Action Figures - Issue Six: Power Play

by Michael Bailey

  “King Van the First,” Van muses. “I dig it.”

  “You in, then?”

  Van throws his hands up. “What the hell. YOLO, am I right?”

  “No one says YOLO anymore,” Jonas says, “but yeah. No guts, no glory.”

  Delroy grins. “Then let’s get to work. We got ourselves a for-real super-villain secret base to set up.”

  ***

  Our high spirits don’t last long after getting to school. Mine don’t, anyway. I’m at my locker for, like, thirty seconds when Ashlyn, one of my friends from the LGBTQ student group, comes bouncing up to me.

  “Hey, you,” I say. “Where were you all last week?”

  “Up at my dad’s cabin in Vermont, hiding out from the Martians,” she says, pushing a lock of hair out of her face. She likes to dye her bangs different colors, and today she’s sporting Christmas green. “He was convinced if we stuck around we’d all get abducted and butt-probed. Where’s my pretend girlfriend?”

  Oh, crud.

  “Carrie got into a huge fight with her mom,” I say, the lie so familiar by now I don’t have to think about it. “She moved out and went to live with her dad on the Cape.”

  “What?! No!” she moans. “She’s gone?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  “Man, I had an awesome Christmas present for her, too. This sucks.”

  “Yes it does.”

  Ashlyn slumps against my locker to mope. Poor girl. She’s had a hardcore crush on Carrie since day one. Carrie made it clear she wasn’t into girls, and Ashlyn said she understood, but I strongly suspect she’s been holding out hope Carrie’d have a change of heart.

  “Are you going to be okay?” she asks. “Your foster mom’s not going to kick you out because Carrie’s gone, is she?”

  “No, I’m safe.”

  “Good,” Ashlyn says, snaring me in a hug. “I don’t like losing people.”

  I’m with you there.

  A long, dreary day follows, a day so lacking in stimulation and distraction that my mind goes wandering to places I don’t want it going. I mostly worry about Carrie. She can handle just about any threat on Earth, but she isn’t on Earth anymore. God knows what she’s facing out there. Black holes? Planet-killing meteors? Death Stars? Wrathful Khans?

  I also can’t stop myself from dwelling on our decision to reveal our secret identities. I’m trying to remain hopeful, but between Mrs. Hamill abandoning her family, Mr. Steiger resorting to some pretty desperate tactics to stop Matt, and the Lumleys calling in the big guns in the form of Stuart’s grandmother…

  Long ago, Edison urged us to tell our families. If anything bad happened to us, he said, they deserved to know the whole truth. He had a point, but there were no noble intentions behind that suggestion. He knew how our parents would react. He knew they’d lose their minds and try to stop us — which, at the time, is exactly what he wanted. Be careful what you wish for, Edison.

  There’s something else bugging me, another reason why I’m starting to believe we made a bad, bad mistake, but it’s a frustratingly vague anxiety I can’t quite pin down. Or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I’m overthinking it.

  After school lets out, Matt drops Missy and me off at the Coffee Experience then heads to work. Stuart’s working today too, so it’s just us girls. We tuck into our usual corner with our drinks and commiserate over the sad state of affairs at Casa de Hamill.

  “I once told Carrie I kind of wanted my parents to split up,” Missy mopes into her latté. “This was way before I knew Dad gave me my powers. He and Mom barely talked and he acted like he didn’t care about her, or me, and I thought they should go ahead and end things and maybe they’d both be happier.”

  Be careful what you wish for.

  “Give your mom some time, Muppet,” I say. “This hit her a lot harder than anyone else. It might take her longer to come to terms with everything.”

  “I guess.” She falls silent and chews on her bottom lip for a minute, her fangs peeking out. “I’m scared she won’t come back. Not because of what Dad did but...I’m scared she won’t come home because she thinks I’m a freak.”

  I scootch my chair over so I can hug her. “Don’t you dare think that. Your mother loves you like crazy. She’ll come back.”

  Please, God, do not make a liar out of me. You’ve slapped us around pretty good lately, but you know what? I’ll take it without complaint if you give Missy this one little win. Thanks, ‘kay, bye.

