The Trials of Renegade X (7 page)

I sigh and sink down on the couch, staring at my phone. Willing it to ring. Maybe I should call Sarah. She’s probably still busy with Riley, though I’m sure she’d tell him to get lost once she knew I really needed her. As long as I exaggerated and made it sound like an emergency.

“Mom!” Alex shouts, rushing through the living room and looking for Helen.

“Settle down,” Gordon warns. “The doctor said to take it easy.”

The narrow, barely held-together attic stairs creak, and then Helen hurries down them like they’re not some deathtrap that almost killed her only son today. And to make matters worse, she’s holding Jessica, my three-year-old half sister, while she does it. Great. Why not endanger the lives of all my favorite siblings? Amelia tromps down after them. They’re all on the stairs at the
same time
. I feel dizzy just watching and have to look away.

Alex points to the cast on his right arm, practically jumping up and down with excitement. Obviously, he’s still too much in shock to realize how traumatized he should be. “Look, Mom! I got purple! It was the best one.”

“I can see that,” Helen says. She exchanges a slightly worried look with Gordon, then tilts her head toward me. Gordon quickly shakes his head.

As if I can’t tell they must be talking about me. Helen’s probably wondering if Gordon’s had a chance to have some sort of heart-to-heart with me about the dangers of sleeping with supervillains.
You might
think
you want to sleep with her, son, but you’ll be sorry sixteen years from now when you have to tell your parents where your illegitimate villain kid came from.

Uh-huh.

“Damien’s going to draw a Velociraptor on it later,” Alex tells her. “But he can’t right now, because ...” He glances over his shoulder to make sure I’m not listening, and then finishes in a whisper. “ ...because he’s depressed.”

What?
“I am not,” I mutter. Then I sigh and pull the hood of my sweatshirt over my face and sink deeper into the couch. But, you know, not in a depressed way.

Amelia moves to stand in front of me with her arms folded and this smug smile on her face. “Looks like
someone
didn’t have a very good first day.”

She looks like she’s going to sit next to me, but then thankfully Jess beats her to it, cozying up beside me and laying her head on my shoulder. “You know, Amelia, it’s too bad your power only works on things you’ve touched before. Otherwise, you could, you know, summon up boys.”

Her mouth goes sour, like she just ate something that tasted bad. Then she actually clucks her tongue at me. “I heard about what happened.
Everyone’s
talking about how you thought that bomb was real.”

“Oh, is
everyone
talking about it?” I’d like to see her last five minutes at Vilmore.

“They do that trick every year. I can’t believe you fell for it!”

How the hell was I supposed to know? “I didn’t hear you warning me about it.” If she even knew. She’s in the afternoon class, so she had plenty of time to find out during the day. Especially if
everyone
was talking about it.

Jess tugs my hood back so she can cup her hands to my ear. “Hi,” she whispers, then smiles real big at me.

Amelia’s nostrils flare. “Jess. No secrets.”

I cup my hands to Jess’s ear and ask her to go get me a pen. She scurries off to do my bidding.

Amelia scowls at me. “Just try not to become the laughingstock of the school, okay? It’s bad enough people already know we’re related.”

“Yes, it is.” We can agree on that, at least.

“But, since I’m feeling generous, I’d still be willing to help you with your poster. Mine’s almost done, so I have some spare time.”

She has no life, she means. “Why don’t you work up a first draft and I’ll see if I can sign off on it.” Like I don’t have way better things to do than work on some poster, which is apparently supposed to be on “what heroism means to me.” All I have to do is find a magazine picture of a kitten in a tree, glue it on my poster board, and I’m done. No problem.

Amelia scoffs. “I’m not doing your homework for you.”

“Then mind your own business. I don’t need your help.”

“But it’s due Wednesday, Damien.
Wednesday
.” She puts her hands on her hips, letting that sink in.

