Joshua Dread (4 page)

Joshua’s best friend and neighbor, Milton, is a huge fan of Captain Justice …
and
curly fries. Just watch out when he gets too close to a hover scooter
.

For some reason, I didn’t think this was what she’d had in mind.

I spent the next couple of periods in a daze. Something weird was going on, and I needed to figure out what it was.

During lunch, I sat down at an empty table and tried to re-create the surge of power I’d felt earlier. I shut out all the noises around me and strained my concentration. At first nothing happened. But then I felt it. A slight tingle in my fingertips. My heart pounded as a buzz of energy spread down my arms, and then—

“Are you okay? You look like you just swallowed a bug.”

Milton set down his lunch tray beside me. All the focus fizzled away. I wasn’t even sure that I’d felt anything at all.

“Hey, Milton,” I said.

With his mouth half full of macaroni and cheese, Milton launched into a detailed replay of the fight between my parents and Captain Justice. “And the way Captain Justice destroyed the remote device with his Spear of Freedom!” Milton heaved a forkful of macaroni like it was a holographic spear. “Did you see Dr. Dread’s face when the weather suddenly got better? He looked like such an idiot!”

I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. It was bad enough I had to listen to my parents get insulted
on the evening news and in the hallway of my school. Now I was hearing it from my best friend too.

But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t exactly go around defending the Dread Duo.

Suddenly Milton stopped talking. Looking up, I realized what had caught his attention. The Cafeteria Girls had just sat down at the other end of our table.

There were four of them. Seventh graders. Pretty in a too-much-makeup kind of way. They’d been sharing a table with us for the past two months (not that they’d ever noticed us), and somewhere along the way Milton and I had begun calling them the Cafeteria Girls (not that we ever told them that). They immediately launched into their usual activity—criticizing everyone in sight.

“Check out Jenny Allen’s haircut!”

“Is that a pimple, or is James Wendler growing a second head?”

“Look at Maria Rodriguez’s shoes! What did she do? Steal them from a homeless astronaut?”

They went on like this for the next ten minutes or so, commenting on the clothing, appearance, and grooming habits of everyone who passed through the cafeteria. Sitting so close to them gave Milton and me access to all the gossip and trash talk Sheepsdale Middle School had to offer.

“Who’s the new girl?” One of the girls pointed across the cafeteria at someone I’d never seen before.

“Sophie Smith. Sixth grader.”

“Did you hear what Daniel Clark said about her?”

The rest of the Cafeteria Girls shook their heads.

“Daniel’s older brother works for a moving company that helped Sophie Smith and her dad move into this, like, castle outside town. She doesn’t have a mom. No brothers or sisters either. Just the two of them in this enormous house. And the stuff they were moving. He’d never seen anything like it before.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Lowering her voice, the girl telling the story leaned across the table. The others did the same. Milton and I craned our necks to listen.

“Weird stuff,” she whispered. “They had three entire moving vans full of flat-screen TVs. At least two hundred of them. And there were other things too. One truck was full of boxes that were completely empty. I mean, who brings an entire truck full of empty boxes?”

Taking a bite of my sandwich, I couldn’t help wondering if any of this was actually true. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Milton sipping his chocolate milk and trying to listen without seeming conspicuous.

“Wanna know the craziest thing, though?” The girl paused long enough to snap her gum. “Outside the house, there were guard towers. With machine guns.”

The entire table gasped. Milton spit out his milk.
Luckily the Cafeteria Girls were too immersed in the story to notice.

“Machine guns? Why?”

“That’s the point. Nobody knows. So I’m thinking that Sophie Smith is the daughter of, like, some mob boss who really likes TV or maybe a superwealthy guy who collects weird stuff for no reason and worries a lot about security, or maybe—”

“Shhh. Here she comes.”

The table went silent. I snuck a glance at Sophie as she passed our table. Light swam in her blue-gray eyes. Holding her food tray with one hand, she pushed a strand of blond hair out of her face with the other.

She scanned the room, looking for a place to sit. For a second I felt sorry for her. First day in a new school without any friends. I’d been there before.

I was about to offer Sophie a seat at our table—it would have been worth it just to see the looks on the Cafeteria Girls’ faces. But before I could say anything, she turned and walked outside.

Rumors spread about Sophie Smith like a bad case of acne. People said that her dad was a celebrity in hiding. That she’d spent the last several years in an exclusive private school for the children of powerful parents. That
she was an antisocial weirdo. That she only talked to the kids of other famous people. That her dad moved to Sheepsdale to get away from the paparazzi …

But in the end, they were just rumors. Sophie and her father were a mystery. A mystery everyone in school seemed to know about.

When I got to seventh period, I took a seat at the back of the room. Joey and Brick were at their usual desks in the middle of the class (the most beneficial spot for cheating purposes). As soon as I sat down, they turned around in their desks and stared at me. I tried to block them out, but that wasn’t so easy.

“I think Joey and Brick are trying to get your attention,” Milton said, poking me on the shoulder.

