Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight (13 page)

“Bobby … ” I couldn’t quite place the emotion in her voice. Was it sorrow? Was it disappointment at the screwed-up protégé who had once again let the grown-ups down? Just as long as it wasn’t pity. I hadn’t wanted pity when I lost my pop or Uncle Jack; I wasn’t going to put up with it for losing my academic future. “Bobby, have you thought about how this is going to affect your chances of getting into college? You’re going to have more than a few admissions officers wondering why an applicant dropped out four months from graduation, which is not something that’s going to move you to the top of the pile. Then you—”

“The chances were getting slimmer every day, anyhow,” I interrupted before I could get even more angry and frustrated. “I was nearly down to safety schools, and if I wasn’t able to pull my quarterly grades back up after a month of neglect because I was out playing hero—”

“Maybe there’s something that can be done. You might be able to convince the school board that you—”

“I couldn’t think of a way other than blowing my cover.” Well, blowing my cover further. “Isn’t that why I took this damned job anyhow, to keep people from putting the pieces together? What good would it do if the entire school board knew they had a superhero enrolled in one of their buildings? And if the parents of the other kids found out, they’d probably want me expelled as a danger to myself and others.”

“You’re just looking for excuses. Jack wanted you to go to college. He wouldn’t want you quitting like this.”

“You loved him, didn’t you?”

“Mr. Zip? Of course not.”

“You know who I’m talking about.”

“You’re trying to change the subject.”

“You’re damn right I am. And since you brought him into this conversation, you can deal with it. I could see it that first night, five years ago. You were in love with Uncle Jack.”

More silence followed, but this time I was leaving it up to her to say the words. “Yes, of course I was. Can you blame me?”

“I can’t blame you for anything. Being straight and having that whole ‘new dad’ thing between him and me kinda keeps me from seeing him exactly how you did, but intellectually, I guess I can understand some of what you saw in him.”

“It went even further than that. Fighting alongside someone all these years, you sort of develop a bond with people. It’s almost like being married. I’m willing to bet you’ve got a similar thing going on with the other sidekicks. Not necessarily in a romantic or physical way, of course.”

“Of course.”
Yeah, keep telling yourself that about not in a romantic and physical way.
Being a healthy, red-blooded American boy, I could easily imagine a lot of stuff between Sarah and me. Stuff I would never get away with putting down in words. But I hadn’t asked her out on a date because I didn’t want to weird things out between us on the job. As for Rick and Tommy, I certainly didn’t think about them in a physical sense, but there was a certain bond between us that went deeper than any physical relationship ever could. They were my brothers, and if I had to, I would lay down my life for either of them in a heartbeat.

“You know he wanted to ask you to marry him,” I said, and almost immediately regretted it.

“I didn’t know that.”

“He loved you, Phoebe. He always had. I don’t know why he never took it further.” Well, maybe a little. Like I said, there’s no reason to complicate things in a professional sense, especially when your profession involved life and death on a somewhat regular basis. “But he wanted to.”

“Maybe he didn’t know how I felt toward him.”

“No, that’s not the case. He knew. Even I knew, and I was an impartial observer in the whole thing.”

I looked over at Prism and caught her eye. She was starting to tear up. “Maybe it’s for the best that he didn’t ask me to marry him. It would have made losing him all the more painful. Besides, could you imagine
me
as your foster mom? What a nightmare.”

“I
always
considered you my foster mom.” Now it was my turn to tear up. I had no idea that talking about Uncle Jack with Prism was going to dredge up the level of emotion it did. She and I exchanged smiles, and then broke eye contact, looking back to where we were going. I changed the subject back to business. “So what are we going to do about replacing Mr. Zip on the team? Invite Tommy to join?”

“He’s barely seventeen. I might be tempted to say he was too young, but you’ve all proven you kids grow up fast in this business.” She pondered the situation. “I would say yes, we should bring him in, but not yet. We’ve just discovered Jack’s death was probably not an isolated incident. Being one of us just got a hell of a lot more dangerous, and I don’t know if it’s fair to put him in the line of fire right now.”

“He’s more than up for it.”

