“Happy Birthday to me,” he sighed to himself.
There was a time when Will would have begun the school day by counting his classmates. When their numbers dwindled to about seven he found he didn’t need to count anymore—he knew at a glance how many kids remained. Now there were only six, including Will—or there had been, at any rate, last Friday.
Four? he thought as he surveyed the room. There were still twenty-five desks in Ms. Chadwick’s class but only Aidan, Nathan, and Julie sat there—still in the same seats their last names had determined at the start of the school year but now with vast stretches of empty alphabet between them. Only four now. That can’t be right…. Lily and Barry will come in after me, thought Will, though he was nearly late himself. Or maybe they’re just home sick.
Will took his seat, said hi to Aidan when Aidan said hi to him, but he never took his eyes off the classroom door. It opened a moment later, but only Ms. Chadwick entered with a really big cup of coffee.
“Quiet down,” she said, though no one had been talking. “All stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.”
“Where are Lily and Barry?” asked Will without raising his hand.
Ms. Chadwick studied him for a moment, then answered. “Barry found out over the weekend that he’s a wizard,” she said. “He’ll be finishing the year at a wizards’ school upstate.” Her tone suggested, always suggested, that people did not find out they were wizards where she came from. Where she came from they might find out they were, say, dentists—but only after a long and tedious period of self-discovery and dental school. “And Lily…I have no idea why Lily’s gone. How should I know?! I’m only the teacher!”
She reached with trembling fingers to her lips and felt around for some phantom cigarette she’d probably left in the teachers’ lounge. Then she stared at her hand for kind of a long time.
So no Pledge of Allegiance after all. It was just as well. Aidan only pledged his allegiance to Asgard since learning he was the son of Thor, Julie was mute because of some bargain she’d made with a witch or something, and Nathan was a Jehovah’s Witness.
“I bet Lily’s just sick,” Aidan whispered to Will. “There’s a flu going around.”
Will hadn’t heard about any flu, but he nodded and gave Aidan a kind of half-smile. They hadn’t really been friends until recently, but of course neither boy had many choices anymore. And Aidan was nice for a demigod. It seemed to Will that you could really let that sort of thing go to your head.
Ms. Chadwick was still staring at her hand.
She was getting that look on her face, that owl look—big fierce eyes and a strong impression that she could turn her head all the way around if she wanted to.
“POP QUIZ!” she hooted. The class groaned, as classes will, but it sounded feeble. There weren’t even enough kids to get a good groan going anymore. “An essay, in two hundred words or less! Explain what you think will happen to a teacher if all her students keep turning into flipping butterflies! Assume she has only two years’ experience and student loans. Show your work,” she added, and went to hide behind her desk for a while. Usually a screaming teacher was like ice down your back, but Ms. Chadwick had been getting gradually louder since Labor Day.
No one, strictly speaking, had actually turned into a butterfly. Hannah had sprouted wings from touching some sort of meteorite back in November, but everyone agreed they were really more dragonfly wings than anything else. She’d done a science fair project about it before leaving for St. Peppermint’s Fairy Academy over winter break. Nonetheless, Will took out a sheet of paper and wrote, “What’ll Happen to a Teacher If All Her Students Turn into Flipping Butterflies” at the top, and then he thought a moment.
I think if the teacher had our class she wouldn’t have to worry. Because the other seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Murray, is really old and will probably retire and they’ll still need someone to teach the seventh grade. And Aidan won’t leave because there is no special school for him—he only goes to that Norse god summer camp in Connecticut. Lily’s probably just out sick. I don’t understand Julie’s deal but if she was going to leave she would have left already. And Nathan’s too big a loser to get powers.
Will considered that last sentence. Of course he couldn’t call his classmate a loser in a school paper. But Nathan had always been a dork. Even more this year than last—he’d turned into one of those kids who raised his hand too much and used words like “however” and “approximately.” Still, Will erased a bit and wrote:
And Nathan doesn’t seem like the type to be a vampire or leprechaun or whatever. You can just tell with some people.
