Hero (6 page)

Dad picked at the grime underneath his fingernails for a second and then headed down the hallway to his room.

As soon as he left, I rushed over to the laptop and tried to turn it back on. Nothing. This was bad. Really bad. That picture would still be on it if a repairman turned it back on, and my life would be over. I picked up the laptop and shook it to see if I could hear anything. I heard some loose plastic bits rattling around inside the hard drive, like I was shaking a near-empty bottle of aspirin.

I set it on the bed and tried to remain calm. Maybe I could fix this. I took a deep breath and rubbed my hands over the smooth surface of the laptop and waited.

My hands didn't get hot, and I smacked them together a few times to see if I could ignite a twitch in one of my fingers. Maybe my powers extended to inanimate objects. I looked over at the electrical socket in the wall and thought about sticking my finger in it.

I tried whispering a prayer while I rubbed my hands over the screen.

"I booked us a court tomorrow, if you want to play—" Dad poked his head back in my room. "What are you doing?"

"Um . . ."I took my hands off the computer and rubbed them together. "Just praying my English paper gets an A."

Dad looked at me curiously, like he wanted to smile with me, but that something didn't add up. He walked over to my bed, reached down and grabbed the computer.

"Wait!"

Dad was surprised by the outburst. He folded the laptop shut and tucked it under his arm. He rubbed his eyes and thought about the right thing to say.

"Look, I know most of your friends have their own computer. As soon as I get my realtor's license, I'll be making enough to get you one." He took his thumb and pulled down the skin beneath my lower eyelid, a not-so-subtle gesture to see if I was on something. Then he mussed my hair and said, "For now we have to share."

I listened to his footsteps growing softer and softer as he walked down the hallway, down the stairs, until the screen door slammed shut behind him. I heard him rev up his old Camaro and pull out of the driveway, careful to avoid the cracked pavement at the foot of the driveway. He'd open the computer and see that picture, the gay superhero porn site, and understand everything all in one nauseating moment of clarity. I stared out the window at the full moon and watched it cast shadows that danced on the mulch in our backyard, like skeletons on a freshly dug grave. I knew I had to leave.

CHAPTER  THREE

I CHECKED THE CLOCK above the stove, and give or take ten minutes, I figured I had two and a half hours to pack and get a head start before Dad got back. For some odd reason, the first thing I put in my bag was a six-pack of canned juice and some protein bars. It wasn't like I was going camping, but I thought it would be a good idea to take some food anyway. Next, I found myself throwing a can opener in the bag. It seemed like something everyone should have.

I tried not to look at photo albums as I hurried past Dad's trophy case. There were more important things to bring, and I didn't have a ton of room for pictures. I grabbed a medium-weight jacket from the closet and climbed the stairs, three at a time.

In my room I grabbed the Swiss Army knife my dad gave me for Christmas. I stood there picking at a hangnail as I tried to think about what my life would be like once I left, where I'd live, where I'd work, how I'd finish school. I caught myself thinking about falling in love with someone who I hoped was out there right now thinking about the possibility of me, but I quickly banished the notion. It was that kind of thinking that landed me in this situation to begin with. Hope can ruin you.

I packed exactly seven clean pairs of socks and underwear. I wanted to take more so I wouldn't have to do as much laundry, but the bag was only so big and I needed to be able to sling it over my shoulder without it slowing me down. The hardest part was actually figuring out which clothes to take. I'd need something nice for a good job interview, and my sport coat and tie didn't fold up nicely in the bag. I folded the jacket seven different ways from Sunday before I just wadded it up beside my sweatpants in a corner of the bag. In the bathroom I threw my toothbrush in my dop kit and stopped at my reflection in the mirror. I grabbed some tweezers and plucked at a stray hair growing in the middle of my eyebrows. I'd never seen a hair there before, which could only mean there'd be more, so I tossed the tweezers in, too.

By the time the moon had drifted above the window's line of sight, I decided my food choices hadn't been wise. I could drink water for free anywhere and therefore should ditch the drinks and pack more food, maybe some canned goods, maybe some peanut butter.

I headed downstairs back to the kitchen, but stopped by the shelves with the photo albums. I reached up high and dragged one of the albums off the dusty top shelf.

