Hero

by Perry Moore

  "All I know is," he said, "if I had a father, I'd show him a little respect."

  Ouch.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I SHOWED UP AT the rec center early in the morning, like I'd been doing every day, to train in the boxing/martial arts room, lift some weights, and run the one-on-one game with Goran. He didn't show up in the martial arts room, so I trained with the punching bag alone for about half an hour. Then I moved on to the weight room, and there were a few meatheads with tiger-striped pants on, but no Goran. Finally, I headed to the basketball court thinking I'd do some wind sprints to make up for the basketball I'd missed. Maybe he was sick. I wondered who took care of him when he was under the weather.

  I heard the ball bouncing against the wooden floor of the gymnasium, and what I saw inside stopped me in my tracks. Goran was there, dribbling the ball at the top of the key, making a circular path with the ball inside and around his legs while he decided what to do. I'd seen him do this a thousand times and I still couldn't read whether he was going to drive straight to the basket, right or left, or pull back for a jumper. Usually, I was up in his face, trying to make him think I could read him, and that I knew exactly where he was going and exactly how I was going to stop him.

  But instead of my hand in his face, it was that little shit-head's, the Gary Coleman look-alike.

  Goran dribbled the ball, but his posture stiffened, like he was suddenly aware I was standing in the doorway, like he could hear me breathing. The Gary Coleman look-alike didn't notice me at first. He was too busy trying to read Goran's moves. His face was scrunched up in frustration, the bratty kind of look a kid gets when his mom won't buy him the candy bar in the checkout line and he's about to throw a tantrum. My guess was Goran must have been beating him badly, not holding back, and this guy didn't know what had hit him.

  The ball bounced in a perfectly even cadence. It's rhythm lulled me, hypnotized me, made it hard to complete a thought. It made it hard for me to think of any reasonable explanation why he'd betray me like this, play with this idiot instead of me. And then it dawned on me.

  He'd been waiting for me to see this.

  He'd done it on purpose. To hurt me.

  The Gary Coleman look-alike noticed me, out of the side of his eye at first. Then he did a double take, and a spark of recognition lit up his face.

  Just then, Goran turned around, slowly, deliberately, and leveled his stare at me. Without taking his eyes off me, he jumped into the air, smooth and strong, and shot the ball from three-point range. As the ball soared, the Gary Coleman look-alike opened his mouth and began to say, pointing at me, "Hey, there's the gay g—"

  The ball sailed perfectly through the center of the basket, and the sound of the swish drowned him out.

  I slammed the door shut as hard as I could. Goran watched me through the small square window in the middle of the door, his stare perfectly fixed, unmoving. His face reminded me of the first time I met him, when I thought he was going to hit me. I tore myself away and pushed off from the rusty metal bars of the door. I felt the concrete walls of the hallway close in on me, the fluorescent lights beat down hard, like I was a specimen under a magnifying glass. I ran out of that place and never looked back.

  Later that day I called in to the Student Life Center to tell them I wouldn't be coming back to tutor because my family was moving to another town.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DAD DIDN'T COME HOME that night, so I was alone when I got the call. I had slipped into his bedroom and crept over to the closet to take his ruined costume out. I'd planned on bringing it to the cleaners. I'd made a few phone calls and found a place that specialized in fabric repair for old military outfits, but they were very expensive. After paying to get the computer out of the shop, this would drain my savings, and I knew I would have to find a way to fit in another part-time job on the weekends. But it was worth it. You can't put a price on your father's dignity.

  I'd just grabbed his costume and looked out the window to make sure he wasn't driving up the street when the phone rang. I jumped.

  "Hello?"

  "Thorn, it's me," Golden Boy said. "Hold on for second."

  I could hear the urgency in his voice, and it rattled me.

  "Why, what is it?"

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and someone said, out of breath, "Thorn—"

  "Holy—!" I wheeled around and saw Kevin standing there. I was so scared I dropped Dad's costume on the floor. I almost dropped a load in my pants, too.

  "Don't do that! You scared the shit out of me."

