The Ables Read online

  I swear to God Bentley was the smartest person I ever knew.

  Chapter 11: The Hearing

  We spent the better part of an hour trying to make Bentley’s theory a reality. Henry tried with all his might to turn his powers around and make them work the opposite direction, but nothing happened. But we were all convinced it was possible. Bentley made too much sense. His hypothesis was too sound.

  I had protested at first, concerned that my blindness meant that I couldn’t see images whatsoever, even ones from Henry’s brain. But Bentley didn’t think blindness worked like that. “Your brain’s still capable of processing images,” he explained, “but you just don’t have any receivers. Your eyes don’t work. You can’t take in the signal of an image. See, the eyes just send what they capture to the brain for processing, and that’s where the image is made. So even though you’re without vision, if Henry’s powers can serve as the signal carrier to your mind, you should be able to ‘see’ what he sees, so to speak.”

  So we tried, over and over again. But we never got anywhere. Nothing happened. And we had a hearing to rest up for, so we reluctantly went to bed.

  That night, somewhat predictably, I dreamed about Henry sending me images from his eyes to my brain, and it was glorious. We were a well-oiled machine, chasing some bad guys through an alley. I saw whatever Henry saw and used those images to sharpen and strengthen my powers. Of course, it was just a dream, but I was throwing bodies against the wall and really flexing my superhero muscles.

  We stumbled through the Sallinger morning routine like zombies. We’d stayed up too late laughing and trying to perfect our abilities. There is a reason that parents don’t typically allow sleepovers on school nights, and we were finding that out firsthand. We were grumpy and tired. That feeling lasted well into the school day to the point that I began to have serious anxiety about our ability to focus and be alert for the hearing.

  At lunch I learned that Chad Burke had been expelled from school. Freddie had all the latest gossip about it—that kid was a good listener, and his mother was the secretary to a well-connected board member. “Chad’s father packed him up and shipped him off to Goodspeed.” I heard his inhaler, then a deep exhale, and then, “He’s going to live with his aunt and uncle. He was gone within twenty-four hours of the fight.”

  How about that?

  Instead of using his position of authority by pulling strings to get his son out of trouble, as I think we all expected, Mr. Burke had the opposite reaction. Embarrassed by his misbehaving son, who had a long history of troublemaking, he’d sent him somewhere out of sight and out of mind.

  I enjoyed hearing the details of Chad’s demise, I won’t lie. I didn’t feel even a little guilty about it. He’d twice singled me out for torment, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Served him right. I was glad he was no longer a threat.

  Donnie had returned to school Tuesday while I was home in bed recuperating. The guys had told him about what happened, though they couldn’t be sure he’d followed what they were telling him. They did say he got a bit agitated and restless afterwards. But he was his quiet, normal self by the time I returned.

  “So, how does it all work?” I asked Bentley. “I’ve never been to one of these.”

  “Me neither,” Bentley replied with a nervous laugh. “But from what I understand, it’s a pretty straightforward affair. The school board is made up of seven members, and they sit up front facing the rest of the room. They’ll ask us a bunch of questions, and we’ll respond, and then they’ll make a decision.”

  “You mean we don’t even get to give an opening statement or anything, like on those TV court shows?” Henry sounded alarmed.

  “No. They don’t have opening statements. Just the petition for reinstatement that we turned in two weeks ago. They’ve already met and discussed it, and the hearing is our chance to answer any questions they have.”

  “That’s messed up,” Henry declared, shoving a bite of food in his mouth.

  “It is,” Bentley agreed. “But it’s all we got. We have to work our arguments into our answers.”

  “And you’re going to do all the talking, right?” I was sure about one thing: I didn’t want to do the talking. Public speaking was not my thing. Bentley, on the other hand, was eloquent, mature, and articulate. Plus, he knew the rules and the laws on the subject—he’d been studying for days.

  “They can ask questions of anyone whose name is on the petition. That means me, you, Henry, James … any of us, even Donnie. Oh, and your dad.”

  My heart sank. “What?! You didn’t say anything about that!”

  “Relax, Phillip, you’ll be fine. He’s the adult we got to sign our initial petition, that’s all. We just have to all tell the truth and answer honestly, and we’ll be fine. I’m telling you that this is just a formality. If the school board denies our petition, we’ll file a lawsuit, and they aren’t going to want us to sue because that’s going to create a whole big mess and draw all kinds of attention to the matter. Believe me, this is going to be easy, guys. Besides, it’s not like there’s going to be some huge audience or anything. It’s a school board hearing. Our families will probably be the only people there besides us and the board members. Relax. Everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”

  ***

  For the first time since I’d met him, Bentley was wrong.

  There was an audience, and it was enormous. From our position in the front of the room, it sounded like there were three hundred people behind us. Henry said there were people standing all along the back wall because there weren’t any seats left. Our little hearing was of interest to practically the whole town, much to our surprise. I hadn’t dreamt that anyone aside from us would care about our quest for reinstatement. And yet, here they were.

  The acoustics told me the meeting room had a much taller ceiling than most rooms. But the added space wasn’t doing anything to help the temperature of the room. Hot to begin with, it had only gotten warmer with the collective body heat of the crowd.

