Action Figures - Issue Five: Team-Ups

by Michael C Bailey

  “I see. The team is short-handed, then.”

  “Dad, I told you, there is no team. I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a team again.”

  All of a sudden, my throat gets tight and my eyes hurt, like I’m going to start crying. I’ve really haven’t thought about that before, the five of us never being together again. Even after everything Sara did...

  Like break my leg. Like make Stuart relive the worst day of his life.

  Never mind. Screw the team. I’m still friends with Stuart and Matt and Carrie. That’s all I care about.

  Dad puts his hand on my shoulder. This is his I’m about to say something super-serious, so listen up gesture.

  “I’m sorry for that, Missy. I truly am, but you can’t let that stop you from doing your job. The world needs people like you.” He gently squeezes my shoulder. “You have a gift. Please don’t let it go to waste.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “That was wicked cheesy.”

  He smiles. “Perhaps.”

  “I have to leave for school or I’m going to be late.”

  “Well, we can’t have that. I’ll drive you.”

  Dad drops me off in front of school, where other kids shuffle toward the entrance like zombies. Guh. Hate zombies. He tells me to have a good day and I get out of the car, and boy does my timing suck.

  “Hi, Missy,” Carrie says.

  “Hey,” Sara says, kind of quietly, like she’s —

  Whoa. Wait. What?

  Sara looks so not Sara I almost don’t recognize her. She’s, like, dressed. I mean, she’s always dressed, but now she’s dressed like a real person. She looks really nice. Not going to tell her that, though. Still mad at her.

  “Hey,” I say.

  There’s no way we can’t walk in together. Carrie makes small talk as we head toward the entrance. Mr. Dent, the vice-principal, stands at the door, saying hello to students and telling them to head to the auditorium for orientation.

  “Hello, ladies. Nice to see you all ba— Sara! Well! That’s a new look for you.”

  “Hi, Mr. Dent,” Sara says.

  He gives her a very brief pat on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you back,” he says.

  “Thank you,” Sara says. “It’s good to be back.”

  “If you need anything, let me know, okay?”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  “How about you, Missy? How are you doing? You’re looking well.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’m good. Walking again. Finally.”

  Sara fidgets.

  “Go on in, ladies,” Mr. Dent says, gesturing toward the open doors. “Big day ahead.”

  We run into Matt and Stuart in front of the auditorium entrance. Stuart tenses up when he sees Sara and backs away. I shift over to his side. The five of us stand there, not saying anything and trading uncomfortable glances.

  This sucks. I want everything to go back to the way it was.

  It could happen. I could tell Sara I forgive her, I know she wasn’t in her right mind, she didn’t mean to hurt me, and Stuart would realize the same thing and he’d forgive Sara and everything would be all right.

  The flow of students pushes us into the auditorium, where my eyes immediately go right to a specific seat. It’s in the back section where the rows rise at a steep angle, like in a sports stadium. Fifteenth row, fifth seat in from the aisle. The back of the seat has a dent in it. That was where I landed. That was where I broke my leg.

  Because of Sara.

  Never mind. Screw her.

  “Come on, Stuart,” I say, grabbing Stuart by the arm and dragging him as far away from that seat as I can get. We end up sitting in the front row.

  It isn’t far enough.

  2.

  The morning is boring, boring, boring. Boring and repetitive. I get lost walking to a classroom because the stupid school is built like a stupid maze, I get to classroom and sit there while the teacher is all blah blah blah about the class and maybe we get some actual work to do, then it’s off to get lost on my way to my next class. Over and over.

  Around noon I head downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch, but I don’t feel like eating. My stomach’s a huge knot because I’m worried I’m going to get stuck in a lunch period with Sara and no one else I know, so I either have to sit with her or with a bunch of people I don’t know. My stomach doesn’t unknot until Carrie taps me on the shoulder.

  “Oh. Hey,” I say.

