He turned his head so he could talk to the back of the bus while watching the road. “We’re doing the squad thing, right? And a lot of us are doing this with the idea we’ll police the capes, or help them out.”

“Police them, mostly,” a guy said.

“Opinions vary,” Jasper said. “But I don’t want to get sidetracked. What I’m thinking is, what’s better than a good callsign? We have nicknames to call each other. The trouble is getting a good one to stick.”

“Opinions on what a good callsign is are going to vary,” I said.

“Quiet you,” Jasper said. “You and I have talked about this and I’ve determined you have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to this. You know the cape stuff, sure, but you clearly don’t get this.”

“You want to decide your own callsign?” the girl from the back asked.

“Jester,” Jasper said. “And I swear, if people don’t start using it, I’m going to make it happen by getting a tattoo of a jester and ‘fool’ written beneath it, right on my bicep.”

The protests, naturally, started rolling in from the rest of the bus. He couldn’t decide his own callsign, why would he have it say fool if he wanted the callsign to be Jester, why even have it be Jester?

I tuned it out, sticking my head out the window. Jasper tried to sell the rest of the bus on his idea and was very thoroughly shot down. In this, at least, all was right with the world. It was a bad idea. Forty-year-old Jasper didn’t need to live with the mistakes of seventeen-year-old Jasper.

We drove past skyscrapers paneled in gold-tinted glass. Solar glass, it was supposed to be called. We drove past parks with the same rough-edged slice of nature that touched the schoolyard back at the high school. We drove past a lot of construction, and we were lucky that it didn’t slow us down much.

“Victoria Dallon.”

I’d heard my name. I was broken from my reverie. How long had we been driving now? The city was seemingly unending and I didn’t recognize the landmarks enough to nail anything down.

Victoria Dallon. I looked at myself in the bus’ side view mirror.

“What was that?” Jasper asked, while I remained silent.

“Name sounds familiar,” the voice said, from the back. It sounded almost smug, knowing. “Can’t quite place it.”

“That so?” Jasper asked. “Maybe keep it to yourself, then.”

“Is that how this is?”

“I think it’s how everything is,” Jasper said. “Not just this. When you’re bringing up the past, whoever you’re talking to, there are two likely possibilities. First, it’s good, and we miss the shit out of it, or, second, it’s bad and why would you bring up the bad except to be a tool?”