The Ables (40 page)

He was still a long way from recovering enough to return to school anyway. Bentley said Donnie probably had months of physical therapy ahead of him before he could even walk again.

I tried to act normal at school, which is difficult to do when everyone keeps going out of their way to be overly nice to you. They meant well but only served as a reminder of how things would never really be normal for me again.

I’d overheard a conversation my father had on the phone with Principal Dempsey and had gathered that I would basically be given a free pass on the year’s schoolwork.

I’d missed so much time that, under normal circumstances, I would be destined to repeat a year. But since my absences were caused by something so tragic, and because everyone felt so bad for our entire family, the teachers had all decided to give me passing grades and allow me to progress with my classmates.

And, like a jerk, I took full advantage. I basically just stopped doing any of the assignments we were given, from reading to worksheets. I took all the quizzes and tests like the rest of the kids in class, but I would guess I did no better than 25 percent on any of them. On one multiple choice test, I simply marked the first choice for every single answer. Mrs. Crouch never gave me any of my tests back for the rest of the year.

My selfishness didn’t end with schoolwork. I let my friends do simple tasks for me, even though I was totally capable of doing them myself. They just offered out of pity, and I just kept selfishly accepting. They fetched my lunch, carried my backpack, and opened doors for me. And I just let them treat me like a prince, because it was easy. And I was too angry and sad at everything to say no. I guess I was pretty lazy too.

It’s easy to diagnose my depression now, looking back. Dad would have caught on to it, too, if he’d been able to spend more time with me or had been even a little bit less depressed and distracted himself. But as a kid in the moment, I had no idea how much the recent events had changed me and altered my character for the worse. I felt like I deserved it all. I deserved to be waited on, hand and foot. I deserved to get out of homework and tests. After all, I was a victim of extraordinary hardship. The world had battered and bruised me, cutting me down and leaving me broken. The least it could do was even things out with a little privilege, right?

Out of everyone in my life, only Mrs. Crouch had the courage to tell it like it was. “You’re really letting yourself go, Mr. Sallinger,” she said one afternoon. School was over and the final bell had rung, and I was the last student left, making my way toward the exit.

“Excuse me?” I said, feeling entitled and offended that she should speak to me so bluntly.

“I know you’ve been through a lot this year, but you’re really pushing it now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it’s time to grow up, young man.” She was grading papers, and judging by the direction of her voice, hadn’t even looked up from her red pen to look me in the eye. “You’ve milked this special attention for all it’s worth, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to turn into a horrible human being.”

I was pretty shocked to hear her say these things, even while some part of me knew she was right. And I was about to scoff and defend myself when she continued.

“You’re not the only kid to ever suffer a tragedy, Phillip. It happens every day all around the world. What you have to decide is whether you’re going to let your depression define you or if you’re going to rise above it.” Finally, she put down the pen, raised her spectacles to her face, and turned to look at me. “I’m so sorry you lost your mother. I really am. I cannot imagine how hard it’s been for you, and I wouldn’t even dare to try. But you’ve let the bitterness and the sadness grip you for far too long. Look at Chad. Look at Donnie. Look at the rest of your friends. Henry’s in a wheelchair. Bentley will never be able to walk properly. Poor Darla can’t see or hear. Mr. Brooks spent the better part of three months in the hospital. ”

“What’s your point?” My voice was a bit softer, not as defiant, but I was still not letting down my guard completely.

“My point is that people suffer,” she continued. “It stinks; it’s not fair, but it happens. And there are only two kinds of people in this world, Mr. Sallinger: people who rise above that suffering and people who let it define them. I just don’t want to see you become the latter.”

“Why do you care?” It wasn’t half as snotty as you probably think it was. Her harsh words had actually penetrated my defenses, and maybe some part of me had just been waiting for someone to grab me by the shoulders and shake some sense into me, literally or figuratively. And now that it had happened, I was genuinely curious why this old woman would show such interest in my personal development. The teachers in New York certainly never seemed to care that much. They would have just shaken their heads in pity at the little boy who lost himself in his own grief.

“Because you’re the future, Phillip. You and your friends. In the coming years, you’re all that stands between evil and the rest of the world. If you don’t snap out of this, if you don’t grow up to be the hero I believe you can be, then we’re all doomed. There’s plenty of selfishness in the world’s villains; we don’t need our heroes adding to that problem.” I could tell by the sound of her voice at the end that she’d gone back to the papers in front of her.

I brushed her off and headed for home, where her words spent the evening echoing through my head.

***

All the other kids’ chatter about the upcoming third simulation had given Bentley and me the superhero bug again. Which was a terrible thing, because we were effectively blacklisted from all future SuperSims. It was like taking a dog to the public dog park but leaving him chained to a tree.

So we decided to hold our own SuperSim. It was just one of our old practices out in the charred-out cornfield, but it was the closest we were likely to come to real action for quite some time. So James, Bentley, Henry, Chad, Freddie, and I all met one Friday evening. We split up into two teams and basically created a glorified capture-the-flag game on the spot.

Chad’s invisibility gave him obscene advantages in a game like capture the flag, though I did my best to counter that for my team by repeatedly moving the flag with my powers. It wasn’t very fun, mostly because it was so fake. Like trying to play baseball with three people. And while even the SuperSim was, by definition, not the real thing, it still felt a lot closer than what we were going to be able to recreate on our own.

“This sucks.” Henry was always the best at summing up the entire group’s emotions succinctly.

“Yeah,” everyone agreed. We’d played two rounds of our fake little game, and exactly no one was having any fun.

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Bentley suggested. “Maybe we really are screwed. Maybe we’ll have to wait until we get to college to be heroes again.”

