The Rise of Renegade X (10 page)

Marty suddenly slams his hands against the lockers, making a loud
bang!
and getting a start out of Sarah. He grins, says, “Your boyfriend’s next, Kink,” and lets her go.

Jill flings Sarah’s notebook and sends it sliding down the hall, the pages crumpled against the floor.

Jill and Marty move to leave, along with the other two, but I block their way. Jill raises her eyebrows at me.

“You just made my list,” I tell them. My list of people who need dealing with. “You’re going right to the top.” Too bad I’m new here, or they might be more intimidated by that.

Marty shoves me up against the lockers as he walks past. I slump down to the floor and watch as they disappear, laughing, down the hall.

“Don’t worry, wearing gloves doesn’t make them supervillains,” Sarah says. “They’re only pretending. They’re not any different than you and me, but you still shouldn’t have done that.” She shakes her head in frustration, then looks me over, one side of her mouth twitching in doubt. “I hope you have backup.”

I hold out my hand. “Can I borrow your pen?”

She hands it to me, then runs down the hall to get her notebook. She dusts it off and straightens out the pages. “Losers.”

I take my list out of my pocket and write Jill’s and Marty’s names down in ink.

I slide into a chair next to Amelia at lunch. I slip my hand into hers before she notices it’s me. Her eyes get wide and her muscles go tense, but when she turns and sees me, her look changes from shock to pure disgust. “Get out of here!”

Her friends gape at me, fries and sandwiches held frozen, partway in their mouths. They’ve all got on mauve eye shadow like Amelia. They mostly wear black, except for one girl who’s wearing pink, like she didn’t get the dress code memo today. She looks really out of place.

I don’t know if I’m as freakish as Amelia says I am, or if the idea of a boy coming up to the table is just too out of the ordinary, but all six girls seem broken, like clockwork toys whose gears all simultaneously fell apart. They look to Amelia for some kind of explanation.

Amelia makes a scoffing sound, like she’s offended not only by my presence but by the fact that she has to introduce me. She mumbles into her peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off, red goo oozing out the sides. “This is Damien.”

I can tell from their expressions that she hasn’t told them about me.

“I’m her brother,” I inform them, reaching across the table and grabbing a fry off one of their plates. “We’re very close.” I put my arm around Amelia and squeeze.

“Eww! Get off me, you creep!” She pushes me away.

The girls eye me with interest now. “This is your brother?” the pink girl asks.

“Half,”
Amelia corrects her. “He’s not sitting with us. Not if he knows what’s good for him. And you look like such a poser with those gloves on.”

She could have told me this morning. Not that it would have changed anything. Apparently the deal with the spandex kids is they wear a glove on their right hands to pretend to be covering up
V
s, like they think they’re supervillains. They could be pretending to be heroes, of course, but that doesn’t fit with their beating people up in the hallway. The whole glove thing is stupid because real supervillains don’t use them—that would be too obvious—myself excluded, of course. I’m going to get one of those fake thumbprints as soon as funds allow. Maybe when I get back home, Mom will be so proud of me for surviving my time at Gordon’s that she’ll contribute to my thumbprint fund.

A girl with a green stripe in her hair giggles at Amelia’s poser comment. Everyone but Amelia struggles with their impression of me, trying to decide if they think I’m as weird as she does, or if they can forgive my supposed poser status if it means me staying and them getting to inhale my teenage-boy hormones a little longer.

Sorry, girls, but I came to disappoint.

“Amelia,” I say, scooting uncomfortably close to her, “I want to tell you something.” I reach into my front jeans pocket and pull out a folded-up black sock with lace around the cuff. It’s clearly Amelia’s—it even matches the pair she’s wearing now. I grip it tightly in my hand and slide it under my nose, taking a deep whiff. Luckily, it’s clean.

Amelia watches in horror, then looks to her friends, her expression half asking for their help and half trying to assure them she has no idea what’s going on. “Where did you get that?!” she shrieks, so loud that the people at the next table look over.

“From my pants.” I let my eyes defocus in fake ecstasy and sigh, content.

Everyone watches, not daring to move, their faces pale, as if they’ve just witnessed something obscene.

“I wanted to tell you, Amelia, that I’m
really
glad you’re my sister. And that we’re going to be living together.” I take another whiff of the sock.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Amelia wrenches it away from me.

Everyone else at the table decides that I am, in fact, too weird. They pick up their lunches and leap back from the table.

“We’re just going to … leave you two alone,” the green stripe girl says.

“Guys, wait!” When they don’t come back, Amelia glares at me. If
she
had laser eyes, I’d be dead right now. “What is wrong with you?!”

With everyone else gone, I toss the sock on the table and scoot away from Amelia, getting my personal space back. “I have a proposition to make.”

“Not marriage, I hope. You’re such a loser.” She folds her arms and turns partially away from me.

Ugh. Marriage to Amelia? Not my first choice, and even if she didn’t have her sparkling personality, there’s always the fact that our children would only have three grandparents. “I wouldn’t want to ruin our friendship,” I tell her. “Plus, you know I don’t do farm animals.”

Her mouth falls open so far, I can count her fillings. “Why don’t you just go—”

She holds back from telling me what I can go do with myself, probably thinking about the sock and not wanting to encourage me. She screws up her mouth, clenching her teeth as she struggles to regain composure.

“Listen,” I say, now that I have her complete attention, “you don’t like me, and I don’t like you.”

