Attack of the Tagger (11 page)

Dad got up and whispered, “I’ll be right back.”

Mom sat on the edge of my bed and said, “Nolan? Nolan, please talk to me. You’ve always been an honest child. Now please, tell me the truth.”

I just buried my head under my pillow. How could they think I was the Tagger? It was bad enough that they thought I couldn’t
do
anything. But how could they think I was a villain?

I was the good guy!

I was about to choke to death on hiccups when I heard my dad saying, “Sarge says Shredderman’s posted a movie clip. He says it exposes the Tagger.”

“Oh, no!” my mom wailed.

I said, “I’m not—
hic
—the—
hic
—Tagger!” Then I sat up and said it louder, “I’m not—
hic
— the—
hic
—Tagger!”

Dad was already booting up my computer. Mom got up and stood behind him.

I just sat there, hiccuping.

When they saw the clip, my dad’s jaw dropped.

My mom gasped, “Ryan
Voss?
And he sprayed his own mother’s car?”

My dad leaned back and rubbed his chin. “Well, I’ll be.”

They both turned to face me. “So… so you’re really not the Tagger?” Mom asked.

I scowled at her and hiccuped. “Of course not!”

“But… but then where
were
you at eleven o’clock? Why did you leave school?”

Hic.

Slowly my dad’s forehead crept back. His jaw eased open. His eyes bulged.

Hic.

He scoured my desk and spotted my yearbook sticking out of my scanner. He yanked it out and saw Dr. Voss’s face. “You’re…” He was blinking like crazy at me. “You’re…” He snatched up my digital camera and found the movie clip. Then he looked at my mother and whispered, “Eve, our son is… a superhero!”

“What?”

“Look!” He showed her the clip. “He’s not the Tagger, he’s Shredderman!”

“What?”
she said again, and now
she
was blinking like crazy.

“Shredderman!” my dad said with a grin. “Definitely the coolest superhero to hit this town!”

My mom covered her mouth. “
You
built that site? All by yourself?”

I nodded.
Hic.

“But
how?
How did you know how to do… all of this?” She was back at the computer, clicking around like mad. “This is amazing! Look at this graphic! Honey, I program computers, and I don’t know how to do half of this stuff!” She turned to face me. “Where did you … how did you …?”

I shrugged. “It’s not hard.”

“Ha!” she laughed.

Dad scooted way close to me. “Nolan, you’ve got to tell me how you managed to get that clip of Ryan Voss tagging his mother’s car. How in the world did you
do
that?”

So I told him all about it. Every detail, clear through my getaway in the gardener’s truck. And while my dad was grinning bigger and bigger, my mom’s face was turning whiter and whiter.
“You…you jumped out up by Route 7?” she gasped.

“Uh-huh.” The hiccups were gone.

“That’s
miles
away! You could’ve gotten lost! Or been kidnapped! What if you’d been hit by a car? What if—”

“Mo’Om! Superheroes don’t get lost or kidnapped. Well, if they do get kidnapped, they always find a way out of it, right? I’m fine!”

“But… you could’ve suffocated!”

“I had air holes! A snorkel! I’m fine! And don’t worry—I took a shower. And washed my clothes.”

She checked me over. “In the washer and dryer?”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes, “in the shower.”

“In the
shower.
”

Dad said, “He’s kidding, Eve. You know, a joke?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe someday I’ll even figure out how to toast waffles.”

She looked at me, blinking away. Then she threw her arms around me and started bawling. “My baby!”

“Mo-om!” I rolled my eyes at my dad.

He grinned and winked at me.

So I hugged her back, and the truth is, I was glad they’d found out.

Super glad.

Even though I went back to the beginning and told them everything, Mom and Dad still had questions the next morning. I didn’t mind answering them, though. It was like we were all in a secret club together.

I liked it.

My dad covered for me with the school. He told Mrs. Holler that I’d been with him the whole time.

The school didn’t even seem to care. I guess they were too embarrassed that the town tagger was the principal’s son.

The story was all over the news. Channel 12 showed Ryan being stuffed in the back of Sarge’s
car, and the news lady tried to get Dr. Voss to say something, but she just ducked under her arm and ran away.

My dad wrote a big piece on it, too. Said it would seem suspicious if he didn’t. His headline was SHREDDERMAN SAVES CEDAR VALLEY. I told
him it sounded corny, but he did it anyway. “Why not?” he said. “Not every town can boast its own superhero!”

“But what if people try to find out who Shredderman is?”

Dad grinned. “Didn’t I tell you? That’s my new assignment.” He tisked and shook his head. “And I have a hunch he’s going to be one tough superhero to unmask.”

The next day, everyone was talking about what a jerk Ryan Voss was and how it served him right that he was going to have to spend his weekends painting walls and cleaning gum off sidewalks.

Everyone but Bubba. Bubba kept muttering about what a jerk Shredderman was and how someday he was gonna get him.

We’ll see about that!

We also found out that Dr. Voss is going to pay for a new mural for the Green Machine. Mr. Green says he probably won’t have dolphins
again—that it just wouldn’t be the same. He told the class he was thinking about trolls.

“Trolls?” Miriam Wipple asked him. “Those ugly overgrown elves with sharp teeth and dirty fingernails?”

“Friendly trolls,” he told her. “In a forest scene with ferns and trees and oversized mushrooms. Or maybe I’ll paint the whole van dark blue and have a comet streaking across the sky.”

“Cool!” everyone said, so I think maybe he’ll go with the comet.

Mom and Dad were very interested in hearing about the van. They used to kind of say, Uh-huh, uh-huh, whenever I talked about Mr. Green, but now that they know he’s the Bouncer, they really sit up and listen. Especially since the four of us had a powwow about Shredderman and the site and what we should do to keep it a secret.

Mr. Green said, “We have to keep a lid on it, or I’ll need to look for a new job.”

“Why?” I asked him. “They can’t fire you for being my sidekick!”

My dad said, “That’s right! You haven’t done anything illegal or even wrong.”

Mr. Green shook his head. “Dr. Voss was pretty fried over the way you exposed her son.” He chuckled. “And that little link to her? Oh, she was fit to be tied.”

“But I already took her phone number off the site! Mom made me.”

“Yeah, but before you did, she got calls from all over. I heard a woman from Australia called to scold her!”

From Australia? That was halfway around the world!

“Really?” my mom said.

“Cool!” my dad said.

Mr. Green flexed an arm. “Here’s to truth!”

We all put our arms up and pumped. “And justice!”

I went to bed that night feeling great. The Shredderman site counter was up to ten thousand! Ten thousand visitors! Sure, all I’d really done with the site was collar a bully and trap a tagger, but inside it felt… bigger than that. Inside it felt like there was still more to do.

Maybe the way I was searching for truth and justice had started out small, but I could feel it growing. Spreading. From my little bedroom, through my school, and now my town!

So maybe I can’t fly through the air like Superman, but my
ideas
can fly across a web bigger than anything even Spider-Man could make—the World Wide Web!

So whatever’s next, in the name of truth and justice, I’ll be there!