The Supervillain and Me

by Danielle Banas

  “So with that girl—”

  “She was dying and bleeding out, and I felt that. I’m good at healing smaller things, but fatal wounds I can’t handle. Believe me, I’ve tried more times than I can count.”

  Like with his parents. He hadn’t just seen them die; he’d felt it too.

  I was sick to my stomach.

  “That girl wasn’t the only one who took a bullet to the chest that night,” I said.

  Iron Phantom looked at his shoes. “Not really.”

  I had hoped I’d been wrong. God, I had never wanted to be wrong more than in that moment, staring at the boy with too much blood on his hands to bear. When he first healed the girl, a part of me thought he only trembled and screamed from the amount of energy he needed to exert to heal a gunshot wound. I hadn’t wanted to believe he was experiencing one himself. But really I just hadn’t been able to admit what was happening until now. If Iron Phantom was in any more pain, he wouldn’t have been able to teleport to safety when the police arrived. Someone could have caught him. Someone could have exposed him as a dangerous criminal before the entire city, and he would only have me to blame.

  “I’m sor—”

  He held up a hand. “I told you not to apologize. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “Yes, it is. You healed me once too.”

  Leaning close to me, he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’d do it again. And again, and again.” His hands skimmed up my arms, resting on my shoulders. “Thanks for all your help tonight,” Iron Phantom said. A shy smile lingered on his lips. “We make a pretty great team, huh?”

  His face was getting closer, less than a foot away. I leaned forward, bracing my hands on his knees. The green in his eyes looked impossibly bright and his smile impossibly happy.

  “I guess you’re okay,” I told him.

  “You guess?”

  I shrugged. “I make really educated guesses. Ask anyone.”

  “That’s okay. I guess I’ll take your word for it.” He was closer now, closer still. His head tilted to the side, the warmth of him flowing across the small space between us, settling into me.

  I leaned farther, my chair creaking slightly beneath me.

  Then he pressed his lips to mine.

  Kissing him was like teleporting, but without ever leaving the ground. I couldn’t tell where my stomach ended and the rest of my body began. My heart beat against my ribs so quickly that it felt like my chest had been set on fire. Everything tingled. It was slow and smooth and sweet. It was perfect.

  I scooted to the edge of my seat, nearly falling into him. One of his hands wound around my waist, while the other tangled in my hair. He pulled a bit too hard, and I released a muffled squeak.

  “Sorry,” he chuckled awkwardly, pulling away. Shaking my head, I drew him back again.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed to know his name, if not solely for my sanity than at least for my sense of logic. There was no way this relationship could grow into anything more than flirty jabs and nighttime confessions if I didn’t know who he really was.

  Without breaking our kiss, I found the edge of his mask a few inches beneath his jawline. My fingers touched sticky, warm skin as I pushed it up, up, over his chin toward his lips. I was so close to discovering his identity. If I could just keep going …

  A timer beeped on one of his machines.

  I jerked back, gasping for air, but Iron Phantom held me in place with a hand on my wrist. “If we ignore it, it might go away,” he said, his breathing equally as labored.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “It was just a suggestion.” He moved away to tap at a keypad attached to the machine.

  As I raked my fingers through my hair, I noticed they were shaking. Did that seriously just happen?

  “Uh … Abigail? Come here a second.” Iron Phantom was comparing some type of data from the beeping machine with a slide under his microscope. I didn’t know what he could need me for, but his voice had dropped all the humor it held before he kissed me, so I did as he asked.

  “What is it?” I leaned over his shoulder, watching while he pressed his eye against the microscope. Underneath the lens, one of the chips lay open, a tiny silver tube inside the metal cover. Iron Phantom hummed to himself, sounding a lot like my anatomy teacher when he got excited about dissecting fetal pigs. Picking up tweezers, Iron Phantom poked at the silver tube and refocused the lens with a twist of a dial.

  He hummed again. “Look at this.” He pushed the microscope in front of me.

