“I did ask you not to call me here, right?”
“Yes, but this is important. We can't afford any sort of delays on this, Harold.”
“There's nothing more important to me than the life of my grandson.” A sigh. “What do you want?”
“Do you have any idea how many witnesses there were?”
“Oh, I'd imagine roughly two hundred. What with that Sulzsko girl, we were at one oh three sixth graders and a hundred one seventh graders. Or have we lost one in the last hour that I haven't been told about?”
Silence. In the dark, Michael began to realize that he wasn't dead after all. He couldn't remember whether or not he'd been dreaming something very painful and bright bluish white, but as soon as he moved his body, it screamed at him that no, it hadn't been a dream. He listened to his body and quit squirming.
He couldn't help but interrupt his grandfather. He groaned and cracked his eyes open. He was in a hospital bed, propped up to an almost sitting position. A tray with his e-reader glasses and page turners was there, along with some flowers. Grandpa was facing away from him, and in the second before he turned, Michael got a look at a squat, unhappy face with too many chins. His frown had gotten so big that it was basically dripping off the sides of his face. It was smack in the middle of Grandpa's tablet, and it disappeared as Grandpa turned to look at Michael.
His face was set in an even more terrible scowl than last year, when he discovered the truth about Trent and the paper route.
“I see that you're upset,” the froggy faced man said.
“You're goshdarn right I'm upset. Listen, we will talk about this after I talk to him.”
He jabbed at the tablet, which clicked like a telephone being hung up.
“Michael.”
“Wuh.”
“Here...drink some water.”
He couldn't move his arms very well, so he and Grandpa slopped water all down his chin. But enough got down that he could talk again.
“Hey Grandpa.”
“Hey yourself. How are you feeling kiddo?”
“Terrible.”
“But alive.”
“Yeah.”
“That's the important part anyway.”
“Where's mom?”
“She worried herself to sleep.” He pointed over to where his mother was sitting and lying uncomfortably in one of those boxy hospital chairs. It looked like she'd almost fallen out of the chair, but stopped herself, and fallen asleep just like that. Her hair was mussed up and a few strands were clinging to the wall.
Grandpa put a hand on his shoulder. “Mighty brave thing you did yesterday, son.”
“Yesterday?” The moon was shining brightly through the window.
“You've been asleep, what, sixteen hours? Roundabouts.”
He sat bolt upright on the bed. “Charlotte!”
“Relax kiddo. She's fine.”
But he couldn't relax. As soon as he laid back, a big patch on his back flared to sudden, painful life.
“Doctors say you're mighty lucky to be alive.”
“Where's Trent?”
“Don't you worry about him. He isn't gonna hurt anybody anymore.”
“Is he...” He couldn't even finish the question.
Grandpa chuckled. “Dead? No, no. But I heard through the grapevine, the police got him off to a secure location.”
“Police?” He could just imagine how long it was going to take before Trent's super electric power snapped open the electronic locks on the cells, and he zapped everybody in sight.
“Well, if I were going to disable a super kid, I'd throw him in a plastic and rubber room, myself. And everybody in his complex will have some rubber damping suits. If it were up to me.”
“What about Samuelson?”
Grandpa's cracked face crumpled. “He's...he may pull through. The doctors are working real hard on him. But we should talk about you. You're fine.”
“Fine,” Michael replied.
“Not shaken up.”
“My body hurts.”
Grandpa looked ready to say something, but stopped and settled for, “Okay then.”
“Why?”
“Just...well, plenty of people aren't ready to meet a real Active.”
“Active?” They were called supers.
“Yeah, somebody who's like a superhero. Active. As in the switch's been flipped.”
“Why don't you just call them supers like on TV?”
“Well, maybe we just figured if we call them super, they'll either be super heroes or super villains. And nobody likes a super villain.”
Michael could only say, “Hm.” Grandpa had a point.
“Anyway, if you want to talk about anything, you just swing on by and have a sit-down with your dinosaur of a grandfather.”
Michael laughed. “You're not that old.”
