Action Figures - Issue Five: Team-Ups

by Michael C Bailey

  Miranda snorts. “You’re right. I didn’t want to talk to you. Who’d want to talk to a creepy loner freak like you anyway? Oh, right,” she says with an expression halfway between a sneer and a venomous grin. “A suicidal junkie, a grungy stoner, and a stuck-up bitch who acts like she’s the smartest person in the room.”

  “Ah, there’s the Miranda I know and love: the girl who makes snap judgments based on superficial information, because taking the time to learn who people really are is too taxing and might interfere with the never-ending schadenfreude-fest that is your life.”

  “Like you’re any different. I’ve heard you talking about other kids, and you’re just as superficial and judgmental as you say I am.” She smirks. “Oh, what, are you surprised I know what ‘superficial’ and ‘judgmental’ mean? You wouldn’t be if you knew I’ve had an A-average in English since first grade — but that would mean getting to know me instead of writing me off as just another high school mean girl.” Her expression turns icy. “Stop acting like you’re better than everyone else, Matt, because you aren’t.”

  Miranda turns on her heel to make a dramatic exit, and in doing so brushes by Terry Jr. Judging by his smug grin, he heard the entire exchange and loved every minute of it.

  “Boy, she sure had your number,” he says.

  “She doesn’t know jack about me,” I protest.

  “She knows you better than you think.” Terry Jr. steps up to the bar and orders a beer. Without looking at me he says, “You’re an arrogant jackass, Matt. You think you’re something special, and whenever someone doesn’t buy into your narrative, you decide they’re an idiot and you treat them like crap. You’ve been that way ever since you were little and you haven’t changed one bit.”

  The bartender hands Terry Jr. his beer. He takes a long sip then turns to walk away. He pauses and, finally, makes eye contact.

  “I’ll never understand why Dad wasted his time on you,” he says.

  Right. I think I’ve had enough of today.

  I’m halfway across the parking lot when Dad calls out, “Where are you going?” It sounds more like an accusation than a question. Here we go.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Matt, go back inside, the reception isn’t over.”

  I keep walking. “It is for me.”

  “Matt. Back inside, now.”

  “I’m going home.” I don’t know if I really am going home, but whatever. As long as I’m not here.

  “No you are not.” Dad grabs me by the shoulder and spins me around. “You’re going to march back inside and stay here until the reception’s over,” he says through his teeth. “This is the most important day in Terry’s life and you are not going to walk out on it.”

  “Oh, please. You think Terry Jr.’s going to be upset I left? If he had his way, he’d never have invited me in the first place.”

  “That’s not true,” Dad says, but even he doesn’t believe that. “Unlike you, Terry understands the importance of family.”

  “I understand the importance of family better than you,” I shoot back. A small, rational corner of my brain tells me to stop there, but I ignore it and spit, “I’m not the one who cheated on his wife.”

  “Oh, for — Goddammit, Matt, how long are you going to hold that over my head?” Dad says, throwing his hands up. “I know what I did! How long do I have to keep apologizing before you’ll let this go?”

  “You’ve never apologized, Dad!”

  “I have apologized to your mother every single day since —”

  “And what about me?”

  That shocks Dad into silence. Hell, it shocks me into silence. Where did that come from?

  “You? I don’t — what?” Dad says.

  I stammer and sputter, trying and failing to find a way to express a thought that barely exists as anything more than vague frustration and resentment. It comes out as, “Screw this,” and I walk away. Dad doesn’t try to stop me again. I climb into my car and drive off, leaving Dad standing there in the parking lot with a blank expression on his slack, pale face.

  6.

  “Hi, Matt. How was your weekend?” Edison asks as soon as I enter the office.

  “It sucked,” I say. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay. Sure. Well, there isn’t anything major on the docket for today, so if you’d like to get back to work on the thunder gun...I don’t suppose you thought up a better name?”

