I didn’t move. I mean, I was excited for the art contest. But as I thought about it, the winners would be announced a day before the dance. That was too late for me to become an Est, let alone enjoy it, if I won (for the first time ever) and managed to become Artiest.
Charlie gave me a nudge.
I pushed myself up and toward the bulletin board, managing to arrive at exactly the same moment Betsy did. Gah!
I motioned for her to go ahead of me. There were still two spots left.
I swear she growled as she slid past. Charlie, ever vigilant, stood up at the table, holding his McMonster ready to use as a goopy grenade should things go awry.
Betsy turned around with a sly grin plastered to her pasty face. I caught myself smiling back. Maybe she felt bad about earlier? Maybe there was a chance we could put all that competition and general evilness behind us? She loafed her way back to the computer terminal and I smiled all the way over to the sign-up sheet. Until I saw Betsy had signed up for BOTH the remaining slots!
“Betsy?” I heard myself shriek. “You can’t enter twice!”
“If I’m entering for drawing and photography I can.”
“Hey! Not cool!” I continued my shriek-fest as heat started to build up in my gut.
“Oh, boo-hoo!” she chided me. “I’m Veronica and I’m so sad that I suck at everything! Boo-hoo! I don’t know what I am! BOO-HOO!”
“Quiet down, you two,” Mrs. Brannon said, her black bob haircut swooshing as she turned toward us. Our art teacher was a tiny woman who loved realism and classical skill. Before she came to our little town, she was an art buyer for a big museum in New York. Her obsession with clean lines and photorealism didn’t mesh well with my style. Betsy’s art, on the other hand …
“Betsy signed up for the last two spots in the contest,” I explained.
Mrs. Brannon rolled her eyes at Betsy. “Why would you do that?”
“I wanted to enter in two categories.” Betsy said.
Mrs. Brannon turned back to me. “Slots fill up fast. Why were you so late to class?”
Obviously, I couldn’t tell her the truth—that I was invisible at the time. “I just … forgot?” I offered.
“Pssh!”
Mrs. Brannon didn’t believe me. “You’re in here almost every day. Don’t give me that.”
“Are you going to let her take both spaces?” I asked.
“She played by the rules. There isn’t anything I can do.” Mrs. Brannon shrugged. “Maybe she’ll give up a spot out of the kindness of her heart.”
The smuggest smile of all time slid across Betsy’s face. Pretty sure you need to have a heart to use its kindness.
I wanted to yell some more, but the rage boiling in my belly left me speechless. I was burning up.
Finally I opened my mouth to tell her a thing or two, but instead of an obscenity-laden diatribe, a ball of fire spewed from my mouth. It bounced off the bulletin board and hit the coat rack, where all the smocks and aprons hung, setting them ablaze.
Panic took over the room, but all I could do was slap a hand over my fire-breathing mouth. It had happened again—another crazy moment; except this time, everyone could see it. But did they see it had come from me? I didn’t think so.
The sprinkler system went off as the whole school was rushed out of the building. I grabbed the loop on Charlie’s backpack as we lined up on the lawn. We needed to stay together.
As the fire department quickly arrived, Charlie looked at the smoking school, the firefighters, and back to me.
“It was you?” he said.
“It wasn’t me! Why would I set art on fire?”
“It. Was. You!” His eyes were alight.
Wait, what? He seemed … happy?
But the local news had arrived. I was swept up by local anchorman Stormy Raines (there’s no way that’s his actual name, am I right?), who gripped my arm so tightly I gasped. The cameraman snapped his fingers and pointed at Stormy, directing him to talk, as he pressed the camera too close to our faces.
Stormy flashed his giant squirrel-toothed smile. “I’m here with a student who saw it all! What’s your name, little lady?”
I squeaked out, “I … I … McGowan?”
“What did you see? I heard you eyewitnessed the Molotov cocktail?” Stormy looked at me with great concern.
