“Telekinesis,” said Zack.
Around him, most of the crowd murmured in amazement. However, the comic-book boys nodded knowingly.
“Ri-i-ight,” said the policeman with a doubtful expression, his pen poised over his notebook. “And how are you spelling that?”
There was no time for Zack to answer, because just then a voice rang out from the crowd.
“Where is he? Where is the wonderful young man who saved my life?”
The voice belonged to a tiny white-haired old lady. She was wearing a purple and yellow spotted dress that looked like an outbreak of some nasty disease, and using a walking-frame like a battering ram to muscle her way to the front of the crowd, leaving a trail of stepped-on toes and knocked ankles.
She stood before Zack. “I want to give you something,” she said, rummaging in a handbag the size of a small moon.
“That’s really not necessary, madam,” he said, holding up a hand. “I don’t accept cash or gift tokens. I do this for the good of all mankind.”
We’d rehearsed that. The bit about “mankind” was mine.
But the old lady wasn’t reaching for her purse. Instead, she fished out a lipstick, which she popped open and smeared across her wrinkly lips. She puckered them for a kiss. “I’m ninety-three, you know.”
The crowd watched expectantly. That’s the problem with old people – they get away with anything because they’re nearly dead.
I knew that Zack had fantasised about rescuing Cara Lee and being rewarded with a kiss. The reality was seventy-nine years older and crinklier. He dipped his head so that the old lady was enveloped by his hood. There was an awful slurping from within.
As one, the comic-book boys winced and made a sound like sour milk circling down the drain. But everyone else cheered. Clearly, this is what the public wanted from their superheroes: to rescue Saturday shoppers from runaway buses and kiss old ladies. Mobile-phone cameras snapped the moment. I think I even saw someone throw a hat in the air. It was either a hat, or a hamster. And that’s how it happened. Thanks to poor maintenance of the 227 bus, and Mrs Doris Stevens, 93, of Station Road, opposite the Loon Fung takeaway, the legend of Star Lad was born!
8
SECRET IDENTITY
The boy with red hair and freckles, who’d recorded Star Lad’s heroic act on his mobile phone, uploaded the video right away. Within minutes the footage, entitled “Star Lad versus the 227,” had attracted thirty hits. An hour later the number of views reached three thousand. By the end of the day over a quarter of a million people had watched my big brother stop a runaway bus using telekinesis. By the end of the week, Star Lad was bigger than the cutest cat on the Internet, and second only to a Hawaiian dance craze that was sweeping the globe, or at least the bits of it with nothing better to do than gather in large numbers and perform something called the Hula Robot.
In the comments sections of hundreds of blogs and websites, you could read the same furious argument. There were people who believed that the video was real – that they were watching a real superhero with real powers. And then there were other people convinced that the video was part of a viral advertising campaign for some new Hollywood blockbuster.
I wasn’t annoyed that these people didn’t believe in Star Lad. I felt sad for them. They’d rather look for reasons to call him a fake than believe he was real.
“Dad, why do they say Star Lad doesn’t exist?” I asked one morning over breakfast.
Zack gave me a hard stare. He didn’t like it when I talked superhero stuff in front of Mum and Dad, in case anything slipped out. Dad spooned a mouthful of cornflakes without lifting his head from his newspaper. “They’re called ‘sceptics’,” he said between crunches.
“Sceptics?” I repeated. “They sound like a race of skinny aliens from a dying planet with dastardly plans for taking over Earth and turning everyone into human McNuggets.”
Dad raised his spoon. “Or…” He waved it in a small circle. “Or, a sceptic might be someone who questions the facts, or what other people take for granted.” He raised his eyebrows as if to say, might that be a better definition? “And it’s fine to be a sceptic,” he continued. “It’s always good to question what people tell you.”
I thought about that for a second. “Even what you tell me?”
“Ah,” he said, his spoon dipping. “Ah…”
I saw him and Mum exchange looks and was glad I wasn’t on the end of the one she gave him.
