“Nope. Sorry,” I say.
“No problem. Well, Mr. and Mrs. Bean. This is normally a quiet neighborhood. One of you is an accountant and the other is a”—he looks down at his clipboard—“teachers’ aide for kindergartners. Can you think of any of them who would want to break into your house and smash your TV?”
My mother laughs nervously. I’m not sure it’s that funny, though. I’ve met some of her students.
My father shakes his head. “This is the first time anything like this has happened to any of us.” He wraps a reassuring arm around me.
I nod.
The officer stands. We all stand. He says something about insurance and paperwork and coming by tomorrow. My parents show him out. After he leaves, my mother gives me another smothering hug.
“Why’d they have to smash the TV?” Dad says, surveying the damage, holding a piece of glass to the light.
“The important thing is that it’s over and we are all safe,” Mom says.
“Yeah, until next time,” Dad says.
My mother scowls at him. “Richard. Stop. You’re going to scare your son.”
Dad moves in and wraps his skinny little arms around both of us. “Sorry,” he says. “You’re right. It’s fine. We won’t ever let anything happen to you.” They both squeeze, and I feel like I can hardly breathe.
By the time we get the house mostly back in order and sit down to an unenthusiastic dinner of leftovers, it’s ten o’clock. My parents barely touch their food, and they are reluctant to send me upstairs, just as I suspected, insisting that I keep my door open halfway, even though the knob is still busted off and it won’t close anyways.
I finally collapse onto my bed and stare up at the ceiling, replaying the day in my head from start to finish. I know I should only be thinking about the Jack of Clubs standing over me, ready to clobber my brains out, about Gavin and Eric nursing their wounds, or about their two missing Supers, but it’s the two and half seconds with Jenna that I can’t get out of my mind.
What if she really is in trouble?
What if she and the Fox are the next targets?
What if she never kisses me again?
I try calling again. The Jack of Clubs took my bag of gadgets with him, but at least that means my phone works. I get her voice mail and leave another message. This one is short and pathetic.
Finally, at midnight, she calls me back.
“About time,” I say. I mean it to sound playful, but instead I sound like a father waiting by the door after curfew.
“Hi,” she says. She sounds exhausted. Even more than me.
“Where’ve you been? I tried to call.”
“I know. I got your messages. All ten of them.”
I really thought there were only seven or so. I must have lost track.
“I was a little concerned,” I say.
“I figured. I was out with the Fox,” she says. “We spent half the night looking for those guys.”
“Did you . . .?”
“No, nothing,” Jenna says. “I heard what happened, though. Terrible news about Cryos and Hotshot. The Fox is sure they’ve been kidnapped. She’s determined to find them. What about you?” she adds, her voice softening. “You okay?”
I’m not okay. Not exactly. But I’m not sure how to tell her what’s wrong with me. “I’m alive,” I say finally. “Mr. Masters got to me just in time. He has a knack for that sort of thing.”
“Mr. Masters,” she says. She sounds disappointed. As if she expected something else.
“He said that maybe you . . . because of the Fox . . .”
“That I was in trouble?” Jenna finishes. “You don’t have to worry about me, Drew. I’m fine. I just wish I could have been there. You have no idea how worried I was,” she adds.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Would you say you were worried sick?” I ask.
“I almost blew chunks,” she says.
“That’s really sweet.”
There’s a pause. I can hear my father snoring two rooms away. And Mrs. Polanski snoring next door. And sirens a few miles away. I’ve gotten really good at picking out sirens.
“Listen, Jenna, about today—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“Actually, I wanted to ask you about this Saturday,” she says. “I know it’s probably not the best time, but there’s this charity benefit on Saturday. You know, one of those fancy dress-up things. Kyla’s asked me to be there, you know, to help keep an eye on things. It’s a lot to ask.”
She waits.
“You want me to come keep an eye on you?” I ask.
“Or the other way round,” she says.
And this is how the best and worst day of my life ends. With me being asked out on a date by the girl who kissed me for two and a half seconds.
