The Ables Read online

  I focused in on the gavel and tried to block the rest of the picture from view. I concentrated as hard as I had ever concentrated in my life. I visualized it leaping forth from her grasp and flying straight into my outstretched hand.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  Before I knew what hit me, the gavel smacked into my open palm, as though I’d handled it all my life. The audience shared a collective gasp of surprise and awe.

  And if I had simply sat back down in silence, if I had only let it end there, I would have been fine. I’m just certain of it. But for some reason—I’m still not sure what possessed me—I got it stuck in my head that sending the gavel back into the hands of Mrs. Billings would be the icing on the cake of my little visual demonstration.

  I guess I got cocky.

  It never even occurred to me to consider that Mrs. Billings and her hands may have moved since the time Henry’s image had first been created or that she might not have the sharpest reflexes for a game of catch the heavy gavel.

  I had considered the act of getting Henry to send me an image to be the hard part of my little plan and hadn’t counted on my own hubris getting in the way. So I visualized the gavel leaving my hand and traveling the short distance back to Mrs. Billings’ hands. I was still using the original image Henry sent me—that should have been the clue I needed … seeing Mrs. Billings behind the bench, still holding the very gavel I was about to zap back over to her!

  But I didn’t see it.

  As you have no doubt guessed, Mrs. Billings’ hands were not in front of her face anymore. They were on her cheeks, where she’d placed them in surprise after seeing my powers in action. The poor woman had also leaned forward in her chair several inches to try and see me better. But not knowing these things, I tried to show off and sent the object flying back in her direction.

  All I heard was a sickening thud—a sound that would clearly not be made by two hands gently catching a wooden hammer. The gavel hit her square in the face, and she flew back into her chair as the crowd cried in horror.

  ***

  After the pandemonium died down—and believe me, it was absolute bedlam when Mrs. Billings went down—I was immediately escorted from the hearing and banished to the hallway. Henry, too, since he’d used his powers to aid my little accidental assault on a lovable old grandmother.

  Two teachers from the school were sent to act as guardians, and they sat on a bench across the wide hallway from us. They were babysitters to the two of us troublemakers while the president tried to restore order and wrap up the hearing.

  An ambulance was called, and ultimately, Mrs. Billings was given some ibuprofen and a heating pad, and that was it. She was going to be all right. The gavel hadn’t broken the skin, and her forehead took the brunt of the blow. She even stayed on and continued participating in the hearing after a bit of a delay. She’d end up with some serious bruises, though, and a massive headache, I’m sure. And probably an innate mistrust of blind children for the rest of her days.

  I was crushed.

  The fact that I had just cost my teammates and myself a chance to compete in the SuperSim—not to mentioned how badly I’d embarrassed myself in public—made this one of the low points of my life.

  I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t panicking. I just sat there slumped down against the wall, dejected, feeling like the biggest worm in the entire world. I’d let everyone down. It didn’t matter that I had been trying to hit a home run and win us the big game. All that mattered was how spectacularly I’d struck out. All that was left was the formality of President Tucker announcing the board’s decision. Hope had deserted me and left in its place a hollow isolation.

  Henry wasn’t speaking to me. We sat there, his wheelchair next to my regular folding chair, moping together in silence. I was pretty sure he wanted to strangle me, but I wasn’t about to initiate a dialogue. Instead, I chose to berate myself in silence.

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such forlorn faces,” said a voice—one that I instantly recognized as belong to our teacher, Mrs. Crouch. I lifted my head to speak, but nothing came out. I was still in a great deal of shock.

  I felt her sit down in the chair next to me and braced myself for a pep talk that was coming way too early. I wasn’t ready to learn any life lessons yet.

  “You know,” she began, “super powers are a funny thing, aren’t they, boys?” Again, she was met with silence. We were too caught up in our own depression to play our role in her little motivational moment. So she continued without us anyway. “Sometimes they don’t work quite the way you expect them to.

  “I know you’re feeling pretty down right now,” she continued, “but I have an inkling that everything’s going to work out all right, okay? Now why don’t I go and see about this hearing real quick. You two hang in there.” She patted my knee as she said it and then stood and walked away. I heard the giant oak door of the meeting hall swing open—the nervous sounds of a restless crowd pouring out temporarily before the door slammed shut again.

  What was all that about? And why is Old Lady Crouch being so nice?

  And again, Henry answered my thoughts with spoken words. “She’s probably just trying to make us feel better. You know how adults are,” he said matter-of-factly, like both our lives hadn’t just been ruined.

  I hesitated a moment and then figured I had nothing to lose by talking to Henry. “Nervous habit again?”

  “No. I’m not nervous anymore. I was just reading your mind to see what you were thinking and to make sure you felt properly bad about what just happened.” As usual, he didn’t have any kind of meanness in his voice. He was just stating the facts plainly.

  “I do, Henry,” I said with no small measure of guilt. “I feel horrible!” And it was true. I did.

  “I know, Phillip,” he said. “I know you do.”

  It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was something close. He didn’t speak to me with anger, but it wasn’t a verbal hug either. Maybe Henry wasn’t yelling at me because he could hear me yelling at myself and thought I was doing a good enough job. I wanted to tell him how proud I was of the way he managed to place that image inside my mind, but it didn’t feel like the right time for congratulations.

  We carried on silently, in somber reflection, as we both contemplated life as shamed superheroes, as heroes too broken to be considered useful. I thought back to that day in the cornfield when Dad had first told me the big secret about our family and this town and decided I preferred life before the revelation. Since finding out I had super powers, I’d been bullied, had my phone smashed, gotten punched in the stomach, had a concussion, and now had almost murdered a school board member while single-handedly ruining the reputation of disabled heroes everywhere.

