Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (10 page)

“But he's all super powered,” Michael
said.

“What if he's a super teacher?” Grandpa
asked. “There are plenty of things you don't know about him, and
your mother and I can't really tell you, since we're not him. So I
think you should ask him.”

“Okay,” he said. He had Mr. Springfield's
card with his number, but he felt like it would be weird just to
call somebody up and start asking questions like 'why don't you go
and stop missiles with your chest, why do you still teach?' Mr.
Springfield had told him to call, any time of the day or night,
but...it was awkward. It was awkward enough just talking to his
mother and grandfather, and they were his family.

He had a brilliant flash of inspiration.

“May I be excused?” he asked.

His mother sighed. “Have you eaten your
vegetables?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Yes you may.”

Boom. Manners almost always worked.

Trent was like a snowball thrown to the top
of Mt. Ranier. He was the beginning, and slow to get started, but
steadily growing.

The summer passed uneventfully,
unfortunately. Charlotte was gone for a whole month to this music
camp for people who had a special passion, and his dad was gone the
whole time too. Charlotte told him the camp’s name was Interlochen,
and that some of the best future musicians in the country went
there. She had to fly. They were going to keep her busy. There was
no chance to get in touch with her.

Even so, he did get a few video e-mails from
her, playing more music he'd never heard of in his entire life. And
even when she came back, he wasn't allowed to see her very much.
His mother was out of the house a lot doing community service and
reading clubs and jewelry making parties and Tupperware parties
(what was the point of these), and he was forbidden to have a girl
anywhere near the house without his mother there to watch them.

So he delivered papers and scarfed down as
many books as his brain could process, and sometimes stared at
walls in utter boredom.

One thing didn't change as the summer came,
went, and morphed into seventh grade, and that was the constant
attention of mother, grandfather, and Mr. Springfield. He was
horrified when Springfield called him up the first time, a month
after the thing with Trent, and again a month after that.

“Just to check up,” he said.

Right.

Michael was so caught off guard that he
didn't even think to ask him why he was a teacher instead of
throwing himself into volcanoes to see what happened. And
Springfield called every fourteenth of the month, Michael soon
learned.

He figured out, as seventh grade started and
he talked to Charlotte about it, that he wasn’t the only one the
adults were keeping tabs on. He was in the middle of telling
Charlotte about Springfield’s ‘call me at three a.m.’ spiel when
she held up a hand and he stopped.

“That’s weird,” she told him. “What's really
strange, right, is this school guy keeps calling me too.”

“What, what guy?”

“This counselor from the high school. His
name is Terrance Jackson.” She explained that she'd had a similar
counselor's meeting a week after the
Trent-threw-lightning-all-over-the-place night, and she hadn't
thought much of it. They just wanted to make sure everybody was
adjusting to the new reality of an Active near them. But then
Jackson kept calling and calling, to see how she was doing, what
was new, and if she'd had any strange dreams lately.

“Weird,” Michael said.

“Yeah. And get this, he read my mind.”

“What? He's an Active too?”

He told her about Springfield's
forcefield.

“Okay,” she said, “I was ready to believe
there was just a teacher who could read minds, and he thought 'I
don't need to be a super spy or anything, I can just teach better',
but here's another one.”

“Mr. Springfield seemed like a nice guy
though,” Michael said.

“Well, yeah, okay...maybe Terrance just
wanted to be a teacher too.”

“But two Active teachers in one town, in one
school,
is...it's impossible.”

She shook her head. “Not impossible. Just not
likely.”

“And Springfield told me there are more than
a hundred Actives in town.”

Charlotte's mouth dropped open.

And there was that thing about his
grandfather; he couldn't shake the feeling like Grandpa was
involved. He felt guilty and awful for the thought, but he couldn't
squash it. Grandpa was coming over more often for dinner now, and
had popped in several times for breakfast over the summer. Come to
think of it, he'd been asking the same sorts of questions
Springfield had.

Stop it, he told himself. Grandpa was clearly
just concerned that his only grandson had been through something
completely nuts, and he wanted to make sure everything was
cool.

Oh yeah, the thought countered, why does he
know so much about the student population at LADCEMS? And who was
that guy he was talking to on the tablet?

Grandpa had a life. He didn't show Michael
every single piece of mail or introduce him to everybody he ever
talked to on the phone.

And the little thought worming his way
through his mind replied: you're in denial.

Denial or not, he wasn't going to troop over
to Grandpa's house and ask him what he was involved in. He was an
old man who sat on his porch most days and read the news. He had a
shot of whiskey before he went to bed every night. He played
cribbage very well. Michael wasn't going to start accusing his own
grandfather of anything, especially when he didn't know what was
going on. Or if anything was going on at all.

If you couldn't trust your own grandfather,
who could you trust?

He and Charlotte decided there had to be
something they didn't know. Then they had a laugh over that, and
decided there was something very big they didn't know. Something
that probably affected the whole town and was an awfully big
secret.

Seventh grade was no different from sixth,
even the way Michael’s classmates were looking at him. The fear and
directed at him had increased. Instead of being politely ignored,
people went out of their way to get out of his way. If he was in
line for hot lunch, other people got out of line. When he walked
by, conversations stopped as if he had thrown a switch. Or worse,
as if he’d become the new Trent. The teachers were too busy to
notice this sort of thing. They all had hundreds of students to
teach, hundreds of tests to grade, and whatever teacherish things
they got up to that divided them from paying attention to students'
lives.

Michael tried not to let it bother him. He
knew that people were afraid of him, or afraid that bad stuff
happened wherever he was. They were probably also talking about he
and Charlotte. He didn't mind so much that they were talking about
him, but it irked him when he thought he heard her name and his
together.