“Yes,” said Mum. “You can question your dad. But never your mum. Under this roof it is the Undemocratic People’s Republic of Mum, and I’m Supreme Leader. Don’t you forget it.”
Mum often said stuff like this. I think it was meant to be funny, but I didn’t get it. Anyway, there were far more important things on my mind. “You believe Star Lad’s real, don’t you?” I looked to each of my parents in turn.
“I’d like to,” said Dad. “The world could certainly do with a superhero.”
“Well, whether he’s a superhero or just a regular hero,” said Mum, “Mrs Lee from down the road is happy he was there. Her Cara was on that bus.”
Zack perked up at the mention of her name. Up till then he had buried his head in an essay for history class. He peered curiously over the top of the notebook.
“Who knows what would’ve happened if that lad hadn’t stopped it from crashing.” Mum shook her head slowly at the terrible thought of what might have been. “Whoever he is, seems Cara can’t stop talking about him.”
There was a clatter and a crash next to me. Zack had knocked over his bowl. Milk and cereal oozed across the floor like blood and guts from a murder victim. He said sorry and went to fetch a cloth.
Mum pushed back her chair and started to collect the rest of the breakfast bowls. “Right, you lot. School for you two, down the mines for us.”
Mum and Dad didn’t actually work down a mine. I’m not sure there even is a mine near us. But Mum thought it was funny to say so on a regular basis. I didn’t get it. I think working down a mine would be highly interesting. You might find pirate treasure or disturb a sleeping, shape-changing horror with tentacles buried during the last ice age. But Mum and Dad worked together in an office for an insurance company.
Following that incredible Saturday afternoon, Zack knuckled down to mastering his powers. After school, we used the children’s play park as a makeshift test facility. Zack used his radar power to check that no one was around to see us, then his telekinesis to make all the swings move at once. One by one he added the rest of the equipment, whizzing the roundabout and tipping the seesaw, until the whole place looked as if it were being played on by ghosts. To test his force field I fired increasingly larger rocks down the slide at him. He deflected them all.
We knew that Zack had three more as yet unknown superpowers. The burning question was, could he fly? In my opinion a superhero who can’t fly isn’t in the Premier League. So that evening I decided to find out.
“Hey! Did you just try to push me out of the tree house?” said Zack, teetering on the edge of the doorway.
“No,” I said. “Well, maybe a bit. I just want to know if you can fly. Aren’t you curious?”
“Not enough to jump out of a tree fifteen feet off the ground.”
I peered out investigatively. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s not nearly high enough.” I glanced across to the house. “We should go up to the roof.”
“Are you trying to kill me?!” said Zack, backing away. “I bet that’s it. You’re still jealous that I got to be a superhero and you didn’t.”
He was right. I was still jealous and always would be. How could I not be? My brother was living my fantasy.
“You know what I think?” Zack went on. “I think you’re Nemesis. You’re my arch-enemy.”
That would have been cool. I could hear the voice-over in my head. Two brothers. Two paths. Destined to collide. But Zack was forgetting an important point. “Nemesis is a girl,” I reminded him.
De
spite my insistence that it was for his own good, Zack refused to jump off the roof, which meant we were unable to confirm if he could fly. For now.
In the meantime he went on to perfect his radar power and fix the puncture on his bicycle, which meant he was able to respond to incidents up to ten miles away. In a single week he rescued a baby from a burning building, held a bridge together when it started to collapse during rush hour, and stopped a robbery in a jewellery shop. He was on the front page of our local paper every day, and all over the national and international TV news. If you searched online, you could read articles and watch videos in dozens of different languages. Star Lad is Estrella Muchacho in Spanish, Stjärna Pojke in Swedish, and Etoile Garçon in French.
The one thing everyone wanted to know was his true identity. Who was the boy behind the hoodie? TV crews from all over the world had staked out the High Street, the shopping centre and the park in the hope of catching Star Lad in action. You couldn’t buy a packet of sweets in the corner shop without Japanese Nightly News shoving a camera in your face and asking for a comment.
