The 6th Power (12 page)

“Look around. There’s no one here. He’s coming for you and he plans on dragging you off someplace and, well, teaching you a lesson.” I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, ‘cause I knew that this was sounding crazy.

“That’s crazy,” she said. “What, he’s going to beat me up for helping you? And he thinks I’m not going to tell anybody about it, that he isn’t going to get busted?”

“He, uh, he can be pretty persuasive when it comes to not telling on him.”

She shrugged. “Maybe for you. He lays a finger on me, and I’m going to scream my head off.”

“Only if he lets you,” I said, taking a step closer. Why was it so hard for her to understand this? “What if he promises you that if you tell, he’ll find some way of hurting you even worse, and what if, when you see the look in his eyes, you know that it is absolutely true. Chet is not just your run-of-the-mill bully.” I stopped for a moment as a truth sunk into me. “There’s something seriously wrong with him. Like, in-the-head wrong with him.” I decided to take a chance. “Haven’t you… haven’t you ever met someone like that? Someone who didn’t care about what was right or what was wrong, or about how much they were hurting you, as long as they got their way?”

And the way that Hannah stepped back, her eyes wide, her mouth falling open, I could see that she finally understood, that she recognized what I was talking about, and if the man in white had been right in front of me at that moment, it would have taken a lot for me not to grab him and drop him in the lake from a very great height.

She opened her mouth to say something, but I never got to hear it because suddenly her eyes went wide. Hannah gripped my shoulder and pointed behind me. I turned and looked, a chill already traveling up my spine.

Chet, running into the park, straight for us. He was using the kind of speed that beats the throw to home plate. But the hitter isn’t supposed to still be carrying his baseball bat when he rounds the bases. The hitter isn’t supposed to look like he’s going to bash in the catcher’s head. He’d reach us in seconds.

With an effort, I ignored the impending beating and remembered what I could do. I squeezed Hannah’s hand and said, “Trust me.”

It seemed like centuries before she pulled her eyes away from Chet and looked at me. Eons later, she whispered, “O-okay.”

Chet was getting closer and closer. I sure hoped this would work.

The power came up, flowing through us both. Hannah’s eyes went wide as she felt it and I spared time for a grin when I saw her feet start to leave the ground.

A shadow passed over us as we rose. I heard him grunt and my leg exploded, pushing a shriek out of me with the impact. We wobbled and dipped and I was sure that the bat was going to land again, this time on my head, and that would be the end of the ballgame.

I pushed aside the terror, focused, and thought about Superman.

Hand in hand, Hannah and I shot up into the sky, leaving Chet behind. I looked back and saw him standing there, alone in the park, bat in hand, getting smaller and smaller as we flew away.

Chapter 16

S
he spent a lot of time screaming, at first.

I felt like joining her. My leg was killing me. The only bright spot was that I didn’t think that anything was broken, but I was going to have a wicked bruise.

Eventually, as we evened out and reached a cruising altitude, Hannah seemed to realize that she wasn’t going to die any time soon. She started to howl and flail about, like she was riding a skateboard instead of flying. I, of course, had one arm stretched forward in the classic, superhero pose. I shouted at her until she paid attention, and then I taught her everything I knew in my vast half-hour of flight experience.

Suppose we should have focused on what we were going to do next, but by that point, things started to get fun. We still had to hold hands, and as Hannah got more comfortable being thousands of feet in the air, her death grip relaxed and we started to actually work as a team. We leaned and swooped together through a series of turns and banks, then shot into the nearest cloudbank.

Everything was wet and white and disorienting, because wispy is no better frame of reference than blue. For a moment I was worried that we’d get lost, but then we were through and above it, a cotton-ball world laid out before us, water-air swirls and carvings spread out like a mountain range. We slowed, taking in everything, spinning and twirling. It was my first dance with a girl. The only music was the blowing of the wind and our laughter, but still, not bad.

“Are we really doing this?” Hannah shouted. “Did I even wake up this morning?”

I gently tugged on one of her pig tails and said, “Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey.” Something my mother used to say when she woke me up in the morning.