  “Hey, ladies,” someone says.

  “Oh, hey, Ty,” I say. “What’s up?”

  “Bo just got out of a meeting with Mr. Dreyfuss to talk about the winter concert,” Ty says, gesturing toward her boyfriend Bo, who stands at the counter waiting to order drinks. “Thought we’d grab some coffee, kill time, hang out.” She looks at Missy. “You okay there, Muppet?”

  “Parent stuff,” she says, observing another of Edison’s rules for lying: never say more than you absolutely have to.

  “Sorry to hear. Do want to be alone or —?”

  “No. I don’t.” Ty sits on the other side of Missy and takes her hand. Missy musters a weak smile.

  Bo joins us, and the mood takes a much-needed turn for the cheerier. Bo starts talking up the winter show, which will tie in with the spring musical somehow. He says Mr. Dreyfuss, the stage band’s faculty advisor, wants to try and push some boundaries in the next show, maybe even let the stage band sing songs with some hard swear words in them. Believe me, for our school that’s a big step. One year the school committee refused to let the theater department do Grease unless it censored or entirely cut a bunch of songs. Imagine that. No “Greased Lightning?” No “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee?” It’s an insult to musical theater.

  What can I say? When it comes to musicals, I’m a purist. Do them right or don’t do them at all. As much as I love Tim Burton, I still haven’t forgiven him for butchering Sweeney Todd. No pun intended.

  “Hey, maybe you should try out for the spring musical,” Bo says to me. “They’re doing Wicked.”

  “Ooh, really?” I say. Idina Menzel is one of my musical theater heroes, and the thought of auditioning for the role of Elphaba is incredibly tempting, but, “I don’t know. I’ve never acted before outside of elementary school plays.”

  “So? Everyone starts somewhere,” Ty says. “Wouldn’t hurt to try.”

  “Do it,” Missy says, stating it like an order. She narrows her eyes at me. “Doooooo iiiiiiitt.”

  “Let me think about it?”

  “Sure. As long as you doooooo iiiiiiitt.”

  “No pressure. Oop, hold on,” I say as my phone goes off. It’s a text from Meg. It says, simply, Love you Strawberry (kissy face emoji). I text her back: Love you Sparky.

  “Who’s that?” Ty says with an inquisitive smirk.

  “My girlfriend.” Saying that turns my smile into an ear-to-ear grin. I love saying that. I love her.

  “Let’s see.” I turn my phone around to show her my wallpaper, a picture of Meg giving me a look that turns my knees to mush. I stare at it a lot. “Oh, hello. Very nice. Love her hair.”

  Bo is less impressed. He tilts the screen so he can see it better and frowns. “What?” I say, ready to jump to Meg’s defense.

  “Isn’t that Megawatt Quantum?” he says.

  A giant fist wraps around my body and crushes the air out of me. “What?”

  “Megawatt Quantum. The super-hero.”

  Ty takes a second look. “You sure?”

  “Positive. Saw her on the news last week with the rest of her family. The Quantum Quintet was helping out the Protectorate and the Hero Squad with that spaceship.”

  Ty arches an eyebrow. “Oh, come on, Sara, if you’re going to make up a girlfriend —”

  “She’s not made-up!” I say. “I just got a text from her. Look!”

  I show them the text, complete with the name MEG QUENTIN at the top of the screen and suddenly realize how incredibly freaking stupid I am. I might as well shove
my Protectorate ID card in their faces. What was I thinking?

  I wasn’t. I basically blurted out my secret identity without thinking about it for one second — and that’s when my indefinable anxiety defines itself. The big problem with secrets is that no one’s very good at keeping them. People let things slip — case in point right here — or they confide in someone they sincerely believe they can trust to keep quiet. And then that person tells someone they trust, and that person tells someone they trust, and next thing you know, the secret has become public knowledge. Outside of the Protectorate and the Quantums, nine people know who we really are: the Hausers, the Steigers, the Lumleys and Gordon, and the Hamills. The Lumleys have called in Stuart’s grandmother, so she’ll almost certainly learn about him soon enough. That’ll make ten — and I might have just added two more people to that list because Bo and Ty are staring at me hard.

