The Trials of Renegade X (2 page)

“Never, but that was before you decided you wanted to get your
H
. I’m the bad-girl villain. You’re the hero now.”

I swallow, not liking what that implies. As if choosing to go for my
H
means having Kat in my bed is off-limits. That makes it sound like what we’re doing is wrong, and I so disagree. I love her, and so what if that means I want to take her clothes off?

Besides, I said I wanted to be a hero, not a saint.

“Are you telling me you want to be a bad influence?” I ask her.

“Definitely,” Kat murmurs, kissing me again, her mouth hot against mine. She grips the edges of my T-shirt and starts to pull it over my head. So I don’t see so much as hear when my bedroom door flings open and Helen, my stepmother, says, “Damien, are you—”

She cuts off there. Kat freezes. My heart pounds in my chest.

I pull my shirt back down—it’s blue and says, SUPERHEROES DO IT WITH CAPES!—and run my hands through my hair. They weren’t supposed to be back for at least another hour. Never mind the fact that no one was supposed to just
barge in
, like they, you know, own this place or something.

Helen’s standing in the doorway, her eyes narrowed at Kat, who sits up and stares at the wall, not looking at anyone. She was already a bit flushed from our compromising activities—okay, more than a bit—but now her cheeks turn a bright, shameful red.

“You could have knocked,” I say, shattering the tense silence that’s filled the room. And even though I’m the one breaking the rules by having Kat here, I can’t keep the annoyance out of my voice. There is such a thing as respecting other people’s privacy, after all.

Amelia, my fifteen-year-old half sister, rushes up behind Helen, putting a hand over her mouth. She manages to both smirk and look genuinely horrified at the same time when she sees me and Kat in the bed together, even though we’re both still fully clothed. “Oh. My.
God
,” she says, drawing each word out extra long. She makes the situation sound ten times more dramatic than it is, as if we’d been caught running a prostitution ring out of my room, which isn’t exactly zoned for business. “You are
so
dead.”

“Amelia,” Helen growls.

But Amelia’s already running off, shouting something about having a million phone calls to make.

“Tell them I charge one hundred dollars an hour,” I call after her. “Kat’s my reference if they have any questions about quality of service!”

Kat punches me in the shoulder. “
Damien
,” she says out the side of her mouth, her teeth clenched. She jerks her head ever-so-slightly toward Helen.

Helen, who is staring at us in shock, as if how I feel about Kat—or that I can’t keep my hands off of her—is in any way news to her. “This isn’t a free show,” I snap. “You can stop staring at us like we’re animals in the zoo.”
And to your left, everyone, you’ll observe the mating ritual of the teenagers of the species. Notice how the male specimen becomes agitated when said ritual is so rudely, and prematurely, interrupted.

“What’s going on?” Gordon calls, his footsteps in the hallway.

“Your son and that—” She swallows back whatever she was about to say, but I can’t help glaring anyway. Because I’m pretty sure “that wonderful supervillain girlfriend of his” isn’t how she was going to end that sentence. I’m
pretty sure
Helen thinks Kat is a slut for giving it up to me, even though I’m the only guy she’s been all the way with and we are in love and have plans for a pirate-themed wedding.

We don’t find out what Helen was going to say, though, because apparently she can’t even finish. She can’t even look at me for one more second and instead holds up her hands in an “I’m done” gesture and turns away, leaving Gordon to deal with me.

He glances after her, then at me. He takes in the situation. Me. Kat. The slightly rumpled bed. Then he suddenly gets real interested in his shoes. This from the guy who did it with my mom in a dirty subway bathroom and made her lose her hairpin. He wasn’t so shy
then
.

Kat’s phone starts buzzing again. She reaches down and snatches it out of her purse, hitting a button to silence it.

“Damien,” Gordon says, clearing his throat, “I think Kat had better—”

“I have to go,” she says, not letting Gordon finish. “I’ll see you, um ...” She pauses, realizing that for the first time in months she doesn’t know when we’ll see each other again.

