Dull Boy (13 page)

“Bad
ass,
” I say. “You should be a bull rider. You’d totally kill.”

Sophie starts laughing so hard she unsticks partway and starts to fall off the wall, then gets hold of herself and shoves off, lands in a crouch. “I’d have to ride in booty shorts. My parents would love that.”

She climbs back into her clothes, dusts off the paint flecks that are still attached to her skin. Flops down on the couch and takes a big swig of water, letting the mouth of the bottle stick to her lower lip before she pops it off again and grins at me.

“Avery’s turn,” Darla announces.

Great.

All eyes are on me and I have no idea what to show them. Flying would be the most impressive thing I could do, but I’m almost positive they don’t know about my flight yet, and I’m not sure I want to reveal that on the first day. I mean, there are secrets, and then there are
secrets.
Besides, flying indoors is too creepy, like opening an umbrella in the house. Breaking stuff is out of the question, and I’m not going to risk denting whatever expensive car is in the garage.

“Um, well, you guys already know what I can do, right?”

“Yeah, but show us!” Sophie says, her eyes glittering. “Do something awesome.”

Oh, no pressure there.

Finally I get this picture in my head: an old-fashioned strongman, carrying a girl on each arm. Sophie and Darla are sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Perfect.

“You might want to go sticky,” I say. “Darla, prepare your grappling hook.”

I squat down and heft the couch onto my shoulders, careful not to tip it too far in either direction. When I’m sure I’ve got it balanced, I lift the couch over my head and take Darla and Sophie on an elevated tour of the living room. It’s a stupid, show-offy thing to do, but it was either this or rip a phone book in half.

Nicholas scrambles out of his seat to pull the curtains shut.

Sophie giggles. “I need to be carried around like this all the time. Like Cleopatra.”

“That would be a total waste of Avery’s potential,” Darla says. “That’s why we need robots. And robots at least have laser cannons attached to them. Unlike couches.”

Um, okay, Darla. “So, you have a robot in your living room instead of a couch?”

“No,” she scoffs. “I have one in my workshop.”

I’d give her a skeptical look if I wasn’t holding her over my head. “Workshop?”

“She means the shed in her backyard,” Nicholas says. “Ninety percent inventions, ten percent lawn-care supplies. She doesn’t want her dad going in there anymore, so I always get roped into mowing their lawn. Be careful you don’t get tricked into joining the club.”

“It’s a small price to pay,” Darla says. “My workshop is where the greatest technological dreams of this century become a reality.”

“Ooh, show him the boomerangs you made for me!”

I manage to set the couch down without breaking anything, and Darla unzips her backpack and dumps out four shiny boomerangs, ranging in color from jet black to fire-engine red. “They look like toys so no one will suspect anything. But they’re capable of doing serious damage. This one”—she holds up a black boomerang with a bomb graphic on the front—“is a bomb boomerang. It detonates on impact.”

“Mega-bomberang!” Sophie cheers.

“Er, no.” Darla winces at the cutesiness, like Einstein might overhear and take away her scientific-seriousness badge. “We’re still working on the names.” Darla goes on to show me a white boomerang that explodes and covers the target with a sticky, gluelike substance (“gluemerang!” according to Sophie); a silver boomerang with a ninja-star graphic (“ninjarang!”) that doesn’t explode, but is designed to cut through hanging ropes, wires, etc.; and a red boomerang that bursts into flame on impact.

If you’re playing along at home, that would be the “flamerang.”

“These are just prototypes,” Darla says. “I have tons more in development. There’s some other stuff I want to show you, but it’s locked up in my workshop. Like my
Darlar
! It’s like Kevlar, only better: lightweight, bulletproof body armor that is also impact-repellent and cute-looking. Well, that’s the plan, anyway—I’m not finished with it. And . . . oh!” She perks up suddenly, like she’s just thought of something. “There’s a concussion grenade I really want to try out, but it’s hard to test it because I
personally
can’t risk a concussion, and it’s hard for anyone else to tell me what the experience was like, since they’d be concussed directly afterward, but see, you, on the other hand . . .”

Nicholas makes a quick “noooo, don’t do it!” gesture behind her back.

“I’m kind of . . . um. I’ll have to think about that.”

