The Rise of Renegade X (16 page)

Amelia trails after me as I try to get away from her. Alex and his friends stomp around, shrieking and slamming Alex’s door. Helen calls out to Amelia from the other room, asking her again if I’m home.

I step into the bathroom, the only place where I can be alone in the whole house, and close the door only inches from Amelia’s face. I don’t know what she thought she was going to do—follow me in? I lock the door before slumping down against the wall and sliding to the linoleum. My eyes water, and I lean my head back to keep the tears from falling.

“Damien?!” Amelia pounds her fists against the door, her voice shrill and getting frustrated. “I said I was sorry!”

Mr. Wiggles will dance no more. She ruined the only thing in this house that was any sort of comfort to me, the only thing that was really
mine
.

“Fine, don’t talk to me!” Amelia shouts. “You’re the one who came here and acted like a jerk. Maybe if you were a little nicer, I would have believed you in the first place and this wouldn’t have happened.”

Or if she hadn’t been so quick to point the finger at me.

I hear footsteps, then Helen’s voice asks, “What is going on?”

Amelia pounds on the door again. “Damien! Talk to me already!” When I don’t respond, she makes a huffing noise and tells Helen, “He’s being really emo. I apologized and everything, and he won’t say
anything.”

“Then he might not want to talk,” Helen says. “Maybe you should leave him alone for a while?”

“Mom, I’m going to get through to him. I’m—”

“Amelia.”
I hear mumbling mixed with scolding, then some groaning from Amelia, and then, finally, the sound of them leaving. I can still hear Alex and his friends storming through the house, but otherwise I’m alone, and it’s quiet. I hug Mr. Wiggles to my chest. I thought finding out my father was a superhero was the worst it was going to get, but that doesn’t even come close to today. A couple of tears streak down my cheeks as I get out my phone.

Kat answers after only one ring. “Hey, Damien!” We haven’t talked since the day I told her I didn’t want to get back together. She sounds nervous at first, but then excited and relieved. “It’s so good to hear from you. I thought, when you didn’t call or come over again … Anyway, what’s up?”

I wipe my face on my sleeve. I half expected Kat to hang up on me, still upset about the other day, but no. I guess she’s over it, and we’re cool. My best friend is still there for me, even if everything else sucks. And maybe that’s really all she should be—my best friend. It sounds good. I could live with that. “Oh, nothing much,” I tell her. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

M
onday afternoon, Sarah and I share an armrest on the train. We’re supposed to be in school, but instead we’re traveling to Vilmore, to find Sarah’s father. I know, I know, I wasn’t going to get involved in this. But I figure since I was the one who broke the hypno device, causing my mom and Taylor to kidnap Dr. Kink, I owe her one. I won’t call it a rescue. That sounds like we’re doing a good deed. I don’t have anything against “good deeds” in general, only when they make me seem … heroic. In the superhero sense. If I was out superheroing, and the news got back to Gordon and Helen, Gordon might take that as evidence that I have superhero potential, and then he’d make me stay with him forever.

Well, he might. Depending on how he reacts to the dead baby spiders I injected into his toothpaste, or the inchworms I dropped in his shampoo bottle. I have yet to discover what Gordon’s biggest fear is, but I’m hoping it’s the worms.

Even if what I’m doing does count as superheroing in Gordon’s book, I can console myself with the fact that ditching school and running off on my own to do it doesn’t mesh well with his precious rules. Not only did I leave school without permission and without telling anybody, but I found the money for this trip lying around in Gordon’s wallet.

Sarah looks over and smiles at me. She thinks I’m a good person, a wannabe superhero trying to fight off my half-villain status. That’s the impression I get from the way she talks about how great I am for doing this, and how awful it is I only have an X, but how cool it’ll be when I finally get the
H
I deserve. Yeah, right.

I should set her straight. I really should. But then she wouldn’t want me to help her, and, to be honest, I’m her best bet for getting her dad back. So it’s for her own good that I’m not telling her the truth, and not because I’m selfish and want her to keep talking about how great and wonderful I am. Honest.

Sarah leans across the armrest, her eyes huge behind her glasses. She’s wearing a pink turtleneck sweater with a cartoony cow on the front, mooing in Japanese. “What’s your superhero name going to be?”

“I told you, I’m not a superhero. This isn’t a superhero mission.” I wave away the idea with a flick of my hand.

She raises a finger in protest. “A rescue is a type one mission, according to the superhero handbook. That’s the highest rank a mission can have.”

“Let’s not think of it as a mission. That sounds so … complicated. This is going to be no problem. Easy peasy, right?” Maybe not on her own, but with me here, we should be able to get in and get out and be home in time for dinner. Well, a late dinner—midnight snacks at the worst.

I can’t wait to see Gordon’s face when he wants to know where I was all night. He’ll already be suspicious that I was up to no good—telling him I was out spending the money I stole from him at villain-themed strip clubs is going to be awesome. Especially when I tell him it was minors night and I got all my drinks for free.

A grin spreads across my face, and I almost share my after-mission plans with Sarah. But then I remember she thinks this is a sanctioned trip, all on the up and up, and that she probably wouldn’t appreciate me lying to and stealing from my own dad. So instead I tell her, “It’s more like we’re just two teenagers, casually skipping school and enjoying a train ride together through the country, with plans to help someone out while we’re, you know, there. No big deal. Not anything that requires any superhero antics.”

