Sidekicked (3 page)

I see Jenna twist around sharply in her cuffs and start swinging. The Fox leaps, sword in hand, those little electric bolts still crackling around her eyes. Thanks to Jenna's motions, now
I'm
rocking back and forth. My stomach lurches. I can smell the smoke of the missile as it zips by me, and I suddenly see the next second of my life play out before me before it even happens, just in time to do absolutely nothing about it.

Jenna gives one last giant swing of her legs. I see a blur of white, the glinty gleam of a razor-sharp sword coming toward me. I hear a snap. The cable breaks, and I am plummeting to certain death.

Except I'm not really
plummeting
. I'm actually kind of
somersaulting
, with Jenna's arms and legs wrapped around me like a papoose, clearing the edge of the pool . . . in fact, clearing the entire fence around the pool, and landing in the grass by the parking lot.

I hit and skid. The grass is soft, at least, though I can't say the same for the dirt underneath it. I watch the world spin for a moment. If this were a Sunday morning comic, there would be bluebirds circling my head. Jenna untangles her limbs from mine and immediately springs to her feet, combat ready, but it takes me a moment to clear my senses, acute as they are, and realize what has happened. The smoke in the sky tells me the missile missed its mark, harmlessly exploding in the air above us.

And standing on top of the crane, a hundred feet up, the Fox has the Killer Bee by his antennae, both of his mechanical wings severed by two more swift strikes of her sword. I see her whisper something to him, but even with my powers I can't make it out in all the commotion. All around us, the crowd is hooting and hollering. Chanting her name.
“Fox. Fox. Fox. Fox.”
As if she's the only one who matters.

And here I am, still flat on my back, staring up at the sky, still handcuffed and a little bruised, but unmistakably alive. Having been saved by the wrong hero.

Andrew Macon Bean.

The Sensationalist.

A sidekick without a Super.

I
am home less than an hour later. All part of the act.

Though I am irritated, and exhausted from my afternoon at the pool, I haven't sustained any real bodily harm save for a few bruises and the bright red circles around my wrists. Besides, it's more important that I be home at a decent hour so that I can put on a good face for my parents. The longer you have to be somebody else, the harder it is to convince everyone you are you.

My house is the last one on the block—the one with the peeling brown trim, the stunted evergreens, and the seldom-used swing set. It's dinnertime on Stanley Street. I can smell the garlic and basil before I even open the door. I can actually smell it from halfway down the block. That's how I know it's lasagna night at Casa de la Bean. If I concentrate, I can tell you what everyone's having for dinner. The Hungs ordered pizza. The Randals are grilling out—barbecue chicken and roast vegetables. The Shaumbergs are celebrating something. I can smell the smoke from burned-out candles and the buttercream frosting on the cake. The Powell kid is having strawberry Pop-Tarts for dinner. Again.

Oh, and Mrs. Polanski hasn't scooped the litter box in a while and Li'l Mittens is just finishing some business, so I stop concentrating and hold my nose.

When I walk through the door, my dad's nailed to the TV set, fixated on the story of a wacko in a bee getup who kidnapped and nearly killed two supposed sidekicks and his thrilling defeat by the city's most celebrated star. There's footage of the two sidekicks dangling from the crane. Even with my extraordinary eyesight I can't make out the features of my own face onscreen—there's just too much going on. I watch, breathless, as Jenna swings back and forth, gaining momentum. I see the Fox leap, deflecting the missile with an energy blast from her fingertips and severing the chain that holds me and Jenna with her sword. The camera traces our less-than-graceful fall, and by the time it jerks back up, the Fox has the Bee in her grip. The cameraman didn't catch Jenna and me slinking away or manage to get a good look at our faces.

I watch for a moment from the entryway, easily seeing and hearing the television from three rooms away, careful not to draw attention to myself. The news reporter is gushing about the Fox. “Remarkable,” she says over and over again. “Another day saved by Justicia's newest Super.”

“And
that's
why we need to move,” I hear my dad say. “To a town with fewer freaks.”

