Hero (24 page)

"Your dad was the only hero who knew what it was like to grow up in an orphanage. He knew what it felt like, not being wanted."

I tossed an empty pickle jar into the bin. "I hadn't realized ..."

Golden Boy listened to the clank of the jar as it landed and knocked around glass bottles and metal cans. "They could never figure out what race I was. The black people didn't want me because they thought I might be Puerto Rican or something. The Latinos didn't want me because they thought I might be Middle Eastern. And the whites didn't want a question mark." His eyes avoided mine. "My nickname was Mutt"

I didn't know what to say to that.

"Your dad made it out, and he didn't even have a superpower." Golden Boy started gathering the bottles that had rolled down the driveway to the curb.

"So yeah," he said as he threw the cans in the bin, "the scrapbook's mine."

I felt lousy for jumping to conclusions. I felt lousy for taking so much for granted.

"What about everything that happened to my dad later?"

"I don't know what really happened that day. I wasn't there, were you?"

And that was the end of the conversation. We sealed the cover on the recycling bin tightly and wheeled it over to the curb by the trash bags. I guess he had a good point. I'd never considered the possibility that there were people who took my father's side.

"I don't care what anyone says." Golden Boy wiped his hands on the side of his pants. "He's still a hero to me."

Then he sat down on the curb. I joined him.

We watched the ants run around rivulets of dirt in the gutter.

"You know, the reason I'm your team leader is because you got me demoted."

I looked up at him, surprised.

"When we rescued that bus full of people, I should have been more focused on helping the injured. I didn't even notice that woman had been hit at first. When you have superspeed and superreaction-time, you have to look for these things. You're held to a different standard." He paused. "You wouldn't know anything about that kind of responsibility yet."

When he spoke, the muscles in his jaw moved in straight, sturdy lines. Out of all the tryout candidates, Golden Boy worked the hardest to maintain perfect physical condition. He took all parts of the job seriously. Monitor duty. Post-training cleanups. Even the public service announcements about preventing forest fires and obeying the speed limit. Conventionally handsome like a soap star, nothing objectionable, an even smile, narrow eyes, a strong shock of curly black hair on his head, and that beautiful olive, golden skin.

"We have to do better than everyone else, you know. It's not enough to be good. We can't afford to make any mistakes in this business. Ever."

That was true. Dad was living proof.

"I'll be back at tryouts tomorrow," I said. "Thanks for getting my dad to let me do it." It was really nice of him. I thought about asking him if he wanted some pizza or a beer or something.

"If it had been up to me alone," Golden Boy said, "I would have kicked your ass off the team myself. But the rest of them wanted you back, and a good leader keeps his team happy." He looked at his watch, pulled his golden mask up, and stood to leave. "I need to go, you've already kept me too long. Can I offer you a friendly piece of advice?"

I had the feeling he was going to give me the advice whether I wanted it or not. I wasn't sure it was going to be friendly, either.

"All I know is," he said, "if I had a father, I'd show him a little respect."

Ouch.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I SHOWED UP AT the rec center early in the morning, like I'd been doing every day, to train in the boxing/martial arts room, lift some weights, and run the one-on-one game with Goran. He didn't show up in the martial arts room, so I trained with the punching bag alone for about half an hour. Then I moved on to the weight room, and there were a few meatheads with tiger-striped pants on, but no Goran. Finally, I headed to the basketball court thinking I'd do some wind sprints to make up for the basketball I'd missed. Maybe he was sick. I wondered who took care of him when he was under the weather.

I heard the ball bouncing against the wooden floor of the gymnasium, and what I saw inside stopped me in my tracks. Goran was there, dribbling the ball at the top of the key, making a circular path with the ball inside and around his legs while he decided what to do. I'd seen him do this a thousand times and I still couldn't read whether he was going to drive straight to the basket, right or left, or pull back for a jumper. Usually, I was up in his face, trying to make him think I could read him, and that I knew exactly where he was going and exactly how I was going to stop him.

But instead of my hand in his face, it was that little shit-head's, the Gary Coleman look-alike.