“Uh, no. No, I didn’t. There was just this, like, ball of fire…”
“Ha-ha!” Stormy boomed. “Obviously this young girl is shocked to the core! The school has yet to comment, but this reporter feels confident in calling this yet another example of today’s youth out of control! Back to you, Chet.”
I walked back to Charlie, who was still grinning ear to ear.
“So, you shot out a ball of fire, right?” he asked. “That’s seriously the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I was very confused. “You think all of this is cool?”
“Very, my curmudgeonly gal pal! You can do things, right? I’ve seen you go invisible and breathe fire and—and—I mean, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know! Today, I just … think or feel something a lot, and then weird stuff happens. It’s happened like twice. Okay, three times.”
Charlie was grinning at me like an idiot.
“What’s wrong with you?” I snapped at him. “This is the worst thing ever!”
Charlie threw his hands in the air. “Are you kidding me? You have superpowers! This is like an origin story!”
I rolled my eyes. “An origin story is about a superhero, Charles! With useful powers. Superpowers, not stupidpowers. Besides, this is just a—a thing. A onetime, one-day deal. These whatever-they-are powers are going to go away.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I do,” I said in a tone that would tell any reasonable person to stop pressing.
“Yeah, but how?”
“Because they have to go away.” I looked around to see if any teachers were nearby. “I need to get out of here.”
“And go where? Charles Xavier’s School for Mutants?”
Before I could smack the ear-to-ear smile off Charlie’s face, Principal Chomers gave the all clear to go back inside. The fire had been contained and extinguished with zero damage to the rest of the school. Luckily, I just had to endure only one more period of the day. Not so luckily, I had to spend it working in the school office.
* * *
I figured at least everyone would be too busy talking about the fire to notice if something weird happened again. I was right. The office was chaos. I volunteered to answer phones. Lots of parents were calling to make sure their kid was fine. Every kid was fine. Every single one of them. Well, except for me, but I certainly didn’t say that to any of the concerned parents. I was beginning to get annoyed with their way-too-similar calls, until I got one that scared me.
“Hello, I’m detective, ummm … Mulder, calling about the fire earlier today. Has the local PD confirmed a cause yet?” a stern female voice said.
“Um, the PD? As in ‘police department’?” I asked.
“Affirmative. As in righty-o,” the detective said.
“I know what ‘affirmative’ means.” I caught myself getting annoyed. Who says “righty-o”? Zip! A tiny blue electrical bolt shot from my finger into the phone’s mouthpiece.
“Yeowch!” the detective exclaimed.
Ahhh! I had just zapped a detective.
Recovering, she demanded, “I need full names and addresses of all students and faculty who may have seen anything unusual.”
“Unusual? Like what?” I stammered.
There was a long pause before the detective asked, “To whom am I speaking?”
“Uh, Veronica…,” I said.
“Veronica?” She sounded surprised. “Did you witness the incident?”
Ack! This wasn’t good. Evacuate! Evacuate!
“You’re br-eak-ing u-p! I-have-to-go-now-bye!”
I clapped down the receiver harder than I should have.
/> The day was almost done. Maybe I would take a sick day tomorrow, or, you know … forever. I watched the clock tick every last little second until it set me free. I ran to my locker. I wasn’t even slightly surprised that Charlie had left me a note there, telling me to meet him at his house, “For fun!”
I was convinced he already had a business plan drawn up for our own little comic book starring yours truly.
* * *
Pressing the secret key code, I let myself in through Charlie’s frosted-glass front door. The front of Charlie’s cement-walled, ultramodern house was completely flat, and the doors slid open instead of being on hinges. The house was always cold inside, and there were never dirty cereal bowls in the sink. Everything had its place. It was dead silent today except for the muffled sound of Charlie’s stereo upstairs. No wonder he had invited me over—his parents weren’t home.
“Charlie?” I knocked on his bedroom door as I swung it open.
“Get in here!” he said, pulling my arm and flinging me onto a nearby ottoman.
Charlie’s room looked like it was in a different house. Maybe even on a different planet. The walls were red and covered in posters of obscure bands even my dad had never heard of. The bed was never made, and I wasn’t sure what color the carpet was because it was always covered in clothes.