Then the point of what he’d written sank in a bit and made him feel small.
And you don’t have to worry about me, either. I’m never going anywhere. I’ll never be a hero or have an adventure. I’ll just become a doctor or a banker like my dad or maybe a scientist that finally figures out what’s up with this school.
Just then one of the classroom walls collapsed. Aidan gave an exasperated little sigh, because they’d only just finished repairing that wall from the last time.
A chalky cloud of pulverized cinder block settled around the ragged remains, and in stepped a beefy man snapped into some kind of flashy exoskeleton. The brushed-steel limbs of the suit whirred and clicked as he moved, and made his legs two feet taller and arms two feet longer. Chrome tubes and something like a plastic sneeze guard folded over his shoulders and head. Like he was wearing a motorcycle. Will hoped he was maybe just here to talk about Wall Safety, but in his heart he knew the guy was a supervillain. You could just tell with some people.
The supervillain frowned at the class and said, “Is this all of you?”
It seemed like sort of an ordinary question to ask after knocking a wall down. Aidan and Will looked at each other. Nathan scrambled to the other side of the room while Ms. Chadwick ducked behind her desk. Julie, of course, said nothing.
The supervillain tried again. “Where’s Lily Landers!?” he roared, in a voice that was sounding more supervillainy until the dust made him cough.
Aha. So Lily was probably a superhero, thought Will. That made sense. She had always been pretty athletic. Maybe her enemies learned her secret identity and she’d gone into hiding. Some kids had all the luck.
“C’mon, guys,” the supervillain said. “I know this is her room; the office told me.”
He really had been to the office. He had a visitor’s badge.
“Lily’s absent today,” Will offered. “Maybe you could, you know, come back tomorrow.”
“Lockdown!” Ms. Chadwick said suddenly, and she popped up from behind her desk with her hands whipping about. “Lockdown! You kids know the drill!”
During Lockdown the school would secure all its doors and gates while the students crouched on the floor with their arms around their heads, and Will felt it was probably something you did before the villain punched a hole in the wall. Anyway, Superjerk or whoever blew the door off its hinges with a yellow energy blast from his arm cannon and effectively took the whole question of locking it out of Ms. Chadwick’s hands. Slightly singed and whimpering, she crawled back to her desk.
A cool breeze entered through the hole-where-the-door-used-to-be and crossed to the hole-where-the-wall-used-to-be. Outside, teachers and a long line of kids hurried past. The school was being evacuated. Soon Will’s class would be all alone with the villain. The police would come, demands would be made. Someone would get hurt.
Will fixed his eyes on Aidan, Son of Thor. Can you do anything? he mouthed.
I don’t have my hammer, Aidan mouthed back. Will nodded. Their school was a Weapon-Free Zone.
The villain tottered over the ruined wall and stumbled into the classroom. His suit’s impressive, but it isn’t all-terrain, thought Will.
“No moving or talking! Everyone get to the front of the room! We’ll wait here until Cheetah Girl hears about it. And comes to save you. Then BOOM! BOOM! Why are there only four students?”
<
br /> “There’s a flu going around,” said Will as he moved with the other kids to stand in front of the blackboard. He couldn’t see any reason not to lie to a supervillain.
“Waitaminute. This is that school.”
“What school?”
“You know, that school. The one with the kids everyone writes books about.”
Will shrugged.
“Wait, I can check,” said the villain, and he went a little cross-eyed watching a computer display on the inside of his visor. “I can’t…I can’t seem to connect to your school’s wireless. Is there a password?”
“It’s ‘guest,’” said Ms. Chadwick. She sounded a little shell-shocked.
“Man, it’s so slow. I can’t even load my home page.”
“It might be blocked,” said Aidan. “They block a lot of sites.”
