Of course, Dad also says it’s important to believe in something. Even if it’s wrong.
“Hand me that soldering iron, will you?”
We are sitting in the basement—sorry, the lair—complete with its secondhand map of the world where the U.S.S.R. still takes up half of Asia, and its secondhand sofa with coffee stains the size of a sumo wrestler’s butt cheek. We have an $87,000 scanning electron microscope, but we get most of our furniture from curbs -Я- us. There are rows and rows of metal shelves stacked with bins of hardware—tiny screws and bolts and fuses and transistors and enough silicon to fill two valleys. A bank of computers, most of them oversized and ancient looking, lines one side. On the opposite wall there is a calendar and a poster of a white fluffy kitten dangling from a windowsill, eyes wide with fear, urging us to HANG IN THERE! In the other corner sits the hollowed shell of an FIM-9 Stinger missile that Dad once scavenged for spare parts. We use it as a wastebasket now. One of my jobs is to empty the missile.
Dad is at the workbench, hunched over another of his inventions, a bowl of pistachios beside him. He’s fond of nuts. I am sitting on the stool next to him eating greasy potato chips and doing my homework, even though it’s the middle of June and the sun is blazing and I’d much rather be helping him with his current contraption or just sitting in the backyard with its eight-foot privacy fence, zoning out to some tunes. But I’m on the Professor Edson year-round homeschool schedule, which means I spend half my summer tucked into a book or drooling over imbalanced chemical equations.
I understand why. Putting me in school would require filling out certain forms, forms asking for personal information. Forms that could lead to questions that could lead to men in black suits knocking on our door, flashing credentials and asking if my father is home. Men who wear sunglasses even in the wintertime. Dad’s not a real big fan of the FBI. Or the CIA. Or anyone with an acronym and a badge. Hence homeschool, and world literature on a June afternoon. I can practically smell the fresh-mowed grass, and it’s making me itch.
Today’s assignment is Crime and Punishment, a thick Russian novel that I’m barely slogging through. Dad’s a sucker for the classics. Crime and Punishment is about a man who murders an old woman in his building and does his best to not feel guilty about it—a pretty good hook. So far the only conclusions I’ve come to about it, though, are that the writer was depressed and that axes are a messy way to kill old ladies. Some days I wish I could just reread Harry Potter.
“Pass me that chip,” Dad says. Mozart is playing in the background. Like I said, sucker for the classics. I look over at his waiting hand and give him the half-eaten one I’m holding.
“No, the microchip.” He sticks the first chip in his mouth anyway, then takes the second, soldering it in place with nimble fingers. The three buttons on the black box in front of him flash for a moment, then stop. Green, white, red. I hold my breath, like always, and wait for all the halogen lights above us to go out. Or the microwave upstairs to explode. Or the radio that we keep down here to start picking up signals from some alien race. But nothing happens. The box apparently isn’t finished yet.
“What’s it supposed to do again?” I ask.
Dad beams. He gets that way about his boxes. They are his other children.
“It’s supposed to be a sonic disrupter, but I’m having a little trouble with the magnification. The focus array keeps resetting to the default modulation,” he says, speaking a language that I am still learning. My father’s hope is that someday I will be trilingual, capable of speaking English, Spanish, and Mad Scientistese fluently. “Would you like to see the math?” He holds up pages and pages of scribbles that look even more incomprehensible than a Russian novel. I shake my head. I enjoy helping my father with his work, but there are some days I wish we could just lounge on the couch and watch Animal Planet reruns instead. “Do you see any more of those loose screws lying around here somewhere?”
“I’m looking at one,” I say, waiting too long for him to get the joke, then giving up and looking for them anyway, finding them scattered all over the floor. I gather them up, one by one. “So I was wondering if I could go the mall with Zach today,” I say, handing him his screws.
“The porcupine?” Dad asks absently. The man has a hundred nearly identical little black boxes gathering dust on the shelves down here and knows exactly what each one of them does without looking at the labels, but he can’t seem to keep up with my anemic social life.
“His street name is Spike,” I remind him.
