Junior Hero Blues

by J. K. Pendragon

  “Ha-ha.” I followed him into the bathroom, glancing around as we entered. There was no other exit, just a tiny window that I might have been able to wriggle out of, but he certainly wasn’t going through. He pulled a face at me, and went into one of the stalls, slamming it shut behind him.

  I still wasn’t sure what his game was, but I wasn’t leaving him alone to get away. Not this time. I went to the mirror and examined my reflection, keeping an eye on the closed stall door as well. There was no sound from inside. I leaned forward, fixed my hair, straightened my mask. The stall door swung open, and I went to turn, but he was too quick.

  From behind me, his hand gripped the back of my head and smashed it forward. My face impacted the glass, pain shooting through my entire body from my forehead. I saw white. The glass shattered, and I thought a few pieces of it got embedded in my scalp, although my mask took the brunt of it. I wheezed and slid to the floor, barely managing to avoid knocking my head on the sink.

  For a moment my vision went black, and I wanted to just lie there on the floor and go to sleep. But then I saw Jimmy’s boots step past me out the door, and I knew that nothing, not even the throbbing pain in my head or the possibility that I might have a deadly concussion, was worse than letting him get away.

  I jumped up, ignoring the way my head swished like a goldfish bowl on a boat in the middle of a storm, and limped after him as he pulled the glass doors open and strode out into the street. It was quieter now, only a few sirens and the sound of burning in the distance. Jimmy was walking away, obviously unaware that I was still following him.

  I changed that by leaping onto him and clawing at his face. Somewhere in my brain, I remembered that scratching in fighting wasn’t really acceptable, but damn it, I was angry and I didn’t care. I dug my fingers into his neck, hoping he could feel my nails through my gloves. He screamed and reached back, grabbing at me and spinning in circles. Finally he grabbed me by the arm, pulling me over his shoulder. I had to let go or risk my arm getting dislocated, not that I cared much at that moment, and he threw me forward, smashing me into the wall.

  I was quick and managed to bounce off it, swinging my fist up and knocking him good in the face. He swore and brought a hand to his nose, which was bleeding profusely. Good, I hoped I’d broken it. He swung at me, and I dodged out of the way, but he grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward, boxing me hard in the ear.

  I slammed my hands into him, forcing him backward into a wall. He fell face-first into the ground, and I advanced on him, my fists clenched as he struggled to get up. I lifted my palms, unsure of what I was going to do to him, but angry enough that if I’d been in my right mind, I probably would have been terrified of myself. All I could think about was that darkness I’d mentioned to Rick, and how right then it was filling me to the brim.

  He lunged at me, grabbing at my feet and knocking me off-balance. I rolled out of the way in time to avoid a punch aimed down at my head. It broke the concrete under me. I jumped at him, on impulse cupping my hands to his ears and sending a high-pitched whistle directly into them.

  It worked better than I’d expected. His face contorted in pain, and he screamed, falling to his knees and reaching up to grab my hands. I slapped him away and put my hands to his ears again, doubling my efforts, focusing on his eardrums. He was gritting his teeth, his eyes clenched shut, his whole body vibrating in pain, but I didn’t want to stop. His fingers found their way around my neck, but I was winning. If I could just knock him out first, before the blackness in my vision overcame me, if I could just get a breath between his thick fingers, hard as steel and clenching down on my throat . . .

  My vision spotted and went black again. The high-pitched whistle was in my ears too, ringing like bells on a planet I’d never visited but knew anyway. I didn’t feel my body going limp, but when the darkness overtook me, I felt weightless in a way I never had when I was falling. If only I could fly, then I wouldn’t be so afraid of it, after all. If only I could sleep . . .

  So. You’re probably wondering right now why everything in Liberty City is called dumb, patriotic names like Freedom Hill and Justice Park, et cetera. Oh, you weren’t? Huh. Well, things got a little hot and heavy back there, so I think I’m going to take a break and tell you anyway.

  The truth is, Liberty City started out as Valley City. I know, brilliant, right? And Freedom Hill was Pine Hill, and pretty much everything had boring names like that. And then in the forties, the Kingston Power Plant malfunctioned and exploded, and a bunch of people in the city started developing weird abilities. Some of them decided that they would use them to help people, and after a few years, they formed the League of Liberty, a group of superheroes led by Captain Justice, who fought crime and watched over the city.

  But, as it turns out, not everyone who gets superpowers wants to use them for good, and after a while, a group of superpowered villains called the Organization emerged. Naturally, they didn’t exactly get along with the League. Civilians had to be careful because they never knew when a battle was going to break out and people might be in danger. But nothing really terrible happened until 1982. That’s when the Organization successfully stormed the League headquarters and managed to drive the League and the government of Valley City out entirely.

  Seriously, no one could do anything. Not the police, not the military, no one. For seven whole years, Valley City just belonged to the Organization. They ran the place. The people who could, left, but a lot of people had jobs and lives and families here, so they couldn’t just up and leave. The Captain Justice at the time knew they had to do something, so he convinced all the League members to band together to take the city back. There was a huge battle, and a lot of people died, but at the end of it, the city was reclaimed. To celebrate, they renamed it Liberty City, and gave everything else League-themed, patriotic names. Dumb, right? But there you have it.

  Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this is because after I woke up from my fight with Jimmy Black, the city looked like it did in the pictures in my history textbooks from after that big battle in 1989. And that was really damn scary.

  The Raven had found me passed out on the cracked cement outside the McDonald’s with my mask lying next to me. Jimmy Black was nowhere to be seen.

  “He took my mask off,” I said again, for what was probably the fifth time, as the League doctors examined me for a concussion and injuries. “Why would he do that?”

  The Raven had stayed with me the entire way to the League headquarters, and was now hanging around to make sure that I was okay, which I was actually pretty grateful for.

  “I’m not going to say that it’s not a little worrying,” she said. “But I don’t think the Organization will let him do anything to compromise your identity. If they did, the League could consider it a breach of the arrangement, and arrest the Organization members whose identities we know. They don’t want us to do that. So.”

  She walked over to stand in front of us and glanced at the nurse, who finished checking me out.

  “You’re fine,” said the nurse. “You have a minor concussion, and you passed out from lack of air to your brain. I was a little worried about swelling around your airway, but it looks like the bruising on your neck has already started to heal, so I’d say the worst is behind you. Come in right away if you have any trouble breathing, but other than that, you’re good to go.”

  I didn’t exactly feel “good to go”—superhealing powers don’t extend to emotionally recovery unfortunately—but I didn’t say anything, just nodded and hopped off the table to let the next person be examined.

  “Come on,” said the Raven. “There’s an assembly, and Captain Justice is going to let us all know what the hell just happened.”

  The assembly itself was pretty darn boring, so I’ll summarize. Basically Captain Justice spilled his guts about how the Organization had stolen the information about the chips, and how the attack on their headquarters had been a last-ditch attempt to get the information back. What he hadn’t ex
pected (and probably should have, he admitted, given what we now knew about the presence of a Hound at the Organization—that brought a gasp and a bunch more questions, of course) was for the Organization’s forces to be so many or so strong, or for them to respond to the mission so violently.

  So then they put it to a vote about whether or not we should remove the tracking chips and, since they’d been unsuccessful in retrieving the stolen information, almost unanimously decided that we should. They also decided that we all needed to get extra training so that we could be prepared in case the Organization tried to attack us, and Captain Justice promised to put together a special task force to investigate and see if anything could be done about the Hound.

  The scariest thing, for me, and I think for a lot of other people, was that some of the heroes had recognized a few of the villains they were fighting—they were former superheroes, ones who had mysteriously disappeared or been captured by the Organization and kept prisoner. And now they were fighting with the Organization, which, I mean, I guess that happens sometimes. But this time it was pretty obvious it was because they’d been brainwashed, and that made everyone feel really squicked out and afraid.

  Captain Justice also apologized for his lack of transparency, and promised to be more honest about everything that was going on. Apparently there needed to be some kind of reform in the way decisions were made, according to the Wolfhound anyway, and he and a few other senior heroes stayed in the assembly room debating things long after the majority of us had left.

  I didn’t really want to go home. It was getting dark, and I’d texted my parents that I’d been called into work, but I knew they’d be expecting me home soon. I stayed in my costume and went to one of the older areas of town. There was a cathedral there, and I climbed up it to sit on one of the spires and cry.

  It wasn’t that I was sad, really. It was . . . I didn’t know, it wasn’t really an emotion I’d felt before, so I didn’t know how to describe it. The closest I could come was the way I’d felt the first couple of weeks of school in America, when I couldn’t speak English, and everything around me had been strange, confusing, and wrong. I’d just wanted everything to go back to the way it was before, even though I’d known that it wasn’t going to, and even if it did, something would still be different. I’d cried then too, but then I’d had to do it where people could see me. Now I was alone, and staring at a sunset over the city that I’d come to feel was my home, and I was scared for it.

  And I was scared for me.

  Everyone else seemed like they had everything together, you know? Like even when they were sad, or angry, or hurt, they still knew what was going on. They still knew what they were doing with their life, and who they were.

  Me? I had no idea. And I felt like I was the only one who didn’t. Except maybe Rick, and I didn’t even know what was going on with us right now. I wanted to see him, but I’d texted him and he hadn’t replied, so I assumed he was still at work. But he’d seemed so annoyed at me earlier, and I didn’t really know why.

  I sighed and lay back, letting my stomach do little flops as I balanced precariously over nothing. I didn’t like the anger I’d felt today. I didn’t want it to be part of me. It didn’t feel heroic. I certainly wasn’t a fantastic hero, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I could damn well try. And I could start by never letting myself give in to anger the way I had today.

  It made me felt better, having decided that. Like at least I was in control of some small aspect of my life. There was something I wanted to be like, or be not like, at least. And that was something.

  I jumped off the side of the church and bounced down to the little building by the gardens, hiding behind it to change back into my street clothes. Then I took the bus home. I guess I didn’t realize how bad I looked until my mom saw me and screamed. Turned out I had a black eye from the mirror thing. And I hadn’t come up with any excuse ahead of time, so I ended up telling her that I’d “fallen into a glass display.”

