The Rise of Renegade X

by Chelsea M. Campbell

I swallow and nod, not wanting to think about where this is going.

  Helen shrugs. “I was the fastest, now I’m not. Sometimes I wonder whether I made the right choice. Maybe I didn’t need to stay; maybe we all could have gotten out anyway. But maybe not. And when I come down here and look at this ring and remember my friends are safe and he’s not going to hurt anyone anymore, I know it was worth it. I know I’d do it all over again if I had to.”

  I don’t even have a power yet, but I can’t imagine losing one. Especially while trying to defeat someone in Kat’s family. An awkward pause hangs in the air, but I have one more question, and I know I have to ask now or miss my chance. “How … how did you get the ring?” I picture her prying it off his cold dead finger, but then I remember he died in an explosion.

  Helen smiles. Not, like, a happy smile. It’s kind of sad, but still hopeful. “He took it off,” she says. “Before he hit the detonator. He said he wanted to remember his wife in death. He didn’t want to die masking the pain of her loss. He was only human, after all, and the ring is a reminder of that, too. That’s why I took it. I wanted to remember.”

  She stops and looks at me, like she’s expecting me to say something. Like she wants me to tell her yeah, villains are people, too.

  Luckily, Gordon’s phone rings, rescuing me from Helen, and he answers it. As he listens to the voice on the other side, his gaze falls to me. His jaw sets and his eyebrows furrow. “Yes, yes,” he mutters. “I’ll see to it.” He grips his phone so hard, I’m surprised he doesn’t break it. “Damien,” he says, sucking in a deep breath through clenched teeth, “that was the school. We need to talk.”

  Gordon sighs across the dining table. “Did you or did you not put scorpions in those kids’ backpacks?”

  He means Marty and Jill. I told them they made my list. “You know I don’t like to brag.”

  “The school has reason to suspect that you did.”

  “They can’t prove anything. I have it all under control.” I fold my hands and flash him a reassuring smile.

  “You sent them to the hospital.” Gordon trips over his chair, he gets up so quickly. He clenches his fists and paces the length of the table. “How is that having it under control?!”

  “They only went to get checked out. Besides, they weren’t real scorpions—just clever robots with stingers. They might be really itchy for a couple weeks, but it’s not like they’re going to die. I know what I’m doing. This is only phase one—”

  “Phase one? Dear God.” He slides a hand over his forehead and through his hair. “This is not an acceptable way to behave, young man!”

  “Says you.” I screw up my eyebrows at him.

  “Don’t you dare …” He takes a deep breath to calm himself. “They didn’t deserve what you did.”

  I say it very slowly, so maybe it’ll sink through his thick skull. “Yes. They. Did.” Anger boils up inside me—how can he be so stupid?—and I have to make an effort to squelch it down. This is why I hate superheroes. They might seem all right for a while, but only on the surface; deep down, they’re all deranged.

  Gordon is about to yell at me some more, but my tone at least must have gotten through to him, because he seems to realize how serious I am. “Listen, Damien, let’s say they did deserve it. …” He rubs his temples, like I’m giving him a headache. He slumps down in the chair across from me. “I’m not saying they did, but even so, superheroes can’t act this way. The sooner you learn that, the easier life will be for you.”

  This man is completely insane. I hope it’s not hereditary. “Who said I was a superhero? I don’t see how letting people bully my friends is going to make life anything but hard, no matter what I am.”

  “You could have told the proper authorities.”

  “Psh.” I roll my eyes at him. “Nobody cares what they do. They think they’re so cool, that they can get away with anything, but they can’t push me around. I care.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “It’s not a problem. I took care of it.”

  Gordon pounds his fists into the table in frustration. “You’re missing the point! Putting other kids in the hospital, even for a checkup, is not okay. Not ever. Listen, son, any decent superhero is going to sign the League Treaty. Maybe you’ll be thinking about it when you’re eighteen or so, when you’re getting ready to start your career. If you don’t sign, no one’s going to trust you. They’re not going to have a guarantee that your methods are safe. The League makes sure everyone follows the same rules, the same moral code of conduct—”

  “You keep talking like I’m a hero, but I’m not.” I lean back in my chair. “I don’t have to abide by your useless mumbo jumbo.”

