Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight (6 page)

Mystery let out another weary sigh. Then he turned to me. “There is no secret. There’s nothing to manage. We
don’t
do it all. Some things will inevitably fall by the wayside, which is frustrating. The trick is to know what things are too important to be sidelined, and you focus on those.”

“There she is!” I zoomed the display even farther, focusing it on a shadowy figure. Mystery returned all of his attention to the screen, blissfully ending the lecture. I wasn’t sure what exactly he was expecting to see his nemesis doing, but the way he sprung into action told me he had seen it. He jumped out of the monitor chair and dashed to the far end of the room, programming coordinates into the teleporter. Years ago, we sidekicks shared a joke at Mystery’s expense, saying that if you watched him leave, that was his way of saying goodbye. More often than not, you’d turn around, and he’d be gone. But after he set his destination and was ready to ’port out, he turned his attention back to me.

“Bobby, I want to say this again: you are capable of the job. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you aren’t. But also remember to prioritize. There may come a time when the right thing for you to do is walk away again. Don’t be afraid, or ashamed, to do that if it’s the right thing to do.” With that, he took his own advice and activated the teleporter, leaving me alone in the half-dark room.

***

Monitor duty was quiet; I didn’t see anything that required intervention, although I was tempted to foil a break-in at an electronics factory. The cops got there before I could program the teleporter, which was a good thing. We’re supposed to do that sort of thing on our patrols and think about grand scale things when we’re in front of the big screen.

Once the sun came up on the East Coast and my shift officially ended, I passed right out in my dorm room. The bed was unbelievably comfortable, and I slept like a baby for the first time in weeks. Come to think of it, for the first time since Uncle Jack died.

I woke up and decided to take advantage of one of the nicer features HQ offered—its gym. In our line of work, one needs to stay in the absolute best shape possible, and that means state-of-the-art equipment to keep us fit. Even the sidekicks were invited to use the gym, with supervision. (The supervision catch was put in place after Tommy, who sometimes had a problem controlling his speed, burned out every treadmill in the place.)

I warmed up, did a series of calisthenics, and then climbed onto an elliptical trainer for some cardio. I’d been at it for about fifteen minutes when the gym doors slid open. I glanced up in the mirrors along the far wall and saw a familiar face join me.

“Hey! Good morning, Sarah.”

“Hey, yourself, Bobby,” she greeted me as she dropped her duffel bag in the corner. “How was monitor duty?”

“Boring. So, who’s here with you?”

“What are you talking about?” Sarah asked.

“We’re not supposed to use the gym unless supervised by a hero. Who’s supervising you?”

“Well,
duh,
” she snarked as she reached up to smack the back of my head. “You are.”

“Me?” For a brief moment, I’d forgotten about my promotion. That didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that she apparently hadn’t.

“Yep. The status display said the Scarlet Knight was on premises, so I thought I’d join in the workout. Unless you mind?”

“Mind? No, not at all. Help yourself, you know the place.”

Over the next forty-five minutes, we went through our normal workouts. Sarah was a joy to watch in action. She was so graceful and quick. She practiced some gymnastic moves I’d never seen her use in the field, and I tried to figure out if there was a way I could adapt any of them to my size and body type. She wasn’t what you’d call tall or bulky, just about your average height and build, but that worked to her advantage. You’d never know her sheer strength just by looking at her. Many surprised villains had fallen by her hand.

Next, she moved on to a treadmill, and I got to watch a whole new work of art. You’ve heard of poetry in motion? As far as I was concerned, she was poetry and music and probably a couple forms of impressionist art in motion. Fluid, smooth movements, which …

Uh-oh.

Concentrate on the workout. Lift the weights, feel the burn. Don’t think about …

Crap.

Think of baseball. Think of Algebra. Lie back and think of England.

Dammit. Well, at least I could take some solace in the fact that I decided to wear a jockstrap and cup to work out. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

Was I so blind that I’d never noticed little Pandora, standing aside the feminine colossus that was Clytemnestra, wasn’t quite so little anymore? When did that happen? I’d always harbored feelings for her. Hell, it was hard not to go into battle alongside someone and
not
develop some kind of feelings. We’d shared experiences in our teenage years that usually someone had to grow up and go to war to get.

