My parents weren’t too happy with it either, though my mother at least admitted that it sounded like it had been a pretty good punch. They weren’t entirely unsympathetic to my version of events, so I at least had computer access while I was stuck at home, suspended.
I didn’t use it for what they expected me to, though. They handed me my homework and ran off to work, leaving me alone in the house with very specific instructions on what to do and what not to do. I was allowed to use the computer if I needed it for an assignment, but other than that, I was to read a book or watch television.
I didn’t do either. At least not the way they expected. Oh, I read my assignments and did all my work, but as soon as that was done, I moved to step two. I’d done a lot of thinking to myself about why I’d gotten in trouble, and the more I’d thought about it, the more it had all come down to one moment.
She’d asked me the last time Wanderer had saved someone, and I hadn’t known. I hadn’t been able to say anything, give any numbers, any evidence that I was right—and my nine-year-old mind knew I was! I just didn’t know.
That was the switch, the moment Wanderer stopped being someone that my young mind looked up to and started being someone I was curious about. I actually felt guilty, sitting there at home, all alone. Guilty that I couldn’t defend my hero. Wanderer was our city’s very own superhero, a figure who had cared enough about us that he wanted to protect us, but when the time had come, I hadn’t been able to defend him.
That changed after my suspension. While my parents were at work and I was home alone, I did my homework and then went right to learning everything I could about Wanderer. We didn’t have the internet, so I used the digital encyclopedia on my parent’s computer. When that failed to deliver, I switched to books. Newspapers. I got my mom to walk me to the library so I could look up research on superheroes, digging into every book I could find and quickly making my way to the adult section when it became clear I wouldn’t find anything more in the children’s.
Nine weeks later, I gave my first presentation to the class about Wanderer, and I got a smug sense of satisfaction directing several areas of my report at whatever her name was. She glowered at me through the whole speech. I think she moved not long after that.
I didn’t care. I’d made the jump from superhero fan to superhero geek. I was learning everything there was to know about Wanderer. The problem was … there wasn’t actually much to know. I hit a wall after about a year.
Two years after that, my father died.
TWO
To this day, no one’s really sure what happened. At least, no one who wasn’t there. The official report was that it was a mugging gone bad. Just one more number in the statistical sea of violent crimes that swept through our city every few years. As a girl who’d studied everything she could about Wanderer, I knew the numbers pretty well.
I just wasn’t ready to become one of them.
It hit both me and my mother pretty badly. Thinking back, I’m not even sure I remember the rest of the year that clearly—part of it is a haze, a blank fog that shrouds my memories of that time like mist over a lake. I remember that things had already been weird for me that year, what with getting older and discovering the joys of puberty. Getting fitted for a training bra and waking up bleeding or with stomach cramps had already made the year lousy enough.
Then I came home from school to find out I was now the daughter of a single parent. The rest of it … well, it was tears, heartache, and a whole lot of pain. Fortunately one of the bills my parents had been struggling to pay was life insurance, so we weren’t left completely destitute … not that you would have known it if you’d seen us.
For me, my father had always been there for me—supporting me with my research, listening to me talk, encouraging me to follow my dreams and become someone. He’d been the one who’d taken me on a father-daughter camping trip way outside of the city, back before he’d lost his nicer-paying job. He’d been the one who’d somehow scraped together enough money for me to take almost two years’ worth of an after-school martial arts class.
For my mom … well … He was her husband just as much as he’d been my dad. They’d always reminded me of one of those ancient Roman arches, the kind they’d taught us about in school. Always leaning up against one another, one supporting the other.
With that support gone, well … my mother fell hard. She hid it well, at least in public, but there were a lot of times that I woke up at night to hear her sobbing to herself, and quite often I’d go join her. Missing my father … well, it was a hole in my life.
And, I’ll be honest, I put part of the blame for that hole existing on Wanderer. I knew the numbers, knew that crime had been rising steadily ever since he’d appeared. And some part of me, the part of me that was looking to blame the death of my father on anyone, anything that I could, wanted Wanderer to be held responsible for it. After all, he hadn’t been there. How many teenage girls like me had seen a parent vanish from their lives because Wanderer hadn’t done anything? Was it because he was somewhere else, dealing with some other crime? Or had the night my father died simply been because the superhero who’d chosen to make my city his home had taken the night off?
It took me and my mother about two years to dig ourselves out of that hole. The life insurance helped, but with the rising rates for our apartment, it wasn’t long before I had to take a part-time job after school to keep us on our feet. It wasn’t ideal, but it helped, and even though I wasn’t spending my free time investigating superheroes anymore, I wasn’t about betray my old hero by sinking to something under the table and making things worse. We had to make some sacrifices, but my mother and I pulled it off. We stayed where we were, and we stayed afloat. Together.
I was seventeen when my life came back into contact with Wanderer once more. He’d dropped off my radar, life taking over as I did my best to get good grades in school and help out my mother, but I still knew enough about him to notice whenever he popped up in the news or somewhere online. I knew he’d gotten more active after my father had died, foiling more crimes and becoming a slightly more public figure, but I’d been too busy to keep track of the specifics. I had a career to try and figure out, a life after high school to plan for. I knew I wanted to go for college, but I didn’t know for what. And that was even assuming that I could make enough money, though my guidance counselor had assured me that I was eligible for a number of scholarships. I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.
