I twist around. Still no sign of him.
Jenna is still talking, still not the least bit concerned, it seems. She has moved off health class and is now complaining about the cost of shoes. Jenna’s always short on cash. Most of the time I spring for the french fries after school. I feel for her, but now doesn’t seem to be the best time to worry about new shoes when the ones we are wearing are about to be liquefied with our feet still in them.
I crane my neck and scan the clouds for some glimpse of the man responsible for our impending demise, the one controlling the drones, the demented scientist with his own pair of mechanical wings and a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher who orchestrated our capture. He calls himself the Killer Bee. No joke. I have no idea what his deal is—though anyone who dresses up like a bumblebee and carries around a missile launcher is obviously several eggs short of a carton. Mr. Masters says that more often than not, today’s super-villain is just some kid who was beat up too many times in middle school and decides the best form of therapy is world annihilation—and the freak in the bee suit seems to fit the bill.
Of course here I am, in my second year of middle school, nearly straight As, still wearing tighty-whities, incrementally descending to my death. I’m thirteen, I have a zit on my left eyebrow that hurts every time I blink, I’ve been beaten up four times (not in costume), and I haven’t kissed a girl yet. Unless you count Suzie Walsh, which I don’t, because it was three years ago, the bottle clearly got kicked, and the whole thing lasted, maybe, a nanosecond. Still, it does make you wonder how I’m going to turn out.
The Killer Bee is nowhere to be found, no doubt waiting to pick on someone his own size. Three drones buzz past us, harpoons in hand, and I’m guessing I won’t be around to watch anyways.
Then, in the distance, I see her—long before anyone else can. Energy beams dancing in her eyes, samurai sword in hand, her wavy red perm holding up remarkably well in the humidity. Her white body suit looks glued to her. She runs toward us, nimbly hurdling the obstacle course of parked cars clogging the street, launching herself at the first wing of drones that spots her.
My jaw drops just watching her. The Fox. By far the hottest, coolest Super to grace the cover of the Justicia Daily Trumpet—which is saying something when you think about how Venus looked back in the glory days. But the Fox ups the cool factor by hundreds. Only a year into her career and already considered the best there is at what she does. The kind of Super eight-year-old girls dream of being and twelve-year old boys just dream of.
Our hero.
Or at least Jenna’s hero. I’m not her sidekick, so I’m not technically her responsibility, though I am keeping my fingers crossed. Or I would if I could feel them anymore.
The Fox dispatches the first wave of drones without even breaking stride. Slices her way through the onslaught as a half dozen more swoop down from the clouds. I can hear the split of the wind with each swing of her sword. I can see the aura of energy radiating from her pores. Watching her in action, I kind of forget that I am only a few feet from a really unpleasant death. Then the crank turns and I drop another inch and it all comes rushing back to me.
Eleven feet and counting. I look around frantically.
As if reading my mind, Jenna says, “Don’t worry. He’ll show.”
And I just give her a dirty look. For all of her talents—extraordinary athleticism, super strength, lightning-fast reflexes, gorgeous green eyes—Jenna’s not a great liar. We both know the odds aren’t really in my favor. But even after all of this, even with everything I’ve been through in the past year, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Have to trust that he knows what he’s doing. It’s part of the Code.
“He’s got two more feet,” I tell Jenna, who flashes a glance that is somehow sympathetic and condescending, as if to say, “Okay, and then what?”
I don’t know and then what. I haven’t figured out how I would save myself. Unlike Jenna, I don’t have extraordinary physical abilities. Unlike my friend Nikki, I can’t just phase through solid objects. I can’t shoot lightning or breathe fire. I’m not even double-jointed. In fact, at this point, I would trade my powers for those of just about anyone I know.
“Just hang in there,” Jenna says. I really think she is trying to be funny.