But when did I start to think of her … well … that way?

“Wow,” she breathed as she came over, causing me to almost drop the barbell on my chest. What was so “wow”? Did she see something she shouldn’t have? I pushed the weights up with more exertion than necessary, hoping she’d think the rush of blood to my face was from exertion. “That was a great workout. We need to do this more often.” Sure we did, just as soon as I learned to turn off certain thoughts. She knelt next to my head, which did not help matters. “I’m going to hit the steam room. Do you want to join me?”

YES
!

“No, I’m going to do a few more sets, and then I need to get back to homework. You go ahead.”

“Okay, I’ll see you later then.” I heard her stroll out as I got up to put another set of weights on the barbell.

I wondered if the showers in HQ could get cold enough for what I needed.

Retrenchment

Sometimes it’s so satisfying to pull back and slug a bad guy in the face, particularly when you have issues to work through. That’s why I felt so good hauling back and punching the Harvard admissions board.

Okay, it wasn’t really the Harvard admissions board, it was just Painmonger. Every six months or so he likes to blow through Harbor City and tear shit up. He could do a good deal of damage in battle and take a hell of a lot of whatever we threw at him, but he always wound up on the losing end. That’s why I found it so easy to take my frustrations out on him. I’ve never believed in the policy of “killing the messenger,” but someone had to pay for all the bad news I’d gotten in the afternoon mail.

January had rolled into February. I was adapting to my new role as the second Scarlet Knight, and the world didn’t have a clue that there was a different face under the helmet. All of my old training had been coming back as if I hadn’t spent four months on the sidelines. I’d needed it, too. In the four weeks since I’d first put on the costume I’d taken on Madame Madness, Doctor Destructor (PhD), and some new weirdo who liked to rob banks wearing a pink bunny costume. Not to mention I carried a pregnant woman out of a burning house, rescued some yahoos who’d taken a sailboat out on the ocean at the height of a storm, and stopped too many burglaries, muggings, and other little disasters to count. Overall, a productive month.

It was also the month word came back from Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, and Saint Bonaventure—all of them rejections. I had briefly been accepted to at least one school but had to break it to Wellesley that some ass had submitted an application under my name as a joke. When I’d found myself opening the thin envelope from Harvard that Saturday morning, it had been a relief to hear the explosions and screams announcing Painmonger’s return. I finally had someone to lay into and get some anger out of my system. Semi-invulnerable villains are good for that sort of thing.

By the time Painmonger started getting wobbly and my knuckles had been rubbed raw by connecting with his stubble, I’d finally had enough. I scooped him up, kicked the anti-grav boots into high gear, and zipped straight up a few thousand feet before dropping him onto the beach. That slowed him enough for me to subdue him properly and zip him back out to the high-tech, super-secure, island lockup where the courts had stuck him after his fifth prison break. By the time I got home, I was tired, but it was a good tired. As I lowered myself into the tub filled with hot water and Epsom salts, I wondered for the first time since I’d taken the job, if it ever got any easier.

I was so exhausted by the battle with Painmonger, and frustrated by the letter from Harvard, that I vegged the rest of the weekend. Depression sunk in, and I needed some “me” time. I called Rick, Tommy, and Sarah, and the four of us hung out watching TV together, something we hadn’t really done since I’d graduated from the sidekick business. I’d missed it more than I realized.

***

Monday morning homeroom saw me sitting at my desk, desperately trying to finish my Spanish homework, which had something to do with explaining to some idiot, over and over, that all the boys in that particular town in Spain did on Sunday was go watch soccer.

“¿Que hizo Félix hasta el Domingo?” Félix fue al juego de fútbol.

THOOM
. Okay, that sound couldn’t be good.

“¿Que hizo Enrique hasta el Domingo?” Enrique fue al juego de fútbol.

THOOM
. I ignored the scrape of chairs as my classmates headed to the windows. I
would
finish this before second period.