  “How did you come to meet a super-hero?” Bo asks.

  “It was kind of a friend of a friend of a friend thing,” I say. To my amazement, my voice is steady and level. “Doc Quantum is colleagues with Concorde, who works for Edison Bose, Matt is Mr. Bose’s intern...”

  Don’t say more than you absolutely have to. I leave it there, hoping Bo and Ty will fill in the gaps on their own. No such luck.

  “Yeah, but how did you meet her?” Bo presses.

  “Matt invited me to a corporate thing at Bose Industries. The Quantums were there. Meg and I started chatting, one thing led to another...”

  “You actually met the Quantum Quintet?” Ty says, her demeanor shifting from skeptical to curious with a side order of impressed.

  “Briefly. Aside from Meg I didn’t get a chance to talk to any of them.” I throw in a casual shrug for effect. “I don’t think they were interested in talking to me, so whatever.”

  “You’re actually dating a super-hero,” Ty marvels. “That is so cool.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it cool,” Bo says. “Aren’t you scared of getting attacked by some nutcase?”

  “Not really,” I say. “I admit, I was a little worried about that too, at first, but the Quantums have never had secret identities and they’ve never been attacked by anyone.”

  “Cops don’t have secret identities either,” Ty adds. “You don’t hear about cops getting jumped by criminals they’ve put away. Why would it be any different for super-heroes?”

  A sense of relief hits me out of nowhere. That’s actually true, for the police and for super-heroes — for the Quantums at the very least. They’ve never been targeted for revenge by anyone they’ve tangled with. In fact, now that I think about it, I can’t recall ever hearing about any super-hero with a public identity getting ambushed in their daily lives. Maybe I’m worrying over nothing.

  And how many times have I thought that? And how many times have I been wrong?

  Guh. Stop thinking, Sara. You’re not very good at it.

  Bo and Ty gently grill me about Meg. They don’t ask anything especially probing, thank God, and by the end of it, Ty convinces Bo that Meg — a public lesbian in addition to a public super-hero — might make a good guest speaker at one of our LGBTQ group meetings.

  Bo and Ty are long gone by the time Matt and Stuart arrive to pick us up. We still have a couple of hours to kill, and Stuart is complaining he’s hungry — what a shock — so we head over to the Carnivore’s Cave for dinner.

  “Matt? How many cases have there been of super-heroes with public identities getting attacked by bad guys they’ve put away?” I ask.

  Matt freezes in mid-bite. He takes his burger out of his mouth and says, curiously, “Where’s this coming from?” I tell him about my revelation. “I can think of a few. I remember a super-hero in...Denver? Boulder? Somewhere in Colorado. Guy named Mile High...”

  “Which would make it Denver because Denver is the Mile-High City,” Missy interjects, “but continue.”

  “Mile High had a public identity. He took down a super-villain called the Virago. She sat in prison for three years, got out, and later that same day showed up at Mile High’s apartment looking for revenge.”

  Matt takes a bite of his burger, chews, swallows, goes back for more.

  “And? Don’t leave us hanging, dude,” Stuart says.

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. Mile High knocked her out and she wound up back in prison.”

  “That was anti-climactic,” I say, but it supports my forming theory that having a public identity isn’t basically painting a bright red target on our backs — says the girl who was once stalked by a serial killer.

  Grgh! Dammit, commit to a line of reasoning already!

  “What was that noise about?” Matt says.

  “This is driving me crazy,” I say. “I thought we made the right call to go public with our families. I really believed that. Now I don’t know. Sometimes I think we did and everything will be all right, sometimes I feel like it’s all falling apart — and if it does fall apart, it’ll be my fault.”

  Matt sighs and sets his burger down. “Sara, you didn’t have a choice. None of us did, and I’m not talking about Christina threatening to out us. We lost control the minute Carrie disappeared. We’re not blaming you. Honestly? I’m more pissed at Carrie than anyone else.”

  “What did Carrie do?”