  “Hi,” she says. “I think it’s just you and me for lunch this year.” I nod. “Is it okay if I sit with you?”

  “Sure.”

  Carrie doesn’t say anything as we file through the lunch line or while we search for an open table. We end up sitting at a table in the far corner of the cafeteria, almost exactly where all five of us sat last year. Stupid school. Why are you making me remember things that make me sad?

  After we sit down, Carrie says, “Missy, I want to apologize to you. When I called you over the other week to give you that guitar, I was using that as a pretext to get you and Sara together. I’d hoped you two would start talking again. That was a crappy thing for me to do, and I’m sorry.”

  “S’okay.”

  “No, it’s not. I should have been honest with you.” She sighs. “No. What I should have done was respect your feelings. You’re not ready to talk to Sara. You might never be ready. As much as I want us all together again, I have to accept that.”

  “I want us all back together too, but...”

  It takes me a minute to figure out what I want to say and put it all together. Most times my brain is all over the place and whatever I’m thinking comes gushing out and doesn’t make total sense, but times like these, I need it to make total sense. It’s too important to come out all crazy.

  “I’m not ready to deal with Sara. I know she wasn’t herself when she hurt me. I know that in my head, but every time I see her, I feel scared and angry,” I say. “I don’t want to feel that way, but I do.”

  Carrie nods.

  “I’m not mad at you,” I add. “You were trying to fix things. That’s what you do.”

  “I’m not very good at it.”

  “Shut up. You’re awesome at it, but maybe there’re things even you can’t fix.”

  “You are a wise Muppet.”

  “Duh.”

  Carrie smiles.

  “You know we’re cool, right? I mean, just because I’m mad at Sara and you’re not, which is obvious because you two are still friends because you’d have to be, since you live in the same house now, that doesn’t mean we’re not friends.”

  Oh, poop, I’m gushing again. Doesn’t matter. Carrie understands me anyway.

  “That means a lot to me,” she says. “Thank you.”

  I smile back at her. “And I still want to try and make the team work.”

  “Funny you mention that.” Carrie glances around to make sure no one is listening in. “Edison asked about us at the Protectorate team meeting last week. I didn’t know what to tell him. I wasn’t sure you’d want to come back, all things considered.”

  “I want to come back. Me and Dad have been talking about it a lot and he wants me to stick with it and I want me to stick with it because it’s important.”

  “It’s not going to be easy. With the roster down by one, the rest of us are going to have to step up our games to compensate,” Carrie says. I love it when she gets all take-charge. “Matt’s been working out a lot with Natalie, and I started working with Dr. Quentin to find new ways to use my powers...”

  “Find me someone to train with. I want to get better at...um, ninja-ing? Being a ninja? Ninja stuff?” Oh, man, I know there’s a real word for it.

  “Yeah. Funny you should say that,” Carrie says, but she doesn’t sound like she thinks it’s funny. Not ha-ha funny, anyway. “Someone has in fact expressed a keen interest in training you.”

  “Who? Natalie? She’d be cool. She could teach me how to fight better. All I do now is c
law at things and jump around so I don’t get hit. Ninjutsu, that’s the word!”

  “No, not Natalie.” She takes a deep breath, the kind people take before they drop a bad news bomb. “The Entity.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “I know.”

  “Why him? Why does he want to train me? What did I do? Does he hate me? Is this because I mouthed off to him that one time and told him to bite me? Is he going to take me into a really bad part of Boston on a fake training mission and leave me there and make me find my way home?”

  “I don’t know, Muppet. Last month he declared that he was going to train you, and that’s all I’ve heard from him since.”

  When something really freaks me out, I make a noise that’s half a whine and half a groan. I’m making that noise right now, really loud.

  “Try not to worry about it. I mean, it’s been a whole month and the Entity hasn’t contacted you. I bet he’s completely lost interest,” Carrie says optimistically.

  Not so much.