  “No. But I think I figured out a cooling system.” I dig my tablet out of my backpack and show Edison my concept. He smiles and nods. He says it should work.

  “Now that that’s figured out, what say we fire up the CAD program and design the casing? I bet we could have that ready in a half hour tops, and if I task one of the high-speed 3-D printers, we’ll have a finished casing in a couple of hours.”

  “Sure. Cool.”

  Edison frowns and lays my tablet on his desk. “Look, I know you said you didn’t want to talk about your weekend —”

  “Still don’t.”

  “— but I just told you could be holding a finished, functional version of your invention by the end of the day, and you’re acting like I told you to alphabetize my record collection.”

  “You have a record collection? How old are you?”

  “Stop deflecting,” Edison says with a hint of the old Edison, the one who didn’t think much of me, who didn’t care whether he hurt my feelings.

  And with that, something clicks into place.

  Like I said, Edison and I have not always been on good terms. After Edison revealed his secret identity to me, we had a very long and often painfully honest talk to figure out why we were so antagonistic toward each other. Our big breakthrough came when Edison told me about his son Nick, who died trying to follow in his dad’s super-heroic footsteps. Sorry, I should say Nick was killed trying to emulate his father. Fast-forward a couple of years to the day a cocky teenager with dreams of becoming a super-hero finally met his idol. Neither of us knew it at the time, but our first meeting was doomed to end badly. Concorde didn’t see a well-intentioned young man; he saw a clueless boy heading toward the same untimely end as his son. Understandably, he freaked out and tried to shut me down for my own good. I read it as outright rejection, so I responded as I always do when someone, quote, doesn’t buy into my narrative: I acted like a total ass.

  In other words, I felt betrayed by a man I looked up to, so I lashed out and kept on lashing. I’m good at that. Carrie once said I raised holding a grudge to an art form, and she’s not wrong.

  “What changed between us?” Edison asks, at which point I realize I’ve been babbling like an idiot this whole time. “You’ve obviously forgiven me. What did I do that your father hasn’t?”

  “You apologized.” Edison nods. “You explained yourself so I could understand what was going on in your head. It’s been six months since I caught Dad cheating on Mom, and I still don’t know why he did it.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know if it’d make any difference.”

  “It made a difference between us.”

  “Yeah...”

  “You should talk to him — really talk to him. Maybe it won’t change things between you two, but you have to try. One day, he’ll be gone and you’ll never have a chance to say all the things you aren’t saying now — or take back anything you said in anger.”

  I nod. It’s the closest thing to a promise I can offer.

  Edison hands my tablet to me. “Why don’t you take the afternoon off, give yourself time to decompress a little before your big date tonight,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say. I grab my stuff and start to leave. “Wait. My big date?”

  “With Zina.”

  “What? No, it’s not a date.”

  “You’re going to dinner with her.”

  “It’s not a date. We’re just going to grab something to eat at Silk Sails after work.”

  “Because you asked
her out. After she tried to ask you out.”

  “She did?”

  Edison rolls his eyes. I get the same reaction from Carrie whenever I say something clueless. “Matt, the girl’s been flirting with you for weeks.”

  “She has?”

  Huh. Edison was right; she has.

  “I’ve been trying to get up the courage to ask you out for a while,” Zina says with a coy smile. She plays with a lock of her hair and giggles at nothing in particular and oh my God, how could I have missed this?!

  Oh, right — because I’m dumb.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “Yeah.” I sink behind my menu to hide my face, which suddenly feels a thousand degrees hotter than normal. “Are you blushing?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you are.” She gently pulls the menu down. “It’s cute.”

  “Yeah?” I say. Man, I am the sparkling conversationalist tonight, aren’t I?

  “Yeah, so stop hiding. Shee, you act like you’ve never been out on a date before.”

  “Um...”

  Zina’s mouth falls open in shock, but she’s still smiling. “Get. Out.”

  “Yep. This is my first date ever.”

