, quiet, and it wasn’t like him to be quiet — didn’t seem ready to ask.
“We should ride something,” Lazaro said finally, mostly just to fill the silence. “Get our heads right.”
Luis considered it, and from his face you’d have thought someone had offered him surgery. “…The big one?”
He meant the Jersey Devil — the tallest coaster in the park, the one with the loop and the corkscrew drop, the one they’d walked past three times already and dared each other to ride and chickened out of twice.
“Yeah,” Lazaro said. “Jersey Devil.”
It felt good to want something normal. A line, a safety bar, a stupid rush of adrenaline that had nothing to do with knives or bushes or shoving strangers into trash cans. They climbed into the front car together, restraints locking down over their shoulders with a hard clunk, and for a second — just the climb up that first big hill, chains grinding under the car, the whole park spreading out gold and small below them — everything was, for one long second, exactly right.
Then the drop.
Then the first loop, the second, the world going upside down and right-side up so fast neither of them could scream properly, just laugh-scream, the good kind, the kind that scrapes your throat raw.
Then the corkscrew — and the cart jolted, hard, off-rhythm, caught on something it shouldn’t have caught on.
The ride shuddered to a stop mid-twist, upside down, restraints biting into their shoulders, the whole structure groaning somewhere underneath them, undecided about whether to keep holding on.
Somewhere down the line, someone screamed. Somewhere else, someone laughed too fast, too high, hoping it was a joke.
Lazaro’s restraint had locked tight. Luis’s hadn’t.
“Lazaro—” Luis’s voice went thin, high, wrong. “Lazaro, it’s loose, it’s — I’m slipping—”
Lazaro turned his head as far as the restraint let him and saw it — the safety bar on Luis’s side sitting a full two inches higher than it should, Luis’s body starting to slide, gravity doing exactly what gravity does to anyone hanging upside down with nothing holding them.
“Hold onto something—”
“There’s nothing to hold, I’m gonna—”
Luis slipped another few inches. His fingers scrabbled uselessly against smooth plastic.
There wasn’t a thought. There wasn’t even really a decision — just the same animal certainty from behind the cabana, the same before-fear-finishes-registering speed. Lazaro felt his shoulders tear open in two places that weren’t supposed to open, felt something long and impossibly fast unspool from his own sides, and two more arms — his arms, but not his arms, longer, thinner, moving with a fluid, boneless certainty he’d never asked for — shot across the gap and closed around Luis’s chest just as his fingers lost their grip completely.
Luis didn’t fall.
He hung there instead, upside down, wrapped in two arms that had come from somewhere that wasn’t supposed to exist, held so tight against Lazaro’s own body that neither of them could see straight down at what was happening.
“I got you,” Lazaro said, voice cracking with the effort of it, sweat already dripping backward off his forehead into the sky. “I got you, I got you—”
Below them, out of sight of both boys, a maintenance worker was already jogging toward the control booth, and a lens mounted just beneath the track — the coaster’s own onboard camera, the one that filmed every rider’s stupid, screaming face for the gift shop photo afterward — kept recording the whole thing, clean and unblinking, exactly as it was built to do.
The ride lurched, restarted, crawled the rest of the way through the loop at half-speed until it eased back into the loading dock. By the time it stopped for real, Lazaro’s arms had folded back into himself, seamless, gone — nothing left but two thin lines of torn shirt fabric at his sides, and Luis, gripping the safety bar with both hands, staring straight ahead, saying nothing.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a strange, floating haze. Lazaro rode two more rides on autopilot, laughed at things without quite hearing them, and every so often caught himself glancing down at his own arms, half-expecting them to still be wrong somehow — too long, still unfurling. They weren’t. They looked exactly like they always had, which was almost worse, because it meant there was no proof, no visible seam between the boy who’d shoved a stranger into a trash can and the thing that had reached across open air to save his best friend from a two-hundred-foot fall.
He didn’t remember deciding to do any of it. Not the bush. Not the arms. There’d been no moment where he’d thought this is what I’ll do now — just fear, just Luis slipping, and then his body had simply already been somewhere else, already been some other shape, faster than his own mind could keep up with. This wasn’t a power he could call up on his own. It was a passenger riding along inside him, one that only showed up when he needed it most and left no memory of the decision — only the aftermath, and the sinking, electric feeling that he was not, in fact, in control of any of this at all.