“You mean the guy dressed up like a bumblebee, or the one shooting lightning from her eyes?” my mother asks from the kitchen.

I close the front door with a little emphasis. My mother turns to greet me with a smile that is meant to only half mask the worry in her eyes. For a moment I think I'm done for, that my cover is broken. That somehow she has seen something, something in the frown of the boy on TV, something in the slump of my shoulders, something that only a mother would notice. My other life would finally be exposed, and I would have to come clean and tell them everything.

How I am sworn to protect ordinary citizens like her from the evils that threaten them.

How I spend three days a week training to fight crime.

How I sometimes mix nitroglycerin in the bathroom sink.

And it isn't an entirely dreadful feeling, this idea of opening up to them, telling them everything. There would be consequences, of course, but we could endure them together, as a family.

But her sad smile is just general maternal transference.
Some
where
some
mother has a teenage son who is dressing up in costumes and being suspended above vats of bubbling acid by men with artificial wings and military-grade weaponry. She's just glad it isn't hers.

“Hi, honey, where have you been?” She kisses me on the cheek.

“I was working on a chemistry project,” I say, using the excuse that has been assigned to me this week in case of such an emergency.

“Yeah, Mr. Masters called and said you would be coming home late,” my dad says, eyes still suctioned to the television, watching as the Fox waves to the cameras before taking a flying leap over the pool house and disappearing. “You can call us yourself, you know. After all, that's why we pay for that cell phone you insist on having.”

“Sorry, Dad,” I say, failing to mention that I left the cell phone at school, along with my utility belt—actually
attached
to my belt, right beside my cryogenic grenades and concentrated sleeping gas.

“Did you hear what happened this time?” Mom asks, pointing to the TV that's now showing cops rounding up a half dozen injured drones and piling them into an armored truck.

“Yeah. Crazy stuff,” I say, trying to sound impressed. I keep my hands in my jacket even as she hugs me. It may be a little suspicious that I don't hug her back, but it's better than showing off my raw, red wrists.

“I just don't know why anyone would
do
such a thing,” she says.

“And where does somebody get that much acid?” my father adds.

I shrug. “Like you said, they're all crazy, every last one of them,” I say. “What's for dinner?”

My mother smiles, knowing I already know. I smile back at all the things she still has no clue about.

“We could move to Albuquerque,” Dad says. “Surely this kind of nonsense doesn't happen in Albuquerque.”

I don't say anything, though I'm pretty sure Albuquerque has its own problems, though it probably doesn't attract the criminal element quite the way Justicia does. Something about this city just draws the bad guys like flies to a Dumpster. Mr. Masters calls it job security.

“I'm just going to go wash up,” I say, and slink up the stairs, listening to my father whisper to himself that the Fox is easy to look at, though.

Back in my room, I pull my mask from my backpack and take it to the bathroom to wash it out. There are few things worse than having to put a sweaty, snotty piece of spandex on over your face. I rinse it carefully and set it over the vent beneath my bed to dry; then I peel off my shoes and change into a pair of sweats. I slip on a Highview Middle School sweatshirt to help hide the cuff marks, just in case, and look around the room for my homework

The place is a disaster—a landfill, my mother would say, though it is mostly by design. Like most thirteen-year-old boys, I have a few things that I don't want my parents to discover—heavy-duty steel cable, highly volatile chemicals, thermal imaging goggles, fuse-head electric blasting caps, that sort of thing—all carefully concealed. I've found that if you keep enough other junk lying around, the sheer effort to clean it all up is too much for any parent, and they don't even bother to touch the stuff you keep in the top of your closet or underneath your bed. There are a few posters on the wall, a couple of junior academic decathlon medals, and a dozen books strewn about. I sift through the piles to find
Julius Caesar
and then promptly drop it into another pile of schoolbooks representing the night's to-do list. Finally I turn on my computer to see if I have any messages. There's just one. From Jenna.

Give me a buzzzzz later.

I try to think of something clever to say back, but I'm not in the mood.