The work was much more difficult now. He was
expected to know the names and locations of every Asian nation,
along with their capitals and some special facts about each one. He
was expected to read two chapters of some books per night, which
wouldn't be a problem except that these were stupid books about
stupid, boring real life and made him want to jump in front of a
train. A speeding train. The math was hard just because he didn't
do well with numbers, but his mother helped him out. Science had
him building musical instruments with his father in the garage, and
bird nests with Charlotte a few weeks later.

It was enough to drive someone crazy.

The stress got to other students as well. He
was halfway through his second geography test (Europe this time)
when he realized nobody was looking at their tests. He glanced up
at Mr. Groebels first, who was frowning, then followed his stare
over to the corner.

A kid named Jared McClaren was pulling
himself out of his chair. He wasn’t standing up, there were
actually two of him, identical carrot-topped kids with the same
rash of freckles and hand me down clothes. One was trying to pull
the other one out of his…their…seat.

“Let me do it,” Jared said, hauling another
Jared up by his shirt.

“Get off me!” the other Jared said.

“You are such an idiot!” the first one said.
“Go, go back to math and talk to Rosenbaum.”

“She told me I couldn't retake the test!” he
told himself.

Just then, two more Jareds burst into the
room.

“Are you crazy?” one of them shouted. “People
are trying to take a test here.”

Somebody giggled. Others followed, nervously.
Michael wondered if any of them had realized just how messed up
this was.

Three more Jareds stood up behind the
original one and started pulling the other three away, but six more
sprouted out of nowhere. Those sitting right next to Jared were
thrown out of their seats by one kid having a cleared-benches brawl
all by himself.

Most of the class was still laughing by the
time there were twenty of Jared McClaren in the classroom, and the
punches were being thrown. One Jared got his head smashed into a
bulletin board, throwing an enormous map onto the floor. Then he
snarled and Michael saw four more of himself split off. It happened
so fast that soon there had to be forty of them.

The classroom was getting crowded, and it
hadn't even been a minute.

Mr. Groebels stood up and bellowed at the top
of his lungs. “That is enough of that!”

Forty crazed and identical pairs of eyes
turned on him.

“Get yourself under control, young man!”

“It was his project,” one of the Jareds
muttered.

“And all the memorizing,” another said.

“A hundred countries and capitals.” Now they
were finishing each others' sentences.

“Just give us a blank map, you think we don't
have anything else to do...”

“...but sit around and stare at your stupid
maps all day? Most of these countries...”

“...ain't gonna last ten years anyway.”

“And there's math...”

“...English...”

“...science, what was that, bird nests and
building musical instruments.”

“You can't just be one person and get it all
done!” one of them shouted. None of them sounded quite right,
horrified and laughing, like they'd just been watching
The
Devil's Cheerleaders
and
How I Married a Martian
at the
same time.

Some of the kids who hadn't left the room
were going along with the Jareds, egging him on. This wasn't good.
Michael got up and headed to the front, where an army was closing
in on Mr. Groebels.

The teacher stared, wide-eyed and frightened,
as the Jareds surrounded him. He had a phone in his hand, but his
mouth wasn't making any noise. It was just opening and closing,
like a fish gasping for water, caught on a hook.

“Don’t do this Jared,” Michael said.

“Get out of my way, crazy outcast,” Jared
said, and pushed Michael roughly aside. Half a dozen Jareds grabbed
him. He was punched in the stomach, tripped, and then stomped on a
couple of times before Michael smelled Charlotte’s shampoo and
realized she was pulling him out of the fracas.

All of the Jareds turned their mad anger on
the teacher, leaping over desks and pushing other students aside to
get to him. He went for the door, but his escape was blocked by
more copies than Michael could count.

Then a flash of strange golden light
appeared, and the Jareds fell back. Something happened in the
middle of the circle, where Mr. Groebels had been, but there were
too many carrot-topped heads in the way. The classroom was clogged
with them.

All of the copies howled in rage and started
streaming out the door. It was then Michael noticed the strange
smell in the air. He wondered what was going on, because everything
was getting blurry. Suddenly his head was a leaden ball, and he
couldn't move his feet. He looked around for Charlotte and found
her lying on the ground, was she asleep? He couldn't tell. In fact,
he couldn't think of anything. He was supposed to be scared, he
realized, but then he couldn't be scared, because he just need to
lie down, close his eyes, and everything would be okay.

Or at least everything would be a nice,
peaceful black.

***

When he awoke he was in his room, and the
cheerful, annoying sound of crickets was coming in loud and clear
through his window. It wasn't yet late enough in the year to shut
them up, but the weather was cooling down, bit by bit. Grandpa was
sitting at the foot of his bed, smiling kindly down at him.

“Hey there Michael. Rough day today?”

He mumbled something.

“Second time in a couple of months I've had
to give you a glass of water. Here you go.” He handed it over and
helped Michael clear the desert out of his throat. “Listen kiddo, I
know you were scared, and you had every right to be. But I want to
assure you everything is alright. Completely alright, okay?”

“Sure.”

Grandpa didn't wait for him to ask what
happened. “The school used a sleeping gas in the air ducts. And
yes, before you ask, they've planned for this. It's been on a lot
of minds since your friend Trent crashed the Spring Ball. Your
mother was in on the PTA meetings that decided it. They were ready
as soon as Mr. Groebels called them.”

“What happened to Jared? Did anybody get
hurt?”

Grandpa frowned. “There were a couple of
scratches, but nothing serious. Jared only hurt himself, I'm sorry
to say. Listen kiddo, people think that if they go Active all their
problems are just going to go away. That's not how it works.

“Being Active is a whole new set of problems
in and of itself. You don't just wish for a spaceship to fly away
and then not read the owner's manual on how to fly the thing,
right? You'd get yourself killed off in space, flying too close to
a supernova.”