Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (2 page)

He loved it. He was back in four days to get
the first of Lily's recommendations, a late twentieth century
masterpiece called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. And Harry
didn't take no guff from no Slytherin.

There were Stephen King books, where the
bullies got eaten by giant space spiders, and Watership Down, where
the rabbits banded together to fight the bullies. There were
Fablehaven tales, where the kids had to spend their time in a
magical reserve for faeries and satyrs and dragons and stuff. Five
in that series. He devoured page after page on his little e-reader,
clicking the thing furiously at night after his parents told him it
was lights out. He went through Percy Jackson, who could control
water just by thinking real hard (five books there), and His Dark
Materials, where the kids had shapeshifting Daemons that could
attack and spy and stuff. Three long books. There were four kids
who went through their uncle's wardrobe and came out in a place
that was always winter. Seven books. Michael was unstoppable. The
librarian would just roll her eyes whenever he walked in, to plug
in his e-reader and get something else loaded up.

“What is it today?” he'd ask.

And she'd always say it was a surprise, but
he would like it. In this one, the unlucky kid teamed up with a
magical squirrel, a talking toothpick and a girl who could freeze
people solid.

“Leven Thumps,” he would say quietly, as he
started reading on the way home. “Stupid name.” But then he
wouldn't be able to stop clicking the next page button until after
midnight.

This was how fifth grade went.

Michael was too young to know or be bothered
by how lonely he was. He just watched movies with his mom, and dad
when he was around, read comic books, and devoured novel after
novel.

In June, one of his former friends stopped
him in the hall. Billy and a whole ton of others had given up on
him after that
poink
.

“Hey Michael,” he said. His face was already
flaming scarlet, and he was looking around to see if anybody
noticed him talking to the class head case.

“Yeah?”

“Trent's going over to Patterson for eighth
grade. Just thought you should know.”

Michael was confused at first. He'd grown so
used to paying Trent his money every week (and later twice a week)
that it was just a fact of life. He never thought about Trent
anymore, or the gut punches Trent threw in just for the fun of it,
or the way none of the other kids looked at him. He was already far
away.

The last day of school hit, and so did Trent.
Michael was enjoying the exploits of a kid who was supposed to be a
Warrior but who had a Wizard stone in his chest when he found
himself on the ground. He dimly heard the
poink!
Of the
rubber ball smashing into his face, and he dimly felt the tears. It
was his nose.

“Oh man, that's my bad. My bad.” but that
voice didn't sound apologetic. Through the stars flashing around
his vision, Michael saw Trent and Davey hover into view.

“Michael Washington!” Trent said. “Would you
look at this. Lucky for me I had a chance to come talk to you
before he finished out.”

“Lucky!” Davey giggled. He almost sounded
like a girl. “Lucky!”

“Listen bud, I got to thank you for all the
money. But I'm leaving today, so you're gonna have to give me
another twenty. Nothing personal you know, just a leaving fee.
Little...what did old man Schektor say that word was?
Ah...memorabilia. That's it.”

“A parting gift!” Davey was in hysterics.
Michael realized they were standing just next to his fallen
e-reader. He couldn't see it well enough. Was it broken?

“But listen bud, I'm leaving Davey here to
watch out for you next year. He got held back, see. You just keep
up with the payments, and Davey's gonna see they get to me. Got it?
Got it? Hey, Washington, you listening to me? What the...oh,
this?”

He stooped down and picked up the
e-reader.

“What is this...the Warrior Heir. Think
you're some sort of warrior, is that it?”

Davey doubled over, and Michael felt that
unnatural silence flow over the playground, just like on the first
day.

“Don't...don't do anything...that's not
mine.”

“It sure isn’t,” Trent told him. “Anything
you have belongs to me.”

And he threw the e-reader down onto the
pavement. Just the sound of it sent red waves of anger shooting
down into his guts. Then Trent lifted his size ten way up high, and
when Michael reached for it, stomped both the e-reader and
Michael's hand.

He felt the glass crack under his palm, and
the shards started digging in. As Trent ground his heel down, the
bones started to creak and crack. The pain was explosive.