The Fox is battling right outside the pool’s entrance now, moving quickly. The crowd gathered behind the yellow caution tape is cheering like it’s the Super Bowl. Sometimes I wonder if they even care who wins, so long as they get a show. The last four drones surround the Fox, thrusting their harpoons. I figure she’ll just pound her fist into the ground and create a shock wave to bowl them over. Or maybe she will spin around super fast, creating a whirlwind that will knock them back on their fuzzy little butts. But instead she just does this thing with her eyes, where they roll back in her head and little bolts of red energy start arcing back and forth between them. It’s really pretty intense, and it’s just the kind of thing Supers do when they want you to know that they are totally cranked off. I’ve seen that same look on my mother’s face, even though she’s not a Super, and I know what it means.
The drones are smarter than their name suggests, and they take the Fox’s electric eyeball arcing act as their cue to retreat, flying up, up, and away.
While I keep going down. Eight feet.
He’s not going to show.
Even now. It’s one thing not to make it to training. Or to neglect to take me out on the weekends. But now? Here? When I’m really in danger?
The Fox looks up at the two of us dangling like minnows, and I know what she is thinking. She is thinking that it’s a trap. That the moment she tries to save us, the Killer Bee will come out of nowhere and blindside her. And she’s probably right. Otherwise, what’s the point in even capturing us?
But I really don’t care. Because, frankly, I just want her to rescue me so that I can go home, put bags of frozen peas on my wrists, and forget that this day even happened.
Seven feet. I think the crank is going faster. Jenna looks at me expectantly. I look back at my toes. I happen to like my toes. I really don’t want to see them dissolved.
And then my ears are suddenly filled with a high-pitched buzzing, much stronger than that of the drones, and I know that the villain is above us. I crane my neck to see him, the Killer Bee, hurtling our way, his multifaceted goggles reflecting a hundred versions of my own freaked-out face, his rocket launcher perched on his shoulder. Before I even have time to take a breath, he fires a stinger missile at the only Super who bothered to show up today.
I see Jenna twist around sharply in her cuffs and start swinging. The Fox leaps, sword in hand, those little electric bolts still crackling around her eyes. Thanks to Jenna’s motions, now I’m rocking back and forth. My stomach lurches. I can smell the smoke of the missile as it zips by me, and I suddenly see the next second of my life play out before me before it even happens, just in time to do absolutely nothing about it.
Jenna gives one last giant swing of her legs. I see a blur of white, the glinty gleam of a razor-sharp sword coming toward me. I hear a snap. The cable breaks, and I am plummeting to certain death.
Except I’m not really plummeting. I’m actually kind of somersaulting, with Jenna’s arms and legs wrapped around me like a papoose, clearing the edge of the pool . . . in fact, clearing the entire fence around the pool, and landing in the grass by the parking lot.
I hit and skid. The grass is soft, at least, though I can’t say the same for the dirt underneath it. I watch the world spin for a moment. If this were a Sunday morning comic, there would be bluebirds circling my head. Jenna untangles her limbs from mine and immediately springs to her feet, combat ready, but it takes me a moment to clear my senses, acute as they are, and realize what has happened. The smoke in the sky tells me the missile missed its mark, harmlessly exploding in the air above us.
And standing on top of the crane, a hundred feet up, the Fox has the Killer Bee by his antennae, both of his mechanical wings se
vered by two more swift strikes of her sword. I see her whisper something to him, but even with my powers I can’t make it out in all the commotion. All around us, the crowd is hooting and hollering. Chanting her name. “Fox. Fox. Fox. Fox.” As if she’s the only one who matters.
And here I am, still flat on my back, staring up at the sky, still handcuffed and a little bruised, but unmistakably alive. Having been saved by the wrong hero.
Andrew Macon Bean.
The Sensationalist.
A sidekick without a Super.
2
SPLIT PERSONALITY
I am home less than an hour later. All part of the act.
Though I am irritated, and exhausted from my afternoon at the pool, I haven’t sustained any real bodily harm save for a few bruises and the bright red circles around my wrists. Besides, it’s more important that I be home at a decent hour so that I can put on a good face for my parents. The longer you have to be somebody else, the harder it is to convince everyone you are you.