At school, Cara Lee had become even cooler than before. Ever since the other kids saw her in the video falling off the runaway bus into Star Lad’s arms, she’d become a celebrity.
However, all of this talk about Star Lad posed a problem for me because I knew who he was. I knew that his favourite ice cream was Chunky Monkey. I knew that at the back of his drawer he kept a pair of Thomas the Tank Engine underpants that hadn’t fitted for years, but which he refused to throw out. I knew that in moments of high anxiety he still sucked his thumb.
And I couldn’t tell a soul.
At first, it was oddly satisfying to know something that no one else did. And not just any old dull secret about who fancies who at school, or who let the tyres down on the Deputy Head’s Skoda – no, this was perhaps the greatest secret in the world that summer. And it was mine and Zack’s. Nobody else’s. But with just the two of us to carry it around, it was a heavy secret – and as Star Lad became more famous, it was about to get much heavier.
9
SERGE
Keeping Zack’s secret was particularly difficult at school, where my friends could talk about nothing else. My best friend, Serge, who’s French and therefore starved of proper superhero role models, became obsessed with Star Lad. I’ll admit it, I’m quite fanatical when it comes to superheroes, but Serge went completely nuts.
He drew Star Lad comic strips, wrote Star Lad fan fiction and started up a Star Lad web forum. When we weren’t at school he would wear a copy of Star Lad’s costume, which was very confusing for me. From a distance I kept mistaking him for the real Star Lad, which pleased Serge no end, but which I knew could lead to me giving the game away by accident. All I had to do was shout out “Zack” one time by mistake and that would raise a whole lot of awkward questions.
Serge is shorter than me and has to use an inhaler for his asthma. Although, I have to admit, when he does use it he inhales very stylishly.
“Ffffft,” said Serge, taking a long suck of Ventolin.
It was Saturday morning and we were on the High Street, at the bus stop outside the comic book store. Once a week Serge insisted on coming to the spot where Star Lad had first blazed on to the scene. In religious education we had learned about people who make long, tough journeys to special places as an act of worship. It’s called a pilgrimage. That’s what Serge was doing. Although, the journey wasn’t exactly long or tough, just half a dozen stops. And we always bought ice cream afterwards.
“It was at this very bus stop,” said Serge in an awed tone, “where Star Lad used his psy-cho-kin-etic powers for the premier time in order to rescue the bee-yoo-tiful Cara Lee.”
Somehow when people talked about that day they forgot about the old lady and the rest of the passengers. It was like they’d been written out of the story. Now the lasting image – printed on thousands of T-shirts and on posters stuck to thousands more bedroom walls – was of Star Lad catching Cara Lee when she tripped on the bottom step of the bus.
“Can you imagine what it must have been like to stand here and regard it as it happened?”
Obviously, I didn’t have to imagine, because I had been here. However, I’d discussed it with Zack and we decided it would be safer not to tell people that I had witnessed Star Lad’s debut. We didn’t want a supervillain making a connection between my presence and Star Lad’s true identity. There’s a moment in the video taken that day when you glimpse me, but it’s only my right hand – I’m clutching a wad of comics – and in none of the footage do you ever see my face.
There was a long-drawn-out squeak as Serge ran a moist hand down the plastic window of the bus shelter. “Per’aps, Star Lad laid his hand against this very window.”
Serge squinted up at the electronic passenger information board. “Per’aps Star Lad regarded this very electronic passenger information board.”
Serge ducked inside the shelter and knelt to stroke the plastic seating. “Per’aps Star Lad sat his derrière on this very seat.”
If only he knew how close he was to Star Lad. All right, Star Lad’s little brother. But still, if he knew, it would make his day. His year. His whole life! And really, what harm could it do if I told him? Just him, of course. And he couldn’t tell anyone else. I could feel the words burning the tip of my tongue. I opened my mouth to speak, but instead of my secret out came a long sigh and I said, “Are you done yet? Can we go?”
