Michael didn't trust his mother enough to stay out of his room while he read the loopy script on the three sheets of paper Charlotte had used. Instead he skimmed it and packed it back into Stone's underwear. Even the bare essentials were enough to frighten him.
She'd been locked up, under the Marcus Patterson building since he'd seen her last. She wasn't being hurt, but she wasn't free.
Marcus Patterson was the building only for eighth grade students. Now it made sense, in a way. They had been using the building as an Activation site, a place where they could turn kids into super-powered kids in relative safety. That meant Charlotte was an Active. He would have to read the letter later that night before he knew exactly what she was doing in there, but now it wasn't safe. As long as his mother and his grandfather were out there, not asleep, he couldn't feel safe reading it. And not only that, but Mr. Springfield had said he needed to be watched.
He wondered if Charlotte had convinced another Active to come deliver the message to him, if they were the guards and the teachers. He desperately wanted to read every single word in the letter, but he couldn't.
Instead he ate dinner without tasting it, talked with his mother without hearing her, showered without remembering it, and walked around in a daze that ended with him back in his room, shivering with need.
And Stone was gone.
He stared at the place where the action figure had been in disbelief. Then he cried out, sort of a yell, and started tearing his room apart. Even after he’d checked behind the computer desk and under the computer desk, he knew someone had taken it. They’d put the mind reader guy, Mr. Jackson on his case, and Mr. Jackson had figured out about the notes. Well he was going to kill that guy, he was going to jump on him and punch him like he’d never punched Trent—
“Hey there kiddo,” his grandfather said from behind him. Kindly, in his grandfatherly way. Harmless. Michael slowly turned around.
Grandpa. The liar. The letter thief. He couldn’t just take the note and be done with it, he had to write a fake one instead and then come to gloat about how he’d tricked Michael. How would a twelve year old boy ever figure it out? Grandpa must think he was pretty stupid.
“You!” he screamed. In an instant he was on his own grandfather, climbing up his body while Grandpa fell back into the living room and his mother started screaming. Grandpa fell hard, landing on his butt with a sound like ‘oof!’ and then banging his back on the low table where they kept the coasters and photo albums.
It didn’t even slow him down. He kept screaming, crawling, crying, up towards Grandpa’s head, until his head snapped back.
His mother was standing over him, wide-eyed and heaving. She was looking at her red hand, then back at Michael’s face. Michael started to tear up, but it wasn’t because he was a baby. She’d hit him in the cheek, and in the nose. When somebody hit you in the nose, you didn’t have any choice. He’d learned that in dodge ball.
“Michael Edward Washington Junior,” she hissed. “Are you alright Harold?”
“I hope I ain’t busted a hip. I’ll know more when I can stand up.” He looked at Michael. “You are going to let me stand up, eh kiddo?”
“You stole my letter!”
“Actually I didn’t,” Grandpa said. “But the person who stole it brought it to me.”
“Well you... you wrote another letter and signed it Charlotte!”
“Guilty,” Grandpa agreed. “And I’m awful sorry I did it too. Don’t know what I was thinking. God’s honest truth.”
“You stand up right this instant,” his mother commanded. “And you’re grounded for a month. You will give all your money from your paper route to me, and you will help pay for your grandfather’s hospital bills. Maybe until you’re his age. Am I understood?”
The enormity of what he’d just done crashed down on Michael’s shoulders, and he slumped aside. He buried his face in the sofa and just cried while his mother helped Grandpa off the floor. How could he have thought about punching his own grandfather? He burned with shame and humiliation. He couldn’t stop them from watching him, and he couldn’t run to his room without showing them his face. He would never look at either one of them again.
“Michael,” Grandpa sounded very close. His voice was soft, not angry. “I know you’re upset. I would be upset too, if I were you. I guess I deserved that. Ain’t had someone come up and try to punch me... well, tough to remember when.”
“You answer your grandfather when he talks to you,” his mother said.
“That’s alright Susanna. Actually I’m sure he’d love some hot chocolate right now. Wouldn’t you, sport? Sure you would. Could you be so kind, Susanna?”
His mother sniffed but said nothing, and left in a huff. Michael couldn’t see her, but even her footsteps were angry.
“Michael,” Grandpa said, in that look-at-me tone of voice. Not unkind, but definitely an order. Well he wasn’t going to give in this time. He was equal parts enraged and ashamed right now, and he couldn’t decide which side was going to win. But his throat burned in a tight, hot lump and even his stomach was getting into the action.
“Michael, look at me,” Grandpa said.
After a minute of trying to work his throat he managed to say, “No.”