He didn’t say any of that out loud. Luis hadn’t brought up the coaster since it happened, hadn’t brought up the bush either, and Lazaro wasn’t about to be the one to break that silence first.
By the time his phone buzzed — three sharp vibrations, the alarm Ana had set that morning — the sun had dropped low enough to turn the whole park gold, and neither of them had said a single word about any of it in almost an hour.
Fountain. Three o’clock.
They made it with two minutes to spare.
The car ride to the pizzeria was quiet in a different way than the ride to the park had been — not uncomfortable exactly, just worn down, the whole day sitting heavy on all of them. Carlos was already half-asleep against the window in the back, wiped out from a full day of face-painting and cartoon raccoons. Ana drove with one hand on the wheel and the other tapping along to the radio, humming under her breath.
Lazaro sat up front, phone low in his lap, thumb moving before he’d really decided to type anything.
spidey sense symptoms tingling water
He hit search before he could talk himself out of it.
The first result was a fan wiki breaking down Peter Parker’s danger sense panel by panel. The second was a forum argument about whether Spider-Man’s powers were “biologically plausible.” The third — and this was the one that made him stop scrolling — was a post titled is it normal to feel tingly after swimming???, with exactly one reply, four years old, that read: probably chlorine, see a doctor if it doesn’t go away lol.
Lazaro stared at the screen for a second, feeling profoundly unhelped by the collective knowledge of the entire internet.
He turned the phone off and shoved it in his pocket.
Whatever this was, Google wasn’t going to be the one to explain it. Not today.
Termini’s was Sunday-night loud — Sinatra playing low under the noise from the kitchen, barely audible over an old man two booths over arguing with his wife about whether they’d already ordered garlic knots, a group of women near the window laughing too hard at something on somebody’s phone.
Lazaro slid into the booth next to Luis, across from his mother and Carlos, the table already crowded with a large pie, a plate of mozzarella sticks going cold, and a paper boat of fried calamari that Ana had insisted on ordering “because it’s fancy.”
“It’s not fancy, Ma, it’s fried squid.”
“It’s fancy fried squid.”
Ana reached for a mozzarella stick, pulling a long stretch of cheese off with visible satisfaction before she looked up, suddenly serious. “Okay, but for real — that thing today. The commotion, by the food court.” She shook her head. “I called you the second I heard, I almost had a heart attack.”
“Ma, we told you, we didn’t even see it.”
“I know, I know, you told me.” She pointed a mozzarella stick at him anyway. “But you understand I’m sitting there with your brother eating a churro and some woman goes ‘oh my God, did you hear, there was a whole fight,’ and my stomach just drops, because God forbid anything happen to either of you on your birthday—”
“Nothing happened, Ma.”
“I know that now.” She waved it off, softening, reaching over to squeeze his hand once before letting it go. “I’m just saying. You scared me a little, that’s all.”
Luis, very focused on his soda straw, said nothing at all.
“Anyway,” Ana said, brightening, clearly done with the worry now that it had been said out loud. “What was everybody’s favorite part of today? Carlos, you go first.”
“THE RACCOON GUY,” Carlos said instantly, no hesitation. “And the log flume. And also the cake but we haven’t even had the cake yet so I don’t know if that counts—”
“It counts,” Ana said. “Luis?”
Luis glanced sideways at Lazaro — just a flicker, just enough — before answering. “Um. Probably the — the water gun game. Where I won the frog.”
“I won the frog,” Lazaro said.
“You won it for me, that still counts as my favorite part.”
“Lazaro?” Ana turned to him, chin propped on her hand, waiting.
Lazaro thought about the answer for exactly one second too long — thought about a knife, a bush, two arms unspooling out of his own back — and then smiled instead. “Bumper cars. I destroyed both of them.”
“You did NOT,” Carlos shouted. “I got you like six times!”
“You got me twice.”
“IT WAS SIX!”
The table dissolved into an argument about bumper car statistics that lasted through the rest of the mozzarella sticks and most of the large pie, Ana laughing so hard at one point she had to put her slice down.
It was somewhere between the pizza and the promise of cake that Lazaro excused himself to the bathroom, and Luis — a beat too quickly, a beat too eager — said he had to go too.