I walk to my parents' bathroom to raid my mother's medicine chest for something to put on my wrists. My only discovery is some lotion that claims to come from rain forests and smells like melons. Scented lotions have a tendency to give me migraines, so I just turn on the cold water and soak. If I concentrate, I can block out the slow burn and focus on the sweet sting of the cold. It has taken me
years
of therapy to learn to control my power this much—to focus my overly keen senses and weed out all the extra input. I close my eyes and listen closely for a moment. I hear the sound of the TV and my dad scratching his armpit. My mother is chopping onions for a salad. Next door, Mrs. Polanski is singing Justin Bieber in the bathtub.

I open my eyes and get a good look at the boy in the mirror, who watches me back, mimicking my squinted expression. Shaggy brown hair, skater style. Dull bluish-gray eyes. Mostly straight teeth. Blackheads checkerboarding my nose. The rumor of stubble on my chin. “You again,” I say to myself.

When you're a teenager, everybody is waiting for you to be something or somebody else—your friends, your parents, your teachers. Sometimes you lose track. Are you the shy kid in the back of the room who apologizes for even
accidentally
touching Susan Childress's arm, or the guy making bombs in the backyard? Are you the helpless nerd with the backpack on hoping you don't get the snot beat out of you by the school bully, or the helpless nerd with the mask on, hoping you don't get the snot beat out of you by the town's crazy new super-villain?

Or maybe you're just the helpless nerd staring at the other helpless nerd in the mirror, talking to yourself, wondering which of you needs more help.

The bread is burning, though my mother doesn't know it yet. She calls up that dinner's ready, which is my cue to put my mask back on and pretend to be the kid who stayed after school to finish his science project. The honor-roll kid who the bumper sticker on their Corolla brags about. The kid they don't have to worry about.

Not the one who needs saving.

I head downstairs to eat.

J
enna was right. Mr. Booner really is a terrible health teacher. He doesn't know the names of any of the parts of the brain, instead simply calling them “the front part,” “the left part,” and “the right part,” and “that bumpy thing in back.” He insists that the bigger your forehead, the smarter you are. He uses Shakespeare and Ben Franklin as evidence. That his own hair has receded probably factors into his argument.

Apparently he is a cool gym teacher, though, pretty much letting the fat kids sit in the corner during dodgeball and counting every pull-up you do double if your arms are like Twizzlers, which mine are.

I wouldn't know, of course, because I never go to gym. That would be fourth period on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which happens to conflict with my participation in our school's
highly
selective environmental club, otherwise known as the Highview Environmental Revitalization Organization.

Our job is to keep the trash off the streets.

I'm not kidding. That's what our T-shirts say:
H.E.R.O. WE KEEP THE TRASH OFF THE STREETS.
There is a picture of a teenager dressed in a cape and tights, slam-dunking a crushed tin can into a recycling bin. Our club's faculty sponsor designed them. I guess the thought was that nobody would put two and two together because it was simply
too
obvious. Sometimes it's the thing that's right in front of you that you keep looking over.

There are only six of us in the program, the only one of its kind in Justicia, maybe the only one of its kind in the world; at least the only one
I
know about. It's basically a training program for would-be sidekicks, who then become would-be Supers. Kids with powers who hope to use them someday to fight the forces of evil, save damsels, help the meek inherit the earth, that sort of thing. Saving the environment is just a cover, though we do spend a few days each year planting trees and planning recycling drives to keep up appearances. Nobody ever questions the time we spend together—you can't say that cleaning up the environment is a waste. Besides, our program director can be very convincing when he wants to be.

His name is Mr. Masters, and in addition to being the head of H.E.R.O., he is also the eighth-grade science teacher. A tall, clean-shaven, square-headed man who looks a little like a bald Lurch from
The Addams Family
, he has a forehead that would make Mr. Booner proud. Mr. Masters always wears horn-rimmed glasses and patterned sweater vests over long-sleeved solid-color shirts, and he keeps a tarnished old rail conductor's watch on a chain tucked into his right pocket.