I lean in to kiss her good-bye, but her eyes dart toward Gordon, and she pulls away, too embarrassed.

She gets up from the bed, slinging her purse over her shoulder and stuffing her phone into it.

“Kat, wait—I’ll walk you home.”

I get up to follow, but she shakes her head, already hurrying for the door and pushing past Gordon. “I just ... My mom’s going to be freaked.” That’s all the explanation I get before she makes her escape, though not without one last glance over her shoulder at me. Our eyes meet. She bites her lip. Then she rushes off, leaving me on my own to explain to Gordon where babies come from.

It’s not that I dislike Helen. In fact, for a stepmom, she’s pretty awesome. I mean, I’m her husband’s illegitimate love child with a supervillain, and even if the little incident that spawned me happened before she and Gordon met, it’s cutting it pretty close. She could have freaked when Gordon first brought me home six months ago, just out of the blue, no warning. She could have refused to let me stay here or had crazy ideas that I was evil or something. But no. She welcomed me into the family. And even if she misguidedly felt sorry for me for my supervillain upbringing, she never made me feel weird about it.

And considering that my real mom disowned me for disagreeing with her and showing even the teensiest signs of maybe leaning toward my hero side, Helen gets major points from me for treating me like one of her own kids. Even though we’re not technically related. And even though we might disagree on who I should be allowed to associate with.

I sigh as I glance at the clock—it’s almost six—and dial Sarah’s number on my cell phone. Sarah’s my sidekick. She’s an ordinary citizen, not a hero or a villain, though she
is
pretty heroic. She’s all for me getting my
H
, for obvious reasons. And, also for obvious reasons, she’s on Helen’s list of people that are actually allowed at the house.

Sarah answers after only two rings. “What’s the emergency?” She must know it’s me.

“No emergency. Can’t a hero call his sidekick just to chat?”

I can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “What is it, Renegade?”

“It’s a nice night for crime fighting.”

“I thought you said you were busy?”

“I was.” That was when I thought I was spending the evening with Kat, before Helen chased her off. “I had a change of plans.”

My door opens. I half expect it to be Helen again, or Gordon, coming to tell me off for earlier. He was too flustered at the time to do much more than stammer. And then I told him that when a bird and a bee love each other very much, or when they meet randomly in a dirty subway bathroom—which is
not
on our list, by the way—they want to rip each other’s clothes off and do things to each other that birds and bees would never do in real life. And that sometimes when people meet randomly in a dirty subway bathroom, they don’t use protection and end up with an illegitimate love child who then has to explain the facts of life to them sixteen years later. Because if they already knew, they wouldn’t be gaping at him with their mouths hanging open like that.

Then he stormed out.

Which is why I expect him to be back for round two, but instead of Gordon, Amelia pokes her head in, her eyes darting right to the bed, as if she expected to catch a second showing. Which, considering that no boys will ever touch her—what with her sparkling personality and all—is probably the closest she’ll ever get to the real thing.

Amelia’s got dyed black hair, blond eyebrows, and is slightly pudgy. She also wears way too much mauve eye shadow, something that was popular for some reason with all her friends at our old school.

I glare at her. “You could have knocked.” Just because she has no life of her own and has to live vicariously through mine doesn’t mean she can barge in whenever she wants.

“Then you would have told me to go away.”

“
Exactly
.”

“You had a change of plans?” Sarah repeats through the phone. “So I’m your second choice.”

She makes that sound like it’s a bad thing. As if it’s not an honor to be chosen at all. “We could just hang out. You know, if you think all the evil-doers of the world are taking the night off or whatever.”

“Your girlfriend bailed on you and you’re lonely, you mean.”

Okay, maybe there’s some truth to that, but the way she talks, you’d think it was a crime to want to spend time with her. “We can watch a movie. Your pick.”

