Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (6 page)

Still, the relentless questioning started to
bother Michael.

What was her last name? Sulzsko.

Where were her parents from? No idea, but
Charlotte had said something about 'out west', so Michael's only
ideas were Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles. Those were the only
three she could possibly come from in Michael's mind.

What did her mother do? She was a stay at
home mom, but also a painter.

A painter? Yep.

What sort of paintings did she do? The kind
that were flat, with paint on them. Really mother.

Mrs. Washington was like a jackhammer; she
could get to the bottom of anything. She eventually learned,
through her 'friends' that Mrs. Sulzsko exhibited her paintings in
one of the two galleries in town, Mimsy's Whimsy. She also had some
ceramics which, she learned and informed her husband with Michael
listening, were for burning incense.

Which made his father nod and say, “Ahh, one
of those.” Like an exotic plant.

“One of those is right,” Mrs. Washington
said. Like that exotic plant was probably also poisonous, and best
not even to look at it. “You mark me, there's going to be a drug
bust there soon enough.”

A drug bust? Michael's imagination went into
overdrive. Was there a drug lab under Charlotte's house, like the
radio station in that Stephen King book? Were there a dozen people
in white suits cooking chemicals down there in the basement?
Michael seriously doubted it. His mother had a pretty hefty
imagination though.

Which brought them to the present. His mother
knew about Charlotte, probably more than he did, and he knew she
knew they were friends now. She hadn't yet let him go over to
Charlotte's house for her own strange reasons, and while Michael
probably thought it was the drugs and the art, he wasn't sure. He
wondered, because she seemed to say the word 'art' with the same
sort of light sneer as she said 'drugs'.

Instead, Charlotte had come over several
times, mostly to listen to music and dance whenever she felt like
it. While his mother didn't exactly approve of such things, she
always put on a bright smile for Michael's only friend. She always
made cookies and served milk and asked Charlotte polite,
non-threatening questions that were, regardless, specially designed
to know the enemy.

Michael supposed his mother was in a tight
spot. Should she allow him to befriend the daughter of an 'artist'
and 'drug dealer' or should she forbid them from seeing each other,
and ruin Michael's only shot at a life outside his e-reader? He
knew, and she knew, and he knew she knew, that if she tried to stop
him from meeting and talking to Charlotte, she was going to fight a
losing battle. She couldn't watch him at school, though he
sometimes wondered about this. She could probably drive him to
school and pick him up every day, but that would just be nuts.
Surely she wouldn't go that far. Best to assume he still had some
privacy.

The whole situation came to a dizzying,
confusing conclusion when his mother piped up one night late in
March.

“Have you asked Charlotte to the Spring Ball
yet?”

He stared at her. She was kidding. She had to
be kidding.

“Don't look at me like that,” she
grinned.

“But...” he said. He was going to say 'but
you don't even like Charlotte' but thought better of it. Then he
congratulated himself on the brilliant insight.

“Oh go on,” she said. “You'll have fun. Once
the dance is over you don't have another chance at going. And
you'll only be in sixth grade once.”

With all the seventh graders going to be
there. Davey Rightman being the highest on Michael’s list of people
to avoid, and a few of his other jerks from Trent's old crew.
Though the last time he saw Davey, he was picking on a little fifth
grade kid. He seemed to have forgotten all about Michael.

On the other hand, only sixth and seventh
graders were allowed at the Spring Ball, so maybe Davey would focus
on Michael again, for the first time all year. And anyway, he
didn't have any intention of seeing all the people who thought he
was nuts.

“But I wasn't even going to go.” He also
didn't think Charlotte wanted to go, since all her musical tastes
were fifty to a hundred years old.

“Trust me,” she said, “I didn't go to a
couple of my school dances and I always wondered what the heck I
was thinking. I should have gone. I wish I had.”

His mother had once been young. It was one of
those facts that seemed to turn the world upside down to Michael.
There were a couple of others. First, that his teachers had lives.
Or ate food. Or went out of their sheltered monk hermitage homes
far, far away in deep mountain valleys, and did things normal
people did, like buy groceries or watch movies.