My house is the last one on the block—the one with the peeling brown trim, the stunted evergreens, and the seldom-used swing set. It’s dinnertime on Stanley Street. I can smell the garlic and basil before I even open the door. I can actually smell it from halfway down the block. That’s how I know it’s lasagna night at Casa de la Bean. If I concentrate, I can tell you what everyone’s having for dinner. The Hungs ordered pizza. The Randals are grilling out—barbecue chicken and roast vegetables. The Shaumbergs are celebrating something. I can smell the smoke from burned-out candles and the buttercream frosting on the cake. The Powell kid is having strawberry Pop-Tarts for dinner. Again.
Oh, and Mrs. Polanski hasn’t scooped the litter box in a while and Li’l Mittens is just finishing some business, so I stop concentrating and hold my nose.
When I walk through the door, my dad’s nailed to the TV set, fixated on the story of a wacko in a bee getup who kidnapped and nearly killed two supposed sidekicks and his thrilling defeat by the city’s most celebrated star. There’s footage of the two sidekicks dangling from the crane. Even with my extraordinary eyesight I can’t make out the features of my own face onscreen—there’s just too much going on. I watch, breathless, as Jenna swings back and forth, gaining momentum. I see the Fox leap, deflecting the missile with an energy blast from her fingertips and severing the chain that holds me and Jenna with her sword. The camera traces our less-than-graceful fall, and by the time it jerks back up, the Fox has the Bee in her grip. The cameraman didn’t catch Jenna and me slinking away or manage to get a good look at our faces.
I watch for a moment from the entryway, easily seeing and hearing the television from three rooms away, careful not to draw attention to myself. The news reporter is gushing about the Fox. “Remarkable,” she says over and over again. “Another day saved by Justicia’s newest Super.”
“And that’s why we need to move,” I hear my dad say. “To a town with fewer freaks.”
“You mean the guy dressed up like a bumblebee, or the one shooting lightning from her eyes?” my mother asks from the kitchen.
I close the front door with a little emphasis. My mother turns to greet me with a smile that is meant to only half mask the worry in her eyes. For a moment I think I’m done for, that my cover is broken. That somehow she has seen something, something in the frown of the boy on TV, something in the slump of my shoulders, something that only a mother would notice. My other life would finally be exposed, and I would have to come clean and tell them everything.
How I am sworn to protect ordinary citizens like her from the evils that threaten them.
How I spend three days a week training to fight crime.
How I sometimes mix nitroglycerin in the bathroom sink.
And it isn’t an entirely dreadful feeling, this idea of opening up to them, telling them everything. There would be consequences, of course, but we could endure them together, as a family.
But her sad smile is just general maternal transference. Somewhere some mother has a teenage son who is dressing up in costumes and being suspended above vats of bubbling acid by men with artificial wings and military-grade weaponry. She’s just glad it isn’t hers.
“Hi, honey, where have you been?” She kisses me on the cheek.
“I was working on a chemistry project,” I say, using the excuse that has been assigned to me this week in case of such an emergency.
“Yeah, Mr. Masters called and said you would be coming home late,” my dad says, eyes still suctioned to the television, watching as the Fox waves to the cameras before taking a flying leap over the pool house and disappearing. “You can call us yourself, you know. After all, that’s why we pay for that cell phone you insist on having.”
“Sorry, Dad,” I say, failing to mention that I left the cell phone at school, along with my utility belt—actually attached to my belt, right beside my cryogenic grenades and concentrated sleeping gas.
“Did you hear what happened this time?” Mom asks, pointing to the TV that’s now showing cops rounding up a half dozen injured drones and piling them into an armored truck.
“Yeah. Crazy stuff,” I say, trying to sound impressed. I keep my hands in my jacket even as she hugs me. It may be a little suspicious that I don’t hug her back, but it’s better than showing off my raw, red wrists.
“I just don’t know why anyone would do such a thing,” she says.
“And where does somebody get that much acid?” my father adds.
I shrug. “Like you said, they’re all crazy, every last one of them,” I say. “What’s for dinner?”
My mother smiles, knowing I already know. I smile back at all the things she still has no clue about.