  “What are those?” At first, I nearly cringed away, repulsed. The objects under the lens looked like little silver bugs. They had round bodies and pointy pincers for legs. Spiders maybe. I shivered. Creepy crawlies and I didn’t exactly have a healthy relationship.

  “What am I looking at?” Whatever those things were, they weren’t moving. Completely still, they gathered in clusters along the inside of the tube. Maybe they were sleeping. Or dead. I hoped they were dead.

  Curling his lip in disgust, Iron Phantom plucked the tube of metal spiders off the tray. “Nanobots,” he said.

  “Oh, come on. What kind of cheesy science fiction film did you fall out of?”

  Iron Phantom walked past the beeping machine and dropped the tube inside one of the metal boxes with pulsing red lasers instead. He spent almost a full minute programming codes into a keypad on the glass door before shutting it and letting the box whirl to life.

  “It’s not science fiction,” he said. “I have superpowers. Don’t tell me you don’t believe in nanobots.”

  I watched the lasers sweep back and forth inside the box. To me, superpowers weren’t that weird. Some people had green eyes, some people had blue eyes. Some people had superpowers, some didn’t. But something a scientist engineered in a lab freaked me out.

  “So what do they do?”

  “Whatever you want them to.” Iron Phantom sighed. “That’s kind of the problem. Usually, they’re used for medicinal things, but you can program them to do just about anything.”

  “Anything?” Suddenly, Iron Phantom’s mad-scientist laboratory seemed a million times smaller. Someone in city hall ordered an entire boatload of those things, and they could do anything? “Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that these aren’t tracking devices?”

  I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “Because, Abigail, I honestly don’t think they are. I think they’re something far more complex.”

  “But … but you can figure out what they do, can’t you?”

  “I hope so,” Iron Phantom said, though he sounded uncertain. “It might take a while. I don’t know how many tests I’ll need to run. They’re safe as long as someone doesn’t activate them.”

  “That’s going to be a bit of an issue eventually, don’t you think?”

  Squeezing his eyes tight, Iron Phantom tugged at the back of his mask. His classic nervous tell. My confidence in the fate of Morriston began to wane.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he promised. “I swear we’ll figure it out.”

  We watched the red lasers. They blinked quickly, multiple times a second. But every now and then, they slowed down, and the interior of the machine shined blood red.

  “So…” I leaned against Iron Phantom’s shoulder. “Now what?”

  “Now,” he said, “we wait.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Waiting was taking longer than I anticipated.

  Iron Phantom hadn’t contacted me in over a week. Connor was working nonstop after failing to save the woman outside the City Bank, and my dad was partaking in nightly televised press conferences, during which he assured the city he would put Iron Phantom and his evil ways to rest—though he refused to give details.

  All the details I needed were locked in a laboratory in Iron Phantom’s basement. The mystery rolled around in my head at all hours of the day. Whose orders had Wallace been working on? My dad’s? Every time the thought crossed my mind, I shook it violently away, my nerves plum
meting.

  And yet …

  The worst part was that Wallace had opened his big mouth and spilled the details of the new “supervillain” aiding Iron Phantom. He didn’t reveal much, just that it was a girl and she had a wicked arm with a two-by-four. I would have laughed if I hadn’t almost choked on my breakfast when I read the article in the Morriston Gazette. Hands shaking, I proceeded to stuff the mask Iron Phantom had given me safely in the back of my bra drawer, where Dad and Connor would never dare to go.

  The only thing that remotely distracted me from agonizing about the nanobots was my next musical rehearsal. Hall of Horrors wasn’t improving, but I was hopeful that would change. Isaac was actually making a commitment not to cut out early for once (he even shut off his cell phone), meaning that the number one item on Mrs. Miller’s rehearsal agenda was to block Isaac’s and my most pivotal scene.