“You might be right, and I know you’re his best friend, so you need to defend him, but I think right now the safest thing for him is to stay where he is. After things quiet down a bit and we catch this killer, then we can bring him on board. He deserves it. Honestly, I think all three of them deserve it, but not until this situation blows over. Besides, between Paragon and myself, we can handle the whole ‘super speed’ thing for a little bit. You can even take up some of the slack yourself, since your boots let you fly pretty darn fast. None of us are as fast as Seth or even Tommy, but for the time being, it’s safer for us to do without.”

“I’m afraid you’re right. Like you said, I’m his best friend. Do you want me to break the bad news to him about not getting moved to the grown-ups’ table yet?”

“No, let me do it. I have more tact, and it would sound better coming from me. Besides, that’s the last thing we need to drop in his lap right now. He’s going to have to deal with Seth’s passing, and I’m certainly better equipped to talk to him about that than you are. No offense.”

“None taken. We all have our areas of expertise. Psychology isn’t mine. At least, I don’t think it is. When I figure out what my areas of expertise actually are, I’ll tell you.”

Comparing the GPS readout with the landscape and what passed for Geography when they still pretended to teach it in high school, I knew Prism was going to have to veer off soon if she was going to head straight to her home. That gave me a handy excuse to end the conversation without seeming as ignorant as I actually am. “I believe this is your exit. I’m going to go dissect this heap of metal and see if I can make sense of it.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me to come back to the mansion with you? Sure you couldn’t use some company?”

“I’m sure. The best thing for me to do right now is drown myself in work before I realize how miserable my life really is.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see she cocked her head to look at me again, so I glanced back. “Relax. I’m kidding.”
Yeah,
like I said,
keep believing that.
“I promise I’ll talk with you later and let you shrink my head good and solid.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Bobby.” She started drifting away from me, slow enough to get in a few more words, but fast enough to put her on the right course smoothly. “Remember what I said, Bobby. Don’t be afraid to trust us.”

“And you remember what Mystery said, Phoebe. Watch your back.”

Seven Days in the Hole

Note to self: the next time you want to go off somewhere and be alone while you work on special projects and have yourself a good old-fashioned sulk, make sure you change the locks on your house and the security codes for all your alarms. Friends have an annoying tendency to butt into your affairs unwelcomed.

“Bobby?” The voice came about thirty seconds after I heard the door to the base slide open unexpectedly. I figured any villain who was smart enough to worm his or her way past Uncle Jack’s security measures would have earned the right to stab me in the back and put the world out of my misery, so I kept on with what I was doing and didn’t bother turning around. Hearing Tommy’s voice made me a little sad. I’d not only gotten used to the idea of a Big Bad smiting me at the workbench, I’d started to look forward to it a little. Not that I wouldn’t normally be glad to hear Tommy, but he had an annoying tendency to be happy all the times I wanted to be miserable. And call me old-fashioned, but I thought that him being as cheerful as he sounded less than a week after they’d buried his Uncle Seth was a little too creepy to put up with. It wasn’t right that I should be more depressed than him.

The thing people who have never gone through depression don’t realize is sometimes, the depressed person needs to sit and stew for a while. When something trips you up and sends you spiraling downward, the fastest way to get back up is to just go along for the ride. Strap yourself to your emotional surfboard and wait for the wave to eventually carry you back to shore. It’s not that I enjoy those moments. It’s kind of like when you go for a week or so without a shower, you don’t like the way you smell, you just notice it a lot less. Plodding your way through depression is like letting a campfire burn itself out instead of pouring the kerosene of human interaction onto it. That was why I’d sequestered myself down in the base and poured myself into work, and why I was not happy to have Tommy show up not only on my doorstep but past it and downstairs.

Maybe if I ignored him, he’d take the hint.

“Bob? Dude, it’s us.” Great. Rick was with him. Probably Sarah, too.