I was actually thinking about it the night I came back into contact with the Wanderer. Direct contact.
I was riding the bus home after work, my headphones in my ears, jamming away to one of my CDs while I poured over my calculus homework, trying to get a head start before I made it home so I could have time to help my mom with dinner. Traffic was light, and I wasn’t far from home, but I wanted to get done what I could.
I didn’t notice them get on the bus. I was lost in my own little world. But when someone screamed, my attention snapped up.
There were three of them, all with bandannas wrapped around the lower half of their faces so that all we could see was their eyes beneath the brims of their still-tagged baseball caps. It made them look like strange, modern banditos, confused actors that had wandered off the set of some low-budget, old west flick.
There was nothing low-budget about the guns they were holding, though. At the time, I didn’t know enough about guns to know much past what kind each of them was holding, but I knew enough to know how dangerous they could be in the wrong hands. Two of them had pistols, the third what looked a lot like the boxy submachine guns I’d seen all the time on television back when I was a kid. The kind made of right angles with a long magazine sticking out the bottom. That was the one aimed in our direction, panning across the passengers. Of the other two, one was pointed into the air, clearly to keep everyone’s eyes on it, while the last was pointed at the bus driver’s head. Insurance, I guess, to keep him from getting any ideas like slamming do
wn on the gas pedal.
“All right, you jackasses,” one of them said. My mother would have washed my mouth out with soap for saying something like that. “You know how this works. Money. Phones. Valuables.” He stepped forward, pulling a plastic bag that read “Bob’s Gas and Guzzle” out of his pocket and waving it around to open it up.
Funny how the mind remembers details like the brand name on a plastic bag when you’re trying to breathe.
“In the bag,” he said, stepping up to the first of the passengers and pointing his gun at the man’s face. A wallet and a phone dropped into the bag with a crinkle of plastic, and the thug moved on, pointing his pistol at the next person in line.
I was trying not to hyperventilate. I’d seen a lot of crimes before, even had some stuff stolen from me or the store where I’d worked, but I’d been lucky enough to avoid being robbed at gunpoint until now.
The thug was halfway down the aisle, his bag partway full of stolen goods, when the front window exploded inward. It was so fast that it took me until later to put together all the pieces of how it happened. At the time it was a blur of action and a whole lot of noise—mostly screaming and gunfire, followed by an incredible, stunned silence as everyone struggled to catch up with what they’d just seen.
Wanderer. He’d come right through the front window, the safety glass shattering and bending out of the way, the bottom swinging upwards like a piece of cloth until it slammed into the ceiling. Gravity hadn’t even had time to pull the ruined windshield back into place before the first thug was gone, thrown out the window so quickly he couldn’t even so much as scream.
The thug with the submachine gun was next. He was already turning in surprise when an armored fist clamped down on his gun. An elbow connected with his forehead a moment later, snapping his head back and sending him to the ground.
Then there was just the punk with the bag. To his credit, he managed to get one wild shot off, the discharge deafening in the enclosed space. Later, the cops found the bullet lodged in the ceiling. His aim had been way off, his trigger pull far too early.
It didn’t matter either way. An armored fist wrapped around his wrist, locking the pistol in an upwards position. There was just enough time for the thug to start to shout something loud and probably uncouth—not that we would have heard it with our ears ringing—before a fist slammed into his gut, hard enough to lift him from the ground and send him flying back. He landed in the aisle near the back of the bus, doubled over and silent, the gun lost somewhere along the way.
The silence that fell as the punk let out a groan was almost deafening. My ears were still ringing from the gunshot—they never sound in the real world the way they do on TV—but I had enough presence of mind to look as Wanderer rose to his full height and panned his visor over the bus, checking to make sure that everyone was still okay.
My tongue felt like it was stuck to the roof of my mouth. All those years reading about him, following him, watching news reports … and now I was seeing him. The armored superhero, in the … well, suit.
He was smaller than I’d expected. For some reason that really stood out to me. He was maybe six foot two, give or take an inch or two, rather than the awe-inspiring seven or so feet most images of him seemed to portray. He was bulkier, too, especially around the middle, his armor far less sleek and idealized than I’d envisioned.
But even then, I was awestruck, and my mind sucked in every detail it could, from the mottled grey of his composite armor plating to the soft silver of his visor. I noted the way his suit seemed composed of almost two separate parts—the armor itself, and a softer looking undersuit that was visible in the gaps here and there around his body. I even paid attention to the way he stood, his back ramrod straight, his fists at his sides as he scanned the rest of the bus.
And then, with a jerk of motion that rocked the whole bus, he was gone, bolting down the aisle and leaving the same way he’d come in, the force of his impact enough to tear the splintered windshield free from its frame as he passed. He vanished into the night almost immediately, the mottled grey of his armor fading in the darkness and leaving only the echoing sound of pounding footsteps. Eventually those too vanished.
