Villainous (3 page)

It was easier just to go to summer school.

He wasn’t worried. He knew that if he knuckled down and studied, he would pass with no problem. If he could finally focus on his studies instead of sneaking out every night to battle monsters, he might even earn an A.

“I threw a bagel with cream cheese in there—on the house,” said Mr. Lemon, reappearing with a small white lunch sack. “A jelly doughnut is no kind of breakfast for a growing young man.”

“Thanks, Mr. Lemon,” said Daniel as he fished a couple of wadded-up dollar bills out of his shorts pocket to pay for the doughnut and juice. “And, uh, nice suit.”

Mr. Lemon chuckled. “Oh, this ridiculous thing. Mrs. Lemon’s idea, you know. Whole town’s got the fever. Now if we could just get a photo of the chief eating a Lemon’s doughnut! That would be the ticket!”

Mr. Madison, the floating fire chief, was the town’s star resident. His smiling face graced travel brochures and billboards everywhere, and lucky tourists might catch a glimpse of his silhouette high in the sky, fireman’s helmet and rubber boots and all.

“If I see him,” said Daniel, his mouth full of jelly-filled pastry, “I’ll tell him to stop by!”

The new school, built along the slopes of Mount Noble, was called the Noble Academy for the Gifted, but its title was a carefully crafted understatement. Its students weren’t simply gifted; they were Supers.

The academy was the world’s first boarding school for superpowered children, located right here in Noble’s Green. In theory, it was a terrific idea. Staff the school with superpowered adults who could teach the kids to control their abilities, to use them to make a positive contribution to society. The advertising campaign was slick and seductive,
with posters of beautiful children flying, like Icarus, toward the sun. Never mind, thought Daniel, that Icarus had flown so close that his wings had melted. That part of the story seemed lost on some people.

The best thing about the academy was that classes had already begun. Parents wanted help dealing with the hormonal daughter who could break every window in the neighborhood when she screamed, or the kindergartner who could make it snow over the toilet. Parents were desperate.

So, in effect, the academy was a combination of sleep-away camp and summer school for the Supers. Only their summer school was being held atop a mountain, like Olympus, while Daniel’s was in a basement.

Being an ordinary fourteen-year-old, Daniel had a more traditional summer school experience. The middle school didn’t bother to open up the entire building for the summer students, so “repeat” American history was held in room 207 in the lowest level, which during the regular year was used for biology. Inside, a human skeleton hung on a stand beneath the flickering fluorescent lights, and on a shelf behind the teacher’s desk were rows of
things floating in jars
. All in all, the dangling skeleton and bloated, unrecognizable specimens made for a rather appropriate setting to kick off this new experience. All Daniel needed now was a black-hooded executioner to ask him for any last requests.

At that moment, sitting in that dungeon classroom, just
when Daniel’s heart had sunk to its lowest, he felt someone flick him on the back of the head. Hard.

He turned around in his seat and found himself looking at an Asian American girl with straight black bangs cut close to her dark, almost black eyes. She had folded her arms across her chest, partially obscuring a T-shirt that read, in faded letters,
IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU
.

“Hey,” said Mollie Lee, grinning.

“W-what …?” stammered Daniel, rubbing the back of his head. He looked around her desk for the guilty weapon. It felt like she’d whacked him with a ruler.

“What are you doing here?” he tried again. Although he was glad to see a friendly face, her unexpected appearance threw him off. She often did that to people, using her super-speed to surprise them. Sometimes to hit them if she felt the occasion warranted. To most of the world, Mollie Lee passed by as a breeze and blur. And occasionally a whack.

“History,” she answered, shrugging. “But I’m surprised to see you here. I thought you were, like, Rohan’s brainiac twin or something.”

“I’m not a brainiac …,” started Daniel. “But I fell behind last year. We had other things on our minds, you know.”

Mollie nodded. “I had trouble last year too, and it’s getting worse. I think I’m getting faster.”

“Wow,” said Daniel. He could hardly imagine Mollie being any faster than she already was. “Well, that’s great, isn’t it?”

“Except that I’m having trouble focusing on stuff for
very long. Teachers start talking and I just want them to hurry up already, and who can sit still and read a book​I​mean​what’s​the​use​of​all​this …?”

As Mollie talked faster and faster, her words became impossible to understand. Several of the nearby students looked up at the intercom, trying to pinpoint the source of the sudden buzzing in the room.

“Mollie! Slow down!” Daniel whispered.

Mollie stopped talking and gave Daniel a depressed sigh. She rubbed at her eyes with the palms of her hands.

“You see?” she said. “These days it takes everything I’ve got to not go into hyperdrive all the time. I don’t have any energy left for American history.”

“How were your other grades?”

“Not terrible,” said Mollie. “Algebra and chemistry I can get and then move on, you know? At my own pace. I don’t have to suffer through these boring lectures.”

Daniel thought about this. He’d known that his friends were getting more powerful as they got older, but this was the first suggestion he’d had that this might not be an altogether positive thing. More power might be more of a curse than a blessing, especially when you were Mollie Lee and the world already moved in slow motion around you.

“When I asked what you were doing here,” said Daniel, “I meant what are you doing
here
—the middle school? Don’t you want to go to the academy with the rest of the Supers? If you can fly, who there’s going to care about what you got in history?”

Mollie flipped open her textbook and began paging through it, studiously avoiding Daniel’s eyes.

“I’m not going,” she said finally.

“What? Why?”

Mollie stopped fidgeting with her book.

“We took a vote,” said Mollie. “Rohan, Eric, Michael, and I. It was unanimous. We’re not signing up for the academy.”

Daniel was dumbstruck. Why not? What about the shining towers, the mountain air?

Mollie read the look of bafflement on his face correctly.

“I think it’s creepy,” she said. “You see those ridiculous posters?”

“Well, I admit they
are
kind of over-the-top. But aren’t you curious about it?”

Mollie shook her head. “Nope. What are they going to teach me about my powers that I don’t already know? I’ll bet I know more about flying than any of their stupid faculty.”

That was true, but Daniel had to wonder if someone up there might be able to help Mollie with her speed problem. Power-wise, none of the adults would be able to come close to Mollie or Eric. Most of the adults had been without full powers for decades, and when they finally returned, they were weaker than before. That’s why they’d ended up with a floating fire chief rather than a flying one.

“I don’t think it’s a powers contest,” said Daniel. “That’s not the point of the school.”

“You sure?” asked Mollie. “How do you know?”

“Well,” said Daniel, hesitating. “The posters, I guess.”

“See? Nobody knows anything about that place. It’s all
Hey, are you having trouble getting your super-kid to clean up his room? Well, then, ship him off to us and you won’t have to worry about it for the next seven years!
”

“Yeah, I guess the whole boarding school thing is kinda … British.”

“Kinda.”

“And Eric and Rohan feel the same way you do?”

Mollie nodded. “Michael too. They can take their super-school and shove it. I don’t want to be sent off to a whole different school just so ordinary people can feel comfortable around me again.”

Daniel cringed at the word
ordinary
, and Mollie, to his surprise, seemed to notice.

“You know I didn’t mean—” she began.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Daniel, waving it away. By now, you would’ve thought he’d be used to it. “But I still think the academy’s probably a good thing for a lot of kids. Most of them just got their powers back after years of going without, and they’re having to learn how to use them all over again. And I’ve heard that there are even more who are developing powers for the very first time.”

“I know. It’s like, with the Shroud gone, everyone’s suddenly a Super.”

The Shroud
. Just the mention of their old enemy made
Daniel’s mouth go dry. For generations, the creature known as the Shroud had preyed upon the super-children of Noble’s Green, stealing their powers and their memories. But all that had changed when Daniel revealed the Shroud’s real identity to be old Herman Plunkett, the town’s billionaire son. Powerless and defeated, Herman was now safely tucked away up at the Mountain View Home, hopefully until the end of his days.

“Mollie?”

“Hmm?”

“You guys … you’re not doing this … I mean, you’re not all doing this so that I won’t be alone next year in school, are you?”

Mollie snorted as if he’d just claimed that the earth really was flat. “Keep dreaming!”

But when she said it, she didn’t—or couldn’t—look him in the eye.

That was the end of their conversation since a hush fell over the class as their new history teacher entered the room. He wrote his name on the board—
Mr. Smiley
. Daniel immediately picked up on the irony of the man’s name, because one look told him that Smiley was as sour-faced a person as he had ever seen. His face looked built in such a way as to make it impossible to crack a smile. He was obviously even less happy to be here than his students were.

“So,” Daniel whispered before turning back around in his seat to face their new teacher. “The original Supers of Noble’s Green together again, that it?”

“You bet your butt,” she whispered back.

And at that moment, Daniel’s mood brightened—despite the grim classroom, and Mr.
Frowny
at the board, and the academy, and the sheer cosmic unfairness of school in the summertime. Because now he wouldn’t be alone after all. Not yet anyway. He’d have Mollie, at least, to keep him company for a while longer.

“Mollie,” Daniel whispered again over his shoulder. “I’m glad.”

She didn’t answer this time, but Daniel knew Mollie was smiling. He could feel it. It tingled, like a warm breath on the back of his neck.

Summers usually had a way of flying past, as one sunburned day blended into the next, and by the time school rolled around, an entire season had passed in a montage of beaches, picnics, and video games. Unless you happened to be trapped in Smiley’s basement, that is. That classroom was the place where time slowed to a crawl and fun went to die.

Daniel had never been more thankful for Mollie than he was on those long days in summer school, and this included the many times she’d saved his behind. He could have handled getting beaten up by super-bullies, or left at the mercy of the Shroud, but enduring a summer alone in Smiley’s basement
was unthinkable. Since this history class was the only thing keeping them from repeating the eighth grade, Daniel and Mollie did try to keep their goofing off to a minimum. But Daniel finally got to see up close just how much of a struggle this was for Mollie. He’d always known that Mollie had trouble focusing on one thing for very long, and that she was super-impatient as well as super-fast, but Smiley’s droning history lectures seemed especially difficult for her to follow. She missed the most important details because five minutes into a lesson she was already flitting through her book, rifling through the pages, or doodling pictures of Smiley with buckteeth and donkey ears with one hand while flicking Daniel on the back of the head with the other.

On one Saturday morning Daniel tried to explain all this to his father while helping him with some home repair and improvement, which in Daniel’s house meant he got to hold the tools while his father did all the work. Even so, his dad listened patiently as Daniel laid out the tortures that awaited him every morning in Smiley’s classroom, and his fears that Mollie wouldn’t pass.

“Sounds like a form of attention deficit disorder,” Daniel’s father said as he straddled the roof with his legs and swung a hammer in one hand. Daniel’s job was to sit in the open window of his attic bedroom and supply the requested tools. His father wouldn’t let him come all the way out. He said it was too high up to be safe.

Daniel looked at the distant clouds in the sky, where he’d
flown with Eric countless times before, and thought,
Dad, if you only knew
.

“Has she been tested?” his father asked. “I mean, I know she’s got those … powers of hers.”

It was funny—the Blackout Event was half a year old and adults like Daniel’s parents still had trouble even saying the word
powers
. They’d spent most of their lives telling their kids that they couldn’t grow up to be superheroes, and that monsters weren’t waiting for them in the dark. The world now knew that they’d been wrong on the first count, and having fought the Shroud, Daniel knew they’d also been wrong on the second.

“She thinks the powers are the problem,” said Daniel. “It’s getting harder and harder for her to sit still long enough to concentrate. And then sometimes she just crashes, like she’s burned up all her fuel too fast and can’t keep her eyes open.”

“Well, if this teacher of yours isn’t helping her, maybe she could use a tutor,” said his dad.

“That’s an idea,” said Daniel. “But where would she get one?”

“Well, I was thinking— Ouch, darn it!” Daniel’s dad stuck his thumb in his mouth after trying to nail it into the roof.

“You should watch your language, Dad,” said Daniel.

“Yeah, and what made you such a smart aleck?” his father said, sucking his thumb.