School for Sidekicks (4 page)

“What the…,” mumbled Manny.

I worked even harder, straining until I thought I was going to rip my own arms off … and the dumbbells moved. Just for a second, but I swear they moved—
3,000
. What the heck? This wasn't how it went! Something must have gone wrong with the display. Somehow, that made me even angrier—
4,000
. There was a distinct clunk, like I'd lifted the weights a tiny bit and they'd fallen back. The whole body-electric itch turned into something more like burning—as though my very cells were on fire—
5,000 lbs
.

“Impossible!” exclaimed Glen.

I pulled with everything I had then—
7,500 lbs
. I'd
never
seen that before. I knew Glen was right and it felt like the machine was mocking me. I yanked and twisted and … the dumbbells moved again. I could feel them lifting off the stand ever so slowly.

10,000 lbs … 000000000 … error … error … error … failure
.

There was a tremendous zorching sound. Half the basketball team screamed. The glass plate in front of the meter cracked and smoke came billowing out of someplace in the floor. In that same moment, the dumbbells suddenly reverted to the ten or so pounds gravity made them. They came up away from the stand like they were rocket-propelled, and I went butt over brains—flying backward away from the machine.

I landed on the back of my head, hard! The whole world went pretty seriously wobbly for a bit. When it came back to normal, it felt like several seconds had vanished into elsewhere and taken me with them. Apparently, they'd also dragged me across the room, too.

That seemed like the only reasonable explanation for the fact that I was lying a good thirty feet from the machine. I couldn't think of
anything
to explain the way the dumbbells had somehow punched themselves deep into the concrete-block wall above me.

I blinked several times, looked at all the smoke and the sparks shooting out of what used to be Captain Commanding's very own weight system, and at the alarmed circle of jocks standing around it. All I could do was wonder how I was going to explain things to the park manager.

That's when the sprinklers went off.

 

4

UnMasked

Worst part of the worst day of my life? No one believed me. Not the firemen. Not the park manager. Not the lawyer who slipped me his card, “In case you need to sue…” Not my mom. No one. Not even with most of the basketball team as eyewitnesses.

Well, that's not entirely true. Pretty much everyone believed I'd been trying my luck with the dumbbells and something had gone horribly wrong. But they all just thought the equipment flaked out. That's sure what Manny was claiming, though he and the rest of the guys kept looking at me funny, and they all seemed awfully nervous about getting too close.

As for the rest, well:
Sure son, you were totally lifting ten thousand pounds and it broke the machine.

I'm so sorry, young man, but what can you expect from something built by that awful Foxman?

Interesting story, kid, it'd sure build sympathy with a jury.

I'm sorry, honey, that must have been really awful—I know how much you've always wanted powers.

By the end of it,
I
almost didn't believe me. Especially since—when I had very quietly tried to lift the concrete bench the firemen had parked me on—I couldn't so much as budge it. If I
had
been superstrong for a few seconds—a big if—it hadn't lasted. Fifteen minutes later, I was plain old me again. Once the paramedics checked out the rest of the guys, they had all slipped off without a one of them even saying good-bye.

Why wouldn't anyone believe me?

I felt like shouting and punching things. Especially after the ride home with my mother in the car. When it became obvious that she didn't believe me either, I'd blown up at her. Apparently this was serious yelling, because there was no snark in her response. She just told me, “I'm listening, honey. I know this has been a hard day.”

I hate that she can be so reasonable when I'm furious. And I hate that I hate it. And I really, really hate that knowing all that makes it almost impossible for me to sustain a good mad. Seriously, reasonable parents are a curse.

As soon as I was out of the car I stormed up to my room and slammed the door. Becoming a Mask was the most important thing in the world to me, no matter what I'd tried to tell myself when I deleted my hero's logs. Here I was, maybe on the brink of realizing that dream, and everybody kept “humoring” me about the whole thing. Didn't they understand what this could mean?

As incredibly corny as it sounded to say it—even silently in my head—Captain Commanding wasn't just
a
hero, he was and always had been
my
hero, the guy I wanted to
become
. I had the shirts. I had the breakfast cereal. I had the action figures. Heck, I had the underwear. If this whole episode with the dumbbells had even a shred of reality to it, maybe I was finally going to get my wish.

And there was a shred of reality … literally. A patch of something like a rubbery bit of cobweb, only thicker and really, really tough. It was slightly smaller than the palm of my hand, and I'd found it stuck in the hair on the back of my head in the minutes between the alarms going off and the firemen arriving.

When I first tugged on the thing, it felt weird, like it had roots going down through my scalp to the bone underneath. I think I screamed then, but my head was still ringing, and the whole memory is kind of fuzzy. A minute or so later, when I freaked out and yanked at it again, the thing came right off. It should have caught on my hair, but it didn't, and it had lots of little holes in it, like it had grown up around the hair without sticking to it.

I'm not sure why I hadn't wanted to share my strange little treasure with any of the dozen people I'd told my story to. Maybe because I was absolutely terrified someone would take it away from me—this tiny shred of hope for my hero dream. Whatever the reason, it was evidence that the weirdness of that moment wasn't all inside my head. Some of it had stuck to the back—in a sort of superscab.

I pulled it out of my pocket again now and looked at it for maybe the fiftieth time. It was stiffer and drier than it had been this afternoon, more like a bit of paper-wasp hive or a butterfly's empty cocoon. It smelled papery, too, and I wondered what it would look like in the morning, and how it would smell. Then I thought about the fact that it had come off my head—
out
of my head maybe—shivered briefly, and stuffed it into my nightstand … for a few minutes, before taking it right back out again and poking at it. It was so bizarre, like nothing I'd ever read about in all my years as a Mask nerd.