  Because our characters were supposed to be in love and whatever, we had to kiss. Our beautiful, romantic, heart-stopping lip lock occurred at the top of act 2. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it once with everything else that was going on, but today I found I couldn’t stop. Last week, in Iron Phantom’s lab, I hopelessly struck out when I tried to uncover his identity, but I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. When Isaac kissed me, he would either make my heart lurch and my toes curl … or he wouldn’t. One way or another, I would finally know the truth.

  “You need to give me all the dirty details.” Sarah smirked after Mrs. Miller announced the day’s rehearsal schedule. Isaac was busy bouncing on his toes and stretching. He looked like he was preparing to run the Morriston Marathon, not peck me on the lips. I tried to remain calm. If Isaac was who I had a hunch he was, then this kiss had the potential to be so much more than just practice.

  I climbed the wooden steps on the side of the stage, following Isaac into the glow of the spotlight as we awaited Mrs. Miller’s instructions. “I promise I’ll go easy on you,” he said, grinning. My stomach flopped.

  “Put your hands on her waist,” Mrs. Miller coached Isaac. His fingers were freezing, like he had shoved them in a bucket of ice. Mine weren’t much better. I was so nervous that I couldn’t get them to quit trembling.

  “Tilt your heads to the right. We don’t want anyone smacking noses in front of an audience.” The corners of Isaac’s mouth quirked into a devilish grin. I tried to smile back, but nothing about a choreographed kiss was particularly romantic.

  “Pucker up.” We did. Mrs. Miller waved her hand like she was conducting an orchestra. The bracelets on her wrists jingled loudly. “And…”

  He moved toward me. I couldn’t see anything except glittering green eyes and a thin strip of perspiration dotting his hairline. A guy in the audience wolf-whistled. Our lips touched.

  Yikes.

  Isaac didn’t quite grasp the concept of the stage kiss. The whole point of stage kissing is to look like you’re passionately kissing the other person without actually doing it. Pucker up and don’t kiss. It’s like kissing your grandma. No emotions, entanglements, or tongue. Especially no tongue. Lips only. Isaac didn’t get that.

  As soon as our lips touched, his tongue thrust into my mouth like troops rushing a battlefield. He did some weird thing where he licked the back of my teeth so I could taste the cafeteria macaroni and cheese he ate for lunch. (Just a note, the macaroni and cheese had a tendency to taste like old socks.) His mouth kept making these weird clicking noises, reminding me of a giant crab waving its pincers on the beach. And as if all that wasn’t fantastic enough, then he gripped my ass like he was trying to start a weed-whacker. Vroom, vroom. Tug on my butt. Vroom, vroom. Lick my teeth.

  Yuck.

  This had to be a joke, right? This most certainly was not what happened in the lab. He was trying to confuse me, throw me off Iron Phantom’s trail. People didn’t seriously kiss like that.

  When we broke apart, our castmates cheered, stomping their feet. Sarah held her phone high above her head, snapping pictures. I only had to think of Sarah’s massive Red Comet shrine to remember that collecting embarrassing photos was what my friend did best.

  Isaac watched me with a smug smile on his lips, looking like he was ready for round two. All I wanted was to take a shower to wash the slimy remains of that assault off my body.

  “You’re screwing with me, right?” I demanded. “Is this a joke?”

  For a split second, he almost looked hurt. “Whatever do you mean, Abigail? I’m not laughing.” Then he winked. “See you later.”

  Isaac walked offstage just as Rylan pushed through the curtain and approached me. A soft purple towel bearing the Morriston mascot—the Fighting Frog—dangled from his fingers.

  “You have a bit of spit on your chin,” he said. “So … if you want to wipe it off or something…”

  Talk about majorly embarrassing. I hid behind the towel while I wiped the spit—Isaac’s spit—from my face. “Rylan Sloan, you are a born romantic.”

  Rylan scuffed his sneaker across the stage. “I try.”

  * * *

  I tried to force myself to do homework that weekend, but as I threw down my pen, leaving a streak of blue ink on my notebook, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. The sky was cloudy and gray, and I hadn’t received a nanobot report from Iron Phantom in approximately eleven days, eighteen hours, and roughly thirty minutes. (But who was counting?) I honestly couldn’t figure out if I wanted to see him or not. After the stage kiss from hell, I knew if I saw him—or Isaac—I might kick them both.

