He keeps his eyes on me a moment longer, then takes another long drink from the glass, leaving only the foam on the sides. He taps the bar.
And I can tell that’s it. The conversation is over.
I should tell him what Mr. Masters said. About the possibility that I was captured in order to make him a target. That someone out there still considers him a threat. But then I look at him. And I realize that no villain with half a brain and an ounce of self-respect would bother to battle the man slumped across the stool next to me.
I stand up and sling my backpack across my shoulder. I make it halfway to the door before turning around. This time I don’t bother to whisper.
“One day you’re going to regret all the things you could have done differently.”
He doesn’t look up. “Already there, kid,” he says. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” He smiles weakly, then buries himself back in his mug.
I do let the door hit me on the way out—only because he asked me not to—then hop on my bike and head for home. I don’t know why I even bothered. What a waste of time. I pedal faster, the wind bringing tears to my eyes, listening to the police sirens in the distance.
7
REMEMBER THE TITAN
Deep down, all superheroes have problems. Mr. Masters says that’s why they fight crime—because it’s easier than dealing with their personal drama. The Scarlet Maiden spent two years hunting down the Posse of Doom just to avoid confronting her failed relationship with Captain Crimson. Angus “The Arrow” McClean admitted in his memoir that every criminal he puts away reminds him of his neglectful father. And Dr. Phil once told Titanium Man that his suit of armor is a metaphor for the barrier he puts around his emotions—causing T.M. to weep uncontrollably behind his metal mask on national television.
At some point, Mr. Masters says, most Supers come to a crossroads where they have to choose between saving the world or saving themselves.
Exhibit A: George Raymond Washington Weiss.
He was born George Raymond Washington to parents Thomas and Jenny on May 5, 1962, though admittedly Jenny did most of the work. Upon delivery, baby George weighed twelve pounds, four ounces. When he came out, he gripped the nurse’s finger so hard it bruised, and the first time someone tried to draw blood, the needle broke against his skin.
It was clear from the start that George was not an ordinary child and would require special attention. So Thomas and Jenny Washington did what most OCs do when saddled with a superhuman baby—they gave him up for adoption. Better than putting him in a basket and shipping him downriver, at least.
So George grew up under the care of Jim and Janet Weiss, a middle-class Midwestern couple who knew nothing of superpowers, sidekicks, or capes, but who had open hearts and minds. Jim worked as a foreman for a construction company, and Janet tried to convince herself that selling cosmetics was more than just a hobby. They had been trying to have children for years, so to them baby George was a blessing, even though he once split their dining room table in half during a fit over having to eat cooked carrots.
Jim and Janet quickly adjusted, and baby George somehow managed to grow up without destroying everything around him. By the age of eight, he was accompanying his father on construction sites, and often, when nobody was looking, Jim let the boy carry cinder blocks or bust up cement with his bare hands. George could drive nails into lumber with his thumbs and pull trees out by the roots. They knew the boy was special, but they also knew that it was something they should keep to themselves. At least until he was older. Before they knew it, though, little George was a strapping teen, capable of lifting their truck with one hand.
Unfortunately, George was at school when the scaffolding surrounding a new office building gave way, sending three construction workers tumbling through six stories of steel. Had he been there, he might have been able to do something. Had he been there, he might have braced the beams somehow, or steadied the platform. Instead, Jim Weiss’s neck snapped when he hit the ground. He didn’t feel a thing.
George snapped too, apparently. Not long after his father’s funeral, he said good-bye to his adopted mother and left the only house he’d ever known, on foot, heading nowhere in particular. Janet Weiss passed away a few years later from a heart condition.
That’s almost all that is known of his childhood, and most of that comes from medical records or interviews with Jim’s sister, Betsy. Little is known about George’s young adulthood—only what reporters have been able to glean from very short and very rare interviews with the secretive Super himself. The next time he showed up, he was no longer George. Wearing his soon-to-be-trademark jacket and sunglasses, he had become the Titan. Saving Captain Marvelous from the hands of the Nullifier, he kick-started a career that would rocket through the next ten years.
The Titan wasn’t your typical Super, though. He was a recluse. He didn’t stick around after a battle for a photo op, and he often phoned in anonymously to the police, who would drive to some intersection to find a couple of thugs with a lamppost wrapped around them. He never took on a sponsor or shilled for soft drinks or milk. He declined all the awards people tried to give him. Mayors mailed him keys to the city, which supposedly sat in their peanut-filled boxes in a storage closet. It is said that anyone who ever got close to him had the snot knocked out of them. Still, he was good at his job, and with the retirement of Captain Marvelous, the Titan found himself leading the new Legion of Justice, perhaps the greatest group of crime fighters the world over. Venus. Kid Caliber. Mantis. Corefire. You could find a poster of them lining the wall of every eight-year-old boy’s room from here to Seattle. But even in a crowd like that, the Titan stood out. For a while he and his team cleaned up crime, not just in Justicia, but all over the world, putting away the likes of Dr. Terminus, the Gemini Squad, the Nullifier (again), and a host of other scoundrels still banging on the walls of prisons across the globe.