“Hold on…here we go,” the villain said. “Oh no.” All over his battlesuit flaps and panels opened and shut. “It is that school. Can you kids…do things?”
Nathan pointed at Aidan. “That boy is super strong.”
Will winced. Even without his hammer Aidan was as strong as three men, but the supervillain didn’t need to know that. And now he was training his gun on Aidan in a serious way.
“I can read minds,” Will said quickly. The other kids looked at him. “Anyone’s mind. Yours.”
Will saw panic flutter across the man’s face, even as he struggled to look unimpressed. Will couldn’t read minds, but he’d always been good at reading faces.
“Yeah, prove it. Tell me what I’m thinking right now.”
Will squinted. “You’re thinking about your greatest weakness.”
The villain flinched, and he turned his head, just slightly, just for a moment, to glance at something on his back. “Wait,” he said, scowling at Will. “No, I wasn’t. That is, I…have no weakness.”
Smooth.
Will examined the suit as best he could. It had clawlike hands and a blaster on each arm. It had a skullcap with earflaps and a chin strap. It had a row of USB ports and a standard electrical outlet on the hip. It had something like a grappling gun between the shoulder blades. Was that what the man was worried about?
“What are we going to do?” whispered Aidan.
“I said no talking!” the villain yelled, and he adjusted some dial by his ear. “I can hear you.”
Will had a thought. “Keep whispering,” he said as quietly as he could.
“What?” Aidan whispered back.
Superjerk advanced a little, and fiddled with that ear-dial again.
“I can…I can hear everything you say,” he told them, no longer shouting. “So there’s no use whispering.”
“Get ready to run,” Will whispered, then he kept moving his lips without making any sound at all, just for good measure.
Superjerk took another step forward and turned his ear-dial all the way up, so that’s when Will scratched the blackboard. He’d been growing his nails out anyway, in case he might develop superclaws or something, and the sound of it hurt even him. It made the villain double over as his earflaps rattled and squealed.
The kids all ran through the big hole in the wall to the hallway beyond. Will stole a glance over his shoulder and was relieved to see Ms. Chadwick finally find the presence of mind to flee through the opposite door. Success! Then the villain started firing wildly around the classroom and Will decided to keep moving.
He caught up with the other kids at the front hall of the school, where they heaved at a steel security fence that had been drawn across the exit.
“Oh, man.”
“Lockdown!” groaned Aidan as he turned to face Will. “They seriously went and locked all the doors on their way out. We’re trapped in here!”
“I can’t believe it.” Nathan hyperventilated. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” said Aidan. “Woden’s Eye! The teachers here are a bunch of…bunch of stupid…”
“Stupid, brainless blouse-apes!” Julie wailed as she took a swipe at the fence.
Everyone paused a moment to look at her, and her face flushed.
Then, from around the corner, the sound of servo-motors and footsteps.
“What do we do?” whispered Nathan. “Where do we go?”
The nearest door was the school newspaper office, and they ducked inside and closed it behind them as quietly as they could. Huddled on the floor, they listened to the robotic footfalls of the supervillain pass down the hall. Will’s own breathing cut like a saw blade through his chest, and he could think of nothing but coughing, but soon the hallway sounds faded away.
Aidan flipped a wall switch and the ceiling lights flickered on. The newspaper room was filled with dusty computers and magazines. A few small silver cameras were still connected to laptops by black USB cords, as if abandoned in the middle of a project. The newspaper didn’t have a big circulation anymore.
“It’s my birthday today,” Will whispered to no one in particular.
“Wow,” said Aidan. “Crappy birthday.”
“I know.”
“So that means…”
Will knew what it meant. There wasn’t any rule that said the Big Change had to come before a person turned thirteen, but almost everyone at his school got it when they were eleven or twelve or they never got it at all.
“Don’t you have an older brother?” asked Aidan. “He’s got some power or something, right?”