“Mom, I'm not going,” he said, and turned
back to the virtual book in his lap. He was in the middle of a
series of books about twins who discovered they had magic, and they
met this old, old guy named Nicholas Flamel. It was one of those
types of books that makes you exhausted. It was paced that quickly.
Anyway there was this big lizard thing, and he wanted to know how
the twins and Flamel (and this vampire/cat girl thing) were going
to kill it.

“You're asking her tomorrow. And that's
that.”

“Mo-om!” he said. “She's probably not gonna
go anyway!”

“I'll take your invisible book away,” she
warned. She couldn't even call it by its real name. Adults were so
stupid sometimes. Most times, actually.

“That's not fair! Because I don't want to go
to a dance?”

“Young man,” she said, “You don't realize it
yet, but you don't have a whole lot of time to have fun and be a
kid.”

“And dancing is kid stuff,” he said, rolling
his eyes at her. Dancing was the sort of thing you did if you
wanted to be a grownup. Never mind that he was twelve years old and
had at least six years of fun left, which would probably be
followed by plenty of fun while he went to university. And who
knew? Maybe in the murky depths of the future he might find
something he loved, and was good at, and had fun doing for his job.
Like his dad.

“Alright,” she said. “Hand over the glasses
and the thumb thingies.”

“Alright, I'll ask her! Gaggghhhh.” he
snarled, and flung himself into his room.

He wasn't sure what happened the next day,
when Charlotte said sure she'd go with him. On one hand, he was
excited, but he was also anxious about the whole thing. If there
was no date, there could be no expectations. He wasn't too worried
about the rest of the kids, but what if he did everything wrong? He
could make a fool of himself and ruin his entire friendly thing he
had with Charlotte. He could do a hundred ridiculously stupid
things, like dance, for one, and the whole school would decide to
laugh at him instead of being afraid of him. He didn't want to
admit that he was scared of a dance. Okay, so he was a little
worried about the rest of the kids.

But it seemed so far away. Three weeks was
practically half a lifetime for him.

And steadily, through English homework where
he had to read stupid stories and then read the author's mind, and
math homework of every even numbered problem (all the odd answers
were in the back) along with showing his work, the days marched on.
Finally, after school on Friday, his mother announced that they
were going to go shopping.

“Shopping?” he asked. “What for?”

“You need something to wear,” she said. When
he stared at her, she said. “At the Ball. You know, the Spring
Ball, the one this Friday? You know, Marcus Patterson Day’s on
Monday, no school.”

Monday off. It was Marcus Patterson day. The
dance was seven days away and he hadn't talked to Charlotte about
it since she’d agreed to go with him.

“Why do I need something special?” he asked.
“I could just go in this.”

He had on the same faded, ripped blue jeans
he always wore, and a Led Zepplin t-shirt Charlotte had given him
she found at a thrift shop.

“If you think I am letting you out of the
house in those rags when you are going to a dance, you need to get
your head examined.” Then she brightened. “Come on, it'll be
fun!”

It was actually a sort of torture, picking
out clothes. He would have been okay in an oversized t-shirt and a
pair of shorts, but his mother was really into it. She also had no
clue what to get for him. She wanted to pick out things with
collars, and pants that weren't even called pants, but slacks, and
shiny dress shoes, and he was horrified by the end of the shopping
trip. She'd won. When he was an adult, he would be able to win all
the battles.

Michael fought with himself that week, trying
not to think about the terror or the awkwardness, the fact that he
might royally embarrass himself. He even thought about trying to
create a time machine like in that series Time Warp Twins.

On Friday his mother had a flower for him. It
came in a plastic box and smelled nice and sweet.

“If you think I'm wearing that at the Ball,”
he said, “you're crazier than I thought.”

She sighed. “It's not for you. It's for
Charlotte.”

“Oh.” That made sense. “Then awesome! It's
great! Thanks mom.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “You're
welcome.”