Goran dribbled the ball, but his posture stiffened, like he was suddenly aware I was standing in the doorway, like he could hear me breathing. The Gary Coleman look-alike didn't notice me at first. He was too busy trying to read Goran's moves. His face was scrunched up in frustration, the bratty kind of look a kid gets when his mom won't buy him the candy bar in the checkout line and he's about to throw a tantrum. My guess was Goran must have been beating him badly, not holding back, and this guy didn't know what had hit him.

The ball bounced in a perfectly even cadence. It's rhythm lulled me, hypnotized me, made it hard to complete a thought. It made it hard for me to think of any reasonable explanation why he'd betray me like this, play with this idiot instead of me. And then it dawned on me.

He'd been waiting for me to see this.

He'd done it on purpose. To hurt me.

The Gary Coleman look-alike noticed me, out of the side of his eye at first. Then he did a double take, and a spark of recognition lit up his face.

Just then, Goran turned around, slowly, deliberately, and leveled his stare at me. Without taking his eyes off me, he jumped into the air, smooth and strong, and shot the ball from three-point range. As the ball soared, the Gary Coleman look-alike opened his mouth and began to say, pointing at me, "Hey, there's the gay g—"

The ball sailed perfectly through the center of the basket, and the sound of the swish drowned him out.

I slammed the door shut as hard as I could. Goran watched me through the small square window in the middle of the door, his stare perfectly fixed, unmoving. His face reminded me of the first time I met him, when I thought he was going to hit me. I tore myself away and pushed off from the rusty metal bars of the door. I felt the concrete walls of the hallway close in on me, the fluorescent lights beat down hard, like I was a specimen under a magnifying glass. I ran out of that place and never looked back.

Later that day I called in to the Student Life Center to tell them I wouldn't be coming back to tutor because my family was moving to another town.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

DAD DIDN'T COME HOME that night, so I was alone when I got the call. I had slipped into his bedroom and crept over to the closet to take his ruined costume out. I'd planned on bringing it to the cleaners. I'd made a few phone calls and found a place that specialized in fabric repair for old military outfits, but they were very expensive. After paying to get the computer out of the shop, this would drain my savings, and I knew I would have to find a way to fit in another part-time job on the weekends. But it was worth it. You can't put a price on your father's dignity.

I'd just grabbed his costume and looked out the window to make sure he wasn't driving up the street when the phone rang. I jumped.

"Hello?"

"Thorn, it's me," Golden Boy said. "Hold on for second."

I could hear the urgency in his voice, and it rattled me.

"Why, what is it?"

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and someone said, out of breath, "Thorn—"

"Holy—!" I wheeled around and saw Kevin standing there. I was so scared I dropped Dad's costume on the floor. I almost dropped a load in my pants, too.

"Don't do that! You scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry," Kevin said.

I reached down and picked up Dad's costume and tried to hide it behind my back.

"What's that?" Kevin pointed at the dry cleaning bag.

"Nothing." I stuffed it back in the closet before he had a chance to say anything more about it.

"Justice called an emergency meeting, all members, reserve and probationary, too."

"Why?"

"There's been a murder."

They'd found King of the Sea floating lifeless, decaying, his scales sloughing off one by one in the harbor, next to the planetarium. Two girls had been working on a high school science project on the deleterious effects of the nearby power plant on the life in the water. They'd hoped for a major expose, maybe even an award at the state science fair or a spot on the local news, something to make them a shoo-in on all their college applications. They found a lot more than they'd bargained for.

His gills had been sliced, and the coroner said that he'd been cognizant, immobile, and in immeasurable pain. What was more disturbing was that his ganglia had been severed in just the right place to paralyze him.

This was troubling because his murderer had placed his school of sea nymphs and his mate, a mermaid, on the side of the shore; King of the Sea had been forced to witness as they helplessly flipped and flailed just a few feet away from the precious water that would have allowed them to live. His only son, a sea horse, had been turned inside out by the pouch. They were cruel deaths, even by supervillain standards.