Then he was on his feet, and he felt Narnia
and Foo and Middle Earth all coursing up his arm, which was
swinging up to meet Trent's beaky nose. His bloody hand cracked
against Trent's face. He snarled like the golden monkey daemon and
only wished he had the sword of Gryffindor so he could hack Trent's
soul right apart.

The big seventh grader fell back, shielding
his face, yelling out.

“This kid is crazy! Geddimoffme!”

“You see my blood here! It's like battery
acid!” Punch after punch fell down, he had battle axes for hands,
just like Oin and Gloin and Thorin. If he couldn't put on a ring
and be invisible, then he was going to smash his way through the
problem. Dimly, he heard screams, but they were screams of triumph.
The other kids were cheering him on.

“What would Percy Jackson do, you son of a-”
He would have liked to finish the thought, but strong hands grabbed
him around the arms and yanked him up off the ground. He knew the
arms were a teacher's, just by the smell of aftershave.

Nobody was applauding him, or screaming his
name. He wasn't a hero to anybody. In those few seconds, Michael
had gone from pitied target to shunned, crazy outcast.

And that was how fifth grade ended, with him
going home to his grandfather and explaining that he'd broken the
e-reader and he would pay for it out of his paper route earnings.
Beating the tar out of Trent Millickie had slipped his mind in the
furious storm roiling in his head over the thing he enjoyed most in
the world.

He had been so looking forward to a summer of
reading and reading and reading that he was physically shivering by
the time he arrived at his grandfather's house.

The house looked like every other one on the
block, a tall and pointy thing that didn't seem as wide from the
outside as it actually was once you got inside. The sparkling
emerald grass, the blocky hedges and the slate gray, almost bluish
siding on the house only made it seem like a quaint, perfect
suburban gem.

Michael's grandfather, Harold Washington, was
seated where he always sat: at a rocking chair on his low porch,
slowly puffing on a pipe and poring over the news on his tablet. He
noticed Michael approaching and set the pipe down, tapped out some
sort of code on the tablet, and put it aside too.

He was a very old man, Michael knew that
much. Grandpa didn't have any of his own teeth, just the neat rows
of slightly coffee-stained dentures, and he had a little gizmo in
his ear (a hearing aid, and it was the only one Michael had ever
seen), and a whole bunch of liver spots. Grandpa never seemed to
have a bad word to say about anybody, and he was so old and sure of
himself that it seemed he didn't mind being alone all the time.

"Well hey there kiddo," he said. It took a
few more moments for Michael's condition to register. "Seems like
you're a bit late. What brings...what happened? Let's get a look at
that hand now."

Michael's chest was so constricted that he
was squeezing out tears when he tried to talk. Grandpa had to take
hold of him and murmur quietly to him that he was going to be fine,
that the world wasn't coming to an end.

In halting, shaky breaths, Michael got out
the story of his e-reader under Trent's boot, but didn't even
bother with the part about the fight. As far as he was concerned,
there wasn't anything else to fight about. The reader was broken
and school was over. Trent and Davey and school teachers had
disappeared into a sort of summer fog, where only Michael and his
thoughts and the few blocks around his house existed at all.

"Let me get this straightened out," Grandpa
said. "You paid this kid twenty bucks today?"

Michael nodded. Speaking was giving him all
sorts of trouble he didn't want to deal with, so he stuck with the
basics.

"And this ain't the first time. No, I can see
it ain't. You been payin him ever since you got that paper route,
haven't you?"

Michael nodded. The reproach and surprise in
Grandpa's voice had clenched the fist around his chest again. He
had never heard his grandfather sound angry. Ever. Then the tone
softened, and Grandpa put an arm on his shoulder. Michael's guts
didn't stop squirming. He couldn't get over the feeling that he'd
somehow let his grandfather down.

"You got that paper route just so you could
pay him, huh?" When he nodded again, Grandpa said, "We'll just see
about that. He's that little Millickie kid ain't he? Yeah. You go
on inside and grab yourself a root beer."

