Amazed to be still alive, I struggled out of the sinking cab, banging my head against the top of the window opening.
Don’t faint, I told myself. You’ll drown.
By the time I swam to the side and opened my stinging eyes, something large and metal was swinging at my nose. I ducked out of its way and resurfaced to see Noah holding the folding chair out over the water.
“Grab this and I’ll rescue you!”
“I don’t need rescuing,” I shot back.
“Grab it!”
So I did. Instead of pulling me out, Noah toppled over the side into the pool beside me.
“I can’t swim!” he burbled.
Why didn’t I know that?
Treading water, I dragged him over to the side and hauled the two of us out onto the deck. We lay there for a second, panting. A huge bubble blurped from the cab of the truck as it sank to the bottom.
“You’re a hero!” Noah told me in an awed tone.
“I can’t be!” I hissed. “I’m not allowed to be here!”
“If it wasn’t for you, the truck would have hit the house and exploded!”
I scrambled to my feet, pulling him up with me. “If I get caught on Hashtag’s street, Beatrice is dead meat! No one can find out about this!”
“But, Donovan—”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone!” I choked at him.
An anguished voice sounded in the distance. “My truck!” I could hear the driver’s heavy footfalls as he pounded across Staunton Street.
I grabbed Noah, boosted him over the fence into the next yard, and clambered after him.
Noah looked down at my hand. “What’s that?”
I checked. It was the St. Christopher medal from the truck, the broken chain still tangled around my fingers. I ripped it off and dropped it to the grass.
Noah picked it up. “It’s a souvenir of your heroism!” he exclaimed.
“Stop saying that!” I peered through a knothole in the fence as the tanker driver burst into the backyard. When he took in the spectacle of his truck at the bottom of the pool, he let fly a series of words that would have sent my mother running for a sponge to wash his mouth out with soap.
The back door of the house slid open and four seriously agitated pajama-clad people ran out—a mother, father, and two kids. At the sight of the tanker in the pool, the boy, who looked about ten, dashed back inside, returned with a phone, and started snapping pictures. He had a slight limp that got worse when he ran.
“What happened here?” the dad demanded.
The driver was almost too upset to speak. “I thought the brake could handle it. But the slope was too steep. . . .” Unable to finish the explanation, he gestured around to the front and across the street, indicating the path his truck had taken.
The family stared at the deep tire tracks that crossed the lawn all the way to the pool deck.
“It’s a miracle!” the mother breathed. “It could have destroyed our home, but it turned at the last minute.”
“It was no miracle,” the driver told her. “It was that kid!”
“What kid?” the father asked.
“I didn’t get a good look at him,” the driver admitted. “I only saw his feet.”
“His feet?” the mom queried.
“He jumped into the cab and steered around your house with his feet sticking out the window. Like one of those Olympic swimmers cutting through the water—you know, a scissor-kick. Bravest, craziest thing in the world! He must be some kind of superkid!”
“Superkid?” repeated the daughter.
I was just reflecting that she sounded kind of familiar when Noah took my spying place at the knothole and whispered, “It’s Megan from cheerleading!”
“Shhh!” I hissed sternly. He was right! Megan Mercury—I’d forgotten she and Hashtag were neighbors. Of all the houses in town, I had to save the one belonging to the alpha bigmouth in school.
Megan’s mom switched on the pool lights and everybody took a close look at the submerged truck. “Thank goodness there’s nobody down there,” she exclaimed after a moment. “This wonderful boy might very well have saved all our lives. It would be awful if it cost him his own!”
“But why would he leave after doing such an incredible thing?” the father mused. “He deserves to be honored for it.”
“Is that a chair?” the son asked in amazement. “Was he sitting down when he saved us?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Megan snapped at him. “This is serious. We’ve got a real hero in our town. Don’t you think it’s important to find out who he is?”
Well, I didn’t think it was important. On the contrary, nothing was more important than keeping the hero’s identity a deep, dark secret. And when I heard police sirens in the distance, that became Job One. I grabbed Noah, and we snaked through backyards, climbing over fences and wrestling our way through hedges to put as much distance as possible between us and this act of heroism. We were soaked to the skin, scratched from head to toe, and covered in mud and grass when I left him at his front door.
“Remember—act natural,” I told him, and then realized it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever said. He was shivering and shirtless, his long underwear plastered to his skinny body and dripping what looked like black paint all around his dress shoes. There was definitely nothing natural about him.
He regarded me gravely. “Donovan, I’ll never forget what I saw you do today.”
I lost my temper. “You have to forget it, because it never happened!”
He reached under the waistband of his long johns and drew out the St. Christopher medal. “This will always be my most prized possession.”
“Hide it!” I practically yelled. “Swear to me, Noah, that you’ll never tell anybody that I was the guy who jumped into that truck and saved the Mercury house.”
“But Donovan, people should know—”
“Swear!”
“All right, all right. I swear. I swear on the memory of Einstein, Max Planck, and Sir Isaac Newton.”
And I had to be satisfied with that.