“Fair enough. Then just listen. What your mother and father and I have done, it’s not fair. I know it’s not, now. It’s been hard on you, but we were afraid, you see? We didn’t want you to get the wrong ideas.” He chuckled to himself. “Instead you got the right ones. Don’t know where you found out I’d wrote your girlfriend’s letter, but there you have it anyway. That’s what happened.
“I know you’re going to ask why. To tell you the truth, I’m not so sure, kiddo. I thought at the time it’d be the right thing to do. You remember our doctor, Mrs. Montgomery? Anyway she found your note in your backpack, and she passed it on to me.
“It’s my job, Michael,” he said at last, like he was apologizing. “I’ve had this job now for... holy smokes, how long has it been? Longer’n you’ve been alive, for sure. Maybe fifteen years. Tough to say, the wires are getting crossed upstairs. Anyway my job’s to make sure the town runs nice and smooth. Because with over a hundred Actives living here, you can see how things could get messy in a hurry if just two or three of them got out of hand.
“Got me an army of psychologists, got a squad of Actives who are really good at searching and investigating, and I’ve got to keep everybody happy. Because, say for instance your dad—”
“Harold!” Susanna shrieked. One of the hot chocolates slipped out of her hand. She’d just been coming in the room, and hot chocolate went everywhere. It looked like someone had thrown a shovelful of mud on the white carpet.
“He deserves to know. Heck Susanna, he had that Stone doll up on his computer desk for, what, near a month now, eh?”
Wait.
Um. What?
What did his dad and the action figure have to do with anything? They were totally... but they weren’t even…
Michael’s eyes shot open. Grandpa had been waiting for it, with a tiny smile, and he nodded.
There hadn’t just been a resemblance between his dad and Stone. His dad was Stone. A superhero. No no, his dad wasn’t just any superhero, he was the superhero. He was the leader of the Alphas. He was always gone. Around the world, saving people from nasty floods and stopping terrorists and mashing wars into dust.
“You remember that slide of Tallahassee?” he asked. Michael would never forget that image, blown up ten feet tall and twenty wide. “Yes, you do. Well, that sort of thing happened in other places. We're here to stop that. We're put here to keep America safe...” He trailed off.
“Don't you dare, Harold,” Susanna told him.
“Well anyway, that's all the depressing junk. Our town's been a nice place for the last, what, ten years? We haven't had a serious incident in a long time. Grass is nice and green, people mow their lawns and say hello to each other in the streets. We have bake sales. Nice. Safe. Ordinary.
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“You see kiddo, super people, they need this. They need a place to come back to and feel normal again. They can't be out all the time throwing tanks around. The people they meet, sometimes they're not happy your dad is there. Sometimes they're too happy.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a rebel group out in eastern India that tried to turn your father into a god,” Grandpa said with a sigh, like it was nothing more than a burned-out spark plug. “If it's one thing your dad doesn't need, kiddo, it's to think he's bigger than he is. Everybody fits into the world, somewhere. Everybody's got a function my boy. The librarian, that Lily, is an important person just the same as your dad. She helps people expand their minds through the joy of reading.”
“But your father redirects rivers,” his mother said miserably. She had her arms crossed and her lower lip stuck out.
“And that's just it, Michael,” Grandpa said. “He changes the course of everything. It's a huge job, and he needs all the normal he can get while he's back here. This place, this little town, doesn't need to feel like a time bomb just about to go off. This should be a place where your dad should buy bread and milk, bake some cookies, cut up jack-o-lanterns, and dress up as Santa Claus when Christmas rolls around.”
He sighed again.
“I don't expect you to understand everything,” he said. “But I do expect you to understand this: if you'd grown up knowing Stone was your dad, you probably wouldn't be a nice kid who I could be proud of. You might've been another Trent Millickie.”
“Which you're not,” his mother said.
“And we're darn glad you didn't turn out that way. But it meant we had to hold the truth back a few years. You understand that, at least, eh?”
Michael nodded. He guessed he did understand, though he didn't like it.
“Go wash up,” Grandpa said. “I know your mama baked up some wonderful dinner, but tonight seems like an A&W night.”
Susanna's arms flopped to her sides in defeat. “Oh well, why not? This night couldn't possibly get any worse.”
The A&W in town was one of the town landmarks; it had been the same building and hadn't changed anything up for one hundred and three years now. The place was laid out as a large parking lot with a small building attached. At each parking spot, you could use the little telephone (with a cord, that was really odd) to place your order, and a high schooler on roller skates brought you a tray with your food on it. The tray clipped onto the car's window.
Michael had always thought it was kind of cool, but couldn't figure out why people would want to do it this way when they could sit in actual chairs where they didn't risk a crazy angry mother when they spilled french fries on the backseat.