“I’ve been thinking,” Charlie began, sitting down on what used to be a patio chair, “today was just a first step. I think we can do better.”
“Do better? Charlie, I set the school on fire!” I threw a pillow at him.
“You’ve got this amazing gift—”
“Gift?”
“Gift. And I think we should use it. Save the world. Make some money. I don’t know. Something cool,” he said.
“Something cool?” I shook my head. “Did you even think about what might happen to me if anyone found out about this? This isn’t a cute quirk, like dimples or your stupid accent. This could hurt people, including me. If anyone knew about this, I’d be made into a lab rat, not an Avenger! Things don’t always turn out awesome.”
Charlie leaned back, with a straight face for once. “Yeah. You’re right. Obviously, it could be dangerous and scary. I get it.” He nodded. “Sorry.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Now if you had just thought about it for five seconds before—”
“I’ve been thinking about it since I ditched after fifth period.” He stood up and revealed what he had been doing when I interrupted him.
A yellow legal pad had the words “SAVE VERONICA” scrawled across the top and a list below.
“We’re going to cure you!” Charlie said proudly.
I had no words. I hugged him as tightly as I could.
“See, I think about things sometimes,” Charlie said as he gasped for air.
I let him go.
“I’m sorry I was a pain,” I said.
“No worries. Women.” He rolled his eyes. “They get superpowers and are smart enough not to want them. Le sigh.”
CHAPTER FIVE
IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Charlie foraged around on his desk (which was covered in pieces of a model Star Destroyer he’d been building since I met him) and unleashed a purple stethoscope that had “WEATHERS” written down the tube in silver Sharpie.
“Ta-da!” he said with a flourish.
I stepped back. “Dude, there’s no way I can be examined by your moms!”
Charlie guffawed. “I would never let those kooks near you! Doctor Charles Weathers in the house!”
He listened to my heart and lungs, but everything sounded fine—assuming he knew what fine sounded like. Our check of my symptoms online suggested that I was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or schizophrenic.
Charlie shrugged that off and said, “Okay, we’ve tried the least invasive methods. Now, let’s try something a little more—”
“Invasive?” I shook my head. “No.”
“This will be fun. Trust.”
I followed Charlie down the meticulously cleaned hallway. The walls were lined with family photos. One was of Charlie and me when we went to the zoo a couple years ago. His mom Lucia was stroking Charlie’s hair. He stared, panic-stricken, at a person in a sea-otter suit. His other mom, Daphne, was holding my hand as I tried to lunge toward the otter to hug it. Boy, things had changed a lot in such a short time. Now I was the big chicken and Charlie was the one hugging otters. Or something like that. You get what I mean.
Charlie and his biological brother, Nick, had been adopted when he was a baby and Nick was six. Daphne is British while Lucia is American. Just an FYI, Charlie’s accent didn’t exist until we started middle school. In fact, he’s never even been to the United Kingdom, and Nick doesn’t have an accent at all. Unless, when he left for college, he took a cue from Charlie and donned a fake one to impress people.
Charlie inched the door open like it might be booby-trapped. Whoa. I had never been in his moms’ home lab before and it was absolutely … whoa. Test tubes, microscopes, a centrifuge, and shiny metal tools as far as the eye could see! I went to investigate a massive freezer that was the length of a whole wall. I wasn’t really clear on what his parents were always researching, but whatever it was, it apparently required that major experiments could be conducted at home as well as at work. Considering how often Charlie came over for dinner, my guess was that the home lab didn’t get a lot of love.
“Don’t open that,” Charlie warned. “I opened it once thinking they might have hidden some ice cream in there, but it was definitely not ice cream.”
Charlie directed me to a roll-y chair and unveiled a weird-looking helmet that had tons of wires running all over the outside of it. I was less than thrilled when he placed it on my head.
After the headgear was sufficiently strapped to my noggin, Charlie fired up the attached computer.
