The Rise of Renegade X (28 page)

“Why don’t you call her and stop
moping?”

“Give me that!” I make a grab for it, but Amelia anticipates my move and steps out of reach.

Amelia smirks at me and waves the phone around. “Is it your
girlfriend
?”

“I do not
mope
. And no, it’s not. So give it back.” I scramble to my feet.

Amelia sings, “Damien’s in lo-
ove
,” and makes a run for the kitchen.

I chase after her. This must be exciting stuff, because Alex actually tears himself away from the TV to watch.

I corner Amelia next to the fridge. She’s wider than me, but I think I can take her. She pushes the call button on the phone. I lunge for it, but she elbows me in the collarbone. Which actually really hurts. A lot. “It’s ringing,” she says.

Oh, God. I rub my forehead with the palms of my hands. They’re sweating. “Amelia, give me that. Right now.” I tackle her and tickle her ribs.

It nearly works. Amelia’s almost cackling too hard to answer the phone. “Hello,” she says, in between bursts of laughter, “will you
puhlease
talk to my stupid brother, so he’ll stop pining over you?”

“I’m not pining!” I reach for the phone. Amelia twists away again.

“He’s so
in love.”

“Agh!” I scream at her. I tear the phone out of her hands just as the front door opens. Gordon and Helen storm into the kitchen. Helen’s in tears, and if Gordon didn’t look so angry, I’d ask them who died.

“Everybody go to your rooms, now!” Gordon shouts. He shakes his head and points at me. He’s so mad, he can hardly talk. “And
you
…” He can’t even finish his sentence. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. “In the living room.”

I flip my phone shut without saying good-bye.

I feel sick. I’d give anything for Mom and her laser eyes right now. At least she’d just shoot me and get it over with.

Helen can’t look at me. She’s crying her eyes out, and every time she glances over at me, she cries harder. She didn’t give me any crap for being half supervillain or for being her husband’s illegitimate kid. She let me live here and has been nothing but nice. What does she get in return? Me, breaking into her shop to steal an irreplaceable trophy of her glory days, her only reminder of why her sacrificing her superpower was for the greater good. It doesn’t matter if that’s not quite how it went down—I still hurt her. Guess that’s what she gets for trusting a supervillain.

I sink deeper into the couch.

Gordon’s holding a security picture of me with my hand on the display case in Helen’s shop. “Is this you?!” He can’t talk normally anymore, only shout.

I nod.

“So this is you. Dressed like a
supervillain.”

I can see why he would jump to that conclusion, even if you can’t see the whole costume. I’m not about to point out that it was in fact my superhero outfit.

Gordon crumples up the picture and hurls it to the floor. “What were you thinking? Is this some weird kind of payback for me going out of my way to teach
you
to fly? Because you’re not just hurting
me
with this.”

He doesn’t need to say Helen’s suffering the worst and that she doesn’t deserve it—it’s already painfully obvious. I wish she’d leave the room.

“Were you trying to prove something?” Gordon goes on. “You hate it here this badly, is that it?”

I open my mouth. A little croak comes out, but no words.

“Damn it, Damien.” Gordon seethes and paces in front of me. “I thought you learned something after the fire. I thought I could respect you, that on some level we could see eye to eye. It’s a good thing a
superhero
came and stopped you.” By saying “superhero” like that he means I’m not one and never will be. That’s exactly what I wanted, but it still makes me feel like crap to hear him say it.

“Good thing,” I mutter, avoiding eye contact.

“I don’t even want to think about what would have happened otherwise. I can’t believe how far you’d go to spite us. I
trusted
you. No wonder your mother was so quick to agree to this arrangement.”

“Gordon,” Helen warns. She shakes her head, blotting her face with a wad of tissues.

Great. Now she’s defending me. I know it’s meant to help, but it only makes me feel worse.

He ignores her. “She’d probably had more of you than she could stand.”

“Gordon, that’s enough!” Helen snaps.

I swallow back a lump in my throat and stare very hard at my knees. It’s hard to see their shape through my jeans, so I think about the wrinkles in the fabric instead.

“He’s my son, I’m handling this! Damien, go to your—” Gordon realizes I don’t have a room. When he can’t think of where to put me, I expect him to tell me to pack my bags instead. Well, bag. In the singular. But he doesn’t. He holds out his hand. “Phone.”

I give it to him. I had to turn it off because Kat tried to call me back, after I hung up on her.

His forehead wrinkles as he tries to think of anything else that matters to me. “No dinner tonight. And no … no friends over.” He pauses, and I know he’s wondering if I have any friends. “And I don’t think I have to tell you that you’re not leaving this house.” He looks like he wants to say more, but he storms off into his bedroom and slams the door instead.

Helen comes and sits next to me on the couch. She puts a hand on my shoulder. “He didn’t mean that,” she says, her voice still thick from crying. “He’ll calm down.”

I don’t deserve her sympathy. I turn away, curling up against the far edge of the couch, and bury my face into the cushions.

