Mayhem and Madness

by J. A. Dauber

  As it turns out, he wasn’t the only collateral damage.

  If you live around here, you might remember that our football team was on its way to the state championships. Thanks to Logan. Although in the local news interviews, he always gave credit to his coach and teammates. I’m telling you, even though he basically broke my nose and was hooking up with the love of my life, he was a good guy.

  It was terrible, what happened to him.

  NOW. FRIDAY. 9:16 P.M.

  I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, but I’ve managed to reroute power from the weapon drives to the suit’s servomotors.

  I hadn’t just been fooling around with flying and shooting things all those weeks. I’d learned some stuff about the suit’s mechanics, too. I’m not sure it’s going to be enough, but a bunch of indicator lights that were red are now yellow. Which is better than nothing.

  Here goes.

  Okay, shifted the rubble off one leg. And nothing else fell on my head in the meantime. So far so good.

  Better wait a minute to make sure nothing else got disturbed before trying the other one.

  I guess I should keep going. With the story. But it gets tougher from here….

  Why isn’t there anyone firing machine guns at you when you need a distraction?

  SIX WEEKS AGO

  The thing is, you can’t grow up in my part of the US and not know something about football. I’m not sure which one the nickelback is, and the difference between most of the pass plays are beyond me. But I know the basics.

  And I also knew—everyone did—that that week’s game was crucial. If we won, we went to the state group of eight, which would be the furthest our team had gotten in about fifteen years, longer than some of us had been alive. The school was going crazy: cheer rallies, locker decorations, random kids running through the halls dressed as charging rams. Normally, I would have found this deeply annoying, but I had other things on my mind. To put it mildly.

  And then it was game night.

  If you can’t picture the scene, just hit the Internet. There’s video everywhere. Given what happened.

  It was the third quarter and we were down by three. The other team had the ball and they were making good progress downfield. In other words, it looked like they were going to score, and if they did, that might be it, since they’d been shutting down our quarterback all night.

  Their defense was good. But ours had Logan.

  Like I said, it’s rare for a linebacker to be team captain. Logan made great, key plays—especially the blitz. Everybody knew that. And that was, I guess, the thing: everybody knew that. In an area like ours, where high school football gets covered obsessively on the radio, local TV news, Facebook groups, everywhere…everyone was just waiting for Logan to put his head down and knock the opposing quarterback into the dirt.

  The coaches knew it. The other team knew it. Our team knew it. Everyone in the stands knew it—I mean, even the little kids knew it. Everyone was shouting, “Blitz! Blitz! Blitz!” and jumping up and down on the sidelines, generally going crazy. The incredible thing about Logan was that even though everyone knew he was going to blitz, nothing could stop him.

  Well, nothing on the football field.

  The other team’s quarterback called hike, and the back-field went into action. The crowd was on their feet roaring as Logan spun and whirled and flattened an offensive lineman and charged at the quarterback, who was backpedaling, wheeling, looking for anyone to throw the ball to, but there was no one open. It was third down, and it looked like the other team was going to lose another ten or fifteen yards. Which meant they were going to have to punt the ball away, which would have pretty much ended their momentum and put us right back in the game. It was the kind of play most players hope to have once or twice a season. Logan had two or three every game.

  And then his left foot exploded.

  The police determined later that the charges were attached to his cleats and set off remotely. But to the people in the stands, it looked like he’d stepped on a land mine.

  I’ve watched the videos maybe two hundred times. I haven’t wanted to, but I’ve made myself sit down and watch. Over and over again.

  Logan goes flying. His shoe—what everyone hoped was just his shoe—goes the other way, flipping over and over in midair. The crowd screams. Everyone is ducking for cover. The teams abandon the field—all except, of course, Logan. He’s groaning and crying and puking, lying on the turf holding the place where his foot had been.

  That’s where it gets hard to watch. I mean, literally, my neck wants to turn itself away. Like it’s under someone else’s remote control.

  I force myself, though. It’s the least I can do.

  Yeah, it’s true, they were able to recover the foot, and with all the donations that came in he was able to get the best surgeons in the country to stitch him back together. Within a month, he was walking with crutches and a limp, which would have been impossible for anyone other than an athlete at the top of his game.

  But he would never play football again.

  In those first few crazy hours, everyone assumed it was a homegrown attack, some trenchcoat-mafia student or a Centerville booster who’d gone way too far. When the Bloody Front made their YouTube announcement taking credit later that night…everything went nuts.

  But that’s not the full story. If it was, I’d probably have been able to shake it off.

  No one knew the full story, not even me, until three days later. When Mr. Jones showed up in the lab.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long he’d been waiting. I guess he wanted to make a dramatic reappearance after ghosting me for days. If that was his plan, he must have been a little disappointed. There’d been an unannounced assembly, a not-quite-memorial service for Logan, since he wasn’t dead, but kind of one for his foot, his playing career, and the hopes for our season. And, if you want to get all poetic about it, for a kind of American innocence, too, since if the Bloody Front was attacking high school football games, what wouldn’t they do?