“¿Que hizo Hector hasta el Domingo?” Hector no fue al juego de fútbol. Hector sedució las novias de Félix y Enrique. Que estupidos son Félix y Enrique
.

THOOM
!

The gasps and screams of the other students told me that maybe I’d better leave the soccer-obsessed Spanish kids alone for a while and see what was going on. With a sigh, I shut my Spanish book and joined the crowd at the windows.

THOOM
!

Monster. Big monster. With tentacles. Coming out of the ocean and heading directly for the school.

Great.

“Excuse me, Miss, I need to use the bathroom.”

***

I’d prepared for this moment. I’d known that sooner or later my job would require me to leap into action during the school day, so I’d planned out my actions step-by-step. Retrieve gym bag from locker. Pop into bathroom. Change into costume. Slip out of the building unseen (easy to do when people are distracted by, say, some Lovecraft-reject readying itself to smash your school into bits) and deal with the problem. Before heading to the beach, I flew a wide circle away from the building to make sure no one would be able to figure out I was coming from the school and then hovered in front of, but a safe distance away from, the newcomer.

GREETINGS, MORTAL.
The creature didn’t actually make any sound, which meant telepathy. I hate telepathy. It always gives me migraines.

“I am the Scarlet Knight, defender of this city. Identify yourself and your intentions.”

MY NAME IS UNPRONOUNCEABLE BY YOUR TONGUES. YOU MAY REFER TO ME BY THE CLOSEST WORD IN YOUR LANGUAGE
.

“And what is that?”

FLUFFY
.

Bile rose into my throat. I really did not need this on a day when I had a homework backlog that could choke a humpback whale. Hm. It could choke a humpback whale, but could it choke an overgrown squid? Maybe I should have brought my Spanish book with … no, focus on the job at hand.

AND MY INTENTIONS ARE CONQUEST. I SHALL LAY WASTE TO YOUR PUNY CITY AND USE ANY SURVIVING HUMANS AS TOOTHPICKS WHILE I FEED ON …

I stopped listening. I grabbed the staff off my belt, extended it, and quickly yanked some wires out and twisted them together while the big lump of calamari went on about the horrors it was planning.

DO YOU HAVE A FINAL STATEMENT, MORTAL
?
A PLEA, PERHAPS
? The voice in my head sounded hopeful.

“Yes.” I pushed a button and felt the heat as the stun gun feature started to overload. “My final statement is, ‘
I don’t have time for this shit today
!’”

I flung the now-spitting staff at Fluffy. It landed in the water directly in front of him, and electricity arced into the beast. I watched the guts of the staff burn themselves out, sending even more bolts of electricity all over the surface of the beast. Pain seared in the side of my head as he screamed telepathically, and then, as the staff gave up its last, he turned tail and fled back out into the ocean.

It annoyed me to lose that staff, but I wasn’t going to argue with the results.

Satisfied that Fluffy now knew better than to mess with a high school kid on a deadline, I flew back to school and managed to get out of costume and back to homeroom just in time to pick up my stuff as the bell rang. Fluffy may have failed to destroy the city, but he had managed to ensure that the world would never know exactly what happened with Felix, Enrique, and Hector.

***

“Bobby, what the hell has happened to you?”

Mrs. Carr was mad. She was always so careful to watch her language around us kids, and her use the H-word was about as shocking as hearing a normal person use the F-word, the C-word, and a couple of dozen other letter words, one after the other. I wanted to tell her that what happened to me was a giant hell-beast came out of the ocean during homeroom, but I couldn’t get a word in through all my flabbergastation at her choice of language.

“You’re a bright kid,” she continued when it became obvious I wasn’t going to answer her apparently rhetorical question. “You always have been. I know. I’ve read your entire transcript. You skipped third grade and almost past fourth. You were on the honor roll so many times in grade school that your parents couldn’t have had room on their car for all the bumper stickers. Your standardized test results are off the chart.” She stood, started to pace around her office but only got two steps before what I can only imagine to be her complete and utter frustration made her stop and sit back down. Boy was she on a roll. “You were the last kid I would have expected to develop a case of Senioritis. You’ve always been such a hard worker, even more so this year, but the last couple of weeks … ”