Everyone hung their heads at these words, as no one wanted to go back to being a normal kid, not after what we’d experienced. Most of us agreed with Bentley, but no one wanted to say so because it would feel like the final nail in our coffin.

But I had been spending time thinking about this very issue, and I had the perfect solution to the town’s ban on disabled hero kids: we would be heroes in some other town.

“Maybe we don’t have to wait,” I said enticingly. “Maybe all we need … is a change of scenery.”

***

Central Park had never looked so gorgeous.

Of course, technically, I’d never seen it before—which might explain why I thought it was so gorgeous. The lights throughout the park were all sparkling, and because it was a Friday night, there were lots of people around.

It had taken a full fifteen minutes to convince the group that we should go on a real-world reconnaissance mission and another fifteen after that to convince James that he could get us to Central Park even though he’d never been there—in the end, we used Bentley’s computer to show James some maps and photographs, and he finally agreed to try. He’d gotten us there on his first try, which I was sure would be a huge boost to his confidence while also expanding the services his business could offer.

Even though there were lots of people around, there were pockets of deserted park area as well. Central Park, if you haven’t been there, is ridiculously big—way bigger than you think it is until you’ve been there.

On my direction, we fanned out to try and find some place to sit and observe the park. We settled on a cluster of oak trees near a dirt path. It was relatively low lit, yet it afforded us a nice wide view of the park. After a few minutes of silently waiting, some on the team began to get restless.

“Phillip, are you sure about this?” Bentley asked. “With Weatherby gone, our abilities won’t be hidden.”

“Relax, Bent,” I assured him. “We aren’t going to be using any abilities people will see, okay?”

“So, what are we supposed to do, Phillip?” It was Henry, of course. “Just wait for a crime to happen?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound confident enough to shut him up. “That’s what the real heroes do.”

“That could be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he continued. “We could be here all night and not see a crime.”

“Henry,” I said calmly, with my best condescending tone, “this is New York City, my friend. There’s so much crime here, we probably won’t have to wait twenty minutes to find someone to apprehend.”

Almost as though I’d planned it, there was a loud scream at just that moment. It came from our left, partway down the jogging path.

Everyone looked at me in awe for a few seconds before I snapped them out of it. “Okay, gang. That’s it. Let’s go. James … advance us down the path in that direction,” I ordered, pointing. Everyone scurried in close and put a hand on James. “Okay, James. Let’s go.”

Ooph!

We appeared 100 yards up the path in the direction of the screaming. Another 150 yards up, there was a woman and two small children. She was shouting and pointing in our direction. “He’s got my purse!” Only then did I see the man running straight towards us, still 100 yards off or so but moving quickly. We weren’t under a street light, so he probably hadn’t seen us yet.

“Everyone off the path!” I scampered to my right into a small grouping of trees and shrubs, and everyone else followed.

“What do we do now, Phillip?” Bentley asked, sounding excited but nervous.

My mother would have killed me for being in the park at night. She said it was an incredibly dangerous place to be after dark, and I surely would have been grounded. And once upon a time, I believed her enough to actually be scared of Central Park—even in broad daylight.

But now … I wasn’t remotely scared. I’m not sure if I was being cocky or had simply lost enough innocence over the previous several months to no longer care. Surely any criminal I encountered in the park would pale in scariness to the people I’d been bumping into back in Freepoint. I’d faced off with a man in possession of nearly every power, for crying out loud. What could a purse-snatcher do to compete with that? Besides, we were a bunch of superheroes. This man was just a human being.

I walked out of the brush with a firm step, stopping just off the path’s edge. The man was only fifty feet away at this point, still running hard. The poor woman was still shrieking in the background.

I glanced up the path about ten feet from my position and found the kind of tree I was looking for. It was a crooked old maple with two or three very low-lying branches. I reached up with my right arm extended and pulled one of the away-facing branches toward me with my powers. It creaked as it swung out over the path—about chest high on an average adult. I could tell it was building up pressure because I had to concentrate and focus more as I pulled it backward toward me.

When it had completed a 180-degree arc, it was pointing straight at me. I simply held it in place mentally and peeked out around its leaves to see the purse-snatcher approaching. Twenty feet away. Then fifteen. Then ten.

When he was five feet away, I finally made my presence known. “Boo,” I said sharply, simultaneously releasing the branch from my control. It whipped instantly back around to its original intended position, smacking the burglar in the chest with a loud
thwack
as it went by. It stopped him in his tracks and reversed him, sending him flying backward.

I walked out onto the path as he tumbled through the dirt. He’d lost control of the woman’s purse in the fall, and it was lying just off the far side of the path in the grass. I concentrated for only a second before it levitated off the ground and zoomed straight across the walkway into my outstretched hand. I turned immediately and threw it straight into the bushes where my teammates were.

The criminal was far from incapacitated and had begun to rouse himself … just in time to see me throw his prize into the trees.

“Why you little …” he sputtered. He stumbled back a bit, losing his balance, only to suddenly return to a proper upright position again, this time brandishing the gun he had tucked in his pants.

Oh crap!

I hadn’t considered the fact that he might be armed, which was pretty foolish if you think about it. I’d assumed that taking him to the ground and relieving him of the purse would be the end of it. As though he’d be so shocked, he’d just give up and leave. I was too stunned to even think of the obvious solution: using my powers to disarm him.

He didn’t have any idea what had hit him, and he was still a little dazed. But he’d regained his sense enough to point the pistol straight at my head. I knew I had to run, and that I had to run right away, but my legs wouldn’t respond as quickly as my brain was processing things. There’s no way around it … I froze. Choked.

Right around the time I heard the sound of the gun going off, I heard two lightning-quick, distinct little sounds.

Ooph!

Ooph!

And I was in the bushes again.

James had saved my bacon, thinking quickly and getting me out of the bullet’s trajectory just in the nick of time.