“I'm old enough. I've got to skedaddle, but I'm around. You come on over and I'll beat you at cribbage a couple times, alright?”
“Okay,” Michael said. He wanted to ask about the fat man on the tablet, and how Grandpa knew exactly how many students were going to LADCEMS, but at that moment his mother screamed and threw herself across the room at him. Grandpa winked at him, smiled, and headed out.
He had the rest of the night to read, and the next day was Sunday, so he spent it recovering and trying not to talk too much about it when his mother was grilling him. She seemed to think it was somehow his fault that he was nearest to the half naked man, and his fault that Charlotte had been in danger. Still, she was in tears every time she reminded him that he was still alive, like he didn't know that.
Charlotte poked her head in just after dinner time.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey!”
“You okay? I guess you got it pretty bad from that jerk.”
“Yeah,” he said, trying to act cool. “I'm totally fine. Totally fine. A hundred percent.”
She grinned. “And yet you're still here. That's strange.”
“Well, the uh...the doctors, they're just being careful.”
“Oh, okay! Cool, hey, listen, I'm going to head out and pick up some Taco Bell.”
“Um...is that allowed?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Anyway, the food here...blech.”
So he decided why not, and asked her to pick him up something that sounded good. When she brought it back, they sat down and ate until one of the hospital orderlies sent Charlotte back to her room.
He had Monday off for Marcus Patterson Day, which was great. Watching movies, reading, and eating his favorite food were all way better than facing a broken school and the idea that his principal might be dead.
Sure enough though, Tuesday rolled around to start another week at school, but Michael didn't end up in his classes. He was just sitting down to his first period when a fifth grader rushed in with a note for Mr. Wozniak. The old teacher sighed, looked up at Michael, and gestured him over.
“Says here you're supposed to head over to the counselor's office,” Mr. Wozniak said.
“Counselor?” he asked. “Why?” Contrary to most of his classes, he rather enjoyed his computer class. Most everybody else hated it, mostly because it was stuff you learned while you were potty training, and the school's computers should have been in a museum somewhere. Still, Michael liked the mindless repetition of the typing assignments.
“You let me know as soon as you get back, okay?”
What was strange was that everybody was back to school on Tuesday, just like he was. Mind, most of the students didn't have a burn plaster taped to their backs, or nasty burns over their front half. They also didn't have a shirt worth a month's paper boy tips burned beyond recognition. They did, however, have eyes, and all of them were turned on him. Staring at him. He rushed to the counselor's office with his head down.
Nobody had yet reacted to the fact that a fireball crashed into their school, and the gym now had a makeshift skylight, along with some rubble, and—
“What?” he asked, to
nobody in particular.
He stopped and stared in through the gym doors. The hole was gone. The scoreboard sat in the place where the man had plummeted through, on fire. There was no fine sheet of dust from all the crushed cinderblocks, no cinderblocks or chunks of cinderblocks.
The burned spot between his shoulder blades began to itch, and he wondered if this was what going crazy felt like. Then he decided that, no, there was no way he was going crazy. He had bandages all over, and everybody was staring at him like...
...like he was crazy.
He rushed to the main office and burst into the room. Several secretaries with ages old spectacles connected at the back by chains frowned at him. Okay, maybe all was right with the world.
The main office was carefully neutral, with beige walls and gray carpets, a few cubicles and too many pieces of paper. There were plenty of little pamphlets that probably gathered dust and a few of those horrible inspirational posters, with pictures of eagles soaring over pristine lake/mountain scenes, and slogans like 'you'll never know how far you can fly until you spread your wings'.
“Yes?” one of the secretaries asked him, and not politely.
“I'm...I'm supposed to come down to the counselor's office.”
“All students are attending an emergency assembly. Go back to your class.”
“I got a message...” he said hopelessly, and waved it at them.
“Give it here,” she said. Her eyes widened the instant she saw his name on it, and she stammered for him to head into counseling room A.