And then came the Dealer—a particularly nasty villain who dogged the Legion for over a year. The Titan made it his personal mission to stop this man and his gang—a group of equally vicious thugs known only as the Suits. In the end, the forces of goodness and light were triumphant. The Dealer was gone. His henchmen dead or captured. His crime spree ended. It was the pinnacle of the Titan’s career. His crowning achievement.
And the beginning of the end.
Something happened after the Titan’s battle with the Dealer. He lost his edge. The bad guys started slipping through his fingers. The Titan stopped showing up for work. The OCs started to lose faith. Not long after, he stepped down as leader of the Legion of Justice, promising that he would still be an integral part of the superhero community. That he would continue to make the world a safer place.
And then he all but disappeared. Nobody knew where the Titan was. Nobody saw him around. He was a legend, but he wasn’t super anymore.
What none of them will tell you, none of the papers or talk shows or cereal-box biographies, is that about a year ago, George Raymond Washington Weiss waited in the shadows outside Bob’s Bowlarama for a then-twelve-year-old boy to appear.
That boy was me, less than a year into my training as a sidekick. Time spent honing my powers and biding my time, reciting the Code that would govern how I would behave. The Code that told me that my Super was more than just my role model—he was my partner in the quest for truth and justice, freedom and happiness, goodness and light, and all the things at the end of the rainbow.
George Weiss showed up with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and another on his breath.
“Andrew Bean?”
He stood in the shadows. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew who he was just by his size. I knew who he was because I had been thinking about him all week. I knew him before, of course—I had the poster, the button, the commemorative stamp—but I had spent the time since finding out I was going to be his sidekick intensely studying him. Staring at his picture. Watching old news footage of him online. I had been preparing for this mome
nt, the moment when I would meet him and shake the mighty hand that brought down the Dealer.
“I’m Drew,” I said.
He stepped out into the faint glow of the setting sun so I could see his pale skin and stubbly cheeks. He didn’t look much like the pictures. He had shaved his head but not his jaw. His stomach spread out over the top of his pants. He was massive, though everything was a little out of proportion from how I pictured it. He still wore his sunglasses, though.
The Titan held out a hand that could crush my head like an olive, though it only held a crumpled piece of paper.
“I got this,” he said.
He handed the paper to me, and I tried to smooth it out. It was printed on official H.E.R.O. stationery. It was addressed to the Titan and signed by Nathan R. Masters.
I already knew what it said.
It said that my life was about to change. That I would no longer spend my weekends playing video games. Instead I would be patrolling the streets, sniffing out danger with my hyperkeen senses, fighting crime alongside one of my childhood heroes, a man who could chew glass and punch through the hull of a submarine with his bare fist.
It said that I, Andrew Macon Bean, aka the Sensationalist, had been officially assigned as apprentice to the Titan, to serve him in the name of all things good and just, and to uphold the sacred codes of Super and sidekick alike.
I knew what it said because I had a nearly identical letter folded in my back pocket. It had been there for days. I had it memorized. The afternoon after Mr. Masters handed it to me, I ran straight home and pulled out my copy of Portraits of Justice and memorized every detail of the Titan’s career. Right up until the moment he disappeared.
I couldn’t begin to imagine what had happened since then.
But even in the state he was in, leaning against the wall of the bowling alley, reeking, his clothes stained, I didn’t care. He was my mentor.
The Titan shook his head.
“Listen, kid. I can’t . . .” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence.
I just stared at him. Holding his crumpled copy of the letter in one hand, my other arm limp by my side. I could hear the purr of cars on the interstate two miles away. I could smell the four-day-old scrim of sweat under the Titan’s shirt.
“You don’t want to be my sidekick,” he said finally.
I felt in my back pocket for my own letter, wondering now if they were the same, wondering if I had missed something. Some fine print.
“No. That’s not true,” I said. “I do. I mean, I don’t really know what I can do, yet, but I’ll try . . .”
The Titan held up a finger, and I shut up. “I understand what you all are trying to do, and I appreciate the thought, but you should tell Nathan Masters that he needs to find somebody else. I’m sorry. I just can’t right now. If something . . .”
He stumbled again, chewing over the words, eyes glazed, as if he were trying hard to remember something. Or maybe the opposite. He didn’t finish the thought.
“Wait. Hang on a minute. Is it me? I know Mr. Masters says that I really don’t have enough combat training, but I thought that with my powers and your powers, you know . . .”
The Titan took hold of my hand and pulled his coat free. His hand felt huge and cold wrapped around mine, and I was suddenly scared that he was going to break my arm.
Instead he just gave it a squeeze. Just hard enough that I winced.
“You’ll thank me someday,” he said.
I looked down at my hand, still wrapped in his, and held my breath. And then he let go and disappeared around the corner.
I shook my fingers out, then clenched them into a hard little fist. I had been imagining this moment for days. In some ways, I had probably been imagining it for years.
I slumped against the wall, letting myself drop, hands over my ears, closing off.
