Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (4 page)

The conclusion was that Trent had gone over
to the Marcus Patterson wing, which wasn't actually a wing. It was
a squarish building, dirty and ominous, a football field away from
the LADCEMS. As far as he knew, it was a prison and the eighth
graders never had any sort of break at all. They just vanished.

The nice scars on his hand hadn't
disappeared. He hadn't imagined the whole thing. They were puckered
craters, lighter than the skin on the rest of his hand. There were
a couple of others on his palm, from where the glass had cut into
him. As the weeks went by, he liked to pretend that they were
bothering him, and stretch his hand out while hissing loudly.
Everybody got the message.

Michael’s former friends from grades one
through four stayed gone. So what if they’d had good times in
grades one through four. Good riddance, Michael thought. He was
better served traveling to some far distant land, where people
landed on solid clouds and met pirates who collected lightning.
These were his friends. They didn't demand anything of him, and he
controlled when they came and went.

He spent the first semester studying hard,
because there wasn't anything else to do and because his mother
demanded nothing less than perfection. Once, at the beginning of
the first semester, his science teacher had told Susanna that her
son seemed 'vacant' in class, which resulted in lessons on how to
focus, posture practice, and just how often he needed to raise his
hand in class. When his mother was finished with him, he was a
model student. He didn't have a choice, really. His mother
confiscated any books in his room until his homework was finished,
along with the computer, the video games, and any toys he still
hadn't sold at garage sales.

If he hadn't been public enemy number one
with his peers, Michael might have been picked on for getting
straight A's all through sixth grade.

He spent a routine Christmas break, totally
exploding when he got a new e-reader from his mother. This was the
new type with the glasses to project the illusion of a book into
your hands. You wore these little battery powered things on your
thumbs to turn the pages, and it was literally the coolest thing in
the whole wide world. Lily went nuts when he showed her.

“You're totally lucky,” she told him. “You
should tell your parents how much this means to you.”

Yeah, he'd get right on that, just as soon as
he morphed into a girl and put unicorn posters up all over his
walls.

So she started to put e-books onto the
page-turner, which also contained the miniature hard drive.
Miniature wasn't meant to imply that it had a low capacity. His
mother told him it would store more than 5,000 books, as long as
they weren't in color or had a ton of pages each.

He had paid off the e-reader a long time
back, with the money from his paper route. If he hadn't, he would
have given the thing to Lily instead.

His dreams were now being invaded by the
young, pretty librarian. He couldn't really understand why, either.
One minute, he'd be having a perfectly normal dream about fighting
a ringwraith alongside his faithful daemon, a brilliant orange
tiger. The next minute, Lily was chained up and screaming for him
to come save her before the kraken devoured her. And the thing is,
he would, every time. He ran up the steps carved into the mountain,
slaying evil troops with skull masks until he got to her, and she
would breathlessly thank him.

He kept waking up feeling confused and
ashamed and funny at the same time.

The second important thing happened when
Christmas was over.

After the break, he found a new face in his
classes. She was definitely the strangest girl he had ever seen.
She walked in dressed in, get this, in a suit much too big for her.
Somewhere under the pants were gleaming leather loafers. She was
very pale, but didn't look unhealthy. Her thin, sharp face was set
with searching eyes the color of overcast clouds and blonde hair
done up in a loose ponytail. The girls started snickering just as
soon as she walked in the door, and the boys were nudging each
other, eyes wide. Michael didn't much care either way, since none
of the teachers had figured out he was reading his books with his
special glasses on. He was in the middle of the last book of the
Lord of the Rings, and it was shaping up to be way better than the
movie. The first movie had been pretty awesome, and pretty close,
and by now Michael was tracking all the huge changes the filmmakers
had made.

“So she's weird,” he muttered. “Big
deal.”

Mr. Shepherd called for silence, and he
introduced the new girl to the class. Michael wasn't listening.
Sauron's Mouth was coming out of the massive gates to inform
Aragorn they all had a one way ticket to the worm farm.