“I know that, Milton.” I focused on my desk. “I’m ignoring them.”

“Brick just rolled up his sleeves, and now he’s staring at you as he pounds his fist against the table.”

“Thanks for the commentary.”

“And Joey’s superangry about something. Looks like he’s writing a note. Hmm. I wonder what it says. Okay, he’s folding the note and passing it to Jade Watkins. Now she’s passing it over to Sam Berthold, and he’s passing it to … Oh— Hold on a second.”

Sam handed the note to Milton, who took one look at it, then tapped me on the shoulder.

“It’s for you.” Milton dropped the note on my desk.

I unfolded the sheet of paper and glanced down at Joey’s sloppy handwriting.

I looked up from the note when I heard a wave of whispers sweep across the classroom. Sophie Smith had entered through the doorway. The entire class watched as she crossed the room. Even Joey and Brick.

Sophie passed between the rows of desks toward the back of the room, where Milton and I were sitting.

“Is this seat taken?” She pointed to an empty seat beside me.

I stared back at her, thinking about all the things I’d heard. The trucks full of TVs and empty boxes, the machine guns—

“No,” I blurted out. “I mean—yes.”

Sophie tilted her head.

“What I mean is that,
no
, this seat isn’t taken, and
yes
, you can sit down,” I finally got out.

“Thanks.”

And then she did.

Seventh period was American history. Our teacher was Ms. McGirt, who was somewhere between seventy and seven hundred years old. She had a fluff of white hair and a pair of eyes that were magnified behind thick glasses.

Ms. McGirt was half blind and three-fourths deaf. She misunderstood whenever students asked questions, she didn’t notice us raising our hands, and she never caught Joey and Brick cheating off the students around them. All of this made class interesting for reasons that had nothing to do with American history.

As the bell rang, Ms. McGirt rose from her desk, wobbled across the room, and began to describe our class project.

“It will have a specific emphasis on DNLS—Date, Name, Location, Significance.” She spoke in a high, shaky voice, blinking at the class in front of her as if she weren’t sure we were even there. “If you can adequately recite the DNLS of a historic event, then you will come away with a superb comprehension of American history. Is that understood?”

“No,” Joey said.

“Very good. Let’s continue.”

Brick laughed. Ms. McGirt, oblivious, went on.

“Students will organize themselves into groups of
three,” she said. “Each group will prepare a ten-minute presentation.”

The class let out a collective groan. Ms. McGirt ignored this (probably because she didn’t hear it).

“Your assignment is to choose a specific historic event and focus on DNLS,” she said. “Who can tell me what these letters stand for again?”

“Dumb Nut Loser School?” Joey said.

“That is correct. Date, Name, Location, Significance. Now, please select your groups.”

I already knew Milton and I would be in a group together. Turning in my desk, I looked around for a third person. Sophie’s eyes caught mine.

“Would you—” I stopped myself. The gossip was swirling around in my head again. She was some rich celebrity’s daughter; she lived in a giant house surrounded by machine guns; she only hung out with other kids of famous people. Why would someone like that want to partner up with a kid who goes by the name Dorkface?

“Sure! I’ll work with you guys.” Sophie smiled at me. “By the way, I’m Sophie. Sophie—Smith.”

I gripped my desk a little tighter. Maybe it was just my imagination, but there was something strange about the way she’d said her first and last names. As if she couldn’t quite remember how they fit together. After years of hiding my identity, I could recognize when someone was doing the same thing.

“E
verything okay?” Dad asked. “You’ve been staring at your textbook for the past two minutes like it’s written in binary.”

He was holding a pair of his silver goggles in one hand and a tiny screwdriver in the other. Thanks to his superpowered eyesight, he could examine atomic particles without a microscope, and read fine print from a mile away. The goggles he’d invented allowed him to regulate his vision. They also looked intimidating and masked his identity. Perfect for the supervillain who wanted to be terrifying
and
practical.

“What’s going on?” Dad asked, sitting on the couch beside me.

“Just something that happened at school today,” I began. “These bullies—”

“Bullies?”

I stared at the floor. “Yeah.”

“That’s the problem with this world.” Dad let out an angry sigh. “The big and powerful think they can push around the little guy. It’s a vicious cycle. The bullies exploit the weak, and it makes them even stronger. Unless someone stands up to them. Unless someone fights back. Like your mom and I do.”

“Um … okay, but—”

“See, that’s the thing people don’t understand about your mom and me,” Dad went on. “
Sure
, we put on uniforms, and,
yes
, we threaten the government with total annihilation. But we’re not out to destroy the world just for the sake of destroying it.”

I wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with my problem, but I nodded anyway.

“Our goal is to start the world over again. Reboot. Do it right the next time. Shake up the power structure. Of course, we need money for all that. Which is why it’s necessary for us to make our little requests.”

“You call a private jet full of hundred-dollar bills a
little request
?”

Dad shrugged. He gave the goggles a twist. The goggles let out a squeak.