Dareen, getting ready to fly, letting her mind wander. This is from Part 36.
Dareen sat on the shag toilet cover in Sherry’s bathroom. It was night and she had been sitting there unclothed. Her powers had come a few minutes ago. She hoped she wouldn’t be called tonight. It had been a while; fortunately things were quiet recently.
She had taken to waiting here in the bathroom, it being somewhere that being naked didn’t seem so out of place. She didn’t want to sit on the living room couch anymore, it seemed too exposed, even though everyone had gone to sleep. But here on the toilet cover she felt just like a normal girl after a shower, about to do her hair, enjoying the fluffy feel under her bare butt.
She looked at the monitor button sitting on the side of the sink. She decided it looked like a cockroach with its legs folded up. She smiled, remembering her old boyfriend Omar’s ratty apartment. Which had a serious cockroach problem, and an exterminator who was noticeably sympathetic to their plight. Called in by the landlord twice a month, he would rhapsodize while testing out the spritzing of his little pump. “They don’t spread disease, they don’t bite, they don’t chew up the house like termites . . . they’re just gross, that’s all. It’s their only sin. Well here goes . . . ” And he would start his regular tour of the apartment’s corners.
Good old Omar. He came from a real old-country family from Saudi Arabia, a tradition of arranged marriages, and just didn’t know how to date. He tried to go “too fast” with Dareen in that apartment and she stopped him. It really wasn’t his fault. She just wasn’t interested enough in him. If she was a real raging feminist like some of the others at that college, he could have been accused of “date rape”. It would have ruined him and would have been a terrible thing to do. The whole world was just too quick to judge and condemn. As a result good-hearted people were too shy about saying what they thought and expressing what they felt. One time she even wrote up these general observations in a letter to the college paper. They didn’t print it, of course -- the tone wasn’t hysterical enough -- but that was actually a relief. After she sent it off she realized she didn’t want to become misunderstood and a center of controversy.
Cockroaches were misunderstood too, at least according that exterminator man. So was this monitor button, at first. It was too hard to hide so she had told all of them about it. She figured Colonel Mike and his team wouldn’t mind. At first Elly and Jamal were suspicious, but actually the button had turned out to be a good thing. Elly and Jamal had been worried about being under surveillance; Elly was always peeking outside from behind closed curtains to see if there were any guys out there sitting in parked cars. But with the button, the feds already knew where Dareen was. No need for surveillance. It was a big relief, especially because with no one watching, the government wouldn’t find out about Lourdes. Looking out for Lourdes was their no. 1 priority these days.
Dareen sat there, wondering when she would get sleepy. At that point she could go out and flop down on the couch. She looked down at her feet and flexed her toes. A normal girl sitting here would be painting her toenails. Elly had urged her to have them professionally done “you have perfect toes, Dar” but Dareen had never gone in for it. Still traditional in some ways. She sat up and pulled her shoulders back and looked down. Now she could no longer see her toes. The breasts seemed to stick out halfway to the wall. She hoped that someday soon, somehow, she could get that reduction operation.
And as she was looking down at her huge, dark brown nipples, they began to tingle.
She jumped up, still looking at her nipples, watching her breasts ponderously bob up and down before coming to rest. Then her shoulders slumped. Another “call”, another naked flight to who knows where to be seen by who knows how many people. But the hesitation was only momentary. This was an emergency. This tingling could only mean a pulse bomb.
She prostrated on the bathroom floor for a quick prayer. The fluffy rug made a rather decadent sajjada. Then she grabbed the button, deftly hopped through the living room, past the sleeping Lourdes, and slid the window open and jumped out, holding the button in her hand. While hovering outside she carefully closed the window behind her. No one awoke.
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