Zach, aka Spike, is a henchman—one of Tony Romano’s knuckle rollers and pretty much my best friend—and he and my father have met at least two dozen times. Usually when my father finishes a project that the big man commissioned from him, Zach comes by to exchange it for a fat envelope of cash. Zach is like me in that he’s a little bit different. He can bristle his skin with three-inch quills and then make them shoot out by, I don’t know, tightening his butt cheeks or something. Hence the name Spike. All henchmen have street names, kind of like aliases. Not me, though. I’m just Michael.
Of course, I’m not a henchman either. I’m something else.
“Spike. Right. Sorry.” Dad pulls away from his box and looks at me. His bushy orange brows are caving in, universal sign of fatherly concern. His lips work around the words a few times before his tongue utters them. “It doesn’t bother you, does it?” he says at last. “Not having any normal friends?”
“What do you mean by normal?” I ask, licking the salt from my fingers.
“You know, people who go to a real school and pass notes in class, who go bowling on the weekends. Who don’t shoot thorny barbs out of their pores.”
“I don’t think anyone goes bowling anymore,” I say.
Dad frowns. “I used to like bowling.”
I snort. I can’t help it. I can’t picture my father bowling. “So does that mean I can go?”
He turns and rifles through some parts on the workbench. He can’t seem to find what he’s looking for. I reach over and take a guess, handing him an eyeglass screwdriver that had snuck behind a bin of bolts. He smiles and nods. “Sure. Go. But only if you stop and pick up another one of these circuit boards.” He points to a part he’s already soldered in, then writes the model number on a Post-it note and I stick it in my pocket. He tells me to swipe sixty bucks from Charles Dickens to pay for it. We pay cash for everything. Checking accounts require forms and . . . well, let’s just say that there are a lot of things in the world that require forms. “Give Aziz my best,” Dad says.
I look at the unfinished black box. They all look the same, even on the inside. Circuits and chips and a whole lot of imagination. It’s not the pieces, I know; it’s the way they fit together. My father just has this knack for making something extraordinary out of the everyday. There’s really nothing the man can’t fit into one of those things. I stand there for a moment, just staring at him, impressed even though I’m still not sure what it does. I feel the itch. “Would you rather I stay and help?” I ask. I can tell what he wants to say. I see it in his eyes, his need to have me here where he can keep an eye on me. Dad opens his mouth, lets it hang there for a moment, then snaps it shut.
“No. I’ve got it,” he says. “Go to the mall. Play with the porcupine. Be back by dinner. It’s taco night.”
He smiles warmly, and I see how hard it is for him, to lend me out. But Dad wouldn’t be caught dead in a mall. He doesn’t understand them. Wonders why you have seventeen different stores all selling basically the same pair of jeans. Wonders why people go to a store just to look at things they can’t afford and don’t even need. But it’s not just that. He can’t imagine being one of them. The bystanders. The ones who spend their whole lives holding their breath, waiting for something remarkable to happen.
“Thanks, Dad,” I say. “I’ll see you later.” I stuff a bookmark in Dostoyevsky and wipe my hands on my pants, then head to the surface, to sunlight.
“Wait,” he says, stopping me
on the stairs. “Tell me who said this: ‘I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.’” He glances down at the dog-eared copy of Crime and Punishment sitting on the corner of the workbench.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m not to that part yet, I guess,” I say.
“Oh. Well. You’ll get there,” he remarks, then turns back to his work, and I gallop up the stairs before either of us changes our mind.
The walk to the mall winds me through the neighborhood. It doesn’t really have a name—like the ones in the burbs, Oakcrest or Willowwood or Admiral’s Landing—though everyone knows it’s Romano territory. I pass the corner deli and the Happy Dragon, provider of Take-Out Tuesday. Mr. Hyung waves at me from the window. Past the pizza place with the cracked windows and the Laundromat where the old ladies congregate to smoke. I know some of them by name. They know me as the professor’s kid. The two checkers-playing geezers at the park give me toothless smiles. It’s not really a park, just the only patch of green for miles. The old men bring their own lawn chairs and set up the board on an overturned trash can. The park’s not much to look at; it’s decorated by empty bottles planted along the curb—green glass flowers with jagged petals—but it’s kind of pretty how they reflect the light. Nobody gives me a second look as I pass by. I know a lot of people wouldn’t even drive through this neighborhood, but they don’t belong anyway.