She makes kind of a snorting sound. “You said you were busy, so I made plans. With
Riley
.”

I make a shooing motion at Amelia, directing her toward the door. I mouth the words
Get out.

Amelia acts like she didn’t notice and plops down on the bed. I don’t know if she’s just misguidedly making herself at home, or if she’s hoping to get a better look at the scene of the crime. The
almost
crime, anyway.

I ignore her and tell Sarah, “Cancel them. Wouldn’t you rather spend time with me?”

“Spend time with you instead of my boyfriend? Yeah, right, Damien.”

“I’ll let you pick the movie. Something sci-fi, if you want. With a really technical plot I won’t be able to follow.” Sarah convinced me to go see some futuristic, super-convoluted sci-fi movie with her this summer while Riley was out of town, visiting his grandparents. My brain just about melted out of my skull, and I spent the whole time asking Sarah what was going on while she kept saying she’d explain it to me later, after it was over. I
considered
faking an illness and pretending I needed to go home, but the fact that I didn’t and sat through the whole thing, melting brain and everything, just goes to show what a good friend I really am and how lucky Sarah is to have me.

“Riley and I are watching a rom-com. In my room. And I’m turning off my phone.”

Erg. “Riley’s a total douche. You know that, right?” He’s also got an
H
on his thumb, marking him as an official hero—just Sarah’s type.

“Uh-huh. Sounds like someone else I know. Funny how you only started wanting to hang out with me so badly after he entered the picture.”

“Not true.” Okay, totally true. I don’t know why, but the guy just irks me. And I know I shouldn’t care, but the fact that Sarah likes him better than me, and might actually believe he’s a better
hero
than me, really pisses me off. I’m supposed to be the hero in her life. The only one. I don’t need a do-gooder type like Riley showing me up. Especially since he’s the type who will watch
The Crimson Flash and the Safety Kids
—my dad’s kids show—with her while keeping a straight face. Something I could never do, though, thankfully, neither can Kat. It’s one of our favorite shows, as long as we get to make fun of it the whole time. Sarah watches it intensely, like the Crimson Flash’s words of wisdom about how to safely cross the street is the most important advice she’ll ever hear. I’m surprised she doesn’t take notes.

“And,” I tell Sarah, “just to prove how not jealous I am, I’ll come over and watch the movie with you guys. I’ll even sit between you, to equally share my presence.”

“The last time I let you hang out with us—”

“Let me? Don’t you mean, ’was honored by me wanting to spend time with you’?”

“The
last time
I let you watch a movie with us, you pretended Riley had gone invisible and that you couldn’t see him.”

Riley’s superpower is turning himself invisible.
Lame
.

“I’m entertaining,” I tell her. Which is true and she knows it.

“No, you’re a jerk. You
sat
on him, Damien, and pushed him off the bed.”

“I didn’t push anyone. He fell in his frantic attempt to get away from me.”

“He broke his finger! He had to go to the doctor.”

How is this my problem? “It’s not my fault he doesn’t get enough calcium. I didn’t
intend
for him to get injured.” It was just an added bonus. “Plus, it healed, didn’t it? I don’t see why I can’t hang out with you guys.”

“Because you’re not my boyfriend. And you’re not the only guy in my life anymore.”

I was her boyfriend, sort of, once upon a time. During a very brief period where I was mistakenly denying my love for Kat and thought fooling around with Sarah would be easier than dealing with my real feelings. Which it turned out wasn’t true, and Sarah and I were better off keeping our relationship romance-free. Not that there was a lot of romance going on, just some making out, but whatever.

And yeah, maybe I enjoyed being the only guy in Sarah’s life, before she met Riley at some sci-fi convention back in June. And it’s not like I want to date Sarah now or anything. I just don’t want Riley putting his mouth all over her. Or making her think that having an
H
makes him a better hero than me. “That doesn’t mean you’re not still my friend.”