  After school, Stuart and I start walking into town. We plan to hit the Coffee Experience for our traditional afternoon caffeine. Carrie and Matt have work, and Sara...whatever, so it’s just us two. We talk about how our days went, but that’s a short conversation because nothing interesting happened to either of us.

  “Oh, take a wild guess who’s in my lunch period?” Stuart says. I don’t have to guess, judging by how bitter he sounds.

  “Sorry.”

  “Matt’s there too, so that’s cool. He said he’s going to split his time between us so he’s not playing favorites. One day he’ll eat with me, the next day with Sara.”

  “I guess that’s fair.”

  “And he talked to Carrie, and they’ll do the same thing for homework nights. Carrie’ll hang with Sara on nights Matt’s with us and vice-versa. Congratulations, Muppet. Matt and Carrie have joint custody, and we’re the kids.”

  “Yay?”

  “Whatever. I don’t care who we’re doing homework with as long as we’re not doing it at my house.”

  “How come?”

  “Because Gordon’s being a huge pain is how come. He spent breakfast lecturing me, like, ‘Stuart, you need to get serious about your schoolwork. You can’t just coast through school anymore, you have to think about your future,’” Stuart says, nailing his big brother’s snotty attitude. “Want to hear the good part? After spending, like, the whole morning harassing me about school, he finishes with, ‘You need to get into a good college, or you won’t be able to find a good job,’ and I said, ‘Oh, you mean like the one you have?’”

  “HA! Burn!”

  “Yeah, but now I can never go home again.” He shrugs. “Ehh. I had a good run. Is that your phone?”

  It is, and it’s the default ringtone, which I almost never hear, so I didn’t even realize it was my phone going off. I look at the screen. It says UNKNOWN CALLER.

  “Hello?”

  The voice on the other end is flat and lifeless. “Get your uniform,” it says. It gives me an address, somewhere in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston. “This isn’t a request.”

  The line goes dead.

  “Who was that?” Stuart asks.

  I slip my phone back into my pocket. “That was the Entity,” I say. “I think he just asked me out.”

  3.

  Stuart offers to go with me, but I really don’t want to cheese off the Entity by dragging him along when he wasn’t invited to...whatever this is.

  I head home and put on my Kunoichi costume. Most of it, anyway. I stick the boots and my mask in my backpack and throw a jacket on to hide the tunic. I have to call a taxi so I can get to the train station, where I hop a commuter rail train to the city. I get receipts for everything. Dad always gets receipts so he can get reimbursed for business expenses. I’m on super-hero business, so travel expenses are business expenses, so I’m getting reimbursed, darn it.

  I wonder if the Entity will write me a check. No, he probably only carries cash. Makes sense. He dresses like a giant wallet.

  I change trains and ride into Roxbury. I get off and walk the rest of the way through a kind of sketchy neighborhood with a lot of closed businesses. People hang out in front of them, smoking and talking and staring at me as I pass. The address the Entity gave me looks like an apartment building, at least from the second floor up. On the ground floor, broken steel shutters cover a picture window and the front door. A sign above the entrance says ROXBURY FINE LIQUORS. Another business that went out of business.

  The Entity said to meet him on the roof. I circle around to the side and, after checking to make sure no one is watching, climb up a rusty fire escape.

  The roof is empty. Am I early? I must be early. Great. I get into the rest of my costume, stick my real person clothes into my backpack, and sit to wait.

  The air is still summertime warm, and the humidity helps trap all the smells of the city — garbage, exhaust from all the cars and trucks, stuff like that. I catch a whiff of Chinese food from a nearby restaurant hiding in the stink. I change my focus to listen to my surroundings. Mostly I hear the white noise of traffic, the buzz of running engines and tires creeping along the road, the occasional squeal of a car that needs a brake job. Across the street, in front of a convenience store, two men complain about their girlfriends. A third is on his phone, yelling at someone in Spanish.