I meet Zach outside the Sears and we bump fists and then make fun of each other’s hair. I’m still working the windswept, unbrushed mop of limp brown wisps I’ve cultivated since Dad rescued me from St. Mary’s. Zach’s got a streak of green running down the middle of his buzz cut, looking as if someone spray painted a line to show where he could best be split in two. He says I look like a skater, and I say he looks like a thug. We both know I’m right.
Zach and I met last summer, when he was hired on as a bodyguard and gopher to the Romano family, doing whatever Big Tony asked. Tony Romano is one of the few really big guns left in New Liberty after the Great Migration, when the well of villains dried up and all the heroes left for greater glory. He runs a wide-reaching crime syndicate with fat, greasy fingers stuck in every conceivable pot. Gambling. Extortion. Money laundering. You name it, Tony’s in it. He’s also my father’s number-one customer and the reason we get a 50 percent discount on our heating bill. Most of the boxes Dad builds sit on the shelf in the lair, but the ones that do make it out of the basement usually end up in Tony’s meaty hands, and he pays pretty well for them. Dad says he doesn’t know what Tony Romano uses the gadgets for and doesn’t want to know—it’s best that way. But in New Liberty you need to be on somebody’s good side to help protect you from everybody else’s bad side, so Dad makes it a point to pick up the phone whenever Tony calls.
It’s not like this anywhere else. In places other than New Liberty, just about the time the cops get pasted, some tight-panted freak with a mask on will come swooping in to turn the tide. Guys like the Judicator, with his giant hammer and flashy silver boots, or Miss Mindminer, who always knows what you’re thinking. Or the Gemini Twins, who can combine their DNA to mutate their shape. You hear about them all the time on the national news. But they are the defenders of other burgs, pledged to protect other citizens from other evils. New Liberty doesn’t have a champion, and hasn’t had for as long as I’ve lived here. There was that group of rich business types who dressed up in stupid costumes with fiberglass wings and pretended they could fly a year or two ago, but one run-in with a power line was all it took to end their short careers as vigilantes. It’s a Super-less town, and though he’s never said it out loud, I suspect that’s one of the reasons Dad likes it here.
Instead, we have people like Tony, who is exactly what you think he is. Everything about the boss screams hyperbole, from his pinstripe suit and four-hundred-dollar Oliver Peoples sunglasses to his pasta-bred belly and the golden wolf’s-head cane he pretends to need to walk. Tony provides the walls. The imaginary lines that separate the bad from the worse. He has dozens of people in his employ, most of them bruisers with hairy chests, leather jackets, and below-average IQs, but a few of them like Zach and me. Talented. Zach says his stint with the Romanos is just an apprenticeship, that he hasn’t made a permanent commitment to the family or anything, but it’s clear by the designer labels on his clothes that he likes the perks of the job.
Zach is an orphan like me. We both got adopted into this world. I guess that’s one of the reasons we get along. That, and we like the same grungy music, and we both think “deep fried” and “chocolate covered” are food groups.
“How’s your dad?” Zach asks as we shuffle by the stores, letting the mall walkers and stroller rollers pass us. Liberty Square is one of two malls in the area, sitting right on the equator between the side I’m from and the side I’m not. The whole place has a dingy halo to it, like the film of scum ringing the bathtub. The overhead lights flicker on occasion. The waste bins are usually overflowing. Even the plastic ferns seem to wilt. But it has one of the few dollar stores in America where, surprisingly, everything is still only a dollar, and a halfway decent place to get chili dogs, and a photo booth for teenagers to make out in. The other mall is at least thirty miles north, in the burbs. I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen pictures.
“You know him,” I say. “Head stuck in a box.”