“Mr. Washington?”

Maybe it was twenty other pairs of eyes on
him that caused him to look up. The pages of the book were still
there in front of his face, only now the rest of the class was too,
hazy and indistinct just beyond the words.

Shepherd was looking at him impatiently.
“Welcome back to the class. People, I know you've just been away
for ten days, but we're going to be studying starting today, and
you're going to have homework starting today. And don't groan like
that either. You're not in third grade anymore. Next year you'll be
getting ready to go to Patterson, and after that is high school.
It's going to come quicker than any of us would like. Now, Michael,
Charlotte is going to be stuck to you all day. You show her around,
you help her get to her classes.”

“Yes sir,” he said, and shut the e-reader off
angrily.

“I appreciate it very much, Mr. Washington.
Now everybody, we've got a lot to learn about the Civil War. It's
not just people shooting cannons at each other and dead bodies.
Open up your books to page three fifty-six.”

The bizarre girl came over and got one of the
empty seats near Michael. She gave him a brief smile, but he didn't
return it. Shepherd was doing this because he knew Michael didn't
have any friends. Teachers were always getting you to do things you
didn't want to do. Things that were good for you. Ugh.

When the class ended, and Shepherd had lumped
a healthy scoop of homework on top of his obligation to help this
Charlotte girl, he packed up and gave her a flat, dead glare. She
was struggling to pick up a backpack he hadn't noticed before, and
her enormous sleeves were getting in the way. He gave her another
snort.

The backpack was hardly visible under a
wriggling mass of patches and buttons and frilly things hanging off
it. You couldn't tell what color the backpack had been. There were
tie-dyed peace signs and a funny smiley face with a drop of red on
it, either ketchup or blood. There were others, like 'Save the
whales' and 'Save the rainforest', and a bunch of other things that
needed saving. Several were just pictures, or strange sayings he
couldn't read, because they were half-covered by other buttons. The
'Make Love, Not War' was the only good one, because it had somebody
riding a missile on it.

“Come on,” he said quietly, but
forcefully.

“Alright, hang on...” she was having all
sorts of trouble.

He zipped the bag up for her, and held it out
so she could adjust her sleeves enough to receive it. She thanked
him, and they got going.

“Where's your class?” he asked.

“Um...” she fumbled about again. Seriously,
half the break time was going to be gone already, and he wanted to
pay a visit to the drinking fountain. Plus he wasn't going to be
able to get in a minute or two of reading.

“Seriously,” he sighed. “What's up with the
suit?”

“Oh, you like it?” she brightened. Not
really, he thought. He was never late. She was going to make him
late.

He shrugged instead of replying.

“It's a zoot suit,” she said. When he stared
at her, she went on. “It's a 1940's thing. They wore them in big
bands for a few years. It was really the style...though my dad said
my great-grandpa hated the things. People in California had zoot
suit riots, when World War II was going on. It was a pretty huge
thing back then, because we were in a war, you know, and there was
rationing. But there were black market suit makers, even though the
government told people to cut back on how much fabric was in
them.”

Holy mackerel, she was serious. She was
really into this, but unfortunately she couldn't keep on. The bell
had rung. She finally dug her schedule out of one of the pockets,
and he got her pointed in the right direction. He was annoyed and
grumpy by the time he got to his own class, but promised he would
find her at the door and take her up to the third floor for her
next class.

He couldn't shake the image of Charlotte for
the rest of the day. He kept picking her up and taking her to her
classrooms, and she kept up a running discussion of the 1940's as
she did. She was a library of useless ancient history, and he
wondered just what had made her so crazy.

It wasn't until the end of the day that he
realized that Charlotte was just like him, only not as far along
yet. There wouldn't be anybody to take her lunch money, but he
watched everybody else, especially the girls, eye her with open
disgust. There were random eye rolls, muttering, and all sorts of
mean-spirited giggling going on. If she wore outfits like this all
the time, she was in for a world of trouble. He figured she might
as well get an e-reader and kiss the idea of having friends
goodbye.