“We could move to Albuquerque,” Dad says. “Surely this kind of nonsense doesn’t happen in Albuquerque.”
I don’t say anything, though I’m pretty sure Albuquerque has its own problems, though it probably doesn’t attract the criminal element quite the way Justicia does. Something about this city just draws the bad guys like flies to a Dumpster. Mr. Masters calls it job security.
“I’m just going to go wash up,” I say, and slink up the stairs, listening to my father whisper to himself that the Fox is easy to look at, though.
Back in my room, I pull my mask from my backpack and take it to the bathroom to wash it out. There are few things worse than having to put a sweaty, snotty piece of spandex on over your face. I rinse it carefully and set it over the vent beneath my bed to dry; then I peel off my shoes and change into a pair of sweats. I slip on a Highview Middle School sweatshirt to help hide the cuff marks, just in case, and look around the room for my homework
The place is a disaster—a landfill, my mother would say, though it is mostly by design. Like most thirteen-year-old boys, I have a few things that I don’t want my parents to discover—heavy-duty steel cable, highly volatile chemicals, thermal imaging goggles, fuse-head electric blasting caps, that sort of thing—all carefully concealed. I’ve found that if you keep enough other junk lying around, the sheer effort to clean it all up is too much for any parent, and they don’t even bother to touch the stuff you keep in the top of your closet or underneath your bed. There are a few posters on the wall, a couple of junior academic decathlon medals, and a dozen books strewn about. I sift through the piles to find Julius Caesar and then promptly drop it into another pile of schoolbooks representing the night’s to-do list. Finally I turn on my computer to see if I have any messages. There’s just one. From Jenna.
Give me a buzzzzz later.
I try to think of something clever to say back, but I’m not in the mood.
I walk to my parents’ bathroom to raid my mother’s medicine chest for something to put on my wrists. My only discovery is some lotion that claims to come from rain forests and smells like melons. Scented lotions have a tendency to give me migraines, so I just turn on the cold water and soak. If I concentrate, I can block out the slow burn and focus on the sweet sting of the cold. It has taken me years of therapy
to learn to control my power this much—to focus my overly keen senses and weed out all the extra input. I close my eyes and listen closely for a moment. I hear the sound of the TV and my dad scratching his armpit. My mother is chopping onions for a salad. Next door, Mrs. Polanski is singing Justin Bieber in the bathtub.
I open my eyes and get a good look at the boy in the mirror, who watches me back, mimicking my squinted expression. Shaggy brown hair, skater style. Dull bluish-gray eyes. Mostly straight teeth. Blackheads checkerboarding my nose. The rumor of stubble on my chin. “You again,” I say to myself.
When you’re a teenager, everybody is waiting for you to be something or somebody else—your friends, your parents, your teachers. Sometimes you lose track. Are you the shy kid in the back of the room who apologizes for even accidentally touching Susan Childress’s arm, or the guy making bombs in the backyard? Are you the helpless nerd with the backpack on hoping you don’t get the snot beat out of you by the school bully, or the helpless nerd with the mask on, hoping you don’t get the snot beat out of you by the town’s crazy new super-villain?
Or maybe you’re just the helpless nerd staring at the other helpless nerd in the mirror, talking to yourself, wondering which of you needs more help.
The bread is burning, though my mother doesn’t know it yet. She calls up that dinner’s ready, which is my cue to put my mask back on and pretend to be the kid who stayed after school to finish his science project. The honor-roll kid who the bumper sticker on their Corolla brags about. The kid they don’t have to worry about.
Not the one who needs saving.
I head downstairs to eat.
3
HOW I GOT OUT OF GYM CLASS
Jenna was right. Mr. Booner really is a terrible health teacher. He doesn’t know the names of any of the parts of the brain, instead simply calling them “the front part,” “the left part,” and “the right part,” and “that bumpy thing in back.” He insists that the bigger your forehead, the smarter you are. He uses Shakespeare and Ben Franklin as evidence. That his own hair has receded probably factors into his argument.
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