  So I was an hour or so later to the lab than usual. I’m not sure if this is nice or disturbing or just anal retentive, but he’d taken the time while he was waiting to clean up the lab a little, organize the tools and whatnot. Which meant his first words to me were something about the need for order and cleanliness, and while I was trying not to jump down his throat in return, he followed up by blaming me for Logan, too, which was kind of a surprise and not a surprise all at once.

  The attack on Logan had been unusual for the Bloody Front. The journalists who had invaded our town before the YouTube video was a day old called it a troubling new direction for the group. The national security specialists had theories about why they might have changed their approach, but none of them had hit on revenge on the community they were pretty sure their supervillain adversary belonged to, since they’d tracked the supervillain in question’s flight, since the supervillain in question forgot, in his discombobulation and inexperience, to activate his cloaking device when he flew off after attacking their warehouse, leaving a chemical exhaust trail even the rankest amateur could follow.

  Which was, more or less, what Mr. Jones told me.

  Which in turn sparked an argument in which I denied forgetting to turn on the cloaking devices, and he denied my denial, and we went back and forth until he held up his phone and showed me a rapid stream of data which he said were the logs of the suit, which clearly indicated they had indeed been off. He said it was lucky that I’d done enough damage to the Bloody Front’s infrastructure that they were only able to narrow my return flight path down to a general region, not a specific neighborhood or house. Hitting the golden boy quarterback was their retaliatory strike.

  It was all Greek to me. I was sure I had turned on the cloaking device. But I wasn’t positive. And, like I said, even before Mr. Jones showed up, I’d had the
sinking feeling that the attack on our local hero couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Yes, you could say Logan was a thorn in my side. Yes, my nose still hurt most mornings. But he didn’t deserve that.

  The thing is, while Mr. Jones was telling me this, I kept thinking about something else. This one moment at the memorial service earlier that day that I kept flashing back to. Over and over.

  Rebecca standing by Logan onstage. Tears rolling down her eyes.

  But. But.

  But when Logan put his arm around her, having to limp over to do it, she flinched.

  Just for a second. And she immediately looked terribly ashamed.

  But she flinched.

  And it filled me with hope.

  Whatever’s happened to me—whatever’s coming to me—sometimes I think I deserve it.

  * * *

  Mr. Jones was in the lab and I didn’t care, because I was fixated on that moment at the memorial service. Rebecca and Logan weren’t going to last much longer. I could feel it.

  Of course, just because she wasn’t going to be with Logan didn’t mean she would end up with me. I understood that. I wasn’t insane.

  Except I was convinced that after she flinched away from Logan she had looked directly at me.

  Maybe I was kidding myself. Maybe I wasn’t. Even now, with her as my date for winter formal, I’m still not sure. I’m afraid to ask her. Either she’d tell me, or she’d lie. I’m not sure which would be worse.

  Meanwhile, I tried to focus on Mr. Jones, who was apparently not used to people not giving him their full attention. He demanded to know what I was thinking about, and—maybe so he’d stop lecturing me, maybe to avoid feeling guilty about everything for just a minute—I answered him.

  “I’m hopelessly in love with Logan’s girlfriend, Rebecca,” I said.

  I couldn’t see Mr. Jones’s expression. He was wearing another mask, of course, this one of Richard Nixon, or maybe it was Jimmy Carter. Then he leaned forward, and his whole tone changed.

  “Rebecca,” he said. Sounding out the name. Like it was in Latin or something.

  He wasn’t the teacher anymore, or the angry scolder. This was something else. Something I hadn’t seen before.

  “Rebecca,” I agreed.

  Another long pause. And then he said, “A beautiful name,” like he was a judge on one of those cooking shows and had just tasted something that was going to win that week’s challenge. “A name one could easily fall in love with.”

  And then—to my total shock and embarrassment—he started talking to me about love.

  He told me that falling in love with someone was the most powerful thing in the world, and he said it in a way that made me understand he’d been there, too, and I added a mental note to my Figure out who Mr. Jones is file. Maybe he hadn’t been a parent. He may or may not have been a teacher. But he was, or he had been, married. To someone he loved. A tremendous amount.

  I couldn’t believe it. For the first time, we were having a real conversation. So now that we were, you know, talking, I thought I might be able to try asking him something more personal. About my dad. How they met. How this all started.

  And so I did. Direct. Out of the blue. Figuring he’d shut it down. But something had changed between us and he answered.

  They’d been college roommates, him and my dad, and although my dad wasn’t the off-the-charts, Nobel Prize–worthy genius Mr. Jones was, the two of them connected. They spent hours talking about how to change the world, that sort of thing. And they kept it up, beginning to work on the suit together, until my dad met a woman—my mom—and that soured things a little. “A smoker,” Mr. Jones said theatrically. “Ugh. Still, I suppose she had her charms.”