  "Sorry," Kevin said.

  I reached down and picked up Dad's costume and tried to hide it behind my back.

  "What's that?" Kevin pointed at the dry cleaning bag.

  "Nothing." I stuffed it back in the closet before he had a chance to say anything more about it.

  "Justice called an emergency meeting, all members, reserve and probationary, too."

  "Why?"

  "There's been a murder."

  They'd found King of the Sea floating lifeless, decaying, his scales sloughing off one by one in the harbor, next to the planetarium. Two girls had been working on a high school science project on the deleterious effects of the nearby power plant on the life in the water. They'd hoped for a major expose, maybe even an award at the state science fair or a spot on the local news, something to make them a shoo-in on all their college applications. They found a lot more than they'd bargained for.

  His gills had been sliced, and the coroner said that he'd been cognizant, immobile, and in immeasurable pain. What was more disturbing was that his ganglia had been severed in just the right place to paralyze him.

  This was troubling because his murderer had placed his school of sea nymphs and his mate, a mermaid, on the side of the shore; King of the Sea had been forced to witness as they helplessly flipped and flailed just a few feet away from the precious water that would have allowed them to live. His only son, a sea horse, had been turned inside out by the pouch. They were cruel deaths, even by supervillain standards.

  Ruth stirred some nondairy creamer into her Styrofoam cup and said hello to me without looking up. I sat between her and Scarlett, who was her typical warm, loving self. She sneered the second Golden Boy and I appeared, rolled her eyes, and looked the other way. I thought about what Ruth had said to me about how I treated her, and I still couldn't make sense of it.

  I said hi back to Ruth, and then Kevin nudged me to lean in so he could whisper something to me; but Scarlett shushed us before he could say anything.

  "Shut up, they're about to begin," she said. "Show some fucking respect."

  I'm pretty certain I wasn't showing any disrespect, and I wanted to tell her so; but I saw Ruth shoot me a look, and I just swallowed my comment and tried to pretend I wasn't stewing. Justice descended from the air and hovered behind the podium. I looked around the room; I'd never seen such an assembly of heroes in my life. There had to be every living superhero, every champion who'd ever had any sort of association with the League. I recognized a few old faces from Mom's secret pictures. Mostly it was the costumes I recognized, not the faces. The faces and bodies looked like someone had left them in the microwave too long so that they'd melted at the jowls, waistline, and ass.

  Justice held up his hands and the crowd grew silent. He looked weary, his tone was solemn.

  "As I'm sure you all know by now, a hero has fallen." He took a second to let the gravity of his statement sink in. "He was one of our greatest champions." He pinched the narrow bridge of his nose between his eyes. "And he was our friend." The Aqua-teens and the Nereids wept openly in the front row.

  "We will of course host the appropriate memorial services; everyone will have time to pay due respect." His solemn eyes narrowed.

  "But there's another reason you're here tonight." He took a long breath. "We have reason to believe this may not remain an isolated incident."

  Ruth looked over at me like she knew what Justice was going to say
next and was sorry for it. Golden Boy leaned forward in his chair. Even Scarlett was engaged, fixed on his next words. Justice picked a spot in the crowd, probably the leg of a chair or the sparkle off someone's cape, and stared at it to avoid looking anyone in the eye.

  "Unless we act now, find who did this, there will be more." He hovered slightly above the floor.

  "Friends and colleagues, someone may be killing the heroes."

  Our patrol began shortly after midnight. Justice's plan involved the entire League and its affiliates. We were to apprehend each and every supervillain in existence and bring them in for interrogation. Justice suspected that one of them had snapped—a death as cruel as King of the Sea's could only be the result of a supervillain with a major grudge to settle. Some suggested maybe it was the work of a group of supervillains who had banded together. I heard a few of the old-timers complain that in their day there would have been no meeting, no assignments, no teams or plans. Very simply, the super-villains would have started disappearing, maybe in concrete blocks at the bottom of the ocean, maybe in a black hole, and no one would be the wiser. Vengeance wasn't the kind of thing you announced.