Hannah grinned and we flew up high, higher than I’d gone before, until even the clouds looked small and the world below us was just patches of green and blue.

To be honest, it was awesome and it was freaking me out. Guess I wasn’t the only one, because Hannah gave my hand a squeeze. “Shouldn’t we be freezing to death?” she shouted, the furrow returning between her eyebrows.

I shrugged. “Probably,” I shouted back. “The power’s protecting us, somehow.”

“What power? How are we doing this?”

I opened my mouth to explain, then realized that it wasn’t a conversation we could have while bellowing. I pointed down and with a sigh, she nodded. We flipped over and shot towards the ground. Hannah screamed, but it was barely audible over the roar of wind and velocity.

Finally, we pulled up and leveled off. It took me a moment to figure out where we were, but with Hannah’s help I got my bearings and we headed back towards Coralberry. Hannah copied my superhero pose and looked down at our hands.

“I think you can let go now,” she said, smirking.

“Uh, actually, I don’t think I can,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Well, have you ever seen that first Superman movie, the one with Christopher Reeve?”

“Of course,” she said.

A girl who’d seen a Superman movie. Pretty cool. “You know the scene where Superman is flying around with Lois Lane? They’re holding hands, he lets go, and she plummets towards the ground?”

Hannah nodded. “Sure, but he flies down and catches her.”

“Yeah, but he’s Superman, and this is only my first day flying.”

She grinned and pointed at the blue water tower on the north side of town. I nodded and we floated in, settling gently on top. Immediately, my wounded leg throbbed and it was all I could do to sit down instead of fall on my face.

Hannah sat facing me and we looked out over the town. The water tower was on top of a hill, so we could see all of Coralberry below us. In fact, you could see its history from up here, where the older houses were built when the town was founded and how things got newer and newer the farther you moved from downtown. I remembered Mr. Magellan telling me that the building that the comic book store was in had once been a general store, and that people had come for miles around to buy flour and cloth and things they’d needed to survive, as opposed to his plastic dice and colorful stories. I’d thought about arguing with him that I needed comic books to survive, but it seemed like a silly idea. Now, though, I had the feeling that Mr. Magellan would have understood what I was talking about. I wondered if that light was still on in the window over his shop, whether he was really there. In some ways, it seemed like the most important thing in the world that I find that out, that I get some answers from him. In other ways, it didn’t seem that important at all anymore.

“You know,” said Hannah, “I always thought it would be cool to climb up here, that the view would be amazing. But now that I’m here…”

I smiled. “Not that great, huh?”

“Nope, nothing special,” she said with a laugh. Then she looked at me and kept on looking, as if she were seeing me for the first time. “So you’re from another planet, huh?”

I stretched out my leg, trying to get it comfortable. “I wish. In some ways, that would make this week a lot less weird.” I shook my head. Part of me, I suppose the part that thought that superheroes should never give up their secret identities, or the part that was worried about dragging Hannah further into all of my mess, hesitated to say more. But for some reason, whether it was because I wanted to get it all straight in my head or because I wanted to get advice on what I should do next or because I’d never had an actual conversation with someone my own age and I just didn’t want it to end, the words started falling out of my mouth. “Have you ever been to Coralberry Comics and Collectibles?”

Nice thing about having a perfect memory. When you want to tell a story, you’ve got all of the details. I told Hannah everything. I told her about Mr. Magellan and the herbal memory enhancers. I told her about tracking down the garbage truck and how my memory of invisibility made me invisible. I told her about how I got Chet in trouble in the bathroom and how the power changed at breakfast the next day. I told her what really happened behind Mr. Magellan’s hedges, and I had a hard time looking her in the eye as I did.

“I’m sorry about what happened, that you had to see that, that you got dragged into all of this. That’s why Chet was coming after you this morning. He wanted to hurt you because… well, to get back at me.”

Hannah smacked me upside the head.

“Ow!” I rubbed the spot, wincing.

