The Phobia of Renegade X

by Chelsea M. Campbell

  Riley said it wasn’t my fault. He’s the one who turned visible and botched the mission in the first place.

  But I shouldn’t have let him fall.

  The passenger door opens, and Amelia gets in, her nose scrunching in accusation. “What are you doing in here?”

  “They said it was for both of us.”

  “And you said you didn’t want it.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  She glares at me. “You didn’t have to move the seat around. I had it right where I wanted it.”

  “Uh, yeah, I did. You’re too short.”

  “No, you’re just too tall. And you better not have changed the radio stations. And if I see even one sticker out of place, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?”

  “We’re supposed to share Tom. That means you don’t touch my stickers.”

  “Who the hell is Tom?” The only Tom I know is Kat’s dad, and I know she doesn’t mean him.

  She pats the dashboard. “This is Tom. My—I mean, our—car.”

  I make a face. “You named it Tom?”

  “I named him Tom.”

  “You couldn’t have thought of something more interesting?”

  “I don’t want interesting. I want reliable. Tom sounds reliable. And if we’re going to share him…” She pauses to take a deep breath, like having to talk to me about this at all is a huge inconvenience for her. “We need to lay down some ground rules.”

  “Later, Amelia. I’m not in the mood.”

  She clears her throat, ignoring me. “First of all, I’m the only one who’s had her license long enough to drive with someone else in the car. So if you want to ride with me to school, I’ll be driving. And you’ll have to sit in the back, because I told Melissa and Hil that I’d pick them up.”

  “Shouldn’t I be in the front, so neither one of them has to sit by me?”

  “Then I’d have to sit by you. And second, you can’t… you know. In here. With Kat.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “I can’t what?”

  She doesn’t look at me when she says it. “Have sex.”

  “We weren’t planning on it.”

  “But that’s the rule. No sex in the car.” She glances over at me real quick, then away again, like she’s afraid I’m going to argue with her and she’ll have to keep talking about this.

  “Okay. No one has sex in here.” I want to add, That includes you, but I can’t bring myself to say it.

  “And I’m taking the car to Prom.”

  “It’s going to be hard finding a tux in Tom’s size.”

  “You know what I mean. I’m taking Zach. And you can get a ride with Riley and Sarah, or with Kat. Plus, like I said, you can’t drive anybody, so—”

  “Yeah, fine. I get it. You need the car on Prom night, and Zach doesn’t want to be in the same space as me.”

  “We’re going to dinner with my friends, so it wouldn’t even make sense for you to ride with us.” She hesitates. “He’s still mad at you.”

  “No, I’m still mad at him.” I twist in my seat a little, so I can stare out the window.

  “He won’t tell me what the fight was about, but he said you were being a jerk, which I can totally believe.”

  “Stay out of it, Amelia.”

  “Well, you’re a jerk to me all the time. But you’re usually nice to Zach. Then again, Riley’s your best friend, and you—”

  I whirl around to face her. “Shut up.”

  She sniffs. “You weren’t there for him last night. You let him get hurt.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Did… Did Riley say that?”

  “He told Zach what happened, and Zach told me. And Zach said it was typical of you, only caring about yourself.”

  My blood runs cold, and my stomach suddenly feels like there’s a rock in it. “That’s not… Riley didn’t get hurt.”

  “You let him fall. You could have saved him, but you didn’t.” She shrugs, as if it’s no big deal, just a fact.

  Rage twists inside me, mixed with guilt and dread. “You weren’t there, and neither was Zach.”

  “His leg’s still healing, and you—”

  “You think I didn’t want to save him?! You think I’m so horrible that I’d watch my best friend get hurt again just because?!”

  She shrinks back in her seat. “You don’t have to yell.”

  “I jumped over a freaking banister! Me! You know what that… you know how hard that would be for me! So don’t tell me I wasn’t there for him.” I run my hands through my hair and slouch down. “Don’t tell me what happened when you weren’t even there.”

  “Okay, but it’s just obvious you’re not being a good friend to anyone right now.”

  “Amelia. Just… don’t.”

  “Why are you and Zach fighting? And don’t tell me it’s none of my business, because it affects me, too.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “If it doesn’t matter, then why are you guys not even talking?”

  “It’s like you said. I was a jerk to him.”

  “If you know that, then you should apologize.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  She makes a frustrated sound. “No, it isn’t. He’s your friend.”

  “My friend who apparently thinks I’d let Riley get hurt.” Even if he’s still mad, how can he think that about me?

  “Whatever happened between you two, it really upset him. And as glad as I am that he’s finally come to his senses and stopped being on your side about everything, you guys not talking is just weird.”

  “Okay, Amelia. I’ll talk to him. But I can’t promise anything.”

  “Just promise you won’t be a jerk this time. I’m sure everything will go fine. And,” she adds, motioning for me to move, “get out of the car.”

  “What?”

  “I want to go to the mall. To get more stickers, and maybe some fuzzy pink dice for the windshield.”

  “What if I wanted to hang something in the windshield? It’s my car, too, you know.”

  “You can have the trunk. To decorate, I mean. But just the inside.”