At home, I caught my first break of the entire morning. No one was up, and I was able to sneak back into my room unseen except by Beatrice. She lifted her fuzzy head from where she was sleeping next to Kandy and greeted me with a swish of her tail.
“The world almost ended today, kiddo,” I told her, “but I think we got away with it.”
Man, did I dream big.
8
SUPERANONYMOUS
MEGAN MERCURY
MYSTERIOUS “SUPERKID”
SAVES HOME, FAMILY
HARDCASTLE. It had all the elements of a Hollywood movie. A runaway truck filled with highly explosive propane. A darkened home and a sleeping family, completely unaware of the menace hurtling toward them. And a selfless young hero coming out of nowhere to risk life and limb to save the day, and just as suddenly disappearing into the shadows.
“He could have been killed, that kid,” marveled Stanley Kaminsky, the driver of the propane truck. “That tanker hits the house—kaboom! You always hear about these crazy heroes who put their lives on the line to save a bunch of total strangers, but you never expect to see it in real life. This is no regular kid. He’s more like a superkid!”
Superkid.
The word kept echoing in my head, usually in cheer form, since that was how my mind worked: Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Superkid! Superkid! Go, Superkid!
Or maybe a spell-it-out cheer: Give me an S . . . Give me a U . . . !
My family didn’t have my cheerleader’s positivity.
Mom was freaking out. “Our house was nearly destroyed—and us with it. We could have been killed. If that truck had exploded, who knows how big the fire would have been?”
My kid brother, Peter, was crazy enough to think the whole thing was a fabulous adventure. The town newspaper was paying him two hundred bucks for his pictures of the propane truck in our pool. When he saw “Photo by Peter Mercury”
on the front page of the Hardcastle Post, he was running around the kitchen, punching the air and celebrating his newfound status as a celebrity.
My dad was the worst. He kept glancing out the front window, looking for the next propane truck with our name on it. He rarely made it through a single sentence without using some form of the word “sue.” But what would have been the point of that? We were fine. The propane company was paying for the damage to the fence, the lawn, and the pool. Peter was even up two hundred bucks.
Talk about missing the point. Here was my family obsessing over an explosion that never happened, a lawsuit that would never be filed, and a photo credit in a dinky town newspaper that nobody ever read. And all the while, they were ignoring the most important part of this. Somewhere out there was an unsung hero who’d saved our house and maybe even our lives. This was huge!
And we didn’t have the faintest idea who it was.
It was definitely a kid. According to Mr. Kaminsky, the driver, it was a boy around my age—middle school or maybe early high school. I thought of Hashtag right away, because he lived just up the block and was such a great athlete. But Hashtag slept till noon on non-game weekends, and besides, his arm was injured. Plus, Hashtag said it wasn’t him.
The only other clue was the chair—a metal folding chair at the bottom of our pool. But there weren’t any fingerprints on it, which may or may not have been because it had been underwater. The police had no explanation for how it might have gotten there.
At school, the buzz was all about the missing hero. Nothing ever happened in a boring town like Hardcastle, so a near disaster wasn’t something that came along every day. Add to that the fact that the almost-victim was a popular head cheerleader—Go me!—and you had really big news. Throw a mystery into the mix, and nobody could even think about anything else.
“But surely you know who it is,” Vanessa prompted me. “Didn’t you see him running away or something?”
I shook my head. “The whole family was asleep. I heard a crash when it went through the fence and a splash when it hit the water. By the time we ran outside, there was no one around but the driver.”
Zane Menash, one of the lacrosse players, was unimpressed. “As far as I’m concerned, the guy’s an idiot. He’s got a chance to be famous, get his name in the paper, maybe be on TV. Who knows? There might even be a reward. And what’s he doing? Hiding like a scared rabbit.”
“Maybe he thinks he’ll get in trouble for putting the tanker in the pool,” Hashtag suggested.
“Are you kidding?” I shot back. “Better in the pool than in the living room. There’s no way this kid doesn’t know what a great thing he did. You all saw what it said in that article in the Post.”
I must have read it at least fifty times. At the bottom of the page, the very last paragraph went like this:
. . . Police are continuing to search for clues to the identity of this hero. He appears to have exited the scene by climbing over the fence into the neighbors’ yard, but from there, the trail goes cold. If you’re reading this, Superkid, it’s time for you to step forward and reveal yourself. A grateful public wants to thank you for your bravery.
“Maybe he’s just shy,” Vanessa suggested.
“He wasn’t too shy to jump into a speeding truck,” Hashtag pointed out.
“Heroic instinct,” I explained. “If you’re a hero, you just are. It doesn’t matter whether you’re stopping a mugging or running into a burning building to save people.” I had the most authority to talk about heroism since I was the only kid in school who’d been saved by an actual hero.
“So why the disappearing act?” Zane persisted.
“You guys don’t get it,” I told them. “He’s modest. Some people don’t have to be celebrated for every good deed. For a true superkid, just helping out is thanks enough.” Why was it so hard for people to imagine a genuine Good Samaritan in our midst?