Serge stuck out his lower lip and shook his head. “Not yet. I have composed an oath.”
“An oath?”
“Oui. Y’know, it is the thing a superhero says right before he does something super-heroic.” He cleared his throat, placed one hand on his chest and said:
“Granted cosmic superpower
In our darkest hour,
Star lad, star light,
Protector of the world tonight.”
It was terrible. Cheesier than a cheddar mine.
“So, what do you think?” asked Serge proudly.
I paused. “It’s … interesting.”
“It rhymes,” he said, pleased with himself.
“Yes, I noticed that. Very rhyme-y. Just so I’m clear, you want Star Lad to say this? Out loud?”
“That is the idea.”
“And how is he going to find out about it?”
“Repetition. I will say it. A lot. On my Star Lad discussion forums. Within my fan fiction. Star Lad is bound to notice and then it will follow naturally.”
It would never happen. There was no way Zack would say something as lame as Serge’s terrible oath. “Great. That’s great, Serge. Now can we go?”
He shook his head briskly. “Ah, non. I must now go in here.”
He headed towards the comic book store. I hadn’t been back since that day. If I’m honest, the thrill of reading stories about superheroes had faded since the arrival of Star Lad in my daily life. Reading comics used to be like going into another world. Now it was like going into our front room. It had become so bad that to escape from my everyday life I’d started to read books about ordinary children living hard, gritty lives on grim council estates, where the biggest drama is whether the hero gets on the football team or ends up being arrested for stealing cars.
Serge headed inside. I didn’t know it but as I followed him I was about to encounter the greatest threat that Star Lad had yet faced.
10
THE ADVENTURES OF STAR LAD
Crystal Comics was part of an empire. Not like the Galactic Empire or even the Roman Empire. There were twelve Crystal Comics shops dotted around Great Britain, and I’m not sure what their policy was on taking over the world. So, a small empire. Although they were part of the same company, each shop was unique. Inside they were designed to look like ice fortresses or space stations or superhero hideouts.
The one on our High Street wasn’t the biggest, but it was still spread over two floors, one of them underground. The entrance was like a futuristic check-in d
esk at a spaceport, where they pretended to scan you in case you posed a threat. It was pretty cool, although in my opinion they didn’t have nearly enough security to stop you from getting in if you did actually turn out to be a dangerous Xenomorph with acid blood and a taste for human flesh.
Once inside, the space theme continued. The whole place was designed to look like a moonbase in the middle of an alien invasion. The ground floor was a series of connected pods, each filled with a dizzying array of blinking control panels and viewing windows displaying the inky black vacuum of outer space. Lights flickered; ceilings dripped with green, alien snot. Shadowy shapes lurked behind access hatches whirring with fans. Computer screens flashed red with emergency distress signals. Wherever you went you could hear an eerily calm computer-generated woman’s voice steadily counting down a self-destruct sequence, over and over again – which was highly atmospheric but must have been very annoying if you worked there. Oh, and there were comics. Lots of comics. Shelves full of the latest issues were cleverly built into the walls and floors.
On the lower floor, which you could only reach by shuttle-craft (i.e. a lift), the shiny, brightly lit moonbase gave way to dripping caverns meant to look like some creepy dead alien civilisation. There were lava pits and craters, and the floor was shrouded in a bright-green mist pumped out of vents in the wall. There was a door marked AIRLOCK – AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, which one of the people on the tills once told me was the staff toilet.
In a cavern at the back was an area called Special Collections. In here were rare and expensive comics for rich collectors. On one wall, not for sale, was a framed copy of Action Comics No.1, the most valuable comic in the world. But I think their copy was a copy, if you see what I mean. Above the frame was a laser-gun and there was a sign next to it saying that thieves would be vaporised. But it wasn’t a real laser-gun, and if I had a genuine Action Comics No.1 I’d have made sure it was fully functioning.
My Brother is a Superhero Page 4