At that point, I started breathing again. Or at least, I became aware that I was breathing again. The passengers were all looking at one another in muted shock, looks of disbelief written across their faces. One tried to stand on shaky legs, reaching for the bag of scattered belongings on the floor, but the bus driver shouted them back, calling for everyone to sit down. They complied. I still hadn’t moved. I was still too shocked by what I had just seen.
Wanderer had been there. Right there. I’d been saved from an armed mugging … by the hero himself.
It didn’t take the police long to arrive and start taking statements. I must have looked like a stereotypical teenager in their eyes, because they didn’t even bother to ask for my side of events: They just took one look at me and told me to get checked out with the ambulance so they could give me a ride home. In retrospect, had I been a little less shocked by the whole ordeal I probably would have protested the fact that they just blew me off like that, but I’m sort of glad it worked out the way it did. Because they went right to the “adults” of the situation, that meant that the first news van to arrive looking for a story found exactly one individual not busy with the police and willing to talk.
Me.
To be honest, they were just grabbing the first person they could to get the story out as fast as possible. Beating the other networks and all that. That’s all they wanted. In retrospect, however? They—and I—got very lucky. By the time they’d zeroed in on me as a prospective interview, I’d calmed down a bit, the ringing in my ears had mostly faded away, and I was already running over everything I’d seen in my head, trying to cement every detail inside my mind against what I knew of Wanderer.
What followed was a blistering interview. It started out as an almost resigned “Miss, what can you tell us about what happened here?” but that went out the window the moment my brain started quoting back crime statistics, and the reporter with the microphone was wise enough to capitalize on it as quickly as he could. Between my studious knowledge—barring the last few years—of how Wanderer operated and my first-hand experience with what had just happened, what had started out as a two-minute interview turned into something more like ten. For a nightly news channel, that was the equivalent of handing me a whole show.
And by the time it was over, I must have impressed the both the reporter and his cameraman. Both were giving me surprised but respectful looks, as if I’d passed some kind of test. It wasn’t until later that I’d realized what it was: Even with my knowledge, there was always a chance that I was going to end up as some educated but crazy fanatic. Instead I’d been calm, steady, well thought-out, and—as a bonus—polite. I’d handed them exactly what both of them were hoping for—a story.
Maybe that was why once the interview with me was over and they’d killed the camera, they decided to inquire a little further before heading off to interview some of the other eyewitnesses. Nothing suspicious, just questions about how far along I was in school and what I was looking to do. When I told them that I wasn’t sure yet, both raised their eyebrows at one another.
“Well,” one of them said—and I don’t exactly remember which one. “Maybe you should consider looking into a career in journalism.”
And that was it. The interview was over. They thanked me and went back to work. No showering praise for my capabilities. I simply took one last look around the scene and then walked the rest of the way home, not even bothering to wait for the police’s offered ride.
My mother was worried sick, of course. I called her on the walk home and let her know where I was, and had to talk her out of driving to pick me up right then and there. I wanted to walk. Besides, with Wanderer out and having already survived one gunpoint mugging, I didn’t really feel like I was in any danger anymore. Maybe it was just shock and adrenaline ta
lking, but either way I made it home all right.
THREE
The very next day I started looking into journalism studies. It was like the mugging, robbery, whatever it had been the night before had reactivated something inside my brain. Flipped on a light that had gone out with the death of my father. I had a drive again. I had something I wanted to do.
I wanted to learn about Wanderer. Not just from a textbook or an interview, no. I wanted to be the one giving the interview, the one going out on my own and finding out more about him. I wanted to know who he was, why he’d picked our city, where he’d gotten his armor, even why he’d chosen the name Wanderer.
My workload increased as I threw myself into my studies like never before. I started applying for scholarships, looked up some of the best places to go to college for journalism, and even found out what the name of the position I was looking for was called—an investigative journalist. Except instead of politics or finances, I wanted to investigate superheroes. Specifically, Wanderer.
I graduated high school a year later, not quite a valedictorian, but close. My grades were high enough that I’d earned several scholarships to different colleges, eventually settling on one that was as close to home as possible—mostly because I really didn’t want to leave my mother, who seemed to be dreading the thought of her little girl heading out on her own, but also because I wanted to stick as close to ground zero as possible. After all, Wanderer was here, in my city. If I went somewhere else, even someplace with one of its own superheroes, I’d have to study and learn about them.
And I didn’t want that. I wanted Wanderer. So I stayed close, in the city I’d grown up in, making the hour-long bus ride to the college every morning and doing what I could to get myself a higher education. After a year, tired of the bus rides and wanting to help my mother move out of the neighborhood we had both lived in for so long before local crime levels got any worse, I got my own place: A small, apartment on the outskirts of the college. All right, it wasn’t entirely my place—I was sharing it with someone I’d known from grade school who’d chosen to attend the same college as well as two upperclassmen—but it was my first place out on my own all the same. My poor mother was both sad and proud, I think … but in the end it was best for both of us. I helped her move into a smaller, much nicer apartment on the other side of the city, and I got to give up the long bus rides every morning and afternoon.
Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection Page 29