But the root beer came in these incredible frosted mugs, and Michael always bought a root beer float. He loved to lick the whipped cream off the straw and wait until the ice cream was mostly melted and the whole thing had turned into a vanilla and root beer mud ball. He always tried to get two, but his mother never let him. But sometimes a blue moon came out, and sometimes a hobbit had a stronger will than a demigod, so he tried to order a second one again.
“Absolutely not,” his mother said. “We've been over this a hundred times.”
Yes, but she was also the one who said if you fell off the horse, you had to get right back on and try again. So here he was, being persistent.
“Why not let him have a second? It's been a tough night, after all.”
“First this, and then what? Soon he'll be two hundred pounds overweight and we'll be buying a specially designed van to lift the wheelchair up.”
Michael looked down at his body. When he sucked in, he could see every single rib. He couldn't help it, he started to laugh. That got Grandpa laughing too, and when his mother scowled at them, it just made him laugh harder. It was the first time since Charlotte disappeared that he actually had something to laugh about, and it felt really good.
“Tomorrow night's Friday, so I think a movie's in order. We can see whatever you like. Pick something in the theater, or we'll order up something on the cable doodad.”
Their living room projector and sound system was just about as good as the movie theater, with the bonus of not having your feet stick to the floor.
Michael was thinking about the movies he might pick. A number of the books he liked had been turned into movies, some of them really good and others horrid, when he realized he shouldn't be thinking about movies at all. It was getting close to Christmas, the holidays were coming up and he hadn't seen Charlotte in over a month. They were trying to trick him.
“I'm not stupid, you know,” he said from the backseat.
Grandpa stopped before he took another bite of coney dog. “Nobody said you were stupid, kiddo.”
“I want Charlotte's notes then.” He didn't know where this little wave of bravery came from, but he was going to surf it as long as it stuck around. “No, actually, I want to see her. Make sure she's okay.”
“Michael! You are already grounded, young man, and you are seriously pushing your luck.”
Pushing it right off a cliff? He wasn't sure.
“It's alright Susanna,” Grandpa said. “Michael, it's just—”
His mother cut him off. “It is not alright! My son, the boy I brought into this world, hit his own grandfather today. Makes me wonder if he was really raised by a pack of wolves, thinks he can just hit whoever he likes. And his punishment is a second root beer float? Well, he needs to learn a grain of respect, for once.”
“But—” Michael said.
“Don't you 'but' me, sonny jim. You still haven't apologized to your grandfather. I don't know where you got this idea that everyone is out to get you. We have your best interests at heart, you know. When children grow up, they learn that they can't always have what they want. And maybe it's time that you learned that hitting someone is not a good way to get what you want. If you wanted those notes, and you wanted to see your friend, you should have thought of that before you jumped on your grandfather.”
“As much as I hate to admit it, I think your mother is right,” Grandpa said at last.
They were talking about each other in the third person again.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You need some time to think about our reasons. If you want to ask me about them, I will be happy to explain everything to you, sometime in the next month.”
“When is she getting out of prison?”
“Oh Michael,” his mother moaned.
“It is not a prison, kiddo. Point of fact, it's a training facility. If we thought Charlotte's Activation was a real danger, there is another facility farther from here, but we don't think she's a big threat to herself or others. She gets three meals a day, study time with tutors, all the music she wants. It's more like a vacation away from school than a prison.”
“Oh,” he said. It didn't sound that bad, when you put it like that. What he'd read in the note said she wasn't really in danger, but she couldn't leave.
“So next time, you may want to use your head instead of your fists. Maybe if you had, you'd be on your way to talk to her right now.”
Those words, especially out of his mother’s mouth, steadily made their way into his guts, where they made him feel like a complete jerk over and over again until he just wanted to shrink into his seat, maybe squeeze into the space between the seat and the back, pop right out into the trunk of the SUV. There was a red mark on the side of Grandpa's face, but he wasn't paying any attention to it.
They finished their meal in silence and drove home in the December cold. Outside snow had started its lazy drift, piling up on the grass and a bit on the trees. Charlotte wouldn't be able to play in it, but neither would he, without some seriously good behavior. Oh, who was he kidding? The snow would probably be melted and March would be inching toward its miserable, gray end by the time he got on his mom's good side.
And his mother wasn't going to make it easy either. She sent him straight off to bed whe
n they got back home. For a while he listened to the sound of a low, intense, muffled conversation just outside his door, but he couldn't make out the words. He decided, after maybe ten minutes, that he wanted to know what they were talking about. He crept to his door and tried the knob. He knew that if he made even the slightest click, his mother would be down his throat and he would be grounded until he was eighteen.
He felt the catch slide, slowly, slowly, until finally it was free. Then he eased the door open a fraction of an inch and peered down the stairs.
