Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (17 page)

“You'd best try harder than that, sonny Jim,”
Grandpa said, from the end of a long tunnel. How'd he get in this
tunnel?

“You think it's just a switch you can flip?”
Mr. L asked.

“I know of other switches that'll flip if he
don't heal up right this second,” Grandpa said.

“There!” Mr. L shouted in triumph.

“Michael! Michael! Concentrate, you can do
it!”

He couldn't even breathe, he was drowning.
His eyes wouldn't even work. Only that wasn't true, he was just
staring at a pool of red. He was blinking, but his eyelashes were
scooping up droplets of his own blood and getting tangled together
with gore. His muscles were trying to move him out of the sick,
sticky feel of his blood, but they weren't on his bones the right
way.

“Uhh,” he said. He hefted his head and
shoulders up off the gym floor, and shook his head. His neck
screamed in pain for a moment, but stopped after he told his
vertebrae to get their act together and get back where they
belonged. They answered his call, and he felt the skin protest
while the bones slid back into place.

His hips were shoved sideways, the wrong way.
Slivers of pain shot up his body, but he realized it was his bones
rushing to join their buddies where they ought to be. He didn't
have a gravity center of his brain anymore, he had a regeneration
center, and it was definitely instinct this time, his mind
controlling the ability to allow his body to live and function. His
back cracked a hundred wrong ways as he sat up, and then stood up
on shaky legs.

“I hope most of you remember this
demonstration,” the woman was saying. “I know a few of you still
won't get it through your heads. Nine hundred and ninety nine
thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine people who try this don't
make it, but they still try. Cool will always overcome common sense
when it comes to young people, and I have only one thing to say to
that: I'll bring flowers to your funeral.”

Later, he was back in the hospital again,
even though he was in perfectly good health. The usual nurses and
doctors were swarming around him. Outside their little circle, his
mother stood frowning and worried. Mr. Springfield stood close to
her, talking low and slow. He still had his ridiculous raccoon skin
hat on.

“I'm fine!” he kept telling them, but they
insisted on this or that test. He'd already been in several
different machines, which sounded all sorts of strange.

“What are they checking for?” he asked Mr.
Springfield.

“Sometimes there's internal bleeding,” he
said, “If you didn't have Bob's power long enough, for instance.
They're also checking for other abnormalities.”

“What?”

“It's difficult to know what will happen to
someone who takes on others' abilities, even temporarily. Some
doctors believe your brain has the instinct wired in there, and
that instinct sort of wakes up when Mr. L uses his ability.”

“What did he do?”

“He gave you Nora's ability...but the trouble
is, when Nora Activated, she had no idea how to control her ability
either. She caused a lot of damage before she got it to stop.
Almost went to the moon, with half the neighborhood, if I remember
right. So you couldn't possibly have learned how to deal with that.
It took her years to be able to fly with any sort of speed.”

“But I went straight up,” Michael said.

“Right, but going up and down is the easy
part of gravity control. Tougher to make yourself move sideways.
Especially difficult to move sideways without messing up gravity
all over the place around you.”

“These abilities aren't like people think,”
his mother said, with her arms crossed. She wasn't comfortable
being near Mr. Springfield. “It's like learning math. There are a
lot of things you have to learn.”

Mr. Springfield chuckled. “Yeah, like
learning math all right, only you don't have a teacher and you
don't have a set of books. And if you fail the test, you can kill
yourself.” Mrs. Washington went red in the face, but Mr.
Springfield didn't seem to notice. “The doctors are just trying to
figure out if your brain is going to be fine after this. We don't
like to let Mr. L use his power much. The side effects can
be...unpleasant.”

“I can't believe they brought Archibald
Lansing into this! And on
my
son,” his mother said, and left
the room. Maybe she'd throw something out in the hallway.

“What's with her?” Michael asked Mr.
Springfield. But the big man just shrugged his huge,
leather-fringed shoulders.