Counseling room A was just as bland and boring as the rest of the main office. In a little six by six foot space, someone had crammed in a gray metal file cabinet, a large desk, and two chairs in front of that desk. The only things on the desk were a framed picture of a smiling man and his family, and a black nameplate that said C. Busey.
A lot more interesting than the room was the man sitting behind the desk. It certainly wasn't C. Busey, because Michael knew Mr. Busey. This was the human cannonball from Friday night, alive and looking healthy. And wearing clothes that weren't on fire.
“Hello there Michael,” he said with a smile, and gestured to the chair. “Have a seat.”
“You're...you're...” What had Trent said?
“Mr. Springfield. My students call me Jebediah.”
Something clicked way back in Michael's mind, and it had something to do with Charlotte. She was showing him a cartoon from fifty or a hundred years ago, and Springfield was there, somewhere. Jebediah Springfield exactly.
“But that's...isn't that...the Simpsons right?”
His smile deepened. “My name isn't actually Jebediah, it's a nickname. I'm surprised you know of the show. Most students don't.”
“Why do they call you Jebediah then?” he asked.
“I wear a raccoon skin hat,” he said. “In my wilderness survival courses.”
A thousand questions suddenly winked out in Michael's mind. He was suddenly trying to picture this man with a hat that had a tail hanging off the back, and it was hilariously difficult to do.
Springfield must have seen it, because he continued to smile. “Can I call you Michael? Great. Michael, I'm not a teacher over at Marcus Patterson. In fact, I'm just one of the counselors over there. My job's at the high school.”
“Oh...kay.”
“I wanted to thank you for what you did on Friday night.” Oh yeah, Friday night. When Trent had LIGHTNING COMING OFF HIM. That Friday night. “You'll notice everything here is sort of normal. Back to normal, as normal as you could get. Anyway, this is after we had probably thirty injuries, none of them really bad except for Mr. Samuelson. And you and Trent.”
“And you.”
Springfield smiled. “Yes. You may have questions for me.”
“And you're going to answer them?” Michael asked. He felt like, between his grandfather being weird on the phone and the fact that Trent was an Active, people were keeping a lot more secrets than they were telling.
“I'll answer everything I can,” Springfield replied.
“Okay,” he said. “What happened to Trent? He’s a superhero right?” Grandpa used the word Active.
“Yes and no. A good place to start anyway. Well, some people in the world go Active. It's a difficult process figuring out who, but it usually happens starting at age thirteen, up to around twenty. One time a twenty-three year old man went Active, but we've never heard of anyone older than that. Predicting it isn't an exact science, at all.”
Only people in New York and LA and Washington DC ever got to see superheroes… Actives, on a daily basis. Everybody else it was a sort of once in a lifetime thing. Unless you were very unlucky. Then seeing a super person was the last thing that happened.
“Maybe one in a million people go Active,” he said. “Maybe a few more, but a lot of times they're in terrible situations. Some die. Others go totally crazy. So right now, with eight and a half billion people on the planet, we think there might be eighty five hundred. Less than ten thousand for sure.”
“Wait a second!” he cried. “The gym was fixed! You went through the wall. You lived!”
“I'm an Active,” Springfield said.
“You're...”
“Surrounded by a force field. Go ahead, throw something at me.”
Michael couldn’t even keep his mouth shut and his eyes from staring. Meet a real live super… Active. Actually, two.
Springfield took the nameplate, tossed it into the air, and it bounced off a place about three inches from his head. There was a crackling sound, like someone bunching together a cheap plastic bag. Michael was still speechless.
“Yeah,” he grinned. “Pretty awesome right?”
“But...but...”
“Right, the gym. We have a few Actives in our program here.”
Program, what program? Michael's mind was filling with more questions.
“How many Actives?”
“Somewhere around a hundred.”
“WHAT?” he shouted. The math sizzled through his brain like a lightning bolt. That meant there should be a hundred million people in the area, and he knew there were maybe five thousand people in the entire town. Ten thousand at the most.
“Relax Michael.”
“But that doesn't make any sense. There aren't...there aren't even enough people here to have one.”
“You're right.”
“But how...”