  Mr. Jones wanted to keep refining the suit, strengthening it, using it to save the world like they’d talked about, but my dad wanted to stop, marry my mom, raise a family. Their compromise was to keep their work low-key, make sure my mom never found out—she wouldn’t have understood, especially with a kid to think about. “He showed me your picture when you were just three days old,” Mr. Jones said. “Suffice it to say you’re better looking now. Wrinkled monkeys and such.”

  They kept to victimless crimes where the proceeds went to charity, that sort of thing. But then Mr. Jones pushed harder. “There were too many problems in the world to leave unaddressed,” he said. “Considering the power we had at our fingertips.” And so they tried something bigger: taking on terrorism. My dad was willing to risk wearing the suit again for something that…consequential.

  As smart as they were, they just weren’t ready when they went after the Bloody Front. “I made a mistake—an enormous one—and your dad paid for it,” he said, his voice muffled beneath the mask. “I…can’t tell you the details now. I don’t think I could get through it.” I nodded, a lump in my throat. “I’ve been trying to track him down, watching out for you and your mother, making sure no harm comes to you. But I was always the partner behind the scenes, and to get him back, we need force. We need Mayhem. And that—no matter what’s happened in the past—that means you.”

  I nodded again. The lump had gotten bigger, and I don’t think I could have said anything even if I’d wanted to.

  “But we have to be careful,” he said. “We have to do this right. Can we do that? Can you do that? Do you understand you’re still new to this, and that doing the wrong thing has…consequences?”

  I nodded a third time.

  “Good. I’ll be in touch. For now, think about Rebecca.” I couldn’t see, but I think he even smiled. “And about how you might go about…attracting her attention. At least that will provide some sense of business as usual.”

  For someone as smart as Mr. Jones was, he was totally off base about that.

  But I had to postpone figuring out any kind of plan. Because the most important relationship in my life was rapidly going down the toilet.

  * * *

  Caroline’s mp3s thing had come together, with a girl on drums and a girl and a guy playing guitar. They sounded good, but you never really knew what was fake and what was real. Story of high school, I guess. They were hoping to have enough songs down to put out an album by the end of the school year. In the meantime, they were booking small gigs here and there for practice. They’d even gotten a spot during winter formal. Not as the main band—that was some semi-professional wedding-type orchestra from the city—but as a warm-up, a morale-booster-for-the-home-team kind of thing.

  Of course, Caroline took it obsessively seriously and was devoting all her spare time to practicing, even though winter formal was over a month away. I’d gone to rehearsal a couple of times to watch on days when I made it to school—the music teacher let them practice in the band room during free periods. They did a pretty good job on “Light My Fire,” Caroline whaling away on that Ray Manzarek keyboard part.

  It was keeping her busy, which was what I had thought I wanted, but here’s the thing: I was missing her.

  I mean, we both had our stuff, her with the band, me with a giant robot suit fighting terrorism and trying to rescue my dad, but I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my thing. Except for Mr. Jones, and despite our recent breakthrough, I wouldn’t have called him the ideal conversational partner.

  Which led to the cafeteria incident.

  It must have been a few days after Logan’s quote-unquote memorial service.

  Everyone was a little on edge. Well, more than a little. The whole campus was on high security alert. After all, the Bloody Front had attacked us, and although they’d never struck the same place twice, the federal government had covered the place in SWAT teams. FBI agents were going from classroom to classroom asking kids about their whereabouts, behaviors, and whatnots. The coach, the team’s equipment manager, and the janitorial staff were all in what the principal called administrative detention. People were afraid.

 
Even I was afraid, and when I was in the suit, nothing could hurt me.

  Yeah, like I believe that. I didn’t even believe that then.

  And on top of that, I was preoccupied with trying to think of a Rebecca plan. With no appreciable success. And there was Caroline, rattling on about the band, about how one of the band guitarists had a crush on her, and the drummer kept missing her sticks when she threw them up in the air but kept insisting on doing it at the end of her solos anyway, and they couldn’t agree on a final set list for next week’s gig. By the time she got to describing the new microphone she wanted, I had started getting annoyed.

  I mean, how dare she care about this stuff? When I was clearly suffering? Why wasn’t she there for me?

  I understand that I sound like a jerk. There’s a good reason for that. I was being a jerk. Yes, I was under a lot of stress….

  No. No excuses. I was being a jerk. But just wait. I get jerkier.

  That’s when it started, at the cafeteria, with my stating that it was impossible to look good playing drums, that everyone looked like they were suffering from a stroke. Usually that would have led to some hilarious argument, maybe with lots of drumming hand motions, and that would have been that. Not this time. I pushed and pushed, insisting I was right, insisting she tell me I was right, until she asked me what had crawled up my behind and died.

  So I got up and left her sitting there. With my lunch. Let her bus my tray this time.

  And then I stewed for the rest of the afternoon. During Mrs. Rojanski’s Math class. During our discussion of Roman latifundia in History. I just sat there, getting madder and madder. And knowing there was nothing for me to be mad about, which made me even more self-righteous.

  She was waiting for me by the school front steps at the end of the day. And she let me have it. According to Caroline:

  1. I had secrets I wasn’t telling her.