We fall into a five-second awkward silence while Darla puts her boomerangs away, and my stomach tenses up, like things are about to get weird now. I mean, we just revealed our powers to each other—and our techno secrets, in Darla’s case. That’s a lot of secret sharing for people who barely know each other. There’s got to be some backlash, right?

It’s not like that at all.

Sophie brings more drinks from the kitchen, and we go back to this hyperactive version of normal: talking about our parents, school, our lives; how much Nicholas hates the pop music blaring from the speakers, and how he’s going to change it the next time Sophie leaves the room. I polish off the rest of the pizza before getting up to do my lousy Wolverine impression, while Darla tells them the story of what happened in the office. Sophie laughs so hard she’s almost crying; Nicholas cracks a smile and just shakes his head.

“I’m glad that wasn’t me,” he says. “You know you
can
say no to Darla, right? She’ll try to make you believe you can’t, but it’s not true.”

Darla socks him in the arm. “Lies! Don’t tell him that!”

Sophie and Darla are in the middle of telling me how they met in an ice-skating class and bonded as the class freaks (Sophie would stay in the locker room half the time, because her power was out of whack and she couldn’t change out of her street clothes because they were stuck to her—or the opposite would happen, and she’d be tromping into the parking lot in full figure-skater regalia, ruining her skate blades on the concrete because she couldn’t unstick long enough to get them off. Darla, meanwhile, was taking the class because her dad forced her to get out and do something non-gadget-oriented, but she was afraid she’d get hurt, so she skated in a snowsuit, like a puffy snow-angel marshmallow . . . ) when the doorbell rings.

Sophie bounds over to the door. “That’s him!”

Darla prides herself on being a master of disguise, but she’s pretty easy to read: she is
not
happy. Her eyebrows are scrunched in an angry
V.
Nicholas jabs her with his foot. “Lower the obvious quotient a little.”

“I know, I know, but I’m so
mad.
Jacques is as close to the enemy as it gets. What is she doing bringing him here? When
Avery’s
here? Is she nuts?”

“Mind filling me in?” I ask. My foot’s tapping, my nerves have gone from pumped to screaming like fingernails down a chalkboard, like don’t-go-into-the-basement-alone, the-killer-is-calling-from-inside-the-house! Primordial warnings you don’t ignore.

Or, you know, I could be overreacting, responding to Darla’s tendency to exaggerate.

Nicholas starts: “Jacques is . . .”

Before he can finish, Sophie leads her guest into the room and we all clam up. He’s lagging a step or two behind her, platinum-blond hair in his face, diamond stud earrings in his ears.

It takes me all of two seconds to recognize him.

Jacques is the guy with the Jaguar. Casanova with a driver’s license. And . . . superpowers?

I feel about as tense as Darla looks. Sophie’s friend or not, I don’t want him here. I don’t want to see her hug him hello, or laugh at anything he says that I’m
sure
won’t be funny . . . and I definitely don’t need a demo of his badass force-field-invisibility-bulletproof-better-than-mine powers.

His eyes travel the room until they land on me—and lock. Sizing me up, like we’re having some kind of stare-down.

Sophie’s hugging his arm, her face brighter and cheerier than it was after my feat of strength, or silly charades. “Everyone, this is Jacques. Jacques, these are my friends Darla, Nicholas, and Avery.”

We all
hello
him in return.

“Pleased to meet you,” Jacques says coolly.

I remember his accent from when I first heard him outside Roast, remember thinking it was an unfair advantage—because don’t girls always fall for exotic accents? But as it has time to sink into my consciousness, the odd rise and fall of his speech hits me like a steel pipe.

He sounds like Cherchette.

 

MY MIND’S POUNDING
along with my nervous-tapping fingers:
Cherchette, Cherchette, how old is Cherchette?
She looks . . . not so much young as ageless: like she’s lived, but the scars have stayed on the inside. She’s like a perfect portrait, trapped in time. A white marble statue.

Is it possible she has a teenage son?