“Idiot,” she said. “It’s not your fault that Chet came after me. You didn’t ask for me to stick up for you. I did it because I hate bullies. Absolutely hate them. Always have. And Chet’s coming after me because he’s a jerk, not because you made him throw up everything he’s eaten since the third grade.”

Despite everything, despite the pain in my leg, despite the awfulness of everything I’d gone through with Chet, I started laughing. I laughed long and hard, until I was flopped over on my side, holding my gut, tears streaming down my face.

Eventually, the laughter died. I wiped my eyes and saw that Hannah’s eyebrow was up again, but there was a small smile on her face. “Sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “Been a rough week.”

She nodded and said, “So what happened after the great up-heaval?”

I groaned at the pun and told her about the twins going to the hospital and about me taking the pill that night and waking up the next morning covered with foam. I even shared with her my close call with Mom and Robert in the hallway.

Hannah asked, “Why did you take the blame with your mom?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you could have just let your Mom catch Robert all covered with the bubbles. Get him busted like you did Chet.”

“Yeah, I thought about that. But… I’m tired of playing Chet’s games. Lying, getting people in trouble… that’s not who I want to be.”

Hannah gave me a look that said she thought I was crazy, but there was something else there, too. She waved for me to go on, and I told her what happened when I visited her house. “I’m sorry if I got you in trouble with your father.”

“Step-father,” Hannah clarified, firmly. “No, I wasn’t in any more trouble than I’m normally in.” I wanted to press that point, ask her what she meant, but it didn’t seem like she wanted to fill in the details. She surprised me, however.

“Mom met him on the internet. Seemed like a nice guy. They hit it off. Tied the knot. We moved here. Wasn’t long before we figured out what a major control-freak he is.”

I thought about Chet, how neat he kept his room, how he kept talking about putting things back in order, and I nodded.

Hannah picked at some peeling paint, not looking at me. “Everything has to be done his way. If it isn’t, the yelling starts. Mom works during the day at an accounting firm in Westertonville. He works the second shift at the post office, sorting mail. The best part of my day is when he leaves for work, but until then, it’s just him and me.”

I thought about how things used to be before Mom had Kiki, when she went off to work with Dad and it was just me and the twins in the house. I nodded again.

Hannah shook her head. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about him.” She tried to smile as she said, “What happened next?”

I wanted to say something, to tell her that I knew how she felt or that I was sorry for how things were, but anything I thought about saying sounded stupid and not-enough in my head. So I went on, telling her about the nightmare attack in Mr. Magellan’s yard.

“Wow,” she whispered, eyes wide. “What do you think happened to you?”

“It’s like… he took the stuff that was in these pills and turned it into a weapon, then decided to use it to keep intruders out of his house instead of just, you know, locking his door. It was… awful. As I’m sitting here, I have to keep pushing the memory of it away, or else I’ll just freak out again.” I shook my head. “Anyway, after that, I resolved not to take the last pill. I just dropped it in the field and walked away.”

Hannah propped her chin up with her hand. “What happened then?”

I told her about Robert’s dramatic change in appearance and how he had stormed off after supper.

“Wait a minute,” she said, starting to giggle. “Last night? I saw him! He was at Friendly’s! My mom and I went for ice cream and I saw him!”

“Huh. What was he doing?”

She beamed. “Talking to a girl.”

Well, that didn’t compute. As far as I knew, no girl had ever shown any interest in Robert. At all. 

“And not just any girl,” Hannah continued. “He was talking to Lorelei Davis.”

“Who?”

She rolled her eyes. “Lorelei Davis! She’s just about the most popular girl in the ninth grade. Way, way out of your brother’s league. I was sharing a banana split with my mom and I saw Robert playing one of those video games in the back…”

“
Death Rattle 3000
,” I said.

“Whatever. Robert was playing and Lorelei was there with some other girls and she just went up and started talking to him. He looked pretty shy at first. Then they started laughing, and she touched his arm! I think she even gave him her phone number.”

“Whoa. Why would she do that?”

“Well,” said Hannah, dropping her eyes, “he doesn’t look half bad when he’s cleaned up.”