  I had a hard time believing that the typical school board meeting involved this kind of turnout. I had no idea why they were so interested in our little hearing and was soon struck by a new thought. Are they here to support us or oppose us?

  “Could go either way,” Henry said, as though I’d actually spoken my thoughts aloud. I turned my head in his direction to offer a scolding about how un-cool it was to read minds without permission, but he quickly offered a humble apology. “Sorry, Phillip—nervous habit, I guess.”

  “Reading minds is your nervous habit? That’s what you do when you’re nervous?!” It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, because I did. It was just a strange thing to do when anxiety struck. Plus, I was a little jumpy.

  “Well, whenever I get too worked up about something, my powers sometimes kind of go haywire a bit. They have a mind of their own. I didn’t mean to do it, Phillip, honestly. It was an accident.” He sounded very contrite, and I decided he was probably telling the truth.

  That’s when I realized how strange it was to hear Henry so freaked out. Henry usually spoke from a sense of confidence and assurance, even when he was completely faking it. I thought it would be a good idea to try and calm him down a bit, if only so he wouldn’t make me more nervous. So, forgetting the pit in my own stomach, I offered my best encouragement. “Don’t sweat it, man. Everything’s going to be fine. There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s like Bentley said … the worst thing they can do—the worst possible outcome—is that they decide not to let us participate in the SuperSim. And they’ve already done that once, so … we won’t be any worse off than we are already, you know?”

  I’m not sure how I had evolved into the healer of the group. In all honesty, I never really belonged to any kind of peer group before, so maybe I was that way by nature and was only just now discovering it.

  But I wasn’t very good at it on this evening. I may have even made him feel worse. I felt him grip my arm, and he spoke in a crack
led whisper as though on the verge of choking up. “I know. But it’s too late, Phillip.” I could tell that he was quivering and shaking a bit, and I thought for a moment he was having a panic attack, though I confess I had no idea what that actually meant.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to gently prod for more of an explanation.

  “If they don’t let us compete … I don’t know what I’m going to do, because it’s too late. It’s too late, Phillip, and I couldn’t help it. I already got my hopes up!” His voice wavered a bit. It was a rare moment of transparency for a guy like Henry, who didn’t typically show much emotion.

  I didn’t begin to have the words to encourage him, though, so I opted for the truth. “I know, Henry. Me too.” I grabbed his shoulder and squeezed—the way my father did when he was trying to make me feel better or hammer home a life lesson. “Me too.”

  It felt hollow. The newly awakened healer in me couldn’t let it go at that, so I tried to tack on some kind of pick-me-up. “Besides, whatever happens … we have each other, right? We’re in this thing together, and we’re not going down without a fight, right?”

  Through his shivers, I heard Henry chuckling. “There you go again, Phillip, being all cheesy and stuff.”

  Then I laughed a bit. I had to admit, I was saying some pretty corny stuff.

  “Could you squeeze a few more clichés in there?” Henry continued, the laughter now beginning to replace his anxiety, at least momentarily. “Let’s see, we’ve got ‘we have each other,’ a ‘we’re in this thing together,’ and a ‘not going down without a fight.’ Good grief, Mr. Sallinger, I do believe that’s three different clichés in one—”

  Henry’s moment of levity was cut short with the sound of a gavel piercing the air, and I jumped in my chair. The wooden hammer sounded four times sharply and then was followed by a voice.

  “Uh, welcome everybody. This special meeting of the Freepoint School System’s Board will now come to order.” The voice was smooth and rich, with the deep twang of a Southern gentleman, and it belonged to Octavius Tucker—the school board’s president. He paused slightly before adding, “How’s everyone doing out there tonight?”

  Evidently, he preferred the hearings to be more casual and easygoing than we had been led to expect, and the audience seemed willing to go along with it. Many of them answered him out loud, each with their own variation on “good.”

  “That’s mighty nice to hear, and I’m glad you’re all in such good spirits.” President Tucker’s words were like molasses, slow and sugary. “Looking down the line here, I can see that all our board members are present and accounted for, so I guess we shall begin. Now … we have gathered here tonight to hear a petition to this board regarding the upcoming SuperSim simulation training exercise.” He spoke with the urgency of a tumbleweed. And while he was charming and obviously well-liked by the audience, there was something off about him to my ear. He sounded like a cross between a greasy car salesman and a kindly old preacher. He was probably a nice enough guy, but I wasn’t totally sure about his motives. “Are the petitioners present?”

  “They are, Mr. Tucker,” my father answered on our behalf. No student was permitted to petition the school board without an adult sponsor; otherwise, kids would be overrunning the board meetings with all kinds of ridiculous challenges about gum-chewing rules and the like.

  “And you might be …” Mr. Tucker said, implying that he expected my father to take it from there.

  “John Sallinger, sir. My son, Phillip, is one of the petitioners.”

  “Very good, then, Mr. Sallinger.” There was a bit of a pause, and I heard him shuffling some papers around. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to Thomas Sallinger, would you?”