By the time he was dressed and ready to go,
his mother was shouting out worried orders and fussing around
making the house look nice. It didn’t make any sense, since
Charlotte wasn’t coming over, but that’s what Susanna Washington
did when she was nervous. In true Mrs. Washington style, she was at
the front of the assault on the Sulzsko household, which involved
Michael picking Charlotte up and driving them to school.

“We're going to be late!” she said.

“But I've been ready for ten minutes,” he
said, confused.

“And what color socks do you have on?”

“Um...what? White.” Duh mom.

“White socks with slacks, did you leave your
head in one of your dresser drawers? March right back to your room
and pull on some dark colored socks.”

He went with a groan, because there was no
getting out of it and because there were so many rules he didn't
know and couldn't care less about.

But when he was all ready, and he passed by
the mirror in the hall, he had to stop and look at himself. It
couldn't be helped. He looked like something out of a kids'
clothing website, or one of those giant posters in the stores. He
looked so...respectable.

“You're so handsome!” his mother said, which
made him really detest these clothes. “Now let's move.”

Move they did, Michael thinking about dancing
onto Charlotte’s feet and getting punch on himself. Looking back on
this later, these worries seemed so silly.

“Now,” his mother said. “If she invites us
in, you are to be polite. You can call her mother ma'am and her
father sir. Speak when you're spoken to. Is that clear?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Don't get cheeky with me, young man.”

Impossible, he thought. You do what they ask
you to and this is what you get.

He'd never been to Charlotte's house, but it
wasn't as big or as nice as he thought it would be. Sure, it was
nice. None of the houses in town were eyesores. But this one had
been painted brown, and you could see where the paint hadn't been
scraped off before, because it was sort of reddish brown. The yard
hadn't been mowed in a while, and there was a crack in one of the
windows that had been taped over with silver duct tape. Toys
littered the yard, from overturned tricycles to a thing called a
big wheel, which was missing one back wheel.

“Hm,” his mother said. Clearly this was just
what she'd expected to find.

“Mom,” Michael said quietly. He was beginning
to feel the same anger come on when Trent had put his foot
down.

“Hm?”

“If you're not going to be nice to Charlotte,
we can walk to school.”

She finally turned away from the house and
looked at him, the shock plain on her face. He immediately felt
guilty, and a bit ashamed, but he wasn't going to let his mother
ruin this for him. It was her idea, after all.

She just got out without a word to him. They
went up to the front door. It wasn't enough to worry about how
Charlotte was going to react to him, and if the night was going to
go well, now he had to worry about his mother too. He was twelve
years old, for Pete's sake.

All his worries flew right out of his head
when Charlotte opened the door though. She was beautiful.

“Oh my,” his mother said.

He opened his mouth, but all that came out
was, “Aaaahhhhh.”

“You look wonderful, Charlotte,” his mother
said for him.

“Yeah, really...um, really nice.”

“Thanks,” she said. The smile she answered
with was even better than anything she could have said. Michael
felt something painful dig into his chest.

She had curled her hair and piled some of it
up around her head. Some sort of makeup effect made her gray eyes
twinkle, and she definitely had lipstick on. The dress was some
sort of thin, sheer fabric similar to the tie-dyed shirts she wore,
which started out purple and blue on the bottom, but graduated into
a rainbow as it came up. It was sleeveless, but she had something
draped over her shoulders, something that looked like it might have
once been a sweater, but had been slashed apart. Still, the way the
fringes fell on her arms and the low-cut neck of the dress made him
swallow to unclog his throat. She'd put a necklace on too, a little
sparkling heart that peeked out from beneath the shoulder wrap as
she turned to call to her mother.

“Mom, it's Michael and his mom!” she
said.

Charlotte's mom appeared with a small child
in each beefy arm. She was a solidly built woman with long rust
colored hair and faint smudges of paint on every part of her body.
One of the children was fast asleep, and the other was bawling at
the top of his lungs.