  “It’s not useless. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You might think you’re a villain, but there’s got to be more to you than that. You’re my son, and that means you’ve got hero potential, Damien. You need to consider the possibility.”

  I press my fingertips together. “And what happens when some bad guy comes along who you can’t beat with your precious League rules? What then?”

  Gordon sputters, trying to come up with a real answer, getting angrier and angrier when he can’t. Finally he says, “We work together. We find a way. But we don’t break our code. It’s what binds us together, what separates the heroes from the vi—” He stops. His mouth thins into a tight line. “You can put your faith in the code, in the Treaty.”

  “Well,” I say, “I put my faith in me.”

  He shuts his eyes, the anger seeping out of him, too exhausted to keep it up. “I can see what your mother meant,” he mutters. “Relentless.” He shakes his head. “You’re going to have to change.”

  “I won’t. Let me ask you one more question.” I look him straight in the eyes. I pretend I don’t notice they’re the exact same green color as mine. “Would Helen still have her powers if you’d all played by my rules instead of yours?”

  Sarah presses forward, forcing me against the wall outside the school, and whispers in my ear. It’s only been a little over twenty-four hours since she looked at me through her X-ray goggles, but I guess she must have liked what she saw.

  Normally, I would find a situation where a girl like Sarah has her hands on my chest and her tongue practically in my ear a bit seductive. Maybe a lot seductive, depending on what happens next.

  People are swarming out of the school, running to catch buses and scattering in every direction to walk home with their friends. Nobody notices the couple of freaks invading each other’s personal space, but I don’t expect they would. Any temptation to mess with us evaporated after what happened to Jill and Marty.

  When she speaks, I know one thing’s for sure: Sarah plastering herself against me has everything to do with what she saw through my clothes with her X-ray goggles yesterday. It’s just not what I want it to be. Sarah whispers the words so softly that, even if we weren’t the only people around, only I could hear them, and they do everything to ruin the mood: “Make me your sidekick.”

  I freeze up. My jaw goes slack. An outside observer might think she just said something more appealing, judging from my reaction.

  My hands tremble as I place them on Sarah’s wrists and push her away. Sidekick? Is she nuts? “No way.”

  “You haven’t already got one, do you?” She looks into my eyes, hopeful and earnest.

  “That’s not the point.” I feel my expression go sour.

  “I already know your secret,” Sarah says, and I’m glad she recognizes that that’s what it is. “I saw your X, and that can’t be helped now. Unless …” She pauses, looking off into the distance. She shakes her head. “No, I’d rather not go through all that. The machine isn’t stable yet.”

  “You can’t be my sidekick. The position is closed.”

  “You already have someone?”

  “It was never open. No offense.”

  “Ah, I see.” She nods. “You work alone.”

  “I—Yeah, something like that.”
/>   “You’re cute, Damien. And I like the way you hold your pen.”

  “Er, thanks.” I don’t know what that has to do with anything. “I like your creative use of tinfoil.” The school grounds are empty now, so there’s no one else around to overhear when I say, “But if you know what an X means, you know I’m not really a superhero.”

  Sarah’s face lights up. “I didn’t know what it meant for sure. Not really … Everybody says there’s a third letter, but nobody’s ever actually seen it.”

  If she’s trying to make me feel like a freak, she’s doing a good job. “Now you have. You can sell your story to the tabloids. Tell them you’re having my alien baby while you’re at it.”

  “I was up until three in the morning last night doing research on the Internet. About Xs.”

  She did seem kind of tired in math today, but I chalked it up to Mrs. Log droning on and on about solving for x in terms of y. Which I guess shouldn’t have been so boring for me, because when it comes to my X, I’d really like to know why. As in, why me.