Zach nods. He makes it a point to ogle every high school girl we pass, though none of them look back. This is the reason we come to the mall. It’s pretty much the only reason we ever go anywhere. To watch them. Teenage girls are like precious gemstones: they sparkle and shine, and we just stare at them with breathless wonder. Being homeschooled has its disadvantages.
“I still don’t know why you two just don’t go on a crime spree and get it over with,” Zach says. “I mean, seriously, with his little inventions and your, you know . . .” Zach makes his eyes bug out of his head in a poor imitation of me using my power. I give him the shush-it look, afraid he’s going to just scream it to the rafters. Zach knows all about it, my little mind-control thing. He’s one of only four people who do, myself included, and he’s the only person I’ve ever told. I was forbidden to, of course. One of Dad’s few absolutes, spouting the axiom I had actually learned already at St. Mary’s: that people are drawn to power, that they will latch onto it and find a way to use it to their own ends. But I slipped. Call it a moment of weakness, but I had to tell somebody. Somebody my own age. Somebody who could appreciate what it was like growing up different. As soon as I said it, I swore Zach to secrecy. Bad guys don’t worry about hiding their powers from other people, I know, but like I said, I’m not a bad guy.
“You could steal millions in a matter of days and then retire in style in Aruba or Venice or something,” Zach continues.
“I don’t think Dad wants to retire,” I say. “He likes it here. He likes his work. I think he’s building up to something special.”
Zach shrugs. “Does he ever even leave the house?”
“Sure,” I say. “All the time.” If by all the time you mean once every month or so—and usually then to go rob something. We even have our groceries delivered. To the empty house next door.
Zach looks at me skeptically. “But don’t you ever get tired of being a lab rat?” he asks. “Caged away in that basement of yours, building those little boxes?”
I give him a dirty look, which is as close as I ever get to getting mad at him. Zach is quick-tempered, and when his anger flares, so do his spikes, which could cause a scene. He’s not as concerned with hiding his power as I am. I look at Zach’s two-hundred-dollar high-tops and frown.
“I’m not a lab rat,” I say.
“Squeak. Did you say something?” he says, scrunching up his nose. “I don’t understand lab-ratese.”
“You’re a jerk.”
Zach holds out his hands, wrists together, ready for a pair of invisible handcuffs. “Dude. I terrorize local businessmen, then
I take their money and spend it on video games. Of course I’m a jerk.” That’s one thing about Zach. He’s comfortable in his own thorny skin. Makes me feel better about myself.
We stop by the candle shop to smell everything they’ve got until we annoy the old ladies who work there and get kicked out.
“All I’m saying is that you should aim bigger,” Zach says as we head to the food court. “You could come work for us, you know. The boss could use someone with your skills. Normally when Tony has to be convincing, he uses a baseball bat. Or a pair of pliers.” I’m about to tell him TMI when his hand suddenly presses against my chest, stopping me. Being held there, looking at the bulge in Zach’s arm with its scaly black dragon tattoo, reminds me that this was the summer I was going to start working out.
“Don’t look. Over there. Pizza place. Front table,” he says in a hushed voice.
I look.
“I said don’t look!”
“You can’t say ‘over there’ and ‘don’t look’ at the same time,” I tell him, but I see exactly who he is talking about. Two of them. Just finishing lunch. They look about Zach’s age, maybe a little older. I can see why they got his attention. They’re cute. Of course, most girls look cute to me. I grew up in an all-boys school and have spent the rest of my days in a basement with a man who looks like a washed-up fishing boat captain. All girls are a beautiful riddle. But these two are quantifiably attractive, the dark-haired one especially.
“I think they see us.”
He’s right. They are actually looking our way. I smile and am completely surprised when the girl with brown hair smiles back. That never happens. Twenty-plus trips to the mall and never a smile back. Suddenly I am overly conscious of the ketchup stain on my jeans. Zach grabs my arm, pinching hard.
“Dude. You’ve got to do it.”
“Do it?”
“You know . . . your thing . . .” He stares deep into my eyes, pressed so close I’m afraid he is going to kiss me, which is even more horrifying when I think about what can pop out of his skin. I wince and push him out of my face.
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