  I thought these were awfully aggressive tactics, atypical for the League. When I said something about it later in our team meeting, Golden Boy cut me off and told me it wasn't my position to question the League's authority. But if I wanted to be the sole person to go tell them their plan was bad, he had said, "Be my guest. Maybe they'll tell you to go find your own team, and you can come up with your own plan."

  So assignments had been handed out to all groups, and our little team of neophyte heroes had been given the task of staking out a ramshackle building on the other side of the river, where three villains were purported to reside: Transvision Vamp, Snaggletooth, and Ssnake. Golden Boy explained that we'd been assigned these three because, as a result of my previous run-in with them on the bus, I'd be able to identify them quickly, even in their civilian identities.

  "I bet they gave us loser-patrol because 'Mr. Sensitive' over there can't handle the big guys." Miss Scarlett crossed her legs and sat sidesaddle atop a streetlight across from the building. She clipped her fingernails.

  "Ow." A pinky nail caught Typhoid Larry in the eye.

  Scarlett had been calling me "Mr. Sensitive" ever since I got stuck in the burn unit at the hospital while she and the rest of the gang were fighting the Wrecking Balls. It would have been fine as a nickname from a teammate on your basketball team, typical ribbing from someone who counted on you for at least twenty points a game. But out of Scarlett's mouth, the name dripped like venom, with a slow, deliberate, effeminate drag on the S's.

  "Keep your eyes open, people," Kevin said from behind his binoculars.

  This was our third night keeping watch over the apartment, and no sign of anyone looking like the villains yet. We were the only tryout group who hadn't apprehended our targets.

  "Maybe they slipped in and we just didn't know it was them," Larry said.

  Golden Boy asked, "Is that possible?"

  Everyone turned to look at me. I was, after all, the only one who'd been engaged directly in combat with them. But it had all happened so quickly on the bus that night, and God only knew what they looked like out of costume. I didn't want to let the League down now, in its time of greatest need, but how was I supposed to recognize them if they weren't in costume? I peered through my binoculars as someone with a banged-up metal trash can in his hand opened the front door. As far as I could tell, it wasn't Snaggletooth, Transvision Vamp, or Ssnake. The guy dropped the lid of the trash can, and it sounded like a cymbal when it crashed on the cracked pavement.

  I shook my head and let the others know I didn't think it was one of them.

  "I'm going home." Ruth flicked her cigarette in the gutter.

  "We have another three hours until our shift is over," Golden Boy said.

  "You have another three hours until our shift is over," Ruth said, and zipped up her pocketbook. "Tomorrow, that's when everything will go down."

  Our group exchanged looks. We'd been up all night for three nights in a row and really needed a break.

  "Now she tells us." Larry rolled his eyes.

  "Well"—Golden Boy eyed Ruth suspiciously—"if you say so."

  "I say so." Ruth slung her arm around his neck. "What say you give a tired old woman a lift home. My car's in the shop."

  Golden Boy nodded, picked Ruth up, and in a blur they were gone. I didn't like seeing him go, because he was my ride home, too.

  "See you tomorrow," Larry said as he peeled off in his Trans Am. He coughed at the exhaust the car spewed out. I shouted for him to wait, but over the revving of the engine he couldn't hear me. There went my other ride.

  That left me and Scarlett.

  I didn't even want to acknowledge her presence. But I needed a ride home.

  "Hey, Scarlett?"

  Scarlett's car was a lot like she was. Pretty on the outside, a mess on the inside. It was a gold SUV, one of those cars you'd see on the highway and wonder why anyone needed one that big. She said she kept the outside waxed and clean because it was leased. She did not apply the same logic to the inside of the car, which was covered in a blanket of fast-food detritus and half-empty makeup containers. She pulled over at a gas station and asked me to pump while she cleaned the windshield.

  I milked the nozzle for every last drop of gas before returning it to the pump. I found a cluster of dirty cotton balls from inside the car stuck to my shoe, so I pulled them off and noticed that Scarlett was inside paying at the counter. I saw her lean forward by the cigarette lighter display, in her usual flirting mode with the cashier. I carefully screwed the cap back on the gas tank, and suddenly Scarlett burst out of the door, shouting back at the cashier two steps behind her.