“Bobby? I brought wings. From that place you like in Tonawanda.” Yep. Her too. All three of them had descended upon my Fortress of Suckitude. That could mean one of three things. Either (a) the world was ending and I’d let the battery on my watch run down so they had to come and get me in person; (b) they felt like reliving the old days of the four of us going out and dealing with one of the lesser bad guys, which I absolutely did not want to do in the mood I was in; or (c) an intervention, which was worse than the other two possibilities rolled into one. Boy, was this going to be painful.

“You’ve reached the Baines residence,” I piped up in my best fake-cheerful voice. “We’re sorry, but no one is home right now. After the beep, please piss off. Beep.”

“Come on, Dude. It’s been a week. No one’s seen you. We were starting to worry.”

“Gee, it took you a full week to start worrying? What friends I’ve got. Remind me to think of you when I’m on fire sometime.”

“There’s no reason to be nasty, Bobby.” The hurt in Tommy’s voice was clear. That wasn’t what I’d intended. I just wanted to be left alone to enjoy my own misery, and instead, I’d increased the suffering of the only person in the room who had a right to be more miserable than me. Of course, that should have made me feel even worse, but misery doesn’t work that way. Adding a new misery onto a misery you’re already in doesn’t make the old misery worse, it just adds to the things you’re miserable about. Someday, I might try to write a paper on the Commutative Property of Misery, but I doubt I’d ever be able to get the higher math degree I’d need to make anyone take it seriously.

“I’m sorry, Tommy.” I finally spun my chair around to look at them. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m just not in shape for company.”

“That’s what you said last time.” Rick looked me square in the eye. “It didn’t hold water then, and it doesn’t now. You’ve been out of circulation for a week, ever since the Professor’s funeral. Mystery told me you swapped out your turn on monitor duty this week, and there haven’t been many reports of you even going out on patrol.”

“How do you know that? News reports?”

“Nah, the web. There are whole websites dedicated to tracking hero sightings. It’s a hobby for some people.” He went to the PC over on the other desk and typed in a web address. To my astonishment, the site was exactly what he’d said it was: a list of sightings of all the heroes in the Justice Federation, along with a few blurry photographs taken of us zooming by. There were only two reports of me flying over the City during the past week, which was understandable since I’d only really gone outside to clear my head. Oddly enough, there were a couple of sightings of Mr. Zip in the days immediately following the Professor’s death. “I made those,” Rick bragged. “To help cover it up.”

“Clever. If I’d known about that, or the other heroes had known about that, then there wouldn’t have been a need for me to step in as the Knight.”

One of those awkward silences that were starting to follow me around, like a puppy following a guy holding a steak, descended upon the four of us. Apparently, I’d hit a nerve. “Did Prism speak with any of you?”

“We talked for a little while.” Tommy’s face looked like it was going to slip right off his skull. “She said she was going to suggest I not get promoted until this killer was tracked down, and even though I understand, it still hurts. It’s like I’m being told I’m not good enough.”

“That’s not the case. She thinks you’re all good enough to be alongside the rest of us. And once this is settled, she and I will both push to get you all promoted in your own right, not just as replacements, like what happened with me. You all deserve to be at the big table, but it’s not right to put the three of you in harm’s way unnecessarily.”

“Bullshit!” Sarah shouted, which was uncharacteristic for her. “We’re in harm’s way every single day. We were all practically born in harm’s way. What right do the heroes have to worry about us being in danger now, when they’re the ones who brought us up to be their human shields and cannon fodder?”

“You don’t really feel that way, do you, Sarah?”

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Okay, partially true. I believed what she was saying since I’d felt the same way on more than one occasion, but I couldn’t believe she was the one saying it. Rick had always been the rebellious one of our bunch and the kind to express those feelings. I rebelled in my heart sometimes but toed the line. Sarah was the good girl who did whatever she was told. And Tommy? Tommy just enjoyed himself way too much to care.

“You don’t have to tell me that.” I restrained myself from shouting. “I feel the same way. Frankly, I think this whole ‘sidekick’ thing was a mistake from the get-go, only redeemed by the fact that it made the three of you the great heroes you’ve become. It’s not right to put a kid into a costume and throw him at a super-villain. It’s not right to take a kid and turn him into a weapon.” I kicked the workbench. “It’s just not right.”