  Dropping my unfinished homework on the floor beside my backpack, I retreated to my bed. I had been attempting not to think about him for the past few days … and I was failing. Miserably. I hated admitting it, but I often found myself sitting in school wondering what he could be up to. Did he teleport to another country for the afternoon, or was he sitting in the same classroom as me without my knowledge? Did he forget about me? I’d seen Iron Phantom so much lately, but now it was like he disappeared from Morriston.

  “Knock, knock.”

  I jumped, almost shrieking when my window slid up a few inches and a gloved hand poked through.

  Look who finally decided to show up. If he expected me to think everything was fine and dandy between us, then he had another thing coming.

  I climbed off my bed. He was balanced precariously between my windowsill and a tree branch, grinning.

  His smile did horrifically stupid things to my stomach.

  “Can I come in?” Iron Phantom pushed the window up several more inches.

  I frowned. “You can teleport, can’t you? You don’t need to wait for an invitation.”

  “Yeah, but … I thought it might be nice if I did, for once.”

  “Is that why I haven’t heard from you in almost two weeks? You were waiting for an invitation there too?” I shoved the window up, and he took it upon himself to clamber through. Connor and my dad weren’t home, but I shut my bedroom door out of habit anyway, taking a seat at my desk chair.

  Iron Phantom leaned against the wall beside me. “You look pissed about something,” he observed.

  “Do I? Why could that be?” I tapped a finger against my chin while his eyes narrowed.

  “Abigail, I’ve told you before, I can’t read minds. If I did something to upset—”

  I couldn’t stop the words from spilling out. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”

  He recoiled. “Why’s that?”

  “Why’s that?” I pushed out of my chair and stood before him, our chests nearly touching. “Should I spell it out for you, or would you prefer a diagram? As a general rule, it’s usually frowned upon to kiss someone and then disappear for two weeks, especially if that someone has been testing nanobots with you. I thought we were a team, Steve.”

  He had the nerve to look relieved, like he thought that’s all I was mad about. “I didn’t show up because I don’t have anything to report. I’ve been running a lot of tests, but nothing is conclusive.” He rolled his bottom lip between his teeth. “Abiga
il, we are a team. I promise. We’ll get matching T-shirts and everything if it makes you happy.”

  He gave me another one of those wide, charming grins, but I wasn’t having it. “You could have just told me what was going on instead of leaving me in the dark.”

  “You’re right, I could have.” Iron Phantom winced. “Sorry?” He reached for me, tracing his fingers along my palms, just as he had when we were in his lab. I tried to fight it, but I could feel myself melting, my anger ebbing away. Like we were picking up exactly where we left off.

  He was too good at trying to make me feel better. But this time I didn’t want to feel better. Not after the way he lied to me and completely humiliated me at rehearsal.

  I pulled my hands away.

  “It’s not right,” I said, my voice surprisingly much stronger than I anticipated. “What you’ve been doing. I’m not going to keep putting up with it.”

  “Abigail, we can get matching hats too. It’s no big deal.”

  “No, that’s not what I—What are you even doing here? You said you didn’t have anything to tell me.”

  Iron Phantom shrugged. “Do I have to have a reason? I like coming here.” He looked around the room, straightening a stack of textbooks on my desk. “You’re here.”

  I snorted. “You say that like you actually missed me or something.”

  He moved on from the textbooks and started sorting through a coffee mug full of pens, separating them by color. “I think we’re both guilty there. Of course…” He leveled his gaze at me. “It’s not like we haven’t seen each other in the real world.”

  The way he said the words had me jumping back like I’d been slapped. The real world. The one with musical rehearsals and stage kisses and boys who whispered one thing in your ear in private just to deny the truth in public. He was playing head games with me, just like before, and he needed to throw in the towel and admit it. If we really were a team, like he said, he finally owed me the truth.