The bathroom at Termini’s was small, one sink, fluorescent light buzzing overhead, a faint smell of bleach under the pizza-grease smell that had followed them in from the dining room. The second the door swung shut behind them, Luis grabbed Lazaro by both shoulders.
“Okay,” Luis said, low, urgent, eyes wide. “I need you to understand that I have been sitting at that table for twenty minutes acting completely normal while knowing that you can turn into a bush.”
“Keep your voice down—”
“A BUSH, Lazaro. And ARMS. You had extra arms coming out of your actual body—”
“I know, I was there.”
“I’m not — I don’t even —” Luis let go of his shoulders, pacing the two available feet of bathroom floor, hands dragging through his hair. “This is the coolest thing that has ever happened to anybody I know. This is the coolest thing that has ever happened period. Do you understand that? You’re basically a superhero.”
Lazaro felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight there since the coaster stopped. “You really think so?”
“Bro, I watched you save my life today. And then you turned into a hedge.” Luis grabbed his shoulders again, shaking him slightly for emphasis. “I don’t care if you turned into every bush in New Jersey, I don’t care if you grow forty arms, you are literally the coolest person I have ever met.”
Lazaro looked at him for a second — really looked at him — and felt something click into place that had been wobbling all day. The magic still felt borrowed, on loan, a backseat driver steering his own skin. Luis, wide-eyed and buzzing with thrill instead of terror, utterly convinced they had just been handed the greatest secret in the world — but this felt real. This belonged to him.
“You can’t tell anybody,” Lazaro said. “Not your mom, not nobody.”
“I would DIE first,” Luis said, with the full, overblown sincerity of a fourteen-year-old swearing an oath. “This is like — this is like Spider-Man level secret. I would go to my grave.”
“You better.”
“I would get tortured and not say anything.”
“Okay, relax.”
They washed their hands mostly for cover, in case anyone had actually needed the bathroom for its intended purpose, and headed back out into the noise of the dining room, Luis walking half a step taller than he had going in, let in on something that mattered.
Back at the table, Ana was mid-sentence, showing Carlos something on her phone, and the whole meal picked back up exactly where it had left off — easy, warm, loud, unchanged.
Then the lights near the counter dimmed, just slightly, and a busboy came around the corner carrying a tray with a small, blue-and-white ice cream cake shaped like a whale, a single candle jammed into its back like a harpoon.
“Oh my god,” Lazaro said. “No.”
“Oh my god, yes,” Ana said, already standing, already clapping.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU—” she started, loud and off-key and completely unbothered by it, and Luis jumped in immediately, and Carlos screamed more than sang, and within four words the two women by the window had joined in too, and then the old man arguing about garlic knots, and by the time it reached happy birthday dear Lazaro half the restaurant was singing along to a boy they’d never met, clapping in a ragged, mismatched rhythm that somehow still worked.
Lazaro put his face in his hands, grinning behind them, ears burning.
“Make a wish, baby!” Ana said, sliding Fudgie the Whale onto the table in front of him.
He blew out the candle. The restaurant clapped hard enough that a few strangers whooped along with it.
“Okay, okay—” Ana clapped her hands together once, sharp, all business again. “Gifts. Me first.”
She slid a wrapped box across the table, and inside it — folded under tissue paper — a Supreme sweater, and underneath that, in a small velvet pouch, a gold rope chain that caught the pizzeria light and threw it back twice as bright.
“Mom—”
“You’re my stud muffin,” Ana said, and to her, that settled the matter entirely, already leaning over to fasten the chain around his neck herself. “Fourteen and you’re already too handsome for your own good. Watch, girls are gonna be crazy for you.”
Luis, from across the table, made a small strangled noise into his soda.
“My turn,” Luis said, sliding a flat, badly-wrapped package across next to a game case he clearly hadn’t even bothered wrapping at all. Inside the wrapping paper: an Invincible t-shirt. Next to it: Street Fighter 6, still shrink-wrapped, price sticker peeled halfway off.
“Bro. Bro. You got Street Fighter 6? That just came out like a month ago!”
“I know somebody who works at the GameStop,” Luis said, shrugging it off, though the pride on his face said otherwise.
“And last one,” Ana said, nudging Carlos, who’d been vibrating in his seat for the last two minutes, clearly holding something back.