When Will’s brother was in the fifth grade he and a couple friends discovered a magic tree house that could travel through time, and had taken it on all kinds of funny adventures. But in high school they’d lost interest in time travel, and it mostly became a magical place to smoke. Until they accidentally burned it down last August. And they’d never let Will use it anyway.
“No,” said Will.
“Wait,” said Nathan. “So you lied about reading minds?”
“Yeah.”
“But you got him to think about his greatest weakness,” Julie said quietly. “And he looked at his back.”
“I know. What do you think he’s worried about?”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Nathan, “but that man doesn’t seem smart enough to have built his suit himself. It looks an awful lot like an experimental project that Hannibal Tech has been working on for the military. This fellow probably stole one of the prototypes.”
All of them had stopped what they were doing to look at Nathan. Aidan asked, “How do you know all that stuff?”
“I’m not really Nathan. I’m his father, Mr. Peterson. Nate and I switched bodies accidentally over the summer.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Wished on the same penny.”
“We should stay focused on the suit,” said Will. “Mr. Peterson, do you work for Hannibal or something?”
“That’s right. Or I did, before the switch. Now Nate works there.”
“What can you tell us about that exoskeleton?”
Mr. Peterson looked startled. Specifically, he looked like Nathan looking startled. “Oh, gosh…not much. I can tell you it costs eight point three million dollars. I’m only an accountant.”
“Nothing else?”
“Um…it’s powered by fusion or antimatter or something. And we’re trying to save money, so it just runs Windows.”
This gave Will an idea, and he pocketed one of the cameras. Its cord hung like a tail from the back of his jeans.
There came then the distant sound of the villain’s energy blast, and the muffled collapse of another wall. The kids all tensed. Then it all happened again, but louder. Closer. Then the east wall of the school newspaper office split open and crumbled into the room.
“Go! Go!” Will shouted as he pushed everyone else toward the door. Again the supervillain came doddering like a drunk over the chunky debris.
“What now?!” said Aidan.
Will tried to remember which classrooms had doors to the outside. “Science room!” he answered with a frown. He was never go
ing to get a good look at the back of that battlesuit if they were always running away.
They raced down the hall as the sound of more blasts echoed off the linoleum. “YOU KIDS!” the villain’s voice boomed. The suit apparently had a PA system. “STOP MAKING THIS SO DIFFICULT!”
Seconds later they spread out across the science classroom. Aidan pulled at the courtyard door with his mighty strength, but he only managed to rip off the handle. Will and the others searched the workstations and cabinets for something they could use against the villain.
“So…you can talk,” Will said to Julie when she came near.
Julie blushed again, and smiled, and covered the smile with her hand. “Yes.”
“So that whole story about the witch’s curse?”
She looked away. “I made it up. I just don’t like talking in class.”
“So…you don’t have any special…powers? Things, whatever? Like me?”
Julie shrugged. Will smiled at her, and she smiled back, then blushed harder and turned abruptly to search the supply closet.
“We could turn on all the gas jets,” said Mr. Peterson from the center of the room. Each workstation had a natural gas valve for fueling Bunsen burners. “Fill the room with gas. Then when that…criminal fires his weapon…”
“We all blow up,” Aidan finished.
“We could be out of the room.”
“So what would he be shooting at if we’re not in the room?”
“Maybe he’ll want to blow another hole in a wall. He’s always doing that. Look: I’m the adult here—”
“I wonder…” Will said absently. After a moment he noticed the room had fallen silent and all eyes were on him.
“What?” said Aidan.
“Just…you notice when Superjerk comes through a wall he gets real shaky and nervous stepping over the rubble? Like he’s afraid he’ll fall over.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So his greatest weakness…I don’t think it’s on his back, I think it is his back. I think if he falls on his back he can’t get up again.”
Mr. Peterson was nodding slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Nate told me just the other night that R & D wants more money to give the battlesuit something called a ‘hydraulic back-a-pult.’ I told him to deny the request—they’re way over budget.”