Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (18 page)

And if it all hadn't been going bad before,
this was when it really started to get nasty.

Michael didn't trust his mother enough to
stay out of his room while he read the loopy script on the three
sheets of paper Charlotte had used. Instead he skimmed it and
packed it back into Stone's underwear. Even the bare essentials
were enough to frighten him.

She'd been locked up, under the Marcus
Patterson building since he'd seen her last. She wasn't being hurt,
but she wasn't free.

Marcus Patterson was the building only for
eighth grade students. Now it made sense, in a way. They had been
using the building as an Activation site, a place where they could
turn kids into super-powered kids in relative safety. That meant
Charlotte was an Active. He would have to read the letter later
that night before he knew exactly what she was doing in there, but
now it wasn't safe. As long as his mother and his grandfather were
out there, not asleep, he couldn't feel safe reading it. And not
only that, but Mr. Springfield had said he needed to be
watched.

He wondered if Charlotte had convinced
another Active to come deliver the message to him, if they were the
guards and the teachers. He desperately wanted to read every single
word in the letter, but he couldn't.

Instead he ate dinner without tasting it,
talked with his mother without hearing her, showered without
remembering it, and walked around in a daze that ended with him
back in his room, shivering with need.

And Stone was gone.

He stared at the place where the action
figure had been in disbelief. Then he cried out, sort of a yell,
and started tearing his room apart. Even after he’d checked behind
the computer desk and under the computer desk, he knew someone had
taken it. They’d put the mind reader guy, Mr. Jackson on his case,
and Mr. Jackson had figured out about the notes. Well he was going
to kill that guy, he was going to jump on him and punch him like
he’d never punched Trent-

“Hey there kiddo,” his grandfather said from
behind him. Kindly, in his grandfatherly way. Harmless. Michael
slowly turned around.

Grandpa. The liar. The letter thief. He
couldn’t just take the note and be done with it, he had to write a
fake one instead and then come to gloat about how he’d tricked
Michael. How would a twelve year old boy ever figure it out?
Grandpa must think he was pretty stupid.

“You!” he screamed. In an instant he was on
his own grandfather, climbing up his body while Grandpa fell back
into the living room and his mother started screaming. Grandpa fell
hard, landing on his butt with a sound like ‘oof!’ and then banging
his back on the low table where they kept the coasters and photo
albums.

It didn’t even slow him down. He kept
screaming, crawling, crying, up towards Grandpa’s head, until his
head snapped back.

His mother was standing over him, wide-eyed
and heaving. She was looking at her red hand, then back at
Michael’s face. Michael started to tear up, but it wasn’t because
he was a baby. She’d hit him in the cheek, and in the nose. When
somebody hit you in the nose, you didn’t have any choice. He’d
learned that in dodge ball.

“Michael Edward Washington Junior,” she
hissed. “Are you alright Harold?”

“I hope I ain’t busted a hip. I’ll know more
when I can stand up.” He looked at Michael. “You are going to let
me stand up, eh kiddo?”

“You stole my letter!”

“Actually I didn’t,” Grandpa said. “But the
person who stole it brought it to me.”

“Well you…you wrote another letter and signed
it Charlotte!”

“Guilty,” Grandpa agreed. “And I’m awful
sorry I did it too. Don’t know what I was thinking. God’s honest
truth.”

“You stand up right this instant,” his mother
commanded. “And you’re grounded for a month. You will give all your
money from your paper route to me, and you will help pay for your
grandfather’s hospital bills. Maybe until you’re his age. Am I
understood?”

The enormity of what he’d just done crashed
down on Michael’s shoulders, and he slumped aside. He buried his
face in the sofa and just cried while his mother helped Grandpa off
the floor. How could he have thought about punching his own
grandfather? He burned with shame and humiliation. He couldn’t stop
them from watching him, and he couldn’t run to his room without
showing them his face. He would never look at either one of them
again.

“Michael,” Grandpa sounded very close. His
voice was soft, not angry. “I know you’re upset. I would be upset
too, if I were you. I guess I deserved that. Ain’t had someone come
up and try to punch me…well, tough to remember when.”