“I'm afraid we've come to the place where I can't answer.”
“But why?”
He seemed to regret not being able to answer Michael. “I wish I could. I won't lie to you, Michael, but my hands are tied.” He held up his hands like invisible handcuffs were restraining him. “I've signed agreements. You find out the truth for yourself, that's no problem. But if you find it out from me, let's just say there's someone in charge who would make Trent seem like a baby throwing a temper tantrum. So I can't do that.”
“But...”
“Yes, sure, but you won't tell anyone, sure. Like there isn't anyone on staff who wouldn't know if you were lying.”
“Like read my mind or something?”
“Like that. Or something.”
“So was everybody okay, you know, after the thing?”
Springfield smiled at him. “Very good of you. A true knight. Well, Don Samuelson is going to make it, we think. There were a few other minor injuries, but everyone is going to be all right.”
“And they're...okay. I mean okay.”
“Well, I'm going to be seeing students all week here, if you should know. And all the other counselors at Marcus Patterson and the High School. We'll need to do a battery of tests on everyone who was at the dance that night.”
“And Davey Rightman.”
“I heard about Davey Rightman. Yes him too. Anyhow we figured you were a bit of a special case. Since you threw a water cooler, and later yourself, at Mr. Millickie. Since you were responsible for keeping him from hurting anyone else.”
Micha
el’s embarrassment drew his eyes to his knees.
“And your mother should be giving you a phone today.”
“Mother...a phone. Okay.”
“My number's going to be in there, just in case you feel like you want to talk about anything that's going on. You don't want to talk to your mom, I understand. It happens a lot in middle and high school. But if you want, any time, day or night. I don't care if you wake up at three in the morning and want to tell me something you don't think is very important, you call me, okay?”
“Uh...okay.” There it was again, that divide. It was there and no pretending otherwise, even though Springfield seemed like a decent guy and all. He just wasn't the right age.
“I think the assembly ought to be about done,” Springfield said cheerfully. “Why don't you head out and meet up with your friends.”
The halls were filling up with the normal crowd of young people, with the occasional teacher towering overhead. A few of the seventh graders were getting taller too, and some of the teachers had never been tall to begin with. It was starting to become difficult to see the difference, but only starting.
After a time Charlotte came up to her locker. She brightened up as soon as she caught sight of him.
“Hey Michael,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. “What happened at the assembly?”
“You weren't there? I thought everybody was supposed to go. You know, I thought I would see you there.” Yeah, he thought, there were only two hundred something students in the sixth and seventh grades. “Anyway they just talked about super, uh, I mean Actives. Pretty cool.”
“What did they say?”
“Some old guy talked about how Actives can get their powers when they have a lot of stress. Most of them start out around our age. Mostly they just wanted to answer questions.” And how far those questions went before they couldn't be answered anymore? He had never heard the term confidentiality agreement before, but he understood the idea. Somebody had to shut the truth up, to stop knowledge from coming out.
“I guess there are only maybe one in a million, and we might have just seen the only Active in the whole state.”
Not likely, Michael thought. Then he wondered why the school was lying to them.
“Anyway if we see anybody doing anything weird, we're supposed to tell a teacher or Samuelson.”
“Whenever he gets out of the hospital.”
“Yeah.”
“What did they mean by weird?”
She shook her head as they made their way out of the school and into the fresh April air. “Like somebody jumping off a building trying to fly. They had some pretty nasty pictures. This kid in Idaho set himself on fire. Another one jumped in front of a bus.”
“Uch,” he said.
“Yeah. Uch.” She shrugged. “I know they just want to keep kids from trying something really crazy. Everybody wants to be special. What they don't get is that everybody already is special. You make the choice to be special every day. Or you just do the normal stuff, and you tell people you're bored because you never try to do anything awesome. You don't need to break physics to be special.”
Charlotte had always been pretty cool, but Michael didn't understand until that point. It was like there was a sunbeam shining down on her, the way she looked at the world. And maybe Michael wasn't that dazzling, but he could definitely recognize brilliance when the chorus of angels was singing right in front of his face.