“All right, so this thingamajigger can tell what parts of your brain are currently working,” Charlie said, gleefully tapping keys as various bleeps and bloops came from the speakers.
“Y-you don’t think it can read my mind, do you?” I asked. I couldn’t let Charlie know all my thoughts. Or, at least, only about 76 percent of them.
We saw a blob on the screen. Was it my brain?
“I think we got it!” Charlie shouted. “Let’s find out what’s in your mind, Veronica McGowan!”
No! I reached up to undo the chinstrap.
“Veri, what are you doing?”
“I don’t like this,” I said, closing my eyes as I wrestled with the strap. Don’t think about Blake, Veronica. Don’t think about anything!
I opened my eyes and a light shot out of them. Straight ahead of me, I could see that embarrassing Blake dream being projected from my eyes onto the wall.
“What in the heck is that?” Charlie said.
I shut my eyes.
“Open your eyes,” Charlie pleaded.
“No,” I gasped. “It shows whatever I’m thinking about.”
“A soap opera?”
I tried to think about my dad, my dog, and other “normal things” as I opened my eyes again. Nope. There I was, plucking that really scary, gigantic eyebrow hair that grows right between my eyes.
“Oh, that’s unsightly.”
I closed my eyes again. “Guess it’s not what I’m thinking about. It’s what I don’t want anyone to know.”
“Oh, please,” Charlie begged, “just one more. It’s only me. Who am I going to tell about your unibrow?”
“No way.” I couldn’t help but laugh a little, which made it hard to keep my eyes shut. “Can we please just take this thing off? It’s making me way too nervous.”
“Okay, okay,” Charlie said as he helped me remove the contraption.
Once it was safely tucked back into a cupboard, I felt loads better. For good measure, I put on my sunglasses until I was sure this whole projecting thing was over.
“Charlie? You home?” Lucia called from the entryway.
“Hi, Mom! Veri and
I are doing homework,” Charlie called as we scampered out of the lab and into the kitchen. We cracked open our books just as Lucia and Daphne walked in.
“Hello, Veronica.” Lucia gave me a hug. “Whatever happened to your nose?”
“Oh, just sports,” I said, waving it off.
Lucia laughed. “That’ll do it every time. What are you two working on?”
I said “biology” at the same time Charlie said “history.”
Lucia and Daphne shared a knowing look.
“Well, that should be an interesting project then.” Daphne gave me a wink.
Charlie turned bright red.
It had become a bit tenser than I liked. Time to split.
I said my good-byes and Charlie walked me out.
“Notice how they didn’t even ask about the school catching on fire? It’s like they live on a different planet,” Charlie vented.
“They think you’re self-sufficient, Charlie. That’s really cool,” I said. “My dad texted me eight hundred thousand times after news of the fire broke. He doesn’t think I can handle anything.”
“Correction: your dad doesn’t want you to handle anything. He’s a giant control freak.”
I nodded. “Can you imagine if he knew about my powers? I’d never be allowed to leave the house again. Which is yet another reason they gotta go.”
“But how do you make them happen?” Charlie asked.
“Make? No making. They just happen out of nowhere, uncontrollably.”
“Well, that’s just rubbish then, isn’t it?” he said. “There has to be a trigger.”
“Sure, or I’d be shooting out hearts and lightning bolts while I write English papers.”
“Hearts?”
I forgot I had kept that part secret.
“Theoretically,” I added. Time to change the subject. Quickly. “Uhhh, so let me see … I shrank in gym class when I felt scared. And right before the little fire, Betsy blocked me out of the art contest.”
“And that made you really, really mad,” Charlie added. His face went pink with embarrassment. “Crud. Could I be the trigger? I’ve been there for all the kerfuffles, haven’t I? It could be me!”
Considering Charlie hadn’t been in my bedroom that morning, I wagered not. I thought about gym class and how scared I had been of Betsy and how humiliated I had felt to have everyone looking at me. Really, if I was honest, the moment I was most humiliated, I disappeared.
My So-Called Superpowers Page 4