About an hour later, my mom checked in, tapping on the door and offering me a tray with a snack on it. I still hadn't finished staring at the cracks in the ceiling, so I grunted twice for no. Then I quickly tucked the bit of cobwebby stuff under my pillow, in case she decided to come in anyway. I still wasn't ready to share it with anyone, not even my mom. It was too creepy for that—and too precious—this symbol of my maybe-powers.

She stuck her head in briefly. “I'll get this in the morning, honey.” Then she set the tray down and went away.

Without willing it, I pulled out the bit of superscab again, staring at it as I turned it over and over and over in my hands until I fell asleep. My alarm went off at nine, and after I failed to destroy the clock with my mind, I rolled out of bed, landing with a thud and verifying once again that I couldn't fly.

After I finished my powers check, I pulled out my little bit of superscab for another look. It felt harder now, with only the tiniest bit of flex, like the bits of plastic armor they wear in hockey or football. I wasn't willing to really push on it for fear I might break it, but I got a real impression of toughness.

Then I went down to the basement where my parents have a little home gym. I set the weight machine as high as it would go—a three hundred pound bench press—and, hoping so very hard that this would go like the Captain's weight machine, I threw my whole body into it. Nothing. It didn't budge.

Still, I had my superscab … so I set the machine to the best weight I could bench, eighty-five, and did a couple of reps. If I
did
manifest powers this summer, I needed to be ready.

*   *   *

This is the part of my story where if I was in a movie they'd run a montage with inspirational theme music playing in the background and a clock on the wall with the numbers and dates blurring away two months. I'd keep working the weights and my runs, and by the end I'd be superbuff and those three-hundred-pound reps would go like nothing. Then, I would pick up my Mask suit at Camp Commanding and it would fit perfectly and I would go out and fight crime.

But my life is not a movie. The Mask uniform wasn't even there when I finally went back and checked a few days later. In fact, the whole inside of the building looked completely different now—restrooms—and I was too embarrassed to ask anyone about it. After what happened at the Captain's Bunker,
everyone
who worked at the park knew who I was. As the weeks went by I got more and more depressed.

What if the Captain's dumbbells had just malfunctioned and my only power was superscabs? That seemed ever more likely, since I never even broke one-twenty on my dad's weights. I tried but I'm simply too skinny. I'd like to blame it on my math-dork parents, but the reason we have a machine that even goes to three hundred is that Dad played football in high school—offensive line—and he
can
bench that much. Unfortunately, I take after my mom, who took ballet classes from Gran, which is how she met my dad.

Both Mom and Gran wanted me to take dance, because you can never get enough boys in the classes, but a moment of klutziness persuaded them to give up where my complete lack of enthusiasm had failed. You accidentally break one ballerina's stupid little toe, and suddenly it's no more dance for you, young man. If I'd known that at the start, I'd have been tempted to do it sooner.

The only thing about my summer that went even remotely like the Mask movie I wished I was starring in was that I collected another little shred of superscab.

I was mowing the lawn and I hit something with the blade. I still don't know what, but it shot out from under the mower, bounced off a tree and nailed my left eye. Things blurred out completely, and for a few seconds I thought I was going to end up with a head start on a career in piracy—black eye patch, don't ya know. But within a minute it stopped stinging, and when I blinked a couple times afterward, a bit of web dropped out of my eye.

I'm not sure “grows healing scabwebs” is the kind of power you can build a Mask career on, but combine it with the incident with the Captain's weights, and I really started to hope again. Enough so that I started secretly wearing a costume under my regular clothes on days where I thought I might encounter a crime.

I say
costume
, but it was really just my Dorkman running gear with a domino mask tucked away and some sneakers. All of which made me even more bummed about missing out on the uniform I had supposedly won that first day at Camp Commanding. I did wear the ring most days, but that was a poor substitute for custom-fit Armex and Invulycra.

Sigh
.

*   *   *

School. How did it get to be time for school to start again? I don't hate school like many of the other kids in my class, but I'm not a big fan either. I wasn't looking forward to getting back to my classes or seeing my fellow students. Especially not after the incident at Camp Commanding.

I'd bumped into guys from the basketball team a couple of times since then, and it wasn't much fun. The jocks used to tolerate me. But now they were treating me like I had some sort of weird disease that they were all afraid of catching if they got too close. That might have been easier to take if I had any
real
friends, but I don't.

I was feeling pretty alone and invisible by the third week back when my civics class climbed into a bus and headed for the Heropolis Museum of Masks for our first field trip. I ended up in the middle of the bus, sitting by myself and reading the latest issue of
Captain Commanding
, ignored or avoided by everybody. At least I was able to open the window and enjoy the crisp fall air—I love the dusty dry leaf smells of autumn.

When we got to the museum, Mr. Granger paired me up with one of the geek gang—Dave something—school policy insists we all have to have a buddy. But it took all of two minutes after the teacher took his eyes off us before we went our separate ways—Dave joined some of the other geeks at the front of the group when they herded us into the Hero Bomb exhibit and handed out headsets.

I ended up near the back of the line where most of the jocks were clustered. So, I waved at Glen and Jamal and asked, “How's it going?”

Glen waved back and looked like he was going to say something, but then Jamal elbowed him in the ribs and pointed at Manny, who stood in front of them in line. He wasn't turned our way, but Glen nodded and his eyes dropped to the floor. A moment later, Jamal turned to the front as he collected his headset. Glen caught my eye then and shrugged apologetically. Then he too turned away. I fell back to the very end of our group after I got my headset. There was no point in pushing in where I wasn't wanted.

I turned my audio tour on as we started moving. I'd been there a thousand times before and could practically recite it from memory, but at least it gave me the illusion that I had someone to talk to. Well that, and it drew me in every time I came to the museum. Maybe because this was how it all started, with a huge tragedy and a mystery we don't understand even now.