  “You’re messing with me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. I refuse to believe you have never dated anyone in your life.” She means it as a compliment, a very flattering one at that, but it feels like a cheap shot. She senses the change in my mood. Her smile fades. “What?”

  “I’m not exactly part of the popular crowd at school,” I say. “Most kids think I’m weird. Like, creepy weird.”

  “Are you?”

  “Weird? Yeah, absolutely, but I’m not, you know, dangerous or anything.”

  Zina’s lip curls at the corner, an amused expression. “I can’t imagine you being dangerous. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “And I wouldn’t have gone out with you if I thought you were. I only like nice guys.”

  “Weird nice guys.”

  “I have a type.”

  Zina’s type apparently also includes guys who talk with their mouths full of Chinese food, tell bad jokes, and like to show off how much they know about movies. I may have hit the jackpot here.

  We slip into getting-to-know-you chitchat easily enough, and I learn that Zina was born in South Korea and adopted by an American couple when she was a year old. Her birth parents died in an earthquake. Doctors Without Borders was dispatched to help with the recovery, and Zina’s adoptive mother was part of the team. She instantly fell in love with Zina, and the rest is history. Today, Zina is an honors student at Kingsport Academy and a go-getting fellow intern at Bose Industries. Hobbies include reading, hip-hop dancing, sewing, and playing first-person shooters under the online alias SeoulCaliber13.

  I have no idea exactly when my anxiety passed, but it passed, and I was able to enjoy an awesome night out with Zina. We ate, we talked, we laughed. We laughed a lot.

  Outside the restaurant, in front of the small artificial pond boasting a scale model of a Chinese junk — my inspiration for my affectionate nickname for the place, Junk Food — Zina takes my hand. We walk to our cars in the back parking lot, hand in hand.

  “This is me,” she says, stopping in front of a brand new BMW, which I assume belongs to her parents. No kid in this town is so privileged that they own a car this nice. “I had a great time tonight.”

  “So did I. Thanks for going out with me,” I say, and immediately I second-guess myself. Am I supposed to thank my date? Is that considered good form, or do I sound like a retail clerk? Thank you for dating Matt Steiger. We appreciate your patronage and hope you call again. Have a nice day!

  She’s looking at me. Does she want me to kiss her?

  “Penny for your thoughts?” she says.

  “Pennies cost nearly two and a half cents each to manufacture,” I say. Oh, real smooth, George Clooney. That’ll turn her on for sure.

  She giggles. “You are definitely a weird boy.”

  “Lucky for me you have a type.”

  “A type who doesn’t expect a kiss on a first date, I hope,” she says, but pleasantly. “You have to earn an after-date kiss.”

  “Then I guess I should ask you out again.” Okay, that was smooth.

  And effective. “I guess you should.”

  Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.

  “How do you feel about school dances?”

  7.

  Turns out, Zina is very much pro-school dance.

  Having never been before, I don’t know how much I should dress up. Fortunately, Carrie is more than happy to come over before the dance and play fashion counselor.

  “You want to be dressy but not formal,” she says as she roots through my closet. “A tie is okay, but a jacket might be too much, especially if you plan to dance a lot. Sweat is not sexy.”

  “Agreed,” Sara says from the foot of my bed. “You put on deodorant, right?”

  “Yes, I put on deodorant,” I say. “And clean underwear, too, if that was your next question.”

  “It most definitely was not my next question, but thanks for sharing.” Carrie pauses in her search and shoots me a confused look. “Is this a tuxedo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You own a tux.”

  “I got it at a vintage thrift store in case I ever wanted to go as James Bond for Halloween.”

  “Ah. Okay, I can get behind that. Oh, here we go.” Carrie passes me a pair of dark dress pants and a gray dress shirt. “Wear a T-shirt under that for a pop of color and you’re good. I’d recommend blue, if you have it. You do have a T-shirt without some weird design or goofy slogan on it, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Jeez, I’m not a savage.”

