Sidekicked (21 page)

I nod.

The officer stands. We all stand. He says something about insurance and paperwork and coming by tomorrow. My parents show him out. After he leaves, my mother gives me another smothering hug.

“Why'd they have to smash the TV?” Dad says, surveying the damage, holding a piece of glass to the light.

“The important thing is that it's over and we are all safe,” Mom says.

“Yeah, until next time,” Dad says.

My mother scowls at him. “Richard. Stop. You're going to scare your son.”

Dad moves in and wraps his skinny little arms around both of us. “Sorry,” he says. “You're right. It's fine. We won't ever let anything happen to you.” They both squeeze, and I feel like I can hardly breathe.

By the time we get the house mostly back in order and sit down to an unenthusiastic dinner of leftovers, it's ten o'clock. My parents barely touch their food, and they are reluctant to send me upstairs, just as I suspected, insisting that I keep my door open halfway, even though the knob is still busted off and it won't close anyways.

I finally collapse onto my bed and stare up at the ceiling, replaying the day in my head from start to finish. I know I should only be thinking about the Jack of Clubs standing over me, ready to clobber my brains out, about Gavin and Eric nursing their wounds, or about their two missing Supers, but it's the two and half seconds with Jenna that I can't get out of my mind.

What if she really is in trouble?

What if she and the Fox are the next targets?

What if she never kisses me again?

I try calling again. The Jack of Clubs took my bag of gadgets with him, but at least that means my phone works. I get her voice mail and leave another message. This one is short and pathetic.

Finally, at midnight, she calls me back.

“About time,” I say. I mean it to sound playful, but instead I sound like a father waiting by the door after curfew.

“Hi,” she says. She sounds exhausted. Even more than me.

“Where've you been? I tried to call.”

“I know. I got your messages. All ten of them.”

I really thought there were only seven or so. I must have lost track.

“I was a little concerned,” I say.

“I figured. I was out with the Fox,” she says. “We spent half the night looking for those guys.”

“Did you . . .?”

“No, nothing,” Jenna says. “I heard what happened, though. Terrible news about Cryos and Hotshot. The Fox is sure they've been kidnapped. She's determined to find them. What about you?” she adds, her voice softening. “You okay?”

I'm not okay. Not exactly. But I'm not sure how to tell her what's wrong with me. “I'm alive,” I say finally. “Mr. Masters got to me just in time. He has a knack for that sort of thing.”

“Mr. Masters,” she says. She sounds disappointed. As if she expected something else.

“He said that maybe you . . . because of the Fox . . .”

“That I was in trouble?” Jenna finishes. “You don't have to worry about me, Drew. I'm fine. I just wish I could have been there. You have no idea how worried I was,” she adds.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Would you say you were worried
sick
?” I ask.

“I almost blew chunks,” she says.

“That's really sweet.”

There's a pause. I can hear my father snoring two rooms away. And Mrs. Polanski snoring next door. And sirens a few miles away. I've gotten really good at picking out sirens.

“Listen, Jenna, about today—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.

“Actually, I wanted to ask you about this Saturday,” she says. “I know it's probably not the best time, but there's this charity benefit on Saturday. You know, one of those fancy dress-up things. Kyla's asked me to be there, you know, to help keep an eye on things. It's a lot to ask.”

She waits.

“You want me to come keep an eye on you?” I ask.

“Or the other way round,” she says.

And this is how the best and worst day of my life ends. With me being asked out on a date by the girl who kissed me for two and a half seconds.

“So she can babysit me.”

So will you come?

She knows the answer before she even asks. Even with everything that's happened today, maybe
because
of everything that's happened.

“What do I wear?” I ask.

“A suit, if you have one,” she says. “But leave the belt at home.”

T
hey have their own trading cards, you know. Supers, I mean. They come in packs of five. Just like baseball players. The first one ever printed was of Captain Marvelous, and they only released a hundred of them. Last I checked, it was going for two thousand bucks on eBay.

There's none of me, of course, though I won't lie and say that I haven't already sketched out what it might look like. I've got a better costume. Midnight blue—that kind that's nearly black—made out of heat-resistant, Kevlar-reinforced mesh, of course, sporting a big red S right there on my chest. I've still got my utility belt, and boots instead of sneakers, and my hair is artistically windswept. I'm posing in a kind of ninja-tiger combat crouch, and my nose is in the air, all feral-like. As if I'm tracking someone. You flip it over and see my stats.

THE SENSATIONALIST

Affiliation: H.E.R.O.

Speed: 2

Agility: 2

Strength: 2

Power: 2

Resistance: 2

This is all out of ten, of course. And that's being generous.

But Perception? That one's off the flippin' charts. A 10 easy.

The numbers on these cards are all bogus anyway. Contrived by the marketing department of the company that makes them. It's all subjective. The only way to know which Super is the strongest is to wait and see who's still standing at the end.

I have a copy of the Titan's card from ten years ago, when he was just taking over as the leader of the Legion of Justice. It's one of those cool 3D-effect jobbies where every time you tilt it, the Titan throws a punch at you. The numbers on the back are inflated a little. Mostly nines and tens across the board. But he was in his prime then. The head of one of the most celebrated superhero teams in the world. Citizens' darling and the scourge of villains everywhere. He deserved a little grade inflation.

I think about what the card would be now. A picture of him straddling his stool. And every time you shift the card, he takes another drink.

The Titan. Speed: Zero. Perception: Highly impaired. Resistance to alcohol: Negligible.