I must have had that conversation—or one just like it—ten times that day. Even the teachers were fascinated, thinking that this amazing hero might be someone they saw every day in one of their classes. Not to be negative, but middle schools were filled with a lot of dimwits who never thought beyond their next hot dog, video game, or shade of lip gloss. The idea that any one of us might turn out to be the superkid was pretty exciting for the faculty, too.
The only person who had no interest in the mystery was the guy who might as well have been from Mars. Yes, Noah was still on the cheerleading squad, sad to say. Ms. Torres was sticking to her decision not to let me kick him off. I was starting to think she was doing it on purpose—a test of my positivity. Believe me, any cheerleader who could smile through Noah’s performances could smile through a killer tornado.
At practice that day, we were stretching and Noah was doing his regular whatever it was he did—a cross between knee bends and the death throes of a stick insect that’s been run over by a bike. He heard us talking about the superkid and went even paler than usual.
“What’s wrong, Noah?” asked Kelsey Leventhal.
His lips pinched together and turned dead white, and he ran for the boys’ locker room like the police were after him.
“Wow,” I commented, frowning. “If I’d known it was that easy to get rid of him, I would have had my house almost blow up weeks ago.”
Some of the girls thought I was kidding.
9
SUPERSECRET
NOAH YOUKILIS
I never thought I’d see anything in real life as amazing as the stuff on YouTube.
This was logical. YouTube was the sum total of human experience. But since it was impossible to watch it all, viewers were naturally drawn to those videos that were the most exciting, entertaining, funny, or unusual. In other words, YouTube may have been life, but our experience of YouTube was the equivalent of life’s greatest hits.
And then Donovan Curtis jumped into that truck and blew everything else away.
It won’t ever be on YouTube, but it ran in my head on an endless loop, page views mounting—Donovan, sprinting, catching up to the rolling truck, heaving himself in the window; the tanker accelerating toward the house, disaster unavoidable; and then, at the last second . . .
I was getting crazy just thinking about it.
Donovan was famous for getting himself in trouble because he always acted without thinking. But here was proof that thinking was overrated. If he had taken time to think, the truck would have been out of reach, and Megan’s house would have gone up in a fireball.
I’d studied the great heroes of humanity—people like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But Donovan wasn’t just someone I’d read about. He was my best friend. And I witnessed his act of great heroism with my own eyes. I even participated a little when I fell in the pool at the end and got really bad crotch chafing on the long wet walk home. This was living history!
But the more I thought about those heroes of the past, the more I realized that they’d had an advantage Donovan didn’t—they were free to tell their stories to the world. Donovan couldn’t admit that he was the person they called superkid because then he’d have to explain what he was doing near Hashtag’s house. That was technically my fault—I was the reason he’d been on Staunton Street. But how could I regret that? If Donovan hadn’t come to intercept me, no one would have been there to protect the Mercurys.
The frustration of it was killing me. Donovan deserved so much credit. And how much was he going to get? Zero. I hadn’t even been able to stand up to Hashtag for him. Now it was too late for that—I promised Donovan I’d stay away.
Just seeing him stressing over the whole situation broke my heart. He should have been having parades thrown in his honor, and getting the key to the city. Instead, he was hiding like a criminal, as if he’d done something terrible.
Every time someone talked about the superkid, his head would sink a little farther into his shoulders, like a neutron star collapsing into a black hole.
“Dono
van, we have to tell everyone,” I urged. “Whatever trouble you get in won’t matter when people find out what a hero you are.”
The things he threatened to do to me would have been scary if they hadn’t been anatomically impossible.
“Actually, there’s no way to pull someone’s liver out through his ear canal,” I said gently. But I got the point, which was: Never, never, never, never, never.
Over the PA, when Principal Verlander was done with his usual announcements, he introduced head cheerleader Megan Mercury, who had something special to say. Her voice was like I’d never heard it before—emotional. Not that she didn’t get emotional when she was yelling at me, but this was a different kind of emotion.
“Some of you know that a terrible thing almost happened to my house and my family this weekend,” she announced. “But it didn’t, thanks to a very brave person who might be listening right now. If you’re out there, Superkid, please come forward and let us thank you properly.”
While she was speaking, students stopped opening lockers and storing books and backpacks. They looked away from their phones and paid attention. You could have heard a pin drop in the hall. And when she was done, they all applauded—not wildly, but politely and with respect. By the time it was over, Donovan was bright red and you could see his carotid artery pulsing in his neck.
We had an assembly that morning. Our superintendent, Dr. Schultz, made another plea for the superkid to come forward.
“Now, I know you’re a modest young man, and it might be embarrassing or uncomfortable to be made such a fuss of. But just as you were generous with your courage when you saved that house, we’re asking you to be generous with yourself. Don’t deprive your Hardcastle neighbors of a hero who can unite us all.”
Walking out of that assembly, I felt so bad for Donovan, I could have wept.
I tried everything to console him. “Don’t worry, Donovan. All these people—Schultz, the police, Megan—they’re just fishing. I’ve analyzed the situation from every angle, and there’s no way anybody but the two of us could find out that you’re—you know—that guy.”
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