She looks offended when I say I don’t like her, though she was perfectly happy to jump on the bandwagon and nod when I mentioned she had the same feeling for me.

“Nothing against your family or anything, but I’d rather gouge my own eyes out with a seafood pick than spend any more time with them than I have to.”

“Screw you, Damien.”

“I thought you’d see it that way. I think we can work something out. Gordon thinks he’s going to give me ‘superhero lessons,’ and one of those involves flying. Now, between you and me, we both know I’m a supervillain—”

She scoffs. “Check your hand, genius. An
X
doesn’t make you a villain.”

“This?” I rub my gloved fingers across my thumb. “This is going to change.”

Amelia rolls her eyes. She puts her chin in her hands. “You turned sixteen before me, and now you’re going to fly before me. You suck.”

“But I’m not a superhero, and I’m not going to be. I’ve got the power to be whoever I want.” I jab my finger into the table with each word to emphasize my point. “I. Am. A. Super. Villain.”

She breathes a heavy sigh and shrugs. “Fine, whatever, but Dad thinks you’ve got his ability.” Her eyes dart over to me, judging my reaction. “Alex was right—he was talking about it last night and again this morning, before he left for work. Before you were even up,” she adds, as if I should feel ashamed of my laziness. “He has a plan to ‘jump-start’ your flying lessons.”

I cringe. Just the sound of
jump
makes me want to go find a corner somewhere and curl up and die. Besides, who’s going to take me seriously as a supervillain if I can freaking
fly?
Even if I do get my
V
, it’s a point against me. Another shameful secret for me to hide. “Can we agree we both want to make sure that when my six weeks are up, I’m not stuck living at your house?”

She makes a face, no doubt picturing what that would mean for her. “I’m listening.”

“You were the oldest, and now I’m horning in on your glory. It’s really not fair. You’re so close to being first—and you deserve to be, don’t you think?”

She can’t argue with that. She idly picks off chunks of her sandwich, rolling them into little balls of bread and goo, and waits for me to go on.

“It’s already too late to be first to turn sixteen and get your letter, but I’m giving you an opportunity to make sure I’m not the first to learn to fly. Think about it. What other rites of passage are there? None, and with your help, we’re going to make sure you don’t miss out on yours.”

Amelia mulls it over. “What’s in it for you?”

I smile. “As you pointed out, there’s a slight, teeny tiny chance that my superhero genes will, say, be a problem. And I’d rather not find out.”

“What?” Her brow furrows in confusion.

I give it to her in simple terms. “Flying is superhero stuff. It’s a big step in the wrong direction, and if it turns out I’ve inherited the ability like dear old Gordon suspects, I might
never
get out of your house. I’m also the oldest—it’s likely they’ll give me your room in the attic, since it’s the biggest. You’ll have to share with Jessica for the rest of your life.” Lies, all lies. I’ve seen the attic stairs. They’re steep and rickety and the railing is falling off. There’s no way in hell I’d ever step foot in that attic, even if it meant sleeping in Alex’s cramped little room until I die, but Amelia doesn’t need to know that.

Amelia takes a deep breath. She shuts her eyes, like she knows she’s going to regret this, and says, “Fine. Tell me what I have to do.”

“Y
ou want to tell me about this?” Gordon asks, holding up the magazine I picked up on my way home from school.

It’s nothing dirty, just a gadgetry catalog for the technologically savvy villain or hero. Though the way Gordon holds it away from himself with two fingers, you’d think it was diseased. I decided saving up for a fake thumbprint is going to take too long, and I need it now. They’ve got one in there that uses state-of-the art technology to not only hide your real thumbprint but to holographically project either a
V
or an
H
onto it. It’s even got a remote control for easy programming. At $3,000, it’s probably out of my price range, so I’ll probably have to get the one that’s not much more than a cheap flap of rubber, but I’ll have to check Gordon’s bank records first. Did I mention this new thumbprint is a present from my dear new father? Who was kind enough to loan me his credit card, even if he doesn’t know it yet? He’s missed an awful lot of birthdays. I figure he owes me. I’ll also have to go to the library and get on the Internet—a “luxury-not-a-privilege” they don’t have here at the Tines house—to check customer reviews before ordering.

“It’s a catalog,” I tell him. “They have some good deals.”

Gordon sits next to me on the couch. I’m sitting on the end, so there’s not really anywhere for me to go, but I scoot over anyway, pressing myself into the arm. He might technically be my dad, but I’ve only known him a few days, and that doesn’t give him the right to invade my personal space.

Gordon opens up the catalog to the page with the thumbprints, where I jotted down some notes about the ones I want. “I hope you’re not thinking of ordering one of these.”

Uh, did you read my notes? “I have a problem. I’m trying to fix it.” Also, does he really think I have that kind of money, or is he on to me?

Amelia comes tromping down the attic stairs. They wobble and creak under her weight. Someday they’re going to collapse underneath her, and then she’s going to be sorry she chose to live on the second story. Her eyes dart over to me and Gordon, but she rushes past us into the kitchen, no doubt to stuff her face only an hour after dinner. Alex is playing in his room and Jessica’s already gone to bed, and I can hear the clinking and splashing noises of Helen washing the dishes.

Gordon’s brow furrows and his chin looks extra square and stern. I think about what Sarah Kink said, about me looking like him, and I hope it’s not true. Kat and I have spent a lot of time heckling his show—we would have noticed a resemblance, right? Kat would have told me if I looked like some superhero. She would have teased me about it and never let me live it down.