He did have a bit of a headache, and there
were phantom feelings like he could fly or he could cut off his own
arm and everything would be fine. The doctors and his mother
assured him that he shouldn't, since he couldn't fly and wouldn't
ever recover from a missing arm. More than that, if he did
permanent damage to himself without Bob's ability, he wouldn't ever
get the arm back.

The doctors seemed almost disappointed to
tell him he was going to be okay, and that there weren't any
problems with his brain. They let him go that night, and it was a
relief to get back to his own bed. All this business about being in
the hospital was getting boring. There were lots of times he
couldn't even read a book because they had some test or another to
do. Not that he could really read anyway, with the memory of the
assembly and seeing his grandfather there. It stirred up an angry
hornet's nest of questions in his mind, one he couldn't seem to get
under control.

At home, his mother seemed to blame him for
what had happened at school. She stalked around the house, doing
rage cleanings. When she got really unhappy, there was always dust
to lay siege to. First she vacuumed everything, then cursed herself
for a fool, dusted everything, and attacked the floor again.

“Well I hope your father is happy now,” she
kept muttering.

Michael retreated to his room and listened to
the clanging of pots and pans, then of the hiss of the iron.

It didn't stop the next day either. Susanna
Washington wasn't the type of woman to forget things so easily. She
seemed preoccupied and distant throughout the morning, but stopped
him on the way out the door.

“You be careful,” she told him.

“Yes ma'am.”

“Good, good boy. And if they ask you to go to
some assembly or another, you tell them no. You can have them call
me. I'll march right down there and give them a piece of my mind.”
She'd give them finger shaking to go with it. Up one side and down
the other, or something like that.

“Okay mom,” he said, knowing instantly he
would never, ever call her from school unless he had to go to the
hospital. Like if he cut off his own arm.

All throughout school that day, he tried to
wrap his head around the idea that Grandpa wasn't just a guy who
read off his tablet in the rocking chair on his porch in the
summer. He was more than a man with a set of false teeth and an
easy smile. The more Michael thought about it, the more he
understood that he really knew nothing about his grandfather, and
that wasn't necessarily a good thing.

He was also aware that the solitary, snarky
voice in his mind was winning. It was saying 'I told you so' over
and over again. He couldn't shake the image of Grandpa bent over
the writing desk, penning a lie. He also couldn't help but see
Grandpa try to fade back into the shadows and disappear as Michael
floated up to the ceiling, seconds away from falling thirty feet
and squashing himself like a peanut butter sandwich in a badly
packed lunchbox. He got off lucky though. All his teachers called
on other students, and didn't bother to penalize him when he didn't
have the right answers on his homework.

The paper route called him home after the
seventh bell rang. Normally he'd read a couple of pages in his
e-reader, or watch a half hour of after school TV, but today he
just threw the papers into his bag and headed out the door.

He saw Lily at the library again, and
exchanged polite hellos as he delivered the paper. She was still
looking as good as ever, though he couldn’t help but notice how
much like Charlotte she wasn’t. Lily wore plain clothes, like a
suit only with a skirt, a white blouse underneath, and didn’t do
anything fancy with her hair. She definitely wasn’t changing her
wardrobe up every few months. Still, she had a soft glint in her
blue eyes. She was kind and talkative, and interested in talking to
him. Maybe she wasn’t a friend, but she wasn’t family, and she
wasn’t keeping anything from him.

She asked him how things were going, and he
debated about telling her about the assembly yesterday, where he'd
nearly killed everybody in the gym. He gave up and told her,
especially the weird part about him rearranging his body after the
fall.

“That sucks,” she said. It was always cool
hearing her talk to him like this, like he wasn't just a little kid
doing a dorky thing like delivering newspapers. Obsolete, pointless
newspapers at that, passed by a hundred years ago when computers
started bringing all the facts practically straight to your brain
instantaneously.

“Yeah,” he said.

“But it was probably pretty cool to watch,
pulling your body back together when everybody thought you were
dead.”