“So she can babysit me.”
So will you come?
She knows the answer before she even asks. Even with everything that’s happened today, maybe because of everything that’s happened.
“What do I wear?” I ask.
“A suit, if you have one,” she says. “But leave the belt at home.”
PART THREE
IN WHICH SOMEONE ELSE ALMOST DIES FOR A CHANGE
20
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH
They have their own trading cards, you know. Supers, I mean. They come in packs of five. Just like baseball players. The first one ever printed was of Captain Marvelous, and they only released a hundred of them. Last I checked, it was going for two thousand bucks on eBay.
There’s none of me, of course, though I won’t lie and say that I haven’t already sketched out what it might look like. I’ve got a better costume. Midnight blue—that kind that’s nearly black—made out of heat-resistant, Kevlar-reinforced mesh, of course, sporting a big red S right there on my chest. I’ve still got my utility belt, and boots instead of sneakers, and my hair is artistically windswept. I’m posing in a kind of ninja-tiger combat crouch, and my nose is in the air, all feral-like. As if I’m tracking someone. You flip it over and see my stats.
THE SENSATIONALIST
Affiliation: H.E.R.O.
Speed: 2
Agility: 2
Strength: 2
Power: 2
Resistance: 2
This is all out of ten, of course. And that’s being generous.
But Perception? That one’s off the flippin’ charts. A 10 easy.
The numbers on these cards are all bogus anyway. Contrived by the marketing department of the company that makes them. It’s all subjective. The only way to know which Super is the strongest is to wait and see who’s still standing at the end.
I have a copy of the Titan’s card from ten years ago, when he was just taking over as the leader of the Legion of Justice. It’s one of those cool 3D-effect jobbies where every time you tilt it, the Titan throws a punch at you. The numbers on the back are inflated a little. Mostly nines and tens across the board. But he was in his prime then. The head of one of the most celebrated superhero teams in the world. Citizens’ darling and the scourge of villains everywhere. He deserved a little grade inflation.
I think about what the card would be now. A picture of him straddling his stool. And every time you shift the card, he takes another drink.
The Titan. Speed: Zero. Perception: Highly impaired. Resistance to alcohol: Negligible.
I stopped collecting the cards about a year ago. Mike’s got one of the Fox. He showed it to me a few weeks ago. Much the same as the Titan’s. All nines and tens. The only difference is that next to the word Affiliation, the Fox’s card reads None. There is no Legion of Justice. It seems like there are very few teams left anymore. Everyone’s got their own agenda. Everyone’s out for their own glory.
I wonder if that will happen to us, to H.E.R.O., once we all graduate from the program. Will we just go our separate ways? Just forget about each other? Will we send each other postcards showing us punching the stuffing out of some vil
lain at the top of an erupting volcano with the caption “Wish you were here”?
Assuming we make it through the program, of course.
Assuming we even make it to next week.
21
JENNA’S DATE
It’s Saturday, and everybody’s mowing their lawn. I can hear the symphony of small combustion engines whining and rattling in unison up and down the neighborhood. I can smell the fresh-cut grass, probably the only good thing that comes out of lawn-mowing Saturday. Somewhere, somebody runs over a rubber ball. I can hear the thwap thwap thwap as it’s shredded to pieces, the first casualty of the day.
It’s Saturday, and that means my mother is cleaning. She’s still finding pieces of glass in the carpet, even three days later. She still jumps whenever anyone knocks on the door, even though it has two brand-new locks and an eight-hundred-dollar alarm system attached to it. “You can’t let fear run your life,” she tells my father. And then she checks to make sure the doors are all dead bolted.
It’s Saturday, and my suit is hanging on the door, waiting for me. The tie my father helped me pick out is burgundy. My father owns forty-two ties. He’s an accountant, and nobody ever knows what to get him for his birthday. I practice tying the knot that he taught me and notice my hands are shaking.
It’s been that kind of week.