  “He was my father, sir, yes,” Dad responded. It was weird hearing my grandfather called by his name. It shouldn’t have been; I had never met him. But Mom and Dad had always simply referred to him as “your grandfather” when they had talked about him, which had been rare.

  “Well, how ‘bout that,” the old man remarked, amused. “You know, I was a classmate of your father’s.”

  “Is that right?” My dad was fantastic in these types of situations. He could have a polite conversation with anyone, in any situation, at any time. He was a talker. “I didn’t know that,” he said. But he did know, because he’d told me so on the drive to the hearing. “Your grandfather was a classmate of the school board president, did you know that?” he’d asked. He was only lying to be polite by claiming ignorance.

  “Yeah, oh yeah. We had some pretty great adventures when we were in school, your father and I.” He seemed genuinely tickled. Another brief pause. “It was tragic what happened.”

  Dad said nothing.

  “But,” Mr. Tucker continued, “he was a great man, your pops. A great, great man.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he replied.

  “Now, let’s get back to the business at hand, shall we? Are the petitioners ready to give their opening statement?”

  Opening statement?

  The size of the crowd wasn’t the only miscalculation Bentley had made, as we quickly learned the hard way that the school board no longer followed the old by-laws to the letter. I felt sick to my stomach almost instantly.

  Opening statement?! We didn’t know there was an opening statement? Didn’t I ask Bentley specifically about this?

  My mind flew into action trying to wrestle up some quick solution to this new dilemma. What could we say? How should we begin? I could feel myself getting flush. I wondered if the others were freaking out as much as I was. Tiny beads of sweat began to form at the top of my forehead, and for a second I wondered if I was about to faint. Our best and only chance to gain reinstatement was going down in flames because we hadn’t bothered to come up with an opening statement. I silently screamed inside my thoughts—which I’m sure Henry heard.

  And then Bentley saved the day again. Like a white knight charging in from out of nowhere to vanquish our foe, Bentley answered Mr. Tucker with confidence.

  “Yes, sir. We are ready.”

  Wait … what?!

  You see, Bentley had trouble shutting his mind off. He had trouble sleeping, which was an affliction I was familiar with as of late. And when he couldn’t dream, he worked. He read and wrote and studied and created and invented, all just trying to occupy his overactive brain functions. The only problem he had with his powers, really, was that he couldn’t seem to turn them off when he needed to.

  And on a recent evening leading up to the hearing, as an exercise in formulating his arguments, Bentley had drafted an opening statement. He sat up late at night in his basement workshop and wrote one—several, actually—until he had perfected it. I just wish he’d told me about it before the hearing; he could have saved me a heart attack.

  I slumped back into my chair with a sigh so loud the court stenographer probably added it to the transcript. It was hardly the last time Bentley would save my bacon.

  He cleared his throat and then read a statement that surprised me with its eloquence. Words that were brand new to me but which had stewed in Bentley’s soul for days poured forth like some kind of poetry. “Ladies and gentlemen of the Freepoint School Board. My name is Bentley Crittendon. I and my fellow petitioners are students at Freepoint High School and members of the special education class. We’re each of us gifted with powers, just as nearly everyone in this room is. One of us can read minds. Another can grow several stories tall in an instant.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis as he said it. “One of us is telekinetic!”

  I don’t even think he was reading it; he had it memorized.

  “Yet each of us also has a disability. Blindness for some. Mobility issues for others, like me. But make no mistake: we are hindered only by our determination and bound only by imagination.” He sounded like a grown-up—like a really smart grown-up.

  “Now we have collectively been barred from participation in the SuperSim competition, despite our status as active studen
ts in the school and despite our supernatural abilities. Our teachers and our principal will tell you they have made this decision in the best interest of our own safety. And, to their credit, I believe them. I believe they want to protect us and keep us from harm and are doing so with the best of intentions. However, there is no mathematical evidence to support the theory that disabled heroes are more prone to injury in action.”

  That was news to me, but if Bentley was quoting it in this setting, then that meant it was true. He wasn’t just being dramatic. I bet he had the sources to back it up.

  “In point of fact, ladies and gentlemen of the board, we have even seen some interesting developments in our abilities when working together to overcome our physical disadvantages. I’m not sure any of us here tonight can truly know the limits of what we’re capable of together.”

  He was talking about the previous night and his suggestion that Henry should be able to send things into other peoples’ brains as well as receive things from them. I wasn’t sure why he said it since we actually hadn’t seen any interesting developments whatsoever in that regard. Is he just being argumentative, or are his convictions just that strong?

  “But the real truth—the real sad, hard truth—is that no matter what the intentions are, there is only one reason that we are not allowed to participate, and it’s the fact that we’re disabled.”

  He cleared his throat again and continued, gaining a bit of speed and volume as he came to the finish. “If I didn’t have ataxic cerebral palsy, I wouldn’t be in the special education class, and I would be free to compete. If Phillip could see, he wouldn’t need to be here to petition for a chance to compete. Our disabilities are the root cause for the decision to keep us out of the simulation. And while I may not be able to stand up straight without a cane, I sure can think straight. Discrimination on the sole basis of a disability is not only illegal, it’s illogical, immoral, and unfair! Thank you.”