  "Your machine is broken!" she screamed. "My cards are good!"

  The cashier, a dark-skinned, middle-aged man with a full beard but no hair on his head chased her. Scarlett kept shouting as if she could drown out his presence with the sound of her own voice, and hopped in the driver's seat of the car.

  "Get in!" she shouted at me.

  The cashier pounded on her window as I climbed in. His eyes looked less angry than desperate. The money would have to come out of his pocket, and judging from his job—the graveyard shift at the Pump'n'Fill—and from the size of Scarlett's gas tank, it would probably mean he'd have worked this whole night for nothing. Scarlett screeched out of the gas station onto the road.

  "Jesus," I said, more out of shock than out of judgment.

  "I didn't see you offering to pay, either!"

  I didn't really have a chance to, but I didn't think it was worth mentioning right then. The car started stalling, and Scarlett popped the gearshift into neutral, revved the engine, and popped it back into first, which sent us lurching forward.

  "Don't mouth off to me in my own car, got it?"

  I stared at my hands folded in my lap and thought about not asking what I really wanted to know. I finally decided I didn't have anything to lose.

  "Can I ask you a question?" I said.

  "It's your mouth."

  "Why do you hate me?"

  Scarlett gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles and ground her teeth.

  "Why the fuck does everything have to be about you all the time? God!"

  The engine began to sputter. Frustrated, she slammed her foot on the gas pedal, but I knew that was a mistake.

  "You're going to flood it," I told her.

  "Will you shut the fuck up! I'm trying to drive!"

  The car conked out completely, and we coasted over broken glass from a streetlight onto the shoulder and came to a stop by the guardrail.

  "Fuck!" She smacked the steering wheel as hard as she could, and then buried her face in her hands and began to sob. I studied the sleeve of the pizza delivery jacket that she never took off, how it was frayed at the edges, how the ends of the sleeve were stained with sweat and dirt and sauce. I looked closely at
her hands and saw for the first time her fingers up close, chewed down at the cuticles, bright red spots of raw flesh exposed. She always exuded so much confidence, I couldn't imagine her in a private moment gnawing on her hand, much less crying like this.

  I tried to put my arm around her, a natural instinct when someone's sobbing, but she winced and jerked away.

  I didn't know what else to do. This was someone I didn't really like much, someone who went out of her way to make me feel awful most of the time. And still I Couldn't stand to see her cry like that.

  So I reached out and held her hand.

  And that's when I noticed it.

  There was a color, a swirling of substance all around her body. It was different from the sickness I saw in Ruth. In Scarlett's case it was a mixture of colors, some of them bright. I couldn't tell what it was at first. Her stomach seemed troubled, like she'd been throwing up recently. Her bladder seemed swollen. Her head ached, and hormones raged up and down her tiny frame. Still I couldn't pinpoint the source. I squinted and looked deeper.

  There was a darkness, too, a thick blackness. But it didn't go with the color, like they were two separate forces working against each other. I couldn't make sense of it, but I concentrated and pushed my powers as hard as I could without passing out.

  A mild electrical shock jolted me. I gasped and pulled my hand away from hers. Scarlett looked at me, and I looked back into her eyes, fierce and wet, and finally understood what it was.

  There was something cruel and defiant growing strong inside her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SCARLETT SAW RIGHT through me. "If you tell anyone, I'll kill you, I swear it." Then she added in a tiny voice, "Promise me."

  "I promise."

  What else was I going to say? I'd never had a friend sick like that before. In fact, I wasn't sure I would call Scarlett a friend, regardless of her health. Still, I didn't have any plans to mention it.

  "How long—?"

  "I don't know." She reached into the backseat and pushed away a few empty Diet Pepsi bottles and came back with a cigarette. She pressed it hard against the back of her hand and lit it. "Doctors don't know shit." She inhaled deeply, and the ember glowed against the smooth white skin of her hand.