Since Wednesday, everyone’s been on a tightrope. All of H.E.R.O., of course. Eric and Gavin, who do their best to mask their injuries and check their backpacks for playing cards after every period. The lights flicker whenever someone bangs a locker anywhere near Mike in the hall. Even Jenna—normally so composed, so in control—seems to be constantly looking over her shoulder. And every time I try to talk to her, she finds an excuse to cut our conversation short.
But it’s not just us. The students at Highview fill the halls with murmurs instead of shouts. The teachers look out the window constantly, as if they expect one of the Suits to come busting through and take the school hostage. Officer Jenson keeps one hand on his Taser as he walks the school grounds. Even the principal reminds us to be careful walking home from school in the afternoon.
The mayor’s been on the news twice in two days, insisting that everyone stay calm, that the authorities have the situation under control, that we should continue to have faith in the city’s champions even though most of them are missing or worse. There’s still the Fox. And if anyone can find the Dealer and stop him, it’s her. Jenna says the same thing. The Fox has a plan, though sometimes I’m not sure even Jenna’s convinced.
But none of us are as wigged out as Mr. Masters, who came to H.E.R.O. on Friday pizza-less again and still with no news regarding our missing Supers. He looked like a zombie, ambling slowly to the front of the room to give us the empty update. He was making calls. Trying to summon reinforcements, but to no avail. Lady Dynamo. Ultimatum. Black Scorpion. They were scattered all over the globe. They all had their own villains to beat, their own plots to uncover. Nikki’s Super, Miss Mindminer, was still off the grid, deep undercover in the Chinese mafia.
Then he told us about the Rocket.
Taken from his underground bunker sometime yesterday. Listed as MIA, just like the others. Mr. Masters had gone to check on him after failing to make contact. There were signs of a brief struggle. Broken glass. Holes in the walls. Deep gouges in the floor. It looked, he said, like the Jack of Spades’s work. Just as disturbing—Mr. Masters said he had no idea how the Suits had found the Rocket’s secret hideout. Like our identities and who we served, that information was supposed to be classified.
I looked at Mike, who sat in his seat, stone-faced, except there was a burning smell coming from the armrests where his hands were clenched. His Super might have broken his arm in eight places, but that didn’t mean Mike had stopped caring.
Mr. Masters rubbed his polished head in frustration. “We will get your heroes back,” he assured us, though I wasn’t sure what he meant by we. The members of H.E.R.O.? The Fox and Jenna? The fine, upstanding members of the Justicia police department, who, up to now, had been content to provide after-event crowd control?
I’m not sure he knew either.
As we trudged back up the stairs to the teachers’ lounge, he told us all to remember the Code, to trust in the forces of goodness and light, to stick with the plan. But if Mr. Masters had a plan, he wasn’t sharing it with the rest of us.
And judging by the Supers disappearing left and right, it certainly wasn’t working.
So it’s Saturday, and I’m getting into costume, the tie pulled so tight I can barely breathe. The dress shoes crimping my toes. My hair is slicked back with too much gel, and I’ve brushed my teeth three times since this morning. When I walk into the living room, my mother just stares at me for a moment. She looks like she’s going to cry.
“I hardly recognized you,” she says.
“It’s my secret identity,” I tell her.
Sometimes it’s the thing right in front of our noses that we look over.
Twenty minutes later, she drops me off at the Grand Avenue Hotel and tells me to call her when I’m ready to come home or at eleven, whichever comes first. We apparently don’t want the Toyota to turn back into a pumpkin. She adjusts my burgundy tie and kisses me on the cheek, and I wait until she has pulled away to wipe it off. The hotel lobby is full of marble columns and uncomfortable-looking couches. I can smell the chlorine from the hotel pool, but the very thought of a swimming pool makes me queasy. I take the elevator to the top floor.
I step off and am immediately blocked by a man twice my size, holding a handheld metal detector. He waves his magic wand over me twice, like some Secret Service fairy godfather, and then tells me to have a nice evening.