I opened to a page of me at eleven months drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The tradition continued through my childhood. My dad used to cook out on the grill, when it began to get nice outside in late May, when the gardenia bush began to bloom. He'd come home from work, sometimes whistling a Johnny Cash song, and you'd never know he had any troubles while he dragged out the industrial-size sack of charcoal and filled up the grill, lighting it just so, because only amateurs used lighter fluid. Then we'd wait at least an hour to get the coals perfect, a radiating core of molten light in the middle, before we could actually put the burgers on. It drove Mom crazy.

Mom would pass the long wait by shooing away flies from the cheap meat patties and slicing onions and looking out on the horizon for something that never seemed to come. While he waited for the embers to light in that perfect configuration, Dad would enjoy a beer (or two) on the deck he'd built with his own two hands. And he'd ask yours truly, each time, to go inside and grab the beer he'd put in the freezer. And each time I'd shake it up as much as possible before I brought it out to him.

Sometimes I'd toss the can up in the air and spin it like a baton, sometimes I'd jump up and down with it, sometimes I'd roll it down the kitchen floor like I was bowling. I'd walk out onto the deck slowly, as if there was nothing to hide, and I could always tell he knew what I was up to. That was part of the ritual, part of the game. I'm sure he could read my smirk when he took the beer out of my tiny hands, but he played along anyway. Sometimes he'd hold it over the grill and pretend like he was going to explode it over my burger, sometimes he'd ask me to open it. Sometimes he'd chase me around the deck threatening to spray it in my direction, and sometimes he'd open it up and act surprised when the spray caught him in the eye. He was consistent about one thing, however: he always let me take a sip, safely out of Mom's line of vision, before he set the hot dogs on the grill.

I came across a picture my mom's sister had taken of us at a cookout where I'd accidentally given Mom the can of Dad's shaken beer. Aunt Mary Sue snapped the shot the instant Mom opened the beer, and the entire picture exploded with a foamy spray on top of elated, surprised faces. That had always been my mother's favorite picture, and I stared at a chocolate smudged thumbprint in the corner that proved it.

I leafed through the rest of the album and pulled down another one. This one had a series of shots Dad took on one of our frequent train-watching trips. Dad loved to follow trains, take pictures of the engines, wait at crossroads in deserted towns for some old, rarely seen engine to whirr past us. Mom would pack a picnic lunch, and we'd pile into the car and bounce along a deserted main street in some choked-out old town, with me crawling around the weeds near the tracks looking for June bugs and railroad spikes while Mom and Dad drank beer and munched deviled eggs until the train passed. By the time I was a teenager, those trips felt like punishment, but in the pictures we were nothing but broad smiles in desiccated towns. We laughed with unbridled joy whenever the trains finally whizzed past and sent the wind whipping through our hair.

I rubbed my finger over the picture of my mother at my kindergarten graduation. Time seemed to have faded it. My mother stood behind my father in the back row of the audience, and her image had become blurry. I remember how uncomfortable my mother was with having her picture taken. She must have fidgeted each time someone snapped the shot; that would explain the blur. I flipped through the rest of the pages and noticed that while the shots seemed clear, Mora's image in them had become increasingly faded. She'd been growing fainter and fainter by the year, and I was surprised I'd never noticed it before. By the time I saw the picture from my first-ever basketball game, you could barely see her at all sitting behind my father on the bleachers.

I checked my watch. I'd been stupid to look at old pictures. I should have been on the road long ago. It was a quarter of eleven, and I hadn't even figured out what I was going to do for money.

I flipped the album's pages to my mom's favorite shot—of the beer can exploding on us. I peeled back the cellophane so I could remove the picture and noticed a little strip of paper poking out from behind it. I stripped the photo off the sticky page, and there it was.

I couldn't believe what I saw.

I glanced around the room. Maybe there was a camera, maybe this was a practical joke. It had to be. But when I looked back down at the page, it was plain as day.

A note.

The edges of the paper were almost as dry and brittle as the picture. I tore off all the other photos, one by one, and discovered underneath each a hidden treasure of pictures, another set of photos I was never meant to see, until now.