  “Debatable,” Sara says.

  “You go try it on in the bathroom,” Carrie says, pushing me toward the door. “We’ll get dressed in here.”

  “Why do I have to use the bathroom?” I argue. “It’s my bedroom.”

  “But you’re too much of a gentleman to force two ladies to change together in a cramped bathroom,” Carrie says. “Now go, shoo. I want to look nice for my date too.”

  “You have a date? Cool. Who is he?”

  Carrie takes a deep I’m about to drop a bombshell breath. “Her name is Ashlyn. I want you to know that now so you’re not caught off guard when you meet her.”

  “Your date is a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “...Did I miss something?”

  “I’m not a lesbian, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Bi?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is she a lesbian?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sara says. “Very much so.”

  “Does she know you’re not a lesbian?” I ask Carrie.

  “Uh-huh. We went out for coffee after school Thursday and had a nice, long conversation.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t expect you to. You’re a boy.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? No, never mind,” I say, backing out of the room. “Don’t bother. I’m confused enough already.”

  I change into my party ensemble and head downstairs to wait for the girls. I’m waiting for forty-five minutes. Why do girls take so long to get ready for stuff? Put on clothes, put on shoes, comb hair, do makeup, boom. Done. Ten minutes. Fifteen, tops.

  Here they come. About time.

  Carrie’s wearing a yellow dress and has curled her hair so it falls around her shoulders in loose waves. Sara is in a form-fitting black dress — I literally cannot remember if I’ve ever seen her in a real dress before — and has pulled her hair back into a loose knot. All right, I admit, that was worth waiting forty-five minutes.

  “What are you sitting there for?” Carrie says like I’m the one who’s been holding things up. “Let’s go turn some heads.”

  During the drive to Zina’s, Carrie updates me on the Manticore situation. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to report. Bart spe
nt a couple of days scouring news reports for any homicides or suspicious deaths anywhere in New Hampshire, and aside from a suicide in Manchester — some guy who took a header off the Notre Dame Bridge — no one died under unusual circumstances. Edison’s research was equally unsuccessful. Air traffic control first picked up Manticore’s transponder signal over New York, en route to wherever he was heading, and again on his way home. When he took off from that coffee shop, he either flew low to avoid radar or — Edison’s somewhat hopeful theory — switched over to a different dummy signal. He thinks Manticore might have multiple falsified transponder signals he cycles through to throw off air traffic control, but it’s going to take further digging to prove that theory.

  We put a lid on the shop talk as I roll into Zina’s driveway. I make a brief appearance at the front door so Zina’s folks can give me the obligatory parental once-over. Convinced I’m not a serial killer, they let Zina go with a gentle reminder to be home by eleven.

  Zina hops into the passenger’s seat — I called shotgun on her behalf — and exchanges greetings with Carrie and Sara. They spend the ride to school chatting away like they’re all old friends. That bodes well.

  I park near the relatively empty back of the school parking lot so my car won’t get dinged up and make what feels like the long walk down the Green Mile to the gym. I’ve faced rampaging murderbots, demon lords, and superhuman psychopaths, and none of them have scared me like the thought of walking into a school full of kids who don’t like me with a pretty girl on my arm.

  The butterflies in my stomach turn into pterodactyls as we enter the gym, where the dance is in full swing. Ha. Swing, dance — see what I did there? The music is pumping at deafening levels, forcing everyone to shout their conversations. The dance floor is full of flailing, writhing bodies, causing the floor to vibrate beneath my feet. The adult chaperones are doing an excellent job of pretending they’re paying attention to their surroundings.

  Carrie takes point and leads us inside, and I realize as we weave our way through the crowd that I’m holding my breath. I glance around, expecting to see kids staring back, judging me, questioning my right to be here, but they couldn’t care less about me. They’re too wrapped up in their own good time to spare me a single second of attention.