  Not that I want Sarah to think she knows more than I do about my own thumb, or that I’m interested in her research, but I can’t help being curious. I scratch the side of my face and don’t look at her. “Up until three? There must have been a lot of Wikipedia entries to read.” I sound a little snotty when I say that, so she knows I don’t approve of her online resources, because I don’t want her thinking she knows more about this than I do. All I’ve read is the article Mom gave me—I couldn’t bring myself to search the Internet. There are probably whole forums where people can report their supposed sightings of people like me. Okay, maybe not, but I wasn’t ready to know what was out there either way.

  Sarah sighs. “It was hard to find any real information. But I know it means you’re half hero.”

  “And half villain.”

  “You can still get an H. You won’t have the X forever.”

  “Half villain, Sarah.”

  “So? You live with heroes—just because your genes have some V in them doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  She’s right about me living with heroes, but she doesn’t know it’s only been for the past week. “You know what my being half villain means? One of your heroes messed up and did it with the enemy.”

  “It could have been a forbidden romance. Something dangerous and romantic and—”

  “It wasn’t. My dad, the superhero? He didn’t even know her.”

  She breathes in deep and stares at her shoes. “Everyone makes mistakes. I did. That’s why I need your help. I screwed everything up, and now I need to fix it.”

  “Okay, but I’m not your man. I’m not a superhero.” I shut my eyes and will her to say she needs a villain instead. I could do that. Except that she’s got the Crimson Flash’s chin memorized—she doesn’t want a villain. “You know what an X means, right?”

  “So you don’t have your H yet and you’re not an official hero. It’s okay, I’m desperate. I’ll take what I can get. My dad’s in trouble. I did something I shouldn’t have, got mixed up with the wrong people with this invention I was working on, and he took the fall. It’s completely my fault, and I have to get him back!” Sarah punches her fist into her empty palm. “And I’m running out of time.”

  “I bet the Crimson Flash would help you. Maybe you should ask him.”

  She wrings her hands together. “You don’t know the people I’m up against.”

  I might, actually. That’s part of the problem.

  “They’re supervillains. They’ll see someone like the Crimson Flash coming a mile away. They’re expecting something like that. I need an unknown. What? Don’t look at me like that, Damien, you are an unknown, aren’t you? I’ve never heard of you.”

  “Heard of what? You don’t even know what my superhero name supposedly is—how would you know if you’d heard it or not? But you haven’t because it doesn’t exist, because I’m not a hero. Look, Sarah, I put robotic scorpions in Marty’s and Jill’s backpacks. I’m not a shining example of morality.”

  “That doesn’t count—they had it coming.” She shrugs. “Robin Hood stole from the rich, right? I don’t care if you only have an X. It’s not like you’re some kind of villain or anything.”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah.” My chest feels tight and sweat prickles up and down my back. I can’t take up superheroing, not now. I can’t risk getting caught and having to live in the Tines household for the rest of my life, and the last thing I want to do is influence my X the wrong way and end up with an H. “You’ve got a whole town full of superheroes. Find somebody else. But if you ever want to run your hands over my body again, I’m available for parties and other recreational events.”

  “Oh.” Sarah’s shoulders slump. She looks so disappointed. That’s what she gets for thinking I’m something I’m not. “I wouldn’t expect you to do it for free. I could do your homework for a month or … if that’s not enough, I could do it for the rest of the year.”

  “No, thanks.” I could care less about this homework stuff.

  “Please, Damien. I’ll do anything.”

  “Anything?” My ears perk up at that.

  “Well, maybe not anything.” Sarah glares at me, her glasses sliding down her nose. She sighs and waves her hand, dismissing the whole idea. She folds her arms and turns her shoulder to me. “Never mind,” she says. “Forget the whole thing. You’re right, you’re not a hero, so I shouldn’t have asked.”

  She’s about to walk away, all disappointed and sullen. “Sarah, wait.”

  She looks over her shoulder, hope sparking in her eyes. “You’ll do it?!”