He smiled sadly. It wasn’t that cool, since
all his classmates were afraid of him, but there was no sense in
worrying her.

“How’s your friend, that girl?” Lily asked.
He’d told Lily the details about Charlotte, and the librarian
always asked about her. Sometimes it seemed like Lily was more
interested in Charlotte than he was.

“Missing,” he sighed.

“That's terrible...really?”

“I don’t know. I…” He was about to tell her
about the note, but stopped himself. Nobody could know, not even
someone like Lily. Grandpa had talked to Lily before, about the
e-reader. That meant she could call him too.

“What?”

“I’m worried about her,” he said. “I told
Santa I wanted to see her again.”

Now it was Lily’s turn to smile sadly.
“That’s so sweet. Well, I hope you can see her. As a Christmas
present. It would be pretty nice.”

He thanked her and headed out to finish his
route. He still had a lot to think about, but couldn’t get anywhere
on his own. The only things he could do were talk to Grandpa, and
accuse him of stealing a letter, or do nothing. He was mortified to
start saying bad things about his own grandfather. As his mother
told him, if there wasn’t Grandpa, there’d be no you, so you should
be grateful to have him every day of your life. There was no way he
could march into Grandpa’s house and start pointing fingers. But he
could sneak around…

Yeah, and that had turned out real well last
time.

He’d just turned himself in several circles
by the time he got home and found his mother putting a casserole in
the oven. At least the papers were all delivered.

“Hi dear,” she said. “You found your music
player, right?”

“Huh?”

“Well you rushed in and out of here so fast I
couldn’t ask you. But I guess you found it.”

What was she talking about? Michael’s mind
tried to wrap itself around what she was saying, and failed.

“Um, yeah. Yeah. I found it.”

“Alright,” she said. “Well, dinner’s not
going to be ready for another two hours, and your father’s not
going to be home until Friday,
if he even gets back by then.
So, let’s crack the books and get some homework done.”

He wasn’t listening. He hadn’t been in the
house since he left to deliver his papers. Had someone been in
here, impersonating him?

He glanced around his room, but couldn’t find
anything out of the ordinary. Bed, bookcase-slash-computer desk,
dresser and mini closet looked just like before. No mysterious
imposter had cleaned up the clothes pile on the floor, or the
scatter of papers at the base of his bed. Old homework. Stone was
standing right where he’d stood before.

Wait. His music player was not in the drawer
where he left it, and that was odd. He couldn’t find it anywhere,
in fact. This kick started a full-mess search, including throwing
the clothes from the floor to other places on the floor.

“Music player,” he muttered. Of course, it
was another clue from Charlotte. If he’d ever doubted her before,
about the note or the code, those doubts vanished faster than
scraps off the dinner table, with the dog on patrol.

His clothes were all in the same places as
before, all the video games were still in the wrong cases just like
before, there weren’t any secret Charlotte notes in the little
video game instruction guides, his closet was still a horrible mess
only a bulldozer could clear.

The computer desk still had the usual
assortment of ancient pencils and broken and emptied pens. He
didn’t have any books about music, and didn’t really have any use
for books anymore anyway, since he had the e-reader. He didn’t
think any of them had been moved.

“Stone,” he whispered. As soon as he did, he
looked over his shoulder to see if his mother was watching. Then he
closed the door and approached the action figure.

He almost expected it to jump off the
computer desk and attack him, but the figure stared woodenly off
toward the old Star Wars poster Grandpa had given him. Now he
noticed the hands had changed up. This time they were the
see-through plastic ones instead of the concrete Michael had
snapped on before.

He took it down carefully, like it was a
bomb. His heart hammered in his chest, and he kept looking at the
door. If he didn’t, he felt, his mother would burst through it and
start prying into his business. Glancing up every few seconds
protected him from this.

He also knew he shouldn't do this slowly. He
couldn't help himself. He drew up the figure's shirt and, heart
beating wildly in his chest, sweat prickling his forehead, he
opened a new note from Charlotte.