  “Seriously? She abandoned us.”

  “For real,” Stuart says. “I get there were whatchacallit...”

  “Extenuating circumstances,” Matt offers.

  “Yeah, those, but come on. This is Carrie. She could’ve found a better way to do this than by up and bailing on us.”

  “It’s like she never bothered to think about what leaving would do to everyone she left behind,” Missy says. “It’s like she didn’t care about us at all.”

  “Exactly. Don’t get me wrong, I love her and I’m worried about her and I want her to come back,” Matt says, “but let’s be honest: good reasons or not, she screwed us over.”

  “She didn’t mean to,” I say.

  “Yeah, well. Happened anyway.” Matt glances at his phone. “Let’s finish up. It’s almost time to go get oriented.”

  THIRTEEN

  After an awkward round of quick-changing into our uniforms in the back of Matt’s car, we head to the police station and report in for our orientation. A dispatcher leads us to the briefing room in the back of the station. Concorde is there waiting for us.

  “Evening, everyone,” he says. “The chief will be here soon. As you can imagine, he has a million things on his plate so let’s help him get through this quickly. This is going to be a crash course in police work and believe me, we might play in the same very general ballpark as the police but our jobs are completely different sports, so you’ll need to pay close attention.”

  “Got it,” Matt says.

  “If you have any questions for me, now would be a great time to ask them.”

  “I do,” I say, “but not about any of this.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I, um...I guess it’s not a question so much as I need — we need some reassurance,” I say before hitting Concorde with everything that’s happened since Friday. “We’re starting to question whether we did the right thing after all.”

  Concorde folds his arms, sighs, nods. “No, I understand. You were backed into a corner. It’s natural you’d have second thoughts.” He pauses. “Truth is, we’ve been having some second thoughts as well.”

  “You mean the Protectorate?” Matt says.

  “Second thoughts about what?” I say. “About us telling our families?”

  “No, about keeping our own secret identities,” Concorde says. He sits on the edge of a chair/desk combination like the ones we use at school, complete with that stupid lumbar support curve. Hate that thing. “After the meeting Saturday I went out for drinks with Mindforce, Nina, Astrid, and Catherine, and we got to talking about the Squad going...well, semi-public, and that got us wondering why any of us hang on to our secret identities.”

  “And?”


  “I wouldn’t say we came to a consensus about it, but we did seriously question whether there was any point to living two separate lives. Astrid and Catherine have never had secret identities and it hasn’t been an issue for them. Same goes for the Quentins and they’re even more exposed. Me?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s not as if I have any family I need to protect, and most of my friends are in the life.”

  That was a very thoughtful non answer you gave me there, boss. Thanks for the input.

  Chief Bronson enters and mumbles a weary greeting. He’s a tall man, taller than anyone else in the room, and has the shoulders of a linebacker. A severe crew cut tops his boxy head. His barber must use a T-square and a level to get his hair that precise.

  “Best behavior, people,” Matt says in an unconscious impression of Concorde.

  Best behavior, people? Stuart mouths at me. Don’t look at me; I don’t know where that came from either.

  “Have a seat,” Chief Bronson says. I sit and instinctively fold my hands atop the desk like a good little student. “I want you to know I appreciate your willingness to lend us a hand. A few of my people are back on the roster but we’re still operating at less than half capacity. Normally I have six officers on during peak hours and three during third shift. We’re currently running three and two, and that much is dependent on officer availability. Some of our neighbors have been kind enough to help us fill in shifts here and there but it’s mostly on us, and we are running ourselves ragged.”

  He pauses for questions, comments, criticisms. Hearing none...

  “Let me be clear, I do not want any of you acting as police officers,” he continues. “What we do and what you do are worlds apart. There are men and women in this department who’ve been here for years and, until last week, had never pulled their service weapon in the line of duty much less discharged it. We do not shoot first and ask questions later. We are trained in de-escalation. Do you know what that means?”

  “That you talk to suspects to defuse situations,” Matt says. “You only use physical force to subdue suspects when all efforts to resolve a confrontation through verbal means fail.”