And there wasn't anything about her he
disliked, per se. She was...pretty, he guessed, and vibrant, like
there were more colors around her than other people. And she was
not interested at all in what other people thought of her. That was
pretty awesome.

The teachers and adults were always telling
you that. Peer pressure sucks. Don't fall for it. You don't have to
be like everybody else. Let your inner beauty shine through. You
can't judge a book by its cover.

Yeah, well none of them knew what style was.
Teachers didn't flinch and sulk when you told them their shoes
probably cost a buck fifty or were traded off a bum for a
hamburger. Teachers did not understand that more than half of
school was projecting the right you, the you everybody else wanted
and expected to see.

The rest of them, like Cara MacCullin and
Tenley Davis and their little clique, could disassemble people
without even stopping as they walked through the halls. Back in
September, Tenley had said something horrible about a kid named
Jeremy, and he still hadn't recovered from it. Now he was like a
cockroach, scurrying around. There were still half hearted snickers
at Jeremy, and his nickname was 'Family Jewels' for some reason.
Michael didn't know and didn't care. He had a social force
field.

Charlotte wouldn't last long. Girls needed
friends. Michael didn't know many, but he knew that girls didn't go
it alone in the world of elementary/middle school at LADCEMS. Maybe
the cliques ate the loners, like schools of piranhas swarming an
injured cow.

“Hey Michael,” Charlotte said, as he met her
again. “You don't have to meet me here, you know. It's time to go
home. I know where my locker is.”

“Yeah,” he said. Why was he here? “Listen,
where do you live?”

“Over on Bellemont,” she told him.

“That's just two blocks from my house,” he
said. “Do you want to walk with me?”

“Why don't you...your friends...” she
stopped, appeared to think, and brightened up with a dazzling
smile. “I'd love to walk home with you.”

“Cool,” he said. Their lockers weren't far
away from each other. He finished slopping his books and papers
inside ages before she even had her backpack open. He fought
through the press of middle schoolers and shorter fourth and fifth
graders who had art or band as their last class.

By the time she was finished, the halls were
mostly empty. The few suck ups and teachers' fans were stuck like
leeches to their favorites, and the hardcore band nerds were just
starting up their practice for the day.

“Usually I just take my bike,” he said when
she was finished packing the books she needed. He saw the confusion
on her face and went on. “But, yeah, I'll...you know, walk it.”

“Alright.”

She started to explain about the zoot suits
again, and about the big band music that came in the fifties.
Michael was confused for a second, because he'd been born in the
fifties, until he realized she was talking about a
hundred years
ago
. Yikes, who was this girl?

“They'd usually have like ten or twenty
people on stage, and people were dancing on TV all the time. They
had swing shows, and sock hops. Dizzy Gillespie, it was like...wow.
I'll play you some sometime if you want. I've got some of the later
stuff, when it started to be influenced by South America, like
Brazilian music. There's this one by Gil Evans, it's like...you've
never heard anything like it. Smooth and fun, it really bubbles.
It's like your own private waterfall. I tell you what, Michael, it
was a pretty kickin' time.”

Kickin. Right.

“So then in the nineties there was a mini Big
Band revival. Squirrel Nut Zippers. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Mighty
Might Bosstones.”

He nodded and made a sound to show her he was
still there. Just where did this girl come from, with her music
from the twentieth century?

Early January was a crunching, hard-packed
misery. It felt like it would be dark in an hour, and it was only
three o'clock. Michael couldn't figure out why he had wanted to
walk home with Charlotte for a while, and they walked in silence.
He snuck looks at her, at the massive parka that was actually
draped over he schoolbag as well, at the wisps of blonde hair
escaping out around the fur-lined hood. Then he looked at the tight
ankles on her suit pants, and the way they billowed in the stiff
winter winds, and he remembered.