“And tomorrow’s only Tuesday.” Besides, I’m the idiot villain kid who thought a bomb was actually going off in class. Miss Monk’s expectations of me can’t be too high. She’ll probably give me a gold star just for getting my name right.

Jess waddles back over and holds out the crayon she brought me. Not a pen, but close enough. I whisper to her again and ask her to get me a piece of paper. When she runs off, I say to Amelia, “Wow, look at that. I wanted something, and it just appeared. Almost like a superpower.”

“Shut up.”

I tap the end of the crayon, studying Amelia. “Can you put your arm out a little? And turn to the left.”

“Why?”

Jess returns with a slightly used piece of paper that has one of her drawings on one side. I press it against my leg and ready the crayon. “Because I’m going to draw a Velociraptor on Alex’s cast later and I need to practice first.”

She clenches her fists and makes a frustrated noise of rage.

“What? I thought you
wanted
to be a model.”

Before she can say anything to that, my phone chimes and a text from Kat pops up.
Sorry I missed your calls—hanging in the commons. It’s so loud in here! What’s up?

I get up from the couch and head for the privacy of my room, already texting her back.
Call me.

“Fine,” Amelia says in a snotty voice. “Be a jerk like that and don’t accept my help on anything. It’s not like I care if you fail. But I think you might like to know that that’s not your room anymore.”

“What?” My phone rings, but I don’t answer it yet, too busy raising a skeptical eyebrow at Amelia and putting my hand on the knob anyway. I mean, I think I know my own room.

“Dad didn’t tell you?” She bites her lip in mock concern, though I can already see the smug “I know something you don’t” smile creeping over her.

“Didn’t tell me what?”

Gordon hurries over from the kitchen. “I’ll take it from here, Amelia.” He looks down his nose at her, indicating she should go somewhere else and mind her own damn business.

She gets this self-satisfied grin on her face and takes my spot on the couch next to Jess. She tries to whisper something in Jess’s ear, but Jess pushes her away, having none of it.

“There’s been a change of plans,” Gordon says, right as my phone stops ringing and says I have a missed call from Kat. “Alex is moving back into his old room, and you’re moving into the attic.”

I laugh. Gordon thinks he’s so hilarious. That or he’s delusional. “Ha. Good one.”

“I’m serious. Helen and I talked it over earlier, and after Alex’s accident, we feel it’s not safe for him to be living up there.”

Because the stairs really are a deathtrap, he means.

I glance over my shoulder at Amelia, to see if she’s eavesdropping, which of course she is. Her eyes go wide when I catch her watching us and she looks away super obviously. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I tell Gordon, my hand on the knob to
my
room, “and if you’ll just step into my office, I think we can clear it up.”

“Grab a few things for tonight. We’ll work on actually switching everything this weekend. All right?”

I swallow and look over at the steep, rickety attic stairs. The railing is practically falling off. And he seriously expects me to live up there? “Dad,” I say through clenched teeth, “that’s great that you’re so concerned about Alex’s safety. But let’s not do anything crazy that we might
regret
. I’m more than happy to share my very safe ground-floor bedroom with Alex, especially since it was his room first and he was kind enough to share it with me.” Even if that meant I had to sleep on the floor, curled into a cramped little ball. But it would still be better than living in the freaking
attic
and having to go up and down those stairs every day. I get why he doesn’t want Alex up there, but wasn’t pushing me off a building enough for him?

My phone starts ringing again, but I press the ignore button, sending it to voicemail.

“Damien.” Gordon gets this gruff “I’m your father and I mistakenly think I know what’s best for you” look.

“I would also be perfectly happy to sleep on the couch. But that’s my final offer.”

“Alex’s room”—he means the ground floor bedroom, the one that up until two seconds ago was
mine
—“isn’t big enough for you to share permanently. And you’re not living on the couch. Not when we have a perfectly good extra bedroom upstairs.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and leans in, keeping his voice low. “I know how you feel about heights.”