His mother was standing with her back to him and her arms crossed. Grandpa must have been on the sofa, or maybe the easy chair. If his dad was a superhero, why didn't they have a bigger house? Why didn't his dad drive a Ferrari? Why didn't he have the best bike in the universe, if his dad was Stone and he was making money off his action figure sales? It wasn't fair.
He lay down on the floor and pressed his ear to the two inch gap.
“...you knew what you were getting into. You knew the risks,” Grandpa was saying.
“You think I don't know that?” his mother said. “And now that he knows? What now?”
“Oh, he doesn't know everything, not by a long shot,” Grandpa said.
“The Alphas.”
“The Alphas, the Betas, Deltas, he'll find out all of that at Marcus Patterson. By high school all of this will be a little memory. We'll have a drink and tell ourselves we dodged a bullet.”
“He's got to make it to high school first,” his mother warned. “What are you doing about that? Because I have to tell you, I don't like it. Four of them off schedule? When's the last one you had off schedule?”
“We're working on it, Susanna.”
“You've been working on it since that Millickie kid. And what happens if his little friend Davey goes Active and he decides that my son needs to pay for humiliating him? What do you think is going to happen then?”
“Susanna, we're doing the best we can. We can't watch every child in the school and figure out the problem at the same time.”
“Is it the Omega Syndicate?” she asked.
“Would you keep your voice down?” Grandpa hissed. His mother's head whipped around and stared hard at Michael's door. He'd just had time to move his head. He wasn't sure if his ear would be visible when she looked, but he didn't want to take the chance.
Omega Syndicate. Just what was that?
“It's time I was going,” Grandpa said.
“I'll drive you.”
“Nonsense. It's only three blocks. You take care of my grandson. I won't discourage curiosity, but I can't have him poking his nose where it doesn't belong. I liked it better when he had it buried in that reader thing of his all day long. Not a care in the world. Heh, what I wouldn't give.”
“Tell me Harold, is it the Omegas?”
A loud sigh. “We don't know. We've suspected they have someone here for a while. This might be what they want, it might just be a streak of bad luck. We just don't know.”
He got up. Grandpa getting up was a loud and slow process.
“If it is, what are we going to do?”
“The same thing we did last time, I guess,” Grandpa replied. “Hide in bomb shelters and come out when the smoke clears.”
His mother laughed, but that laughter had a high, strange edge to it. It was the crazy laugh that girl had when she was tearing apart the school, looking at Davey. It was the type of laugh you made when everything was going all wrong.
If Michael thought he was done feeling like a criminal for hitting Grandpa, he was dead wrong. The next day, when he got home from school, his mother was holding the tablet and talking to...his father.
“Here he is,” his mother said. She turned the tablet around, and the angriest face he had ever seen swung into view. Michael's stomach turned to ice and dropped straight into the seat of his pants. He was sure he was going to pee himself.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh?” his father said. “Is that what you have to say for yourself?”
“I'm sorry?” he tried. Wow, check out that super interesting carpet. The number of times Michael found himself staring at the carpet in embarrassment, you'd think he could work at a flooring company.
“Sorry doesn't cut it, buster. Do you know how close I am to letting this war in Bangladesh continue just so I can come home and beat your butt raw? I'll get Bob and Mr. L so I don't have to hold back either. You can heal up again every time it gets bad enough. I swear to the almighty God you will never know such pain in your life, boy. Then I'll think about whether we'll just take your head off and clone you.”
“Only figure out how we went wrong,” his mother asked.
“Probably we didn't spank him enough.”
“But Dad—” he said. He was going to tell him how Grandpa had lied to him. Lying was the worst thing you could do in the Washington household (though apparently hitting your grandfather was the new number one), a crime punishable by death.
“Don't you dare,” Michael Sr. snarled. “You're going to learn how to be a big boy and not settle all your problems with your fists, or so help me, you are not going to have any hands left to punch with. Am I clear?”
He couldn't make his throat work.
“I said am I clear.”
Tears ran down his cheeks, hot and silent. He nodded, and hoped it was enough. He didn't have any friends at school, he didn't have Charlotte, now he couldn't even talk to Grandpa because he was a liar. Now, literally, he had nothing.
“You mind your mother,” he said. “And if I hear you've set a toe out of line, I'm coming back personally to fly you up into the stratosphere. You'll have a couple minutes to think about what you've done before you black out or land, whichever happens first. I am a busy man. If your mother has to call this number again, you're done.”
He zipped away from the tablet and into a hail of mortar rounds exploding the dirt all around where he ran. Michael had time enough to see him jump onto a tank, turn into plated steel, and tear off the gun turret before the call ended.
Michael ran up the stairs to his room, jumped on the bed, and tore the covers off like they were a gun turret, and buried himself in them to cry.
Chapter 11 – Orientating