Ruth stirred some nondairy creamer into her Styrofoam cup and said hello to me without looking up. I sat between her and Scarlett, who was her typical warm, loving self. She sneered the second Golden Boy and I appeared, rolled her eyes, and looked the other way. I thought about what Ruth had said to me about how I treated her, and I still couldn't make sense of it.

I said hi back to Ruth, and then Kevin nudged me to lean in so he could whisper something to me; but Scarlett shushed us before he could say anything.

"Shut up, they're about to begin," she said. "Show some fucking respect."

I'm pretty certain I wasn't showing any disrespect, and I wanted to tell her so; but I saw Ruth shoot me a look, and I just swallowed my comment and tried to pretend I wasn't stewing. Justice descended from the air and hovered behind the podium. I looked around the room; I'd never seen such an assembly of heroes in my life. There had to be every living superhero, every champion who'd ever had any sort of association with the League. I recognized a few old faces from Mom's secret pictures. Mostly it was the costumes I recognized, not the faces. The faces and bodies looked like someone had left them in the microwave too long so that they'd melted at the jowls, waistline, and ass.

Justice held up his hands and the crowd grew silent. He looked weary, his tone was solemn.

"As I'm sure you all know by now, a hero has fallen." He took a second to let the gravity of his statement sink in. "He was one of our greatest champions." He pinched the narrow bridge of his nose between his eyes. "And he was our friend." The Aqua-teens and the Nereids wept openly in the front row.

"We will of course host the appropriate memorial services; everyone will have time to pay due respect." His solemn eyes narrowed.

"But there's another reason you're here tonight." He took a long breath. "We have reason to believe this may not remain an isolated incident."

Ruth looked over at me like she knew what Justice was going to say next and was sorry for it. Golden Boy leaned forward in his chair. Even Scarlett was engaged, fixed on his next words. Justice picked a spot in the crowd, probably the leg of a chair or the sparkle off someone's cape, and stared at it to avoid looking anyone in the eye.

"Unless we act now, find who did this, there will be more." He hovered slightly above the floor.

"Friends and colleagues, someone may be killing the heroes."

Our patrol began shortly after midnight. Justice's plan involved the entire League and its affiliates. We were to apprehend each and every supervillain in existence and bring them in for interrogation. Justice suspected that one of them had snapped—a death as cruel as King of the Sea's could only be the result of a supervillain with a major grudge to settle. Some suggested maybe it was the work of a group of supervillains who had banded together. I heard a few of the old-timers complain that in their day there would have been no meeting, no assignments, no teams or plans. Very simply, the super-villains would have started disappearing, maybe in concrete blocks at the bottom of the ocean, maybe in a black hole, and no one would be the wiser. Vengeance wasn't the kind of thing you announced.

I thought these were awfully aggressive tactics, atypical for the League. When I said something about it later in our team meeting, Golden Boy cut me off and told me it wasn't my position to question the League's authority. But if I wanted to be the sole person to go tell them their plan was bad, he had said, "Be my guest. Maybe they'll tell you to go find your own team, and you can come up with your own plan."

So assignments had been handed out to all groups, and our little team of neophyte heroes had been given the task of staking out a ramshackle building on the other side of the river, where three villains were purported to reside: Transvision Vamp, Snaggletooth, and Ssnake. Golden Boy explained that we'd been assigned these three because, as a result of my previous run-in with them on the bus, I'd be able to identify them quickly, even in their civilian identities.

"I bet they gave us loser-patrol because 'Mr. Sensitive' over there can't handle the big guys." Miss Scarlett crossed her legs and sat sidesaddle atop a streetlight across from the building. She clipped her fingernails.

"Ow." A pinky nail caught Typhoid Larry in the eye.

Scarlett had been calling me "Mr. Sensitive" ever since I got stuck in the burn unit at the hospital while she and the rest of the gang were fighting the Wrecking Balls. It would have been fine as a nickname from a teammate on your basketball team, typical ribbing from someone who counted on you for at least twenty points a game. But out of Scarlett's mouth, the name dripped like venom, with a slow, deliberate, effeminate drag on the S's.