Like Grandpa always said, if it looks like poop and smells like it, no need to taste it, you've got poop. Only Charlotte was totally the opposite. She looked, smelled and sounded like a goddess.
Oh no.
Michael couldn't get her out of his head all that day or the next. He knew something was very wrong by the way he dreamed that he and Charlotte were flying together, because they were both Actives. He knew something was terribly wrong when they came nose to nose, staring soulfully into each others' eyes when he suddenly woke up.
Trent had made the world go wrong.
Grandpa came over to dinner the next night, which wasn't normal at all. Usually they had dinner together on the weekends, or whenever his dad came back from being away. He got the normal needles from his mother, all the questions about how much homework he had, what Mr. Wozniak was teaching that day, and how interesting history was when she was a little girl. To top that off, Grandpa started in too.
Was the math giving him trouble? Did any of the other kids pick on him or look at him funny in the halls, or at lunch time? Who was his favorite teacher? Did he ever stay after class and talk to that teacher? What was the science all about?
He did his best to deflect the questions with his normal shrug shield and grunt armor, but today he had to go the extra step of parrying by shoving extra food in his mouth. Then he had to endure his mother glaring at him when he tried to talk with his mouth full.
“Michael Edward Washington Junior!” his mother finally said. “Will you stop talking with your mouth full of food? That is enough of that. Now, your grandfather asked you a question.”
Grandpa sat back and folded his arms. His smile wasn't cruel, or triumphant either. Michael thought he was really just amused. He probably figured out what Michael was trying to do.
“You don't want me to eat dinner?” he asked, and drank some milk to show her just how good he was doing. He'd even gotten most of his peas down his throat, which was saying something.
His mother didn't have much to say to that, but Grandpa did.
“Well kiddo, when you grow up a bit, you'll see that adults like to have a bit of a chat over dinner. In fact, a long time ago, dinner was three or four hours long. People just talked and talked and talked, and their servants brought them something to munch on every half hour or so.”
“Oh.” A four hour dinner, without the chance to read or maybe catch an episode of Minus Human every day, sounded pretty awful. Like when they told him that, long ago, people didn’t have the internet. Shudder.
“There was an assembly at school today,” he said. “I didn't get to go. I had to go talk to the guy from the high school.”
“Now, was that so hard?” his mother asked.
“And how did the conversation go?” Grandpa asked.
“Okay I guess.” He quickly realized, by the reptilian stare coming off his mom, that this wasn't going to be enough. “He said he was a superhero. I mean Active. He had a force field. So that was pretty cool.”
“Hm,” Grandpa said. “A force field.”
“Yeah, isn't that weird?”
“Weird how?”
Michael didn't know exactly, at first. “Well, that he's a teacher.”
“Even Actives have to do something with their lives, Michael,” his mother said.
“Yeah but, he could go out and stop people from getting hurt, like he's a shield.”
“Ah,” Grandpa said. “But he's not super fast, right? So he couldn't be everywhere at once.”
“I guess,” Michael said. “But then...what, the military? The police? Why doesn't he go and do that? He could take apart bombs.”
“I think these are good questions, and maybe you should ask him. It's possible he just wanted to be a teacher, and then he became an Active.”
“But he's all super powered,” Michael said.
“What if he's a super teacher?” Grandpa asked. “There are plenty of things you don't know about him, and your mother and I can't really tell you, since we're not him. So I think you should ask him.”
“Okay,” he said. He had Mr. Springfield's card with his number, but he felt like it would be weird just to call somebody up and start asking questions like 'why don't you go and stop missiles with your chest, why do you still teach?' Mr. Springfield had told him to call, any time of the day or night, but...it was awkward. It was awkward enough just talking to his mother and grandfather, and they were his family.
He had a brilliant flash of inspiration.
“May I be excused?” he asked.
&nbs
p; His mother sighed. “Have you eaten your vegetables?”
“Yes ma'am.”
“Yes you may.”
Boom. Manners almost always worked.
Chapter 6 - The Seventh Power