  “How generous of you.”

  “I suppose you could put one sticker inside the glove box. But I have to approve it first. And you really should be talking to Zach before you worry about decorating, because, no offense or anything, but you need all the friends you can get.”

  “I told her it wasn’t your fault,” Riley whispers on Monday. We’re in the library, doing our alternative assignment for Advanced Heroism, which is basically a giant binder full of annoying worksheets. Riley’s almost halfway through with his, while I’m barely a third of the way through mine, despite having started a few weeks before him.

  “Yeah, but I saw how Sarah looked at me,” I whisper back. We’re not supposed to talk in here, but it’s the middle of third period, so it’s not like there’s anyone else around. “I know she’s mad.”

  “Well…” He pauses, lifting his pen from the short-answer question he was working on.

  “Don’t sugarcoat it, Perkins. Don’t you dare say she’s just disappointed.”

  “Okay. But she is. In both of us—not just you. She’ll get over it, though.”

  “Let me guess, she doesn’t want to be anywhere near me at Prom, and me and Kat are going alone.”

  “She didn’t say that.”

  “Yet.” I sigh and put my chin in my hands, resting my elbows on the table. “I really screwed up.”

  “Come on, X. It was me. I’m the one who got caught. And all because of that stupid chandelier.” He slides his hands over his face. “God, I thought… I thought the ceiling was coming down. How dumb was that?” He tries to laugh it off, but it comes out half-hearted.

  “Not dumb. The ceiling really did cave in on you.”

  “That was months ago.”

  “Only two and a half. And don’t say you should be over it, b
ecause I’m not over it, and it didn’t even happen to me.”

  He nods, staring down at the table. “I still screwed up.”

  “We both screwed up. We shouldn’t have even been there.”

  “Try telling Sarah that. Can you believe she’s already talking about doing that again?”

  “It’s Sarah, so, yeah. I used to like fieldwork.”

  “No, you used to love fieldwork.” He pauses, then adds, “So did I.”

  “I knew that I wasn’t… that we weren’t… I knew we shouldn’t have gone on a mission yet, but I let Sarah talk me into it.”

  “Me, too. And I know she just wants to feel like things are back to normal, but…”

  “But us doing more fieldwork right now is pretty much the worst idea ever?”

  “I just wish I didn’t have to disappoint her.”

  That makes two of us. “Part of me was hoping that Sarah was right. That we’d been out of the game long enough, and getting back into it would, I don’t know, make everything okay. I’d see that I still loved fieldwork, and that… This might sound stupid, but going on missions made me feel like I wasn’t just some useless screwup.”

  “Hey. Come on. You’re not just a screwup.”

  I glare at him.

  He grins. “You know what I mean.”

  “Being good at fieldwork and going out on missions used to make me feel like I was more than that. Like the world actually needed me or something.”

  “Yeah, me, too. And like… like even when things got really tough, it was still worth it, because it meant something. But now…” He shrugs. “All I can think is why does it have to be us? Haven’t we done enough? There are plenty of other heroes out there who didn’t break their legs or get left for dead by someone they thought was their friend. I mean, my dad died saving a bunch of strangers. Was that worth it?”

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  “He helped those people, and they got to live, and their families didn’t have to feel the pain of having them ripped away. But me?” Riley clenches his fists. “I’m his son. I shouldn’t have had to… Why is it heroic that he cared more about a bunch of strangers than he did about me and Zach? Or about my mom?”

  He’s shaking a little, though I can’t tell if it’s from anger or sadness.

  “Perkins, it’s—”

  “Don’t say it’s okay, X, because it’s not.”

  “I won’t. I wasn’t going to. But your dad didn’t know he was going to die that day.”

  “But he knew it was dangerous. He knew there was a chance that he wouldn’t come back. He still picked them over us, and I don’t ever want to be like that. And I think about that night at the gala, and I think what if you hadn’t found me? What if I’d died, and Mom and Zach had had to go through that all over again? Because of me.” He squeezes his eyes shut, taking a deep breath.

  “It wasn’t the same situation. You went to a freaking awards ceremony. You didn’t know it was going to be dangerous, and you weren’t sacrificing yourself for a bunch of strangers. You were trying to help me.”

  “I know, X. And I don’t regret that. But I still put myself in danger, and if I’d died, I’m not the one who would have had to live with it.”

  He means Zach and his mom, but I think it pretty much would have destroyed me if one of my friends had died that night, especially because they were helping me. “Dangerous situations come with the territory.”

  He doesn’t say anything to that, and I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing I am, that maybe we don’t belong here anymore. I consider telling him how I might drop out of school, because there’s no way I can pass that flying test, and without fieldwork, what’s even the point? But I don’t have the guts to say it out loud.

  “It’s not like we have to decide right now,” Riley says, and we both know what decision he means. “We’re not even doing fieldwork again until next fall. That’s four months from now. We’ll tell Sarah we’re just not ready, and we’ll wait and see what happens.”