  However, unbeknownst to us, the hearing had taken a sharp turn for the positive the very moment Mrs. Crouch entered the meeting room. I didn’t know it until later, when Bentley filled me in, but she had arrived just in the nick of time as the board was about to reconvene the meeting and announce their decision on our petition.

  How I wish I could have seen it! To hear Bentley tell it, she was an angel sent from God Himself.

  As soon as President Tucker had banged the gavel and signaled the proceedings back into order —the very same gavel that I had moved with my powers—Mrs. Crouch spoke up from her position near the back of the room. She reminded the board politely of Article 12.1.A of the Freepoint Code of Conduct, which called for the school board to open any and every petition hearing to public comment before handing down a decision.

  She wanted to address the board, and since she was citing their own rules of procedure, publicly and before the entire audience, President Tucker had no choice but to allow it.

  Almost all of the school board members, as it turned out, were in the same age bracket; they were peers of Mrs. Crouch from her school days. And she’d come armed with enough ammunition to defeat them all, the kind of verbal napalm you typically only find in movies. She had some dirt, and she w
as ready to dish.

  She stood before the board, but she addressed the crowd with her speech.

  One by one, she named every single board member, followed by some specific story or fact about them that cast a new meaning on the hearing. For Alton Babbish, she recounted his own misadventures as a Freepoint High student, during which time he was suspended no less than three occasions for blatant misuse of powers—one boy had ended up with a broken arm. Bentley said Babbish turned bright red and tried to bury his face behind his hand.

  Cynthia Yearling was a board member whose current secretary was a disabled person named Sue Reed. Sue was a paraplegic but was blessed with the kind of advanced mind for mathematics that would make Bentley look dumb. And Mrs. Crouch told the entire crowd all about it.

  Bob Vernor was the oldest member of the board, having served thirty years. And one of his five grandchildren was a disabled hero who served in a field support role with the custodians’ operation in Chicago. He’d won many medals and commendations.

  On and on she went, rattling off a list of apparent hypocrisies among the board members. Each one had either gotten into trouble after an accident with their powers—as I had just done—or had some kind of connection to the disabled hero community.

  By the time she got to Octavius Tucker, she’d already leveled more than enough evidence against the board to pressure their decision, but she didn’t let that stop her. For Tucker, her story was truly a shocker—something only a person with intimate knowledge of a person would know. Octavius Tucker was himself a disabled person. He had scoliosis, and always had, and had kept it a secret most of his life. While it never interfered with his powers, it did affect his mobility, especially in old age.

  Bentley said you could hear a pin drop when she was finished dissecting the board members. In a matter of minutes, Mrs. Crouch had managed to make every single board member feel guilty about their planned decision. They were speechless. And she used that silence to deliver her closing arguments.

  Mrs. Crouch’s closing comments made Bentley’s earlier eloquence look downright Neanderthal in comparison—it was such a great speech that Bentley would later send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the school board office requesting a transcript of the hearing so he could have a copy.

  “Now, I realize that many of you might be feeling a little embarrassed right about now. One of your own peers has just aired some information about you that, while public in nature, is probably a little embarrassing considering the present circumstances. And you might think my aim is to discredit you … or to make you look bad and lose face. But the opposite is really true. I am extremely proud of each and every one of you and think you are all model citizens in this society of heroes.

  Whatever your demons were in your youth, you’ve risen above them and gone on to successful careers, making valuable contributions to this fine city. And those of you with connections to disabled individuals prove your heart’s true nature every day simply by having those relationships.

  “In fact, it is my love and respect for you that has led me to speak here today. Barring these children from competing in the simulation while many of you employ disabled individuals with powers is the very definition of incongruous. It flies in the face of logic. You simply cannot rule against this petition and then carry on tomorrow as you did yesterday, or you risk losing the credibility you have worked so hard to earn. If a disabled hero can serve in a field-support role or as president of the school board, then how can we justify—as a community—telling these children they can’t compete?” Bentley said her voice gradually picked up steam as she came to her conclusion.

  “The choice is simple: you either believe in them, that they can become productive members of hero society … or you’re just humoring them. And that would just be cruel! Thank you.”

  As she walked away from the board, the audience repeated the ovation they’d given for Bentley’s opening statement, only twice as strong—Henry and I heard it clearly from the hallway outside. I knew immediately that something strange was afoot because the crowd had been on our side earlier. And our side had clearly lost. I could think of no reason for such a cheer to occur.

  All I knew at the time was that the crowd was still hollering and clapping at full strength when Mrs. Crouch walked out of the room, turned, and moved briskly past us like she had some other appointments to keep. “See you tomorrow, gentlemen,” she said as she walked away.

  And that was that.

  The hearing’s spectators and participants spilled out into the vast hallway, and Bentley rushed to where Henry and I were sitting to tell us the good news. President Tucker had no choice but to relent or face a serious public relations nightmare—he was up for reelection soon.

  We’d won. We were in. We were going to be permitted to take part in the SuperSim.

  Of course, that only meant that now we had to actually go through with it.

  Chapter 12: Competition

  Sight. It’s a difficult thing to describe, especially to someone who’s had it all their life. The experience was a little different for James since he had, at one point in his life, actually had his sight before losing it in an accident.

  In the days between the hearing and the SuperSim, Henry, James, and I practiced our new trick on our own quite a bit, fine-tuning and improving the patchwork system Bentley dreamt up to allow us blind kids the gift of sight. In no time, we were getting pretty good at it. Well, Henry had gotten pretty good at it; he was the one doing all the work. All we had to do was just sit there and receive the images he sent me.

  One of our first positive achievements was dropping the need for a trigger. I no longer needed to goad Henry into anger in order for his powers to be reversible, which was a welcome change all around. He learned to activate his abilities in either direction at will, and it only took a few concentration exercises from Bentