Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (35 page)

She laughed, “Oh, so a
minor bit of revenge then?”

“
I know, I know, he
didn't do anything to me. I shouldn't be jealous.”

“
You don't have to wait
for your ability to blow them all out of the water Michael,” she
told him.

“
Right.” He was super
just the way he was: unable to shoot laser beams out of his eyes or
walk through cars or slide into computer systems or reverse gravity
or have a barbecue on the moon. Nothing. He couldn't even do
anything pointless, like command ants or shoot spaghetti from his
fingertips.

“
Just repeat after me,”
she said.

“
Don't do it,” he
warned her, but she steamrolled him anyway.

One second she was
Charlotte Sulszko, the girl of his dreams, the one friend he had in
the whole wide world. The next Michael was standing next to his
identical twin, dressed in exactly the same clothes, with exactly
the same five freckles on his nose and the same boring brown eyes
and hair. The same glasses perched on his nose. Everything was the
same, down to the last detail.

“
I'm super just the way
I am,” the other Michael said. Only this one said so in a mocking,
lisping voice.

“
Quit that,” he said,
but he couldn't help it. A smile crept over the corners of his
mouth. Their school had tried to make up a slogan and little
inspirational posters to make all of them feel good throughout the
rest of their school year, after everything that had happened.
Michael finished out seventh grade disliking everything about the
school, and making fun of whoever had thought up 'I'm super just
the way I am'.

“
I'm super just the way
I am,” Charlotte Michael said again.

Next, Michael was
standing not in front of himself, but in front of a large rugged
looking man in a raccoon skin hat. His leather coat was more
fringes than actual material, and he looked down at Michael from a
stern brow, over a well-kept beard.

“
I am super just the
way I am, so sayeth Mr. Springfield the force-field
man.”

“
Quit it,” he
laughed.

But she got on a roll.
She changed into Michael's mother and said it again, and then
changed into Michael's father, a hulking giant of a man with a
booming voice, and said it again. She changed into Michael's
grandfather, then Charlotte's mother, followed by Charlotte's twin
brothers. She started going through the teachers at their school,
LADCEMS.

“
The principal of the
Lincoln Area District Consolidated Elementary and Middle School
says you are super just the way you are!” Mr. Samuelson
said.

His vision was
beginning to swim with tears he was laughing so much, and his face
was starting to ache.

Charlotte turned into a
fat, balding man in thick plastic glasses and a crooked smile. He
started to open his mouth, but frowned. Michael had flung himself
backwards onto his butt. It was a reflex. He was starting to
scuttle backwards like a crab when Charlotte
reappeared.

“
I'm so sorry Michael,”
she said, “I got carried away.”

He slumped to the grass
and stared up at the blue, blue sky and tried to get his breathing
under control. Charlotte didn't have any problem with seeing Mr.
Lansing, and she'd faced him head on. More than that, he'd shot
her. Michael didn't know why that face should affect him like that.
The fear was still coursing through him, making his arms and legs
tremble with weakness. She hadn't seen him in February with his
face dripping down his face like a candle. He
shuddered.

She sat down beside him
and ran her fingers through the grass.

“
Not your fault,” he
said at last.

“
I wasn't
thinking.”

“
It's okay,” he
said.

“
Forgive
me?”

“
Of course I forgive
you,” he said.

They sat in silence for
some time. After a while, she lay back on the grass too. She didn't
like to crush the grass, it was kind of her thing about hurting or
killing anything alive, but this time it seemed too perfect. The
leaves on all the trees weren't ready to turn yet, but in the last
light of day they were all bathed in gold. A faint breeze made all
the leaves glitter.

“
I want to give you a
gift,” she told him.

“
What? You don't need
to do anything like that.”

“
I know. But I want to
get it for you all the same. What do you want?”

This was strange.
Usually Charlotte was so creative she would just make him
something, like a playlist of her favorite songs for the month or a
little painting of him exploding with superheroic firepower.
Somehow she knew what he wanted, and she gave him just
that.

“
I don't know,” he
said. “A food fight in the cafeteria?”

She laughed. Then she
gave it to him.

Michael had never
before been out of Lincolnshire, a little town of about five
thousand people in the backwoods of the U.S. In a lot of ways this
was exactly the same thing as Lincolnshire anyhow. A purple
mountain majesty sat in the east, where it made the sunrises
perfect. The lake was situated to the west, and behind it some
foothills, so the sun burnished the whole place gold and orange
each night. You could believe the place was like the Lincolnshire
golf course: specifically engineered to be beautiful and easy and
perfect by someone who studied these sorts of
things.

Twin clusters of cabins
were situated just north and south of the main path leading from
the lake over to the lodge. They were quaint little log-cabin style
things with enough room for eight kids on bunks, plus one
counselor’s bed. North of the path sat the boys cabins, and the
girls just a hundred meters or so down south.

This was Michael
Washington’s prison cell for the next few days, before he
officially got to be a resident of Hell itself. After camp, he’d
have about two weeks before he started the eighth grade at Marcus
C. Patterson High School Preparatory Building. Two weeks before he
would be forced to sit through classes with his Active,
super-powered classmates. Two weeks of freedom, until the invisible
girl would figure out his locker combination and fill his locker
with shaving cream, or someone would shoot hyper fast spitwads at
him while the teachers’ backs were turned. Two weeks until he was
the only non-super one in all of the eighth grade.

Yeah, he knew it wasn’t
true. Maybe eighty percent of the eighth grade hadn’t gone Active,
and most weren’t ever going to do so. Still, it didn’t give Michael
any solace. His dad was the head of the world’s only superhero
team, the Alphas, and the rest of his classmates already hated him
for electrocuting all of them this last winter. If they didn’t hate
him for that, they probably hated him for the medal of honor he’d
gotten for ‘saving the city’ even though the only thing he’d done
was heave a couple of books at the bad guy, and give him a bunch of
sarcastic jabs. If they didn’t hate him for either of those, they
were afraid of him because he’d gone psycho in fifth grade, and
had, at one point, been given the power to reverse gravity, which
had nearly gotten everybody squashed like bugs on the gym
floor.

The adults were experts
at kidding themselves, sure. They might think Michael was something
extraordinary, but all they’d done was tattoo a giant ‘kick me’
sign on the back of Michael’s head in neon orange letters. Kids
knew. They knew when you were the sucker, licking the teachers’
boots. Whether you were after an A, or special favors for your
dorky chess club or whatever, it was all the same. Why, if he
didn’t deserve any of this extra attention or praise, was he the
only kid at Camp Super Kid without any super?

He entered the lodge
and sat with the other kids from his cabin.

There were seven of
them: Matt and Brian and Wally and Avery, Jason, Micky (real name
Mikhail) and Greg, who everybody called Dorf. Michael wasn’t
friends with any of them. He knew them or knew of them, except for
Micky who’d just been shipped in from Belarus or Abkhazia or
someplace just outside Russia, and Avery who talked with a British
accent. They would have been just normal kids, except they’d gone
Active. His grandfather had explained everything, but Michael
wasn’t listening because he knew most of it anyway. When you went
Active, it was like a metamorphosis. Tadpoles lost tails and gained
legs as they became frogs, and ugly fuzzy caterpillars holed up in
cocoons just long enough to transform into beautiful butterflies.
So even if you were freckly and pimple-studded and one of your eyes
was sort of wonky, and everybody called you buckey or snaggletooth,
going Active changed all that.

Around him were
perfectly sculpted cheekbones and clear complexions and broad
shoulders, and not a pair of skinny hips in sight. Everybody looked
like they were ready to put on a singlet and go figure skating in
the Olympics. Or flip around on the rings or
whatever.

Only Dorf looked a
little off, and while Michael wondered why, he would never ask.
Michael avoided speaking at Camp Whatchamacallit. He did not sing
songs around a campfire, do cute skits, or join in the reindeer
games. His only saving grace was Charlotte.

“
Hey Mikey,” Matt said,
ruffling his hair.

“
It’s the Mikester,”
Wally said. “The Mikeroo. Mike-man. Mikemeister. Mikrophonic.”
Wally was the other exception to the Active-perfect spectrum. Where
the others were lean and wiry, Wally looked like somebody carved
him out of a mountain. He took up half a bench around the big
square lodge tables.

“
Shut up you guys,”
Michael said gruffly, not looking at them. Mere mortals did not
look on the faces of the gods. Michael knew his Greek and Roman
myths pretty well, and what they always told you was this: when the
gods get the slightest bit upset, it’s the normal people who end up
squashed. And the lodge was like a junior Mount Olympus. Like, for
instance, the way Brian Yamagatsu stared right through Michael,
eyes fixed on his face like he was trying to figure out which piece
to carve off and eat.

“
Oh no!” Wally shouted,
and dove to the side. The others laughed. He came up. “Oh...didn't
shoot anything, did he? Didn't try to fry my brain or anything?
Michael, you've lost your touch.”

Michael's scowl
deepened. He probably looked like a toad.

“
Lighten up Mikey,”
Avery said in his accent. “We’re just joshing you. Ain’t that right
mates?”

“
Too roight,” several
of them agreed. Michael felt his hopes rise a
little.

“
Wanted to invite you
out, in fact,” Avery went on.

“
To a
party.”

“
You…but you can’t…”
They weren’t allowed out of the cabins after dark. There would be a
counselor there to make sure they stayed put and fell
asleep.

They laughed. “Listen
to this one,” Avery said. “Michael, we’re Actives. We do whatever
it is we like.”

“
Whatevah we loike,”
Wally echoed.

“
You sound like a
bloody Brummy with that atrocious accent of yours mate,” Avery
said, and then turned back to Michael. “So we’re sneaking out.
Dorf, my fine fellow, will have us covered.”

Dorf usually looked a
bit like a lion, with his long blonde hair fanned out in every
direction. Plus, he wasn’t normally a small kid. Right now he
looked positively scrawny. Maybe his power was looking like a
refugee.

“
So Mikey, I ask you
this mate: you want in?”

“
I…I don’t know,” he
said. His mother and father had been very clear on what they
expected of him while he was away at camp.

“
Sure you do,” Avery
told him.

“
Only one catch,” Jason
said. Michael just looked at him. “You gotta be
Active.”

“
Oh now, be nice to the
poor boy,” Matt said.

“
I was bein’ nice,”
Jason said. “He’s got, what, eight or ten hours to go and
activate.”

“
Clearly your ability
was not mental math, Mr. Bryzynski,” Avery said.

“
Huh?”

“
Mr. Washington here
saved the whole town. He did,” Matt said. Michael didn’t know why
Matt was trying to be nice to him now, he’d been one of the ones
bullying Michael all through fifth grade with another of the
world-class jerks. Michael knew when he was being made fun
of.

“
How super,” Wally
laughed.

“
A shame I wasn’t here
to watch that,” Avery said.

“
Just don’t douse us in
purple foam again, Mikey!” Wally hooted, slapping his enormous
knee.