“You answer your grandfather when he talks to
you,” his mother said.

“That’s alright Susanna. Actually I’m sure
he’d love some hot chocolate right now. Wouldn’t you, sport? Sure
you would. Could you be so kind, Susanna?”

His mother sniffed but said nothing, and left
in a huff. Michael couldn’t see her, but even her footsteps were
angry.

“Michael,” Grandpa said, in that look-at-me
tone of voice. Not unkind, but definitely an order. Well he wasn’t
going to give in this time. He was equal parts enraged and ashamed
right now, and he couldn’t decide which side was going to win. But
his throat burned in a tight, hot lump and even his stomach was
getting into the action.

“Michael, look at me,” Grandpa said.

After a minute of trying to work his throat
he managed to say, “No.”

“Fair enough. Then just listen. What your
mother and father and I have done, it’s not fair. I know it’s not,
now. It’s been hard on you, but we were afraid, you see? We didn’t
want you to get the wrong ideas.” He chuckled to himself. “Instead
you got the right ones. Don’t know where you found out I’d wrote
your girlfriend’s letter, but there you have it anyway. That’s what
happened.

“I know you’re going to ask why. To tell you
the truth, I’m not so sure, kiddo. I thought at the time it’d be
the right thing to do. You remember our doctor, Mrs. Montgomery?
Anyway she found your note in your backpack, and she passed it on
to me.

“It’s my job, Michael,” he said at last, like
he was apologizing. “I’ve had this job now for…holy smokes, how
long has it been? Longer’n you’ve been alive, for sure. Maybe
fifteen years. Tough to say, the wires are getting crossed
upstairs. Anyway my job’s to make sure the town runs nice and
smooth. Because with over a hundred Actives living here, you can
see how things could get messy in a hurry if just two or three of
them got out of hand.

“Got me an army of psychologists, got a squad
of Actives who are really good at searching and investigating, and
I’ve got to keep everybody happy. Because, say for instance your
dad-”

“Harold!” Susanna shrieked. One of the hot
chocolates slipped out of her hand. She’d just been coming in the
room, and hot chocolate went everywhere. It looked like someone had
thrown a shovelful of mud on the white carpet.

“He deserves to know. Heck Susanna, he had
that Stone doll up on his computer desk for, what, near a month
now, eh?”

Wait.

Um. What?

What did his dad and the action figure have
to do with anything? They were totally…but they weren’t even…

Michael’s eyes shot open. Grandpa had been
waiting for it, with a tiny smile, and he nodded.

There hadn’t just been a resemblance between
his dad and Stone. His dad was Stone. A superhero. No no, his dad
wasn’t just any superhero, he was
the
superhero. He was the
leader of the Alphas. He was always gone. Around the world, saving
people from nasty floods and stopping terrorists and mashing wars
into dust.

“You remember that slide of Tallahassee?” he
asked. Michael would never forget that image, blown up ten feet
tall and twenty wide. “Yes, you do. Well, that sort of thing
happened in other places. We're here to stop that. We're put here
to keep America safe...” He trailed off.

“Don't you dare, Harold,” Susanna told
him.

“Well anyway, that's all the depressing junk.
Our town's been a nice place for the last, what, ten years? We
haven't had a serious incident in a long time. Grass is nice and
green, people mow their lawns and say hello to each other in the
streets. We have bake sales. Nice. Safe. Ordinary.

“You see kiddo, super people, they need this.
They need a place to come back to and feel normal again. They can't
be out all the time throwing tanks around. The people they meet,
sometimes they're not happy your dad is there. Sometimes they're
too
happy.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a rebel group out in eastern India
that tried to turn your father into a god,” Grandpa said with a
sigh, like it was nothing more than a burned-out spark plug. “If
it's one thing your dad doesn't need, kiddo, it's to think he's
bigger than he is. Everybody fits into the world, somewhere.
Everybody's got a function my boy. The librarian, that Lily, is an
important person just the same as your dad. She helps people expand
their minds through the joy of reading.”

“But your father redirects rivers,” his
mother said miserably. She had her arms crossed and her lower lip
stuck out.