  I feel a sense of relief as soon as he says it. Four months off from having to deal with this. And maybe in four months, things will be different. I mean, I’ll know whether or not I’m repeating first year. But even ignoring that, maybe it’s enough time that I won’t feel this tight ball of dread in my stomach every time I imagine going on a mission again. Maybe I’ll know whether or not I’m on the right path.

  “Okay,” I tell Riley. “We’ll wait, and we’ll—”

  The door to the library opens, and we both turn to look as Amelia comes in. She spots us and marches right over. She’s got this really smug look on her face, like she knows some secret that I don’t.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask. “I told you this morning, I didn’t see where you lip gloss rolled to in the car. It’s probably under the seat.”

  “I know that.” She folds her arms. “I didn’t say you knew where it was, I said your arm is longer than mine and I needed you to try and reach it.”

  “And you felt the need to get a hall pass and come in here and tell me that?”

  “That’s not why I’m here. Mrs. Deeds sent me.” A grin spreads across Amelia’s face, like she’s about to tell us the best news of our lives. “She said that now that Riley’s cast is off, it doesn’t make sense for him to do the alternative assignment. And she’s decided that, since he needs a partner, you can have a second chance.”

  I look at Riley, not liking this, then back over at Amelia. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that you guys are starting our new unit with us tomorrow. You can stop doing this stupid alternative assignment, because you’re back to doing fieldwork, just like you wanted.”

  Chapter 10

  “I NEED TO SEE your sticker collection when you come home this weekend,” I tell Kat on the phone later that night. I’m lying upside down on my bed, with my feet pressed against the slanting wall.

  “Is that a euphemism? Because if you want to have sex, you could just say so.”

  “I think that goes without saying. But no, I actually mean your sticker collection. I’m going to borrow some.”

  “Borrow? As in, not stick them to anything?”

  “Well…” I clear my throat. “I might be going to stick them to Tom.”

  “What? Since when are you and my dad on a first-name basis, and since when are you putting stickers on him?”

  “Ha. Not your dad, the new car. Amelia named him, obviously. And she so generously said I could put one sticker in the glove box.”

  “So, you’re going to cover him in stickers, right?”

  “Or use one very carefully chosen sticker. One Amelia will never live down once her friends see it. I might need something custom for that, though. How’s your printer?”

  “Out of ink. And you’re going to have to raid someone else’s sticker collection, because mine aren’t for sticking.”

  “What’s the point of stickers if they’re not for sticking? Who do you love more? Me or your—”

  The sounds of arguing downstairs interrupt me. Gordon and Helen never fight. But they’re fighting now, or at least arguing really loudly, which amounts to the same thing.

  They’re arguing because I accidentally let it slip over dinner that Helen wasn’t actually upset about her statue getting taken down, on account of having misgivings about her work with the League. She trusted me with that, and I didn’t even make it a whole two days before blurting it out in front of everyone. But Amelia was giving me crap about the statue again, since the news announced it’s officially in a museum now, and I just wanted her to shut up. And before I could stop myself, before I could, like, think it through, the words were out of my mouth.

  To be honest, I didn’t realize it was going to be this big of a deal. But I knew Helen didn’t want Gordon to know. And as soon as I said it, this weird silence settled over the table, and it was obvious that I’d really screwed up. Again.

  “You never told me any of this,” Gordon shouts, “but
you tell my son?!”

  I sit up, a sick feeling settling in my stomach.

  “Damien?” Kat says. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “I love you more than my stickers, but you’re still not getting them.”

  “Maybe I could come stay with you this weekend. After the Prom, I mean.”

  “I’m serious about our printer being out of ink.”

  I laugh. “I could spend the night.”

  “Really?” She sounds excited about that, then hesitant. “But you’d just have to go back in the morning.”

  “No, I’ll—”

  From downstairs, I hear Gordon’s voice again, shouting, “How could you keep how you really felt from me?!”

  And then Helen, who isn’t as audible as him, “Because I knew you wouldn’t understand!”

  I wince. “I’ll stay Sunday night, too. We’ll spend the whole weekend together.”

  “That sounds amazing. But, Damien, what about school? What about your homework?”

  “I’ll bring my homework, if I have any.” I’m pretty sure I’ll have some, which I will conveniently forget to bring. There’s no way I’m ruining my weekend getaway with homework. “And I’ll leave really early on Monday.”

  “That’s what you said the last time you stayed over on a school night.”

  “And I only missed first period. Nothing happened.” Other than a surprise group project that I’m pretty sure the teacher only assigned because I wasn’t there. “And even if it had? Totally worth it.”

  She sighs. It’s a longing kind of sigh, like she’s already thinking about how awesome this weekend is going to be. “We’ve all been going to that waffle place on Sundays. I can finally bring you. You’re sure you’re not going to get in trouble for this? Because if—”

  “Nope. No trouble. I’m all yours for, like, thirty-six hours.”

  “Okay. Wow.”

  I kind of want to ask her if I can just come over right now. Maybe live in her dorm with her forever, where the biggest decisions I’d have to make about my life are what flavor of waffle to get. But even if I was actually going to do that, leaving the house would involve going downstairs, where Gordon and Helen are, which is something I’m definitely not doing right now. So I guess I’m stuck here.