I
look like some sort of ragamuffin. I believe that’s the technical term. I’m sitting on a park bench Sunday afternoon with Kat, devouring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich she brought me. It was easy to sneak out of the house while everyone was at church this morning. Gordon wanted to drag me along as punishment, but Helen convinced him to leave me alone. So I betrayed her trust yet again and ran off. But at least I know it’s the last time, because I’m never going back. I’ve got everything I own, including Mr. Wiggles’s remains, in my backpack. At least it’s everything I had with me at the Tines house, except for my phone, which is still in Gordon’s clutches. I’m shivering because I lost my coat. At least I’ve got my gloves. I’m wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday because I was too depressed to change them, and now I’ve got a big blob of grape jelly sliding down the front of my shirt.

I don’t know where I’m going. I guess I can always make Mom let me come home early, though if she finds out I ran away, she might send me straight back to Gordon. I wish I could stay at Kat’s house. Her mom likes me, and they have a guest room, and it’s even on the first floor. Right now, it sounds like paradise.

“So your dad’s the
Crimson Flash?”
Kat swings her leg back and forth against the park bench.
“Your mom
and … and
him?”

“I know. It’s totally crazy.” I’ve known for almost three weeks now, and I hardly believe it.

“So that makes you part superhero?”

“Yeah.” I don’t think Kat fully realizes what that means for me, that I have an
X
instead of a V. She hasn’t said anything about it, and I haven’t gotten to that part of the explanation yet. “And my stepmom owns the antique shop. And that ring really meant a lot to her.”

“Oh, that stupid thing.” Kat laughs and waves her hand. “Damien, don’t worry about it.”

She’s taking all of this too well. I’m starting to suspect this is some kind of Kat robot I’ve been talking to the whole time, while the real Kat is locked up somewhere, wondering why no one notices she’s missing.

“Kat, I just told you that my stepmom is the one who defeated your famous grandfather, and I said I’d help you steal his ring from her, then dressed up like a superhero and stopped you.”

“If it meant that much to you, you should have said so.” She stares off into space, all dreamy-like, and sighs.

I get the feeling she’s not listening to a word I’m saying. I raise my eyebrows at her, then wave my hand in front of her face. “You said you wanted that ring. You said you
needed
it, that it was yours and they were letting it collect dust; you—”

“So maybe I changed my mind.” She shrugs. “Maybe I don’t need it anymore.”

A ring that protects from heartbreak, and Kat doesn’t need it anymore. Because I kissed her when I was supposed to be with Sarah. “Listen, there’s something else I have to tell you.” I stuff the last of my sandwich into my mouth and tug a little on my right glove, cringing already.

“So,” Kat says, “I hear you’re in love with me.”

I choke on the sandwich and cough, spitting out the rest of it. I cough some more until my throat is rough and I’m sure my face is red. “Be kind of hard to live out your dream of
marrying me
if I wasn’t. You planning on wearing white, or just a dirty cream color?”

She punches me in the shoulder. “I’ll be wearing black, at your funeral, if you don’t shut up.”

I tickle her—tickling is my new weapon of choice—and she screams and laughs and tries to fight back. And then somehow I have her pinned to the bench. I’m leaning over her, our faces really close. She stops laughing and slips her arms around me. I kiss her and wonder why there’s never a bed and a locked door around when you need them.

“Damien,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“You’re getting jelly on me.”

I sit up. We share the same jelly stain across our fronts, like one of those inkblot pictures.

I fidget with my gloves, tugging off the right one, then pulling it back on again. Tug, pull, don’t look at Kat. My heart is pounding. I stare at the soggy bits of sandwich I spit on the ground. Finally I work up enough courage to speak. “Kat. I have to show you something.”

“Ooh, Damien, not in public.”

I look over at her, but I don’t smile. The grin drains from her face.

“You know how I got my
V
last month?”

Her cheeks are pale. She nods.

“Well, I didn’t.”

She wrinkles her nose. “What do you mean? But you … I saw …” She bites her lip, probably realizing she never did see it. She just assumed.

“I told you. My dad’s the Crimson Flash.”

“So besides making you a lifetime member of the Safety Kids, that means …?”

I slip off my glove and show her my bare right thumb. Even without an ink pad, you can make out the clear shape of an
X
. “It’s what happens to people like me, people who are half villain and half hero.”

Kat pulls away from me, but I think it’s more out of shock than revulsion. “Whoa. I didn’t know that was possible.”

“I have a chance to fix it. There have been cases, with other kids who got
Xs
, and eventually they changed into an
H
or a
V
. It’s just going to take me a little longer to get my
V
, that’s all. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still one hundred percent supervillain.”

She rubs her finger across my thumb. “Oh, my God, Damien.”

“It’s okay. I’m getting used to it. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not.” There are tears in her eyes, and she’s shaking, but now I see it’s because she’s
laughing
.

My eyebrows come together in a scowl. “It’s not funny.”

“I know! It’s horrible!” She can hardly breathe, she’s laughing that hard. “But of all the people it could happen to … What’s your superpower? Can you—” She interrupts herself with a burst of laughter. “Can you
fly
? Just like your dad?”

The blood drains from my face. I put my hands on my knees and stare straight ahead.

“Oh, my God, you can. I was totally kidding—I didn’t think it was true.” She falls against me, shuddering with guffaws and chuckles and whatnot. Then she finally gets ahold of herself, takes a deep breath, and wipes her eyes. “Damien,” she says, “that’s actually the worst news I’ve ever heard.”

“I can tell.”

But she sounds serious when she says, “So, does this mean you’re going to have to wait to go to Vilmore? How long?”