“Leave the belt at home,” she said. Now I know why. The gorilla at the gate probably wouldn’t have looked too kindly on a kid with containers of nerve gas strapped around his waist. I follow the few other puffins and their dates down the hall and walk through the double doors.
Jenna warned me what to expect. A charity dinner to help stamp out hunger. A bunch of Justicia’s well-to-dos spending three hundred dollars on oysters so that some poor family somewhere can get a bag of rice. The dinner is being hosted by Kaden Enterprises, but the guest of honor is the mayor himself.
I’ve never met the man personally, though I’ve seen him on TV a lot lately. His slicked-back silver mane of hair and pounding fists have been everywhere since the Jacks escaped. The speech is always the same. “We won’t be held victims to acts of villainy.” “A thug is still a thug, no matter how he’s dressed.” “The Dealer and his Suits will be captured and brought to justice.” Bold words—especially with a gang of notorious criminals at his doorstep and most of the Supers sworn to defend the city missing in action.
And in the middle of all of it, Kyla Kaden gathers the mayor and a host of Justicia’s wealthiest citizens in a closed-off banquet hall on the top floor of a hotel. It’s almost like dumping a bucket of chum over the side of the boat in shark-infested waters. Not a great idea.
Unless you’re fishing for sharks. I stare into the room full of men in tuxedos and women in dark evening gowns. From here they almost look like pawns on a chessboard. And I wonder if, just maybe . . . But no. It’s unthinkable. A Super would never intentionally endanger the lives of so many innocent civilians. Rule number three.
This isn’t a trap, I have to remind myself. It’s just a date.
Of course, that doesn’t make me any less nervous.
It’s sensory overload, right from the start. Everyone here seems to be sprayed in something, and I get the same woozy feeling that I get walking through department stores at the mall. The sound I can cope with—a steady rumble of voices competing with the string quartet playing in the center of the room—but the smell is dizzying, like a ten-megaton perfume bomb. Save for the greenery decorating the tables, everything seems to be black and white. Even the ties are black. All but mine.
“Drew?”
Any other time I
would have sensed her coming. Her walk. Her smell. But I am so busy blocking out everyone else, she gets the jump on me. I turn to face her.
“Jenna.”
But it’s not really Jenna. It’s not the Silver Lynx, either. This is somebody else entirely. Somebody new. Gone are the cheesy T-shirts and baggy jeans, replaced with a strapless dress, kind of a shimmering black that plays catch with the light. Her hair is tied into a knot, two blond curls snaking down over each ear. Even her glasses are different—slimmer, with gold frames. She is holding a champagne glass, though I can tell by the smell it’s just seltzer tinged with lime.
“Wow. You look . . . um . . . great.” I wince. Jenna cocks her head to the side.
“Really? Um . . . great? That’s the best you can do?”
“Sorry,” I say. “I guess I’ve just never seen this side of you before.”
She shrugs, then reaches over and readjusts my tie so that now it looks even more crooked than before.
“Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen you in anything that buttoned up before,” she says.
“It’s my only suit.”
“That’s not true,” she replies. She reaches out and touches my arm, so I don’t really care that I’m being mocked.
I nod to one of the half dozen servers carrying plates of really expensive and disgusting-looking hors d’oeuvres.
“Fighting hunger?”
Jenna sighs, looks out over the schmoozing crowd. “Not everyone’s a superhero, Drew. Most people would rather just write a check. Besides, Kyla doesn’t really care what she’s fighting, as long as she gets to be a hero.”
“Where is she, by the way?” I ask, scanning the crowd looking for the tallest woman I can see. Though I’ve obviously met the Fox before—have actually been less than three feet away from the business end of her katana—I have never had the chance to meet her alter ego in person.
“Who knows?” Jenna says. “She likes to stay on the edge. There’s the mayor over there, though.” Jenna points to a tall gentleman with too-white teeth and a really expensive-looking suit. “See the two men standing nearby with earpieces? If you look real close, you can see the bulge in their suits where their holsters are.”
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