Excerpt: LIVING PROOF (that no good deed goes unpunished), Neighborlee, Ohio, Book 4

 Saturday morning, Felicity came over to show me all the loot she had dragged home from shopping. When she was in super-shopper mode (not one of her superpowers, no matter how amazingly fast she moved) she was definitely a Felicity, rather than what we sometimes called her: Zap. Thinking of her as Zap, unable to control her powers, helped me ignore the fact she was gorgeous and looked like she was in terminal ditz mode, with those big, Bambi-wide eyes, coffee-and-cream skin, and all that curly hair. Currently she had it tinted amber, but it could be jet black tomorrow and platinum blond the day after, without her resorting to a bottle of dye.

I groaned, but didn't even think of complaining, when she spilled all her shopping bags on the kitchen table. And into the TV room. Mi casa es su casa.

I had to bite my tongue while she enthused about all the bargains and treasures, and contradicted herself every three or four sentences about who would get what gift. There were an even dozen presents in the pile of loot she had bought for me, to give to people. Gotta love having a shopaholic at my beck and call. Especially when I hated shopping. And not just because I loathed going into crowded malls when I couldn't see over people to navigate. The malls generally struck me as a ski slope obstacle course. The problem was that the poles moved without warning, and they had a tendency to scream when I hit them.

"How about this for your mom?" Felicity held up a neon green-and-purple sarong with matching foam-rubber sandals. "They're still in Bermuda, aren't they?"

"Probably." I caught myself twitching, trying to reach back and scratch that tender spot between my shoulder blades that always seemed hyper-sensitive when there was something wrong with the person I had just been thinking about.

Uh oh.

"What's wrong?" She paused in folding the sarong to put back into the gift box. Felicity might have looked like Lobotomy Barbie, but she regularly out-thought the Prime Time TV detectives and would have been a millionaire if she ever auditioned for Jeopardy.

"They missed their last two check-in calls." I shrugged. "You know how Mum and Pop are when they're tracking down the strange and unique. They forget there are people back home who want to make sure they're still alive. But it's not like we're little kids, left home with the babysitter."

"They never left you home with a babysitter when they went hunting down the inexplicable. Remember those pictures, jumping over Stonehenge? You always had the best family vacations." She giggled. "You could make a mint getting impossible photos, getting past all those no-fly zone restrictions."

"Could have. Past tense." I grinned, remembering all the stunts I had pulled as a kid, thoughtless tricks that even Superboy wouldn't have thought of. I had done them just because I knew I could, or wanted to find out if I could.