  She hugged me. “Oh Javi, maybe you should consider getting a job that’s better suited to someone as accident prone as you, hmm?”

  I had to admit it felt nice to have her dote on me a bit, and I was glad she didn’t seem to be angry anymore about the other night.

  I also had a little knot of worry at the bottom of my stomach, because Jimmy Black had seen my face. And he hadn’t done it accidentally either. He’d taken my mask off, and looked at me. And if he’d found out who I was, and tried to take advantage of my parents, well . . . that dark rage inside of me that I’d decided to try to work on eliminating? I didn’t think I’d have any chance at all of reining it in.

  Rick wasn’t at school the next day.

  I know, I know, you don’t have to say it. I’m an idiot.

  But honestly, amidst all the strange and unlikely claims I have made about myself and my life over the course of this story, have I ever once given the impression that I am not, in fact, an idiot?

  No? Then let’s move on.

  I texted him a couple of times. Not like, excessively. I didn’t want to be creepy. But a couple of times. And then after school I called him, but he didn’t pick up. I left a message saying that I hoped he was okay, and then went to Kendall’s place for the afternoon, trying to ignore the very real possibility that he was avoiding me on purpose.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” I tossed a bouncy ball against the slanted ceiling of her attic bedroom. We were lying flat on her bed, and I was hitting a poster of Grace Jones in the face with the ball again . . . and again . . . and again.

  Kendall sat up and batted at the ball, sending it bouncing down the trapdoor into the hallway. I made a little whining noise as I listened to it retreating down the hall. “Stop it,” said Kendall. “I’m sure he’s just busy.”

  I made another little whining noise and rolled over onto my side. “I know. I was just hoping I could talk to him.”

  “What’s wrong with me. You can’t talk to me?”

  I made a face at her, and she imitated it.

  “Well,” she said, “if he turns out to be a jerk, I will take full responsibility.”

  “Yeah? What are you gonna do to make up for it?”

  “I’ll make sure you never make the mistake of dating a buff football player with a heart of gold again, that’s for sure.”

  “We’re talking if he turns out to be a jerk.”

  “Right,” said Kendall. “Which we both know isn’t true, so it’s fine. He’s probably got family drama or something going on.”

  “Probably not. His family is, like, perfect.”

  “Why, have you met them?”

  “I’ve seen their house. It was like something out of Martha Stewart.”

  “You do know Martha Stewart went to jail, right?”

  “Martha Stewart went to jail? When?”

  Kendall glared at me for a second, and I cracked up. Her response was to attempt to suffocate me with a pillow.

  “So you still have that chip in your butt or what?” she asked, when I had finally tapped out.

  “Yeah. Getting it removed tomorrow.”

  “You need me to come hold your hand?”

  “I think I’ll be okay.”

  “I never liked the idea of those chips in the first place. You know that.”

  “Yeah.” I stared up at Grace Jones’s judgey face. “What . . . do you think? About the League, I mean.”

  Kendall rolled away and lay next to me. “I don’t know. You know I’m not a big fan of, like, corporations and big government and all that shiz.”

  “Commie.”

  She smacked me with the pillow again. “I mean, I don’t know if they’re really good or bad. I think they’re just a big group of people, and most of them are trying to do the right thing, and you gotta decide if that’s something you feel like you should be a part of.”

  “I don’t feel like I should be a part of anything.”

  “I know. Well, I wouldn’t complain if you threw in the t
owel, you know that. I don’t like seeing you with all these bruises and stress.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Kendall lifted her head to look at me. “So that answers your question, doesn’t it?”

  By the time two days passed, I was almost convinced that Rick had just decided to break up with me, and was avoiding me in order to get out of having to do it. Skipping school didn’t really seem like his style though, and neither did avoiding me. I’ll admit I got a bit worried about him, so after I got my butt chip out (just as fun as it sounds, believe me), I went over to his house and rang the doorbell.

  A pretty middle-aged lady with a ponytail and yoga pants answered the door. To her credit, she didn’t immediately look disgusted and tell me to get off her property. Instead she just seemed a bit confused and surprised. “Can I help you?”

  “Um, I’m a . . . friend of Rick’s.” I swallowed hard when I realized that I actually had no idea whether Rick’s parents knew he was gay. And, I mean, I didn’t have like a full-on lisp, but I didn’t exactly give off hetero vibes either, so if they didn’t know, they were either going to assume that Rick just had a very diverse group of friends or else . . . I don’t know, I was some weird gay kid who was stalking their athlete son.

  I was overthinking the whole thing, of course, and Rick’s mom just stood there looking politely at me. “Oh. Well, Rick’s been under the weather. I don’t think he’s up to visitors. You could try texting him.”

  “Yeah. Uh. I’ll do that.” I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulders and trotted off as quickly as I could, my face going hot. I turned the corner and glanced up at Rick’s window as I walked past it. The curtains were drawn.

  That night I was at last rewarded with a text from Rick. Why did you come to my house?

  I sat cross-legged on the ledge I’d been leaning against, looking out over a busy intersection. Patrol was really boring a lot of the time. I was worried about u! Is something wrong?