I stopped collecting the cards about a year ago. Mike's got one of the Fox. He showed it to me a few weeks ago. Much the same as the Titan's. All nines and tens. The only difference is that next to the word
Affiliation
, the Fox's card reads
None
. There is no Legion of Justice. It seems like there are very few teams left anymore. Everyone's got their own agenda. Everyone's out for their own glory.

I wonder if that will happen to us, to H.E.R.O., once we all graduate from the program. Will we just go our separate ways? Just forget about each other? Will we send each other postcards showing us punching the stuffing out of some villain at the top of an erupting volcano with the caption “Wish you were here”?

Assuming we make it through the program, of course.

Assuming we even make it to next week.

I
t's Saturday, and everybody's mowing their lawn. I can hear the symphony of small combustion engines whining and rattling in unison up and down the neighborhood. I can smell the fresh-cut grass, probably the only good thing that comes out of lawn-mowing Saturday. Somewhere, somebody runs over a rubber ball. I can hear the
thwap thwap thwap
as it's shredded to pieces, the first casualty of the day.

It's Saturday, and that means my mother is cleaning. She's still finding pieces of glass in the carpet, even three days later. She still jumps whenever anyone knocks on the door, even though it has two brand-new locks and an eight-hundred-dollar alarm system attached to it. “You can't let fear run your life,” she tells my father. And then she checks to make sure the doors are all dead bolted.

It's Saturday, and my suit is hanging on the door, waiting for me. The tie my father helped me pick out is burgundy. My father owns forty-two ties. He's an accountant, and nobody ever knows what to get him for his birthday. I practice tying the knot that he taught me and notice my hands are shaking.

It's been that kind of week.

Since Wednesday, everyone's been on a tightrope. All of H.E.R.O., of course. Eric and Gavin, who do their best to mask their injuries and check their backpacks for playing cards after every period. The lights flicker whenever someone bangs a locker anywhere near Mike in the hall. Even Jenna—normally so composed, so in control—seems to be constantly looking over her shoulder. And every time I try to talk to her, she finds an excuse to cut our conversation short.

But it's not just us. The students at Highview fill the halls with murmurs instead of shouts. The teachers look out the window constantly, as if they expect one of the Suits to come busting through and take the school hostage. Officer Jenson keeps one hand on his Taser as he walks the school grounds. Even the principal reminds us to be careful walking home from school in the afternoon.

The mayor's been on the news twice in two days, insisting that everyone stay calm, that the authorities have the situation under control, that we should continue to have faith in the city's champions even though most of them are missing or worse. There's still the Fox. And if anyone can find the Dealer and stop him, it's her. Jenna says the same thing. The Fox has a plan, though sometimes I'm not sure even Jenna's convinced.

But none of us are as wigged out as Mr. Masters, who came to H.E.R.O. on Friday pizza-less again and still with no news regarding our missing Supers. He looked like a zombie, ambling slowly to the front of the room to give us the empty update. He was making calls. Trying to summon reinforcements, but to no avail. Lady Dynamo. Ultimatum. Black Scorpion. They were scattered all over the globe. They all had their own villains to beat, their own plots to uncover. Nikki's Super, Miss Mindminer, was still off the grid, deep undercover in the Chinese mafia.

Then he told us about the Rocket.

Taken from his underground bunker sometime yesterday. Listed as MIA, just like the others. Mr. Masters had gone to check on him after failing to make contact. There were signs of a brief struggle. Broken glass. Holes in the walls. Deep gouges in the floor. It looked, he said, like the Jack of Spades's work. Just as disturbing—Mr. Masters said he had no idea how the Suits had found the Rocket's secret hideout. Like our identities and who we served, that information was supposed to be classified.

I looked at Mike, who sat in his seat, stone-faced, except there was a burning smell coming from the armrests where his hands were clenched. His Super might have broken his arm in eight places, but that didn't mean Mike had stopped caring.

Mr. Masters rubbed his polished head in frustration. “We will get your heroes back,” he assured us, though I wasn't sure what he meant by
we
. The members of H.E.R.O.? The Fox and Jenna? The fine, upstanding members of the Justicia police department, who, up to now, had been content to provide after-event crowd control?

I'm not sure he knew either.

As we trudged back up the stairs to the teachers' lounge, he told us all to remember the Code, to trust in the forces of goodness and light, to stick with the plan. But if Mr. Masters had a plan, he wasn't sharing it with the rest of us.

And judging by the Supers disappearing left and right, it certainly wasn't working.

So it's Saturday, and I'm getting into costume, the tie pulled so tight I can barely breathe. The dress shoes crimping my toes. My hair is slicked back with too much gel, and I've brushed my teeth three times since this morning. When I walk into the living room, my mother just stares at me for a moment. She looks like she's going to cry.

“I hardly recognized you,” she says.

“It's my secret identity,” I tell her.

Sometimes it's the thing right in front of our noses that we look over.

Twenty minutes later, she drops me off at the Grand Avenue Hotel and tells me to call her when I'm ready to come home or at eleven, whichever comes first. We apparently don't want the Toyota to turn back into a pumpkin. She adjusts my burgundy tie and kisses me on the cheek, and I wait until she has pulled away to wipe it off. The hotel lobby is full of marble columns and uncomfortable-looking couches. I can smell the chlorine from the hotel pool, but the very thought of a swimming pool makes me queasy. I take the elevator to the top floor.