I watch Jacques while Sophie babbles on, getting him up to speed on things I’d rather he didn’t know about—if there are even any secrets anymore. If he’s Cherchette’s son, does he know what
she
knows? He definitely looks like her: same pale skin, piercing blue eyes, bloodless lips. I don’t worry about being caught staring, because Jacques’s eyes haven’t left me since he got here. His gaze digs into me, eager to unearth something ugly, or weak. I don’t know—I’ve never had anyone look at me that way before.

The shiver running down my spine cranks itself higher. Feverlike chills assault my body in waves, getting stronger the longer Jacques stares at me—and there’s no break. I grab a blanket off the back of the couch and wrap it around my shoulders like a cape. Try to think:
summer, barbeque, heat wave,
like he’s not getting to me at all.

No one else is reacting to Jacques like this. Darla’s oblivious, wound up in a tight ball of frustration, a twitchy fake smile on her face. Nicholas is politely listening to Sophie and nodding at all the right times, but at one point our eyes meet and I feel like he recognizes that something isn’t quite right here.

“You know what would be an awesome team-building exercise?” Sophie says abruptly.

“Team-building exercises usually involve a team,” Darla says before she can finish. “I don’t recall Benedict Arnold being on our
team
, so the point is moot.”

The two girls glare at each other. Nicholas squirms in his seat. I sense a girl fight on the horizon. Time to get him out of this.

I get up, dragging my blanket cape behind me like it’s a fashion statement, not a necessity. “Sophie, do you have any macaroni and cheese we could make?”

“Macaroni and—umm, didn’t you just eat like a whole pizza?” She tilts her head, waves of hair tumbling onto her shoulder, totally confused. Jacques snorts, like I’m this disgusting glutton and now he has a legitimate reason to despise me.

“Yeah, I promised Nicholas I’d show him my secret recipe.”

Sophie shrugs. “Check the cabinets.”

“Cool. Onward, Nicholas.” I gesture dramatically with my cape, and thankfully he has the sense to follow. I figure Darla can hold her own out there—Jacques is the one who should be afraid.

We raid the cabinets and I bang a bunch of pots and pans around, doing my best to create an inconspicuous wall of noise. “What the hell?” I say. “Who is that guy and why does he look like he wants to kill me?”

“Jacques Morozov,” Nicholas says. “Sophie met him a few weeks ago. I guess he’s like us, but his pedigree has Darla freaking out. She thinks his mom is evil incarnate.”

“Evil incarnate?” Uh . . . that’s a bit harsh.

He sighs, tears open the macaroni-and-cheese box. “Has a woman named Cherchette contacted you?”

What do I say? Should I lie? Is that the best way to start a new friendship?

“Once,” I say, hoping a half-truth is better than no truth. “You?”

Nicholas nods. “I don’t know if she said the same stuff to you, but she basically offered me a place with her, like she has this powered-kid sanctuary or something, and she claimed she could help me get my power under control so I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“And Darla thinks that makes her evil?”

Nicholas digs the powdered-cheese packet out of the box, sets it neatly beside the stove, and opens the fridge to find whatever else we’ll need. “It’s a combination of things with Darla. Natural caution, competitiveness, paranoia. But I’m sure she’ll tell you all about that, whether you want to hear it or not.”

Actually, I do want to hear it. I’ll take any input I can get, even if it’s a little biased. “And what do you think about Cherchette?”

“It’s hard to say. It’s not like anyone else has shown up and offered to help, you know? So I’m inclined to think her intentions are good, since, I mean, she must know how hard it is, having powers and not knowing what the hell’s going on. What did Cherchette say when you met her?”

“Same stuff.” I don’t mention breaking the thug’s hand and smashing up the antique shop. I concentrate on filling a pot with water, focus on the stream. “So . . . what did you think of her offer? Is hurting people something you worry about?”

I want to say what I’ve never said, except in a screwed-up rush of emotion to my parents after my last wrestling match—and they misinterpreted it, they thought I was being too hard on myself:
I hurt someone. I messed up and I hurt someone. And it could have been worse. One day, it could be so much worse.

“How could I not worry about it?” He takes a deep breath. “I fight so much with my dad. He doesn’t get who I am at all, and I’m afraid that one day he’ll get in my face and I won’t be able to get away from him in time. My vortex will activate and I won’t be able to stop it.”

“Wow,” I say, before I can think better of it. “That sucks.”