I stared down at the note in my hands, my fingertips numb, and the words, written in my mother's perfect, deliberate cursive, burned in my mind:

To my son. Know yourself.

I tucked the stack of photos into my bag and ran out the door.

CHAPTER  FOUR

AS THE BUS PULLED OUT of the terminal, I remem¬bered I'd forgotten to drag the trash can to the curb for pickup tomorrow. That would be Dad's first clue I was gone. I'd man¬aged to say good-bye to the house, and I remembered thinking that I was forgetting something as I watched the bats dance in and out of the glow of streetlights. It was too late to worry about anything else but leaving now.

I settled into an empty seat in the back of the bus by the bathroom. The faded cushions smelled like an ashtray, and I leaned my head against the window and stared back at the terminal as we pulled on the highway. I reached down for my bag and pulled out the stack of pictures I'd swiped from the album, a secret history. I craned my head above the seat to make sure no one in the bus was looking back in my direction, and then I started leafing through the piles.

The first picture of my mother wasn't really a picture of her at all, but of her boot. It was an original black-and-white photo from a newspaper clipping, and there was a chubby, middle-aged woman with a bad perm dressed like a female wrestler in a Halloween mask, and what looked like cardboard, polka-dot wings hastily pinned to the back of her unitard. The chubby woman lay flat on the ground, knocked out, a single stylish boot pinning down her chest. She was wrapped in a lariat pulled taut into the air above her by an unseen force, like her assailant had been magically airbrushed out of the picture, except for the boot.

Inscribed on the picture was the following message:

Congratulations on nabbing your first villain. Keep up the good work! Yours in courage, Captain Victory.

I kept staring at the pictures in disbelief. I didn't blink once for at least an hour. My mother had been a hero. All these years, and I had no idea. The questions were just beginning to take shape in my head. Why had she hidden it from me? Did Dad know? Is this where my powers came from?

I flipped over the picture and found a newspaper article folded and taped to the back. The headline read, "Metro City Mystery Figure Foils Ladybug's Larceny!"

The next shot was taken when Mom was around my age. I'd never seen any pictures of her when she was a young woman, before she met my father. You know how women can be with their pictures. Most of them don't like to be reminded of how they looked thirty pounds ago.

But there was a specific reason I'd never seen these. Dad simply would never have allowed it. Not after what happened to him. Not after he'd laid down the law in his own house about superpowers.

There were more pictures of my mother, her body lithe and fit in a tight costume, in various victory poses with her own rogues' gallery of victims: The Ladybug, Miss Malevolence, Zorba the Meek, Morning Glory and her henchmen, the Pansies (no comment), and this chick called the Quarrel Queen, who had some sort of sonic scream device that poked out of her stom¬ach. God, what a bunch of losers. In those ridiculous outfits did they ever pose a real threat to anyone?

There were a series of group shots where Mom must have joined a C-list group of costumed heroes called C.R.I.M.E.B.U.S.T.E.R.S! Looked like she was teamed up with a guy who could shoot fire out of one hand and make ice cubes with the other. The entire group was young and tan, their bellies trim, held in effortlessly, and you could tell by their persistent smiles that they were always aware when the cameras were on them. There was a picture of the governor himself awarding them with medals of valor. The "Ones to Watch" article heralded Mom as one of a group of new up-and-coming heroes poised to take over where their golden age predecessors had left off.

There were also pictures of Mom in her civilian identity when she graduated from teachers college. She posed with a group of friends holding their diplomas and throwing their hats in the air. In the group, Mom was the only one looking at the camera, her graduation cap still on her head, a serene smile on her face, her lips slightly pursed, like she knew something they all didn't.

And then I saw how my parents had actually met. The banner above them read "LEAGUE TRYOUTS." I had no idea my mother ever got this close to the big time, but there she was up on the platform receiving her official probationary certificate from my father, Major Might. Mom looked elated at receiving official League-try out status; but what you could see in her eyes was the way she looked up at my father. Here she was, fresh out of teachers college, holding a small idea of wanting to fight for truth and justice with her bag of invisible tricks, and a moun¬tain-size crush on Dad, one of the most popular heroes of his time.