  I don’t hear him coming up behind me. I know he’s there anyway. Three feet away, close enough for him to kick me in the head, far enough away I couldn’t lash out and slice through his ankles.

  “You’re early,” the Entity says in his standard monotone, so I can’t tell whether he’s happy with my punctuality. Probably not. He’s never happy about anything.

  I look back over my shoulder. He’s looming three feet directly behind me. Called it.

  “Shouldn’t sneak up on people like that. It isn’t nice.”

  “I’m not a nice person,” he says. “You may have noticed. Get up. We have work to do.”

  I do a backwards somersault that brings me to my feet. If he’s going to show off, so am I. I forget how tall the Entity is until I’m standing in front of him. I barely come up to his chest.

  “What are we doing?” I ask.

  “Follow me.”

  He dashes past me. He sprints toward the edge of the building and leaps the alleyway to the next building. I follow, clearing the gap with feet to spare.

  We hop rooftops for a block. He’s fast but not as fast as I am. I catch up to him easily, and the only reason I don’t pass him is because I have no idea where we’re going. He stops at the corner building and turns to face me.

  “We’re here,” he says.

  “You had me meet you on one rooftop just so we could run to another rooftop? You make no sense.”

  “They’re watching the ground level here. We have to come in from above.”

  I tip my mask up. “Jeez, will you tell me what’s going on already? It’s the first day of school and I already have a ton of homework even though we didn’t do anything in class because no one wanted to be there, including the teachers, which is dumb because at least they get paid to be there, and all I wanted to do was sit and have coffee with Stuart but now I’m running around the city because you said so except you aren’t saying so and it’s wicked annoying, so knock it off.”

  “Are you done?”

  “...Maybe.”

  “Two floors below us are three suspects in a shooting that occurred two nights ago. A seven-year-old boy was caught in the crossfire. He almost died. We’re taking them down.”

  “Ooooookaaayyyy. Sure, cool, but, um, is there some reason we aren’t calling the cops and, you know, letting them do their job?”

  “There is. His name is George Dario. He’s a low-level superhuman: enhanced strength, invulnerable enough to withstand small arms fire. Nothing too special, but the last time the police tried to take him in, he crippled one officer and seriously in
jured four others.”

  “Oh. Then how did they arrest him?”

  “They didn’t. I did,” the Entity says, but he doesn’t share that story with me. Maybe later. Anyway. “This is what’s going to happen. You’re going down the fire escape and covering the window. I’m going through the front door. While they’re focused on me, you come through the window. You come in hard and you take them down hard. Got it?”

  “Sneak, crash, kick ass. Got it. What’s the catch?”

  “Go,” the Entity says, turning away and heading for the door to the roof. Is there a real name for that? I bet it has some fancy architect name.

  I pull my mask back down and slip over the side of the building, slinking down the fire escape to the third floor. I pause halfway down the ladder, which passes by the very window I’m supposed to enter. It stands wide open to let some fresh air in. Convenient. I hear three distinct voices inside the apartment, talking about nothing important while Dr. Phil drones on in the background. Someone takes a loud sip of a drink. Someone else crunches a snack chip. I risk a peek inside. Three men in T-shirts and jeans sit together on a battered, sun-faded couch, feet up on a wooden coffee table, all of them watching a huge, boxy TV older than I am. They’re relaxed. They feel safe.

  They’re totally off guard.

  The Entity makes his entrance. He kicks the door free of its hinges. The suspects, startled, shout and curse. I drop to the fire escape landing and get a glimpse of the scene inside: the men scramble to their feet, one of them reaching for a handgun tucked in his waistband. They’re in such a panic he’s more likely to shoot one of his friends than the Entity.

  Still, it wouldn’t be very nice of me to give him that chance.

  I dive through the open window, tuck into a roll as I hit the floor, and spring up to clock the gunman in the back of the head. At the same time, the Entity charges across the room and barrels into one of the other two men. The impact sends him flying. He lands hard, dazed but not out.