Carlos practically launched two comic books across the table. “Mom helped me pick ‘em but I picked the STORE.”
Lazaro picked them up — and actually went quiet for a second, turning them over in his hands. Invincible #1, the cover still glossy, and beside it, The Amazing Spider-Man #27 — the one everybody online had been losing their minds over since the day it dropped.
“Yo. Carlos.” Lazaro looked up at him, genuinely stunned. “This is the Kamala Khan issue. Everybody’s been talking about this.”
“I KNOW,” Carlos said, way too loud, way too pleased with himself. “The guy at the store said it was new and I remembered you said you wanted it and I TOLD Mom and she said okay—”
“This is sick, man. For real.” Lazaro reached over and knocked knuckles with him, and Carlos’s whole face went red and enormous with pride.
Ana beamed at the whole table — she’d personally engineered every part of it, Lazaro would only realize years later, and basically had.
They ate. They laughed. Carlos got ice cream cake on his shirt and nobody cared. Somewhere in the middle of it, Lazaro caught himself completely forgetting, for whole stretches at a time, that he’d spent the afternoon disappearing into a hedge and growing arms he didn’t ask for. It was still there, underneath — that strange, cold awareness that something inside him was driving now, and he was just along for the ride — but for a few minutes at a time, sitting here, it went quiet.
It was Luis who finally brought it back.
He had spent the last few minutes quietly picking through his calamari, he merely turned the calamari over with his fork, falling into the quiet rhythm that always preceded a confession. Then, the fork came down.
“Dude,” Luis said. “What were you gonna tell me? Earlier. In the car.”
Lazaro looked at him — really looked at him — and thought about the knife. The blood that never came. The bush. The arms. Two hundred feet of open air and Luis slipping out of a restraint that should’ve held.
Luis had already lived through half of it without needing a single word of explanation.
Lazaro shook his head. “Bruh.” He huffed out something that was almost a laugh. “If you know, you know.”
Luis studied him a second — then a slow smile spread across his face, understanding exactly what that meant and didn’t need another word of it. He picked up a single piece of calamari between two fingers, held it up, a tiny breaded puppet, and wiggled it slowly in Lazaro’s direction.
“This,” Luis said, dead serious, “is what you were today.”
Lazaro stared at him. “…What?”
“A Calamari,” Luis said.
For a second nobody said anything.
Then Lazaro lost it — a real laugh, doubled over, forehead nearly hitting the table, and Luis lost it right along with him, both of them laughing too hard to breathe, Carlos immediately laughing too without having any idea why, Ana just shaking her head and smiling at all three of them, clearly wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.
Pruitt sat alone in the security office long after his shift should have ended, watching the same eleven seconds of footage for the fourth time — the extra arm that came from nowhere and saved a kid’s life on the Jersey Devil’s second drop. He’d already decided not to write it up the normal way. Some things didn’t belong in an incident report.
He made the call from the parking lot, engine off, footage saved to a drive he kept zipped inside his jacket pocket, one hand going back to check it every few minutes.
“Don’t put this anywhere near a server,” the voice on the other end said, before Pruitt had even finished explaining. “Keep it on the drive, keep the drive somewhere safe, and don’t discuss this with anyone — not your supervisor, not your wife, nobody. Someone will pick it up, and we’ll handle it from there.”
“And the kid?”
“Not your concern anymore.” A pause. “What’s his name?”
“Piscione. Lazaro Piscione.”
Another pause — someone checking a name against a list they’d been keeping for a long time.
“Understood. Sit tight.”
The line went dead. Pruitt sat there a minute, engine still off, telling himself he’d done the right thing, whatever the right thing had actually been.
Three states away, the agent set the phone down and turned to the man across the desk from him.
“We need eyes on this kid tonight, not tomorrow. Full pickup — I want him brought in for an actual interview, not a phone call to the mother.”
“And after?”
“Full workup. Blood, DNA, physical, psych eval, all of it. I want to know what we’re actually looking at before anyone upstairs asks me a question I can’t answer.”
The other man was already reaching for a folder. “You think this connects to anything we’ve already got open?”
The agent didn’t answer right away. He just looked at the frozen frame still up on his monitor — a boy’s arm extending where an arm shouldn’t extend, mid-motion, caught forever between one shape and another.
“Let’s find out,” he said, and reached for the phone again.
— END —