Sarah chews her lip, then says, “But it’d be easier for me to come up with a sidekick name if I knew what you were going to call yourself.”

“You’re not my sidekick. Can I borrow those?” I point to her glasses.

She blinks and hands them to me. I put them on and instantly feel like puking, but I stick it out, trying to look off to the side and not through the lenses. I want to know how long she’ll let me wear them before asking for them back. I stare out the window, but we’re past the city and there’s nothing to see but grass and cows. Fields and fields of them.

I shut my eyes and start to drift off. I know I’m falling asleep because I suddenly feel like I’m plummeting from a million stories up and jolt awake. I don’t think I’ve slept more than five minutes straight since Saturday. I hope Gordon likes his worms. I’d hate to have to start messing with the family food supplies. Maybe fish eggs will mysteriously appear in the milk, or maggots in the ice cream. That’ll get Amelia—and hopefully several friends—next time she decides to pig out.

I look outside, peering over the edge of Sarah’s glasses. Still more grass. I lean my head on my hand, propping my elbow against the window, and sigh. “Deviant Demon.”

Sarah shakes her head and laughs like I’ve just said something in another language, like the cow on her sweater. “You can’t call yourself that. You sound like a
supervillain.”

Let’s see … Fraidy Flier and Freak Girl? “How about Locke and Keynk?”

She snorts. “I’ll keep it in mind of we start up a detective agency.”

“Cool Guy and Nifty Girl. That’s my final offer.”

Sarah leans over, her hand on my arm. She looks like a pink-and-yellow blob through her glasses. I feel dizzy and sick from looking through them. Sarah moves in close, but I can’t make out her expression through the blur. She grabs her glasses off my face and puts them on. Her eyes flick up and down, studying my reaction as she whispers, “What about Renegade X?”

Did it get hot in here, or is that just her? My chest tightens. Renegade X. It sounds
really cool
. I grind my teeth. I lick my lips and say, “I think it’s been done before.”

My arm hurts where her fingers dig into it. She lets go. “You’re wrong. I checked.” She sighs in frustration as she folds her arms across her chest and stares into the aisle.

Great. There goes my entertainment. I pull my phone out of my pocket and check the time. A little after two thirty. Perfect—the Crimson Flash is having a special afternoon Q&A session.
Live
. This is a once-a-month feature, so maybe it’s not really all that special, but Kat and I have taken advantage of it several times. The studio doesn’t even accept calls from her phone number anymore. Luckily, mine hasn’t been blacklisted yet.

I lean toward the window, away from Sarah, who’s still being all huffy about me not wanting to be Renegade X—not that I don’t want to be, because it’s a cool name, but, like I’ve told her a thousand times, I’m not a superhero—and pick the studio’s number out of my contacts list. It rings.

“Hey, there, Honorary Safety Member,” Gordon’s voice says. “The Crimson Flash is here to answer your question. There’s no challenge too big, no injustice too small—”

“Yeah, I have a safety question.” This always works better when Kat does the talking, what with her voice not having changed and it being easier to sound, you know, the appropriate age for this show. This time around I’m more worried Gordon will recognize my voice before I get to the good stuff. Not that there’s actually an official age limit, and wouldn’t Gordon be thrilled if he thought teens loved his show as much as little kids?

Sarah glances over at me, her eyebrows bunched up in a quizzical expression, but then something farther down the aisle catches her attention.

“If I’m in a subway bathroom, and I meet a girl I like, do I still need to use protection? Or will the germs in the bathroom give us nasty enough infections that we’ll both end up sterile?”

Silence. Then Gordon laughs awkwardly. I’ve never heard anything more forced in my life. “This better not be who I think it is,” he says, and I can hear the fake smile in his voice.

“So that’s a no, then?”

Gordon diverts my question onto the Safety Kids. “What do we think about safety?” he asks them. I know he’s asking them because this is a standard line of his.

And they shout back the standard response, “Always be safe!”

“So would you call pushing someone off a building safe? Or is that a—”

The line goes dead—took them long enough; I’m surprised I was on the air as long as I was—and then Sarah nudges me with her elbow. “Damien!” she whispers, pointing to a middle-aged man making his way down the aisle. “Do you see who that is?”

He looks a little familiar, but I can’t place him. Before I can shake my head no, she says, “Meet me in the bathroom in thirty seconds,” then runs off.

I knock on the bathroom door. At the other end of the train car, the middle-aged man opens his coat to reveal a red supervillain outfit underneath. His chest has the letters
TB
on it, plus a picture of jacks. Not the kind you use on a car, but the kind kids play with. And the
TB
doesn’t stand for
tuberculosis
, either. This is Jack the Toy Boy.

Erg. His name makes him sound more like a porn star than a supervillain. I met him at the Christmas party Mom threw last year. I don’t know if she even invited him. He kept hounding Kat to show him where the coat closet was,
alone
, until she shapeshifted into a six-foot-tall burly guy.

Just for the record, this isn’t the type of supervillain I want to be. I prefer to be the calm genius type, not a creepy soap dropper.

Pedophilia Man pulls out a handful of jacks and lets out a peal of maniacal laughter as Sarah opens the bathroom door for me and I slide in.

“God, it stinks in here.” And the floor is inexplicably wet. All over.

The sink digs into my back, and my knee jabs into Sarah’s thigh. I have to hold my arms up and twist my torso to fit in the room.