Michael didn't know what Grandpa was up to,
but he saw the old man pick up the tablet and make a complex set of
touches to the screen before he headed inside and found the IBC in
the fridge. When he returned, Grandpa wasn't reading the news on
the tablet, he was talking into it.

"...he's been payin this bully twenty bucks
every week or so for the whole school year. That sort of nonsense
can't stand here. Specially not here. And this Millickie kid busted
up library property. Well let me tell you, that snot had no idea
who he was messing with."

"Grandpa no!" Michael blurted.

"Just have some root beer there, chief,"
Grandpa told him. "This fiasco's gonna be sorted out before you can
get to the end of the bottle, mark me."

Sudden terror flashed through Michael. He
couldn't just let Grandpa take care of these things for him. It
wasn't that Trent and his goon squad were going to beat him up
every day. He could take that. It was the insults he wouldn't be
able to bear. The humiliation was already spreading through him, up
his ears and over his cheeks. Grandpa's boy. Gramp's little baby
boy, couldn't handle himself.

Worse than that, he didn't want Trent's
little posse showing up at Grandpa's house, ever. He didn't want
them toilet papering it, he didn't want them to throw rocks at it.
Trent and his gang would think those sorts of things were just
hilarious. He couldn't believe anyone would ever hurt his Grandpa,
but he could believe Trent's gang would harass Grandpa. He'd seen a
few movies where stupid kids did stupid stuff like that.

"Please Grampa, don't," he said. Something in
his tone must have struck Grandpa the right way, because he put the
tablet on hold and looked up.

"What's the matter chief?"

"I...I hit Trent today. After he...and my
hand...he had to go to the hospital."

A couple of wheezy laughs escaped Grandpa.
"That so?"

Relief flooded through his body, and Michael
realized that he wasn't in trouble after all. Grandpa wasn't
disappointed in him, he was furious with Trent. Michael broke into
a huge smile. "I think I broke his nose."

"And you don't want your money back out of
this turd?"

Trent was a turd, and Michael had the sudden
idea that Grandpa could, and would, flush him. He giggled, then
stopped. "No...I can take care of it."

After all, school was out and Trent was lost
in the not-from-his neighborhood mist that enveloped everyone but a
few kids he could have called friend until the beginning of fifth
grade. Only now, he had to deliver his papers. And at the end of
that route was Lily. At the end of that discussion with Lily,
however terribly it was going to go, was the ache in his chest. She
would never entrust him with another e-reader after this. But it
had to be done, just like the papers had to go in the mailboxes and
screen doors of the people who still wanted things printed on
old-fashioned, get-ink-all-over-your-fingers type newsprint.

He liked the paper route basically because he
could be alive in any little universe he wanted to. Mostly these
days he was walking from place to place with his nose buried in the
e-reader, clicking page after page as he strolled up in his silly
white bag with the bright orange, swerve-to-avoid-me trim, which
was bigger than he was.

When he didn't want to read, he could always
just have phantom conversations with whoever he chose to, like
Trent, or Lily, or his mom or dad. This was just as well, since he
couldn't actually talk to any of them, least of all his dad. Dad
was always off on some sort of business trip thing, something that
took him all over the world and left him home several days a
month.

As his route neared the end, and he was
coming up on the Van Buren light, Michael reviewed how the
conversation with Lily was going to go. He knew it was going to
start with her face all twisted up in horror, then a look of fury,
and it would end with her hands on her hips.

“Oh Michael,” she would breathe, and not in
the way he wanted her to. He didn’t know how he wanted her to say
it, and didn’t even know that he wanted her to say his name in a
certain way. But the way it played out in his mind was a big sigh
of disappointment.

“I'm really sorry...” and his shoes were
fascinating. The concrete beneath his feet was fascinating, with
the irregular lumps of rock forever sunk into it like quicksand.
Like that part in Jumanji.

“Sorry won't put the screen back in the
e-reader,” she would say, and maybe add a 'buster' on there. She
seemed like the sort of lady who wanted to swear but always stopped
herself because it wasn't proper, and it definitely wasn't proper
in front of an almost sixth grader.