  “I’ll … I’ll think about it.”

  She smiles at me, beaming like I said yes instead of something noncommittal. She throws her arms around me and hugs me before running off down the street.

  “Ready for the big day?” Gordon chuckles on his way past the breakfast table on Saturday morning, grabbing an orange and digging into it with his thumb to peel it.

  Due to some sort of nightmarish birthday sleepover—thankfully at someone else’s house—where a bunch of eight-year-olds gathered last night to torture somebody else’s family, I actually had Alex’s room to myself, so I know it’s not from grogginess that I have no idea what Gordon’s talking about.

  Amelia munches on her cereal across the table from me. She pours so little milk on it that the cereal might as well be dry. She told me milk makes you fat. Though she didn’t seem to care about all the butter she was hogging down last night. I think her ratio is about half a pound of lard per dinner roll.

  Gordon accidentally sprays me with his orange as he peels it. The sharp smell of citrus fills the room. “Amelia told me how much you’re looking forward to it.”

  A very bad, gut-wrenching feeling creeps its way through me. I laugh. “That Amelia,” I say. “She’s such a kidder.” I glare at her.

  She stifles a snicker.

  Gordon ruffles my hair with his orange-juice hands. “I remember how excited I was the first time I flew. Course, I’d already done it by your age. I didn’t sleep for weeks afterward.”

  This wasn’t the plan. Amelia was supposed to give him the fake article I wrote about how people with Xs don’t have powers. I even made up lab reports with graphs and everything, showing how mixing the H and V viruses renders the victim—er, patient—superpower-less. I spent hours on that, and I even went through all the trouble of sneaking into the computer labs at school and Photoshopping it to look like it came from a real newspaper. Amelia was supposed to tell Gordon about the interesting article she read. She was supposed to leave it lying around where he could see it and talk it up like forcing me to discover my power would actually be harmful to my health. I could have given him the fake article myself, but he’d never believe it, coming from me. It’d be way too suspicious. I should have picked Alex to help me out, except he’s too young to be reading scholarly articles and photocopying them for others to enjoy.

  Amelia stuffs another sp
oonful of bran flakes in her fat, lying mouth. Crunch, crunch. She has the gall to smile at me. And talk with her mouth full. “I’m so jealous.” She says it without her usual groan. Bits of brown flakes stick to her teeth. I can see why the boys flock to her.

  “Actually, Gordon,” I say, “I have a lot of this … ‘homework’ to do today.”

  He shoots me a proud grin, like his glorious influence is finally getting through to me. “You have my permission to do it tomorrow.”

  “Can’t.” I fold my hands together and look up at the sky. “Church tomorrow. All day.” I stepped inside a church once, when it was raining really hard and I couldn’t get my umbrella open. It smelled like old people, and every little noise I made echoed really loudly. I remember everyone in the pews turning to stare at me funny, but that could have been because I interrupted their service. You know, by jumping up and down and screaming that God was burning me.

  Gordon claps me on the back and laughs. “We’re only going for the morning service. You’ll have all afternoon.”

  Oh, God. They actually go to church? And they think they’re dragging me with them?!

  “Looks like you’re free,” Amelia says. Bits of her cereal fall out of her mouth and into her bowl as she moos.

  The front door opens. An overstimulated Alex stampedes past Helen.

  “Look what I got!” Alex bounces up and down in front of me and blows on a noisemaker. It lashes out and whips me in the face. He reaches into a small plastic bag with balloons printed on it and pulls out a yellow Jolly Rancher. “For you,” he says, carefully setting it on the table in front of me. Then he zooms off to his room.

  It’s lemon flavor. I stare at the candy and don’t touch it. I have a feeling I’m already going to regret having eaten breakfast.

  “Better get ready,” Gordon says as he goes into the other room to greet Helen. “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”

  Once he’s out of earshot, I lean forward and jab my finger into the table in front of Amelia. “We had a deal. I thought you didn’t want me to fly first?”