“Obviously you don’t.” Even after pushing me off a building, he still doesn’t understand, because if he did, he wouldn’t be asking this. “I’ve been telling you those stairs are dangerous for months, and you didn’t listen to me. And now that you know I’m right, because Alex nearly killed himself on them, you want
me
to move up there? Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?”

“But you’re older and more careful. Nothing’s ever happened to Amelia,” he points out, as if that should reassure me.
Well, we’ve only had fifty percent casualties. You
probably
won’t die.
“And,” he adds, giving me his gruff look again, “you can fly.”

Says the man who’s only ever seen me do it once. I have, in fact, flown two times, but both times only because I was in mortal danger. I’m not eager to do it again.

“If something does happen,” he goes on, “and I’m not saying that it will, but if it does, at least I know you can handle it. I don’t have to worry about you. Unless there
is
some reason I should be worried? You were awfully quiet in the car. How was your first day?”

I flash him an overly fake smile. “My first day was
great
. I made tons of new friends. I’m already at the top of my class. I might even run for class president because I’m so obviously a shoo-in.”

Disappointment flashes in Gordon’s eyes, though he tries to hide it by not looking at me and staring at his feet, which really only emphasizes it. “Well ... first days are hard.”

“All the more reason why I should get to actually sleep tonight. In a room that isn’t going to collapse. You do realize I’ve never even been to the attic, right? I’ve lived here for six months and I’ve never even been up there.”

He sighs, as if my stubbornness about, you know, not wanting to die is really putting him out. “If you’ve never even been up there, then how do you know you won’t like it? Think of this as a way to start getting over your fears. It’ll be good for you.”

Right. Until the whole floor collapses and I die a horrible, excruciating death, buried under all the rubble. That’s like saying if you’ve never stuck your head inside a lion’s mouth, then how do you know it’s not a great idea? “You’re kidding me, right?”

He claps me on the shoulder, acting like he didn’t hear me, and says, “I know you can handle it, Damien. And that I can trust you to set a good example for your brother and sisters. So go get your stuff.” Then he walks off to go help Helen in the kitchen with dinner. Or to go find someone else’s life to ruin. It’s really hard to say.

“I tried to tell you,” Kat says on the phone later that night. I’m up in my new room in the deathtrap—I mean, attic—sitting on the bed. It took me about twenty minutes to get up the stairs, though it felt more like hours. Every time I even breathed, they shuddered beneath me like they were going to fall. Especially as I got closer to the top and they actually started to
wobble
. My vision blurred and my palms got sweaty, so I didn’t even think I’d be able to grab onto the railing if I needed to. Not that I trust the railing, since it’s falling off and obviously unstable.

I had to practically crawl up the last few steps. I also had to wait until everyone else had gone to bed, or at least to their rooms, since there was no way I wanted anyone seeing me like that. Even if showing Gordon firsthand what an awful choice he made might have been tempting.

And now that I’m up here, the wind howling outside sounds extra loud. And the way it presses against the house makes the whole attic feel like it’s swaying. Like I’m in some precarious tree house, not a supposedly sturdy building suitable for living in.

My new room itself isn’t too bad, if you can overlook the swaying, the rickety stairs, and the general life-threatening danger. It’s technically bigger than my old room, but the way it’s shaped makes it feel more cramped. The wall behind me is slanted, so that I can’t sit up all the way or I’ll hit my head. Something I’ve experienced three times already, and I’ve only been up here an hour.

The floor, the ceiling, and the walls are all a dingy gray, except for the new wall Gordon put in a few months ago, turning what was Amelia’s giant room into two. That wall looks like it’s made of planks fresh from the hardware store. And I discovered it’s not just the stairs leading up here that creak, but all the floorboards. It sounds like the whole attic is about to give way every time Amelia stomps around her room. And either her TV’s blaring or the walls in here are pretty thin, because I can hear every word of the documentary she’s watching.