“And that's just it, Michael,” Grandpa said.
“He changes the course of everything. It's a huge job, and he needs
all the normal he can get while he's back here. This place, this
little town, doesn't need to feel like a time bomb just about to go
off. This should be a place where your dad should buy bread and
milk, bake some cookies, cut up jack-o-lanterns, and dress up as
Santa Claus when Christmas rolls around.”

He sighed again.

“I don't expect you to understand
everything,” he said. “But I do expect you to understand this: if
you'd grown up knowing Stone was your dad, you probably wouldn't be
a nice kid who I could be proud of. You might've been another Trent
Millickie.”

“Which you're not,” his mother said.

“And we're darn glad you didn't turn out that
way. But it meant we had to hold the truth back a few years. You
understand that, at least, eh?”

Michael nodded. He guessed he did understand,
though he didn't like it.

“Go wash up,” Grandpa said. “I know your mama
baked up some wonderful dinner, but tonight seems like an A&W
night.”

Susanna's arms flopped to her sides in
defeat. “Oh well, why not? This night couldn't possibly get any
worse.”

The A&W in town was one of the town
landmarks; it had been the same building and hadn't changed
anything up for one hundred and three years now. The place was laid
out as a large parking lot with a small building attached. At each
parking spot, you could use the little telephone (with a cord, that
was really odd) to place your order, and a high schooler on roller
skates brought you a tray with your food on it. The tray clipped
onto the car's window.

Michael had always thought it was kind of
cool, but couldn't figure out why people would want to do it this
way when they could sit in actual chairs where they didn't risk a
crazy angry mother when they spilled french fries on the
backseat.

But the root beer came in these incredible
frosted mugs, and Michael always bought a root beer float. He loved
to lick the whipped cream off the straw and wait until the ice
cream was mostly melted and the whole thing had turned into a
vanilla and root beer mud ball. He always tried to get two, but his
mother never let him. But sometimes a blue moon came out, and
sometimes a hobbit had a stronger will than a demigod, so he tried
to order a second one again.

“Absolutely not,” his mother said. “We've
been over this a hundred times.”

Yes, but she was also the one who said if you
fell off the horse, you had to get right back on and try again. So
here he was, being persistent.

“Why not let him have a second? It's been a
tough night, after all.”

“First this, and then what? Soon he'll be two
hundred pounds overweight and we'll be buying a specially designed
van to lift the wheelchair up.”

Michael looked down at his body. When he
sucked in, he could see every single rib. He couldn't help it, he
started to laugh. That got Grandpa laughing too, and when his
mother scowled at them, it just made him laugh harder. It was the
first time since Charlotte disappeared that he actually had
something to laugh about, and it felt really good.

“Tomorrow night's Friday, so I think a
movie's in order. We can see whatever you like. Pick something in
the theater, or we'll order up something on the cable doodad.”

Their living room projector and sound system
was just about as good as the movie theater, with the bonus of not
having your feet stick to the floor.

Michael was thinking about the movies he
might pick. A number of the books he liked had been turned into
movies, some of them really good and others horrid, when he
realized he shouldn't be thinking about movies at all. It was
getting close to Christmas, the holidays were coming up and he
hadn't seen Charlotte in over a month. They were trying to trick
him.

“I'm not stupid, you know,” he said from the
backseat.

Grandpa stopped before he took another bite
of coney dog. “Nobody said you were stupid, kiddo.”

“I want Charlotte's notes then.” He didn't
know where this little wave of bravery came from, but he was going
to surf it as long as it stuck around. “No, actually, I want to see
her. Make sure she's okay.”

“Michael! You are already grounded, young
man, and you are seriously pushing your luck.”

Pushing it right off a cliff? He wasn't
sure.

“It's alright Susanna,” Grandpa said.
“Michael, it's just-”

His mother cut him off. “It is not alright!
My son, the boy I brought into this world, hit his own grandfather
today. Makes me wonder if he was really raised by a pack of wolves,
thinks he can just hit whoever he likes. And his punishment is a
second root beer float? Well, he needs to learn a grain of respect,
for once.”