It wasn’t him, I told myself. Not really. That was somebody else. The Titan would come around. There was the letter. And the code. He would come around. He had to. He was my hero.
Behind me I heard a car pull up to the bowling alley entrance. I recognized the rattle of the engine. My mother honked the horn, and I put my real mask back on.
8
TESTED
It’s Thursday.
I wake up in a haze. My normally acute vision is blurry, and somehow I’ve managed to sleep through my mother’s coffee grinder. Today I actually wake to the sound of her voice telling me it’s after seven and I’m going to be late for school and am I feeling okay?
I’m not, actually, though I don’t tell her that. I’m running on less than four hours of sleep. I was up all night reading Julius Caesar and finishing my presentation on Hannibal for history class. Those two megalomaniacs carried me well past midnight.
The hours from one to two had been spent staring up at my ceiling and counting the crags and crevices in its stucco, thinking about all the things I should have said back at the bar, if there was anything I could have said that would have pulled him off that stool. I didn’t come up with anything. Though I did think of several things that probably would have gotten my face smashed in.
The hours from two to three had been spent listening to infomercials from Mrs. Polanski’s too-loud television next door, learning about the wonderful, specially formulated stain-fighting power of Vamoose. Finally, around three fifteen, I fell asleep and dreamed about the Titan being slowly lowered into a pit of poisonous piranhas somehow swimming in a pool of molten lava, with no one around to rescue him.
And somewhere in there—before midnight, I guess—Jenna called. She was busy finishing her report on the sack of Troy. She wanted to know if I thought Hannibal could defeat Achilles in a one-on-one death match. I said it probably depended on what kind of shoes Achilles was wearing.
“I saw the Titan today,” I told her.
It was a lot more than I should have said, I know. It was more than he would have wanted me to say, but I needed to tell someone. And wasn’t he the one who told me the Code was just a bunch of hokum?
There was a long pause. When she spoke again, she sounded hesitant, skeptical. “Wow. I didn’t think anyone even knew where he was.”
“Yeah. He kind of wants to keep it that way,” I said. There was silence on the other end. I took it as my cue to continue. “He looked terrible. All pale and pasty. And he smelled . . . I don’t know, just stale.”
“Disgusting,” she said. “Where did you find him?”
“I probably shouldn’t say,” I told her, finally drawing the line. “Besides. It doesn’t matter anyways.” She said she understood, but I could tell she was disappointed. There were very few secrets between us, but I didn’t want her doing anything crazy, like trying to go talk to him herself. I didn’t trust him. Didn’t know how he would react.
“Does he know what happened yesterday, at least?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He told me I should go save myself for a change.”
“What a loser.” Jenna groaned, then quickly backtracked. “Sorry, Drew. I know how much it meant to you . . . working with him.”
I thought about the tire around the Titan’s waist. The glazed look in his eyes. I’m not sure he could have saved me if he’d wanted to. “Mr. Masters told me to give him time.”
“Yeah, Gavin said he saw you two talking at H.E.R.O. and that Mr. Masters looked concerned.”
I paused. “When did you talk to Gavin?” About me, I wanted to add.
“Today after track practice. He walked me home.”
“Oh,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You told me you had something to do after school, and I didn’t want to walk home alone after what happened yesterday, so I asked him to come.”
“You asked him?” For some reason, I assumed it was the other way around.
“Yeah.”
“No. That’s good,” I said, coughing to try and cover my lie. “I’m glad. I mean, the guy can sweat limestone.”
�
�Granite.”
“Right. Whatever.”
“He’s nice, Drew. Just because he’s new and he’s on the football team doesn’t mean you have to give him a hard time.”
I snort.
“What?” she said.
“A hard time?”
I couldn’t miss the exasperation in her voice. “I’m serious, Drew. Give him a break.”
I’d have to use a sledgehammer, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say it. “Sure. Okay. Well, listen, it’s late, and I’ve got that stupid presentation to finish.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“’Kay.”
I started to hang up.
“Drew?”
“Yeah.”
She paused. “You don’t need him,” she said.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re sidekick to, like, the best Super in the world.” There was another pause.
“Yeah. I guess so.” She sounded somehow resigned to the fact. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”
“See you,” I said, hung up, and tried in vain to fall asleep.
Seven hours later, I am frantically getting dressed for school. My head is throbbing. It happens when I’m distracted. I can’t focus. The result makes my head throb. I can sense everything around me.
The smell of the laundry in my hamper.
The weather report downstairs.
My father’s dandruff shampoo.
The Hungs’ yappy dog.
The incessant ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room.
The mildew in the shower.
The trash truck two blocks away.
The humming buzz of the electrical sockets.
I try to concentrate on what I’m doing, which is putting my socks on. The fuzz of the socks tickles the soles of my feet. I careen down the stairs and inhale a bowl of plain Rice Krispies, grab my bag, and head for the door. My mother lassoes me back with her grappling hook of a hand in order to give me a kiss on the cheek. I can tell by the vitamin-y smell on her lips that she is back on Slim-Fast again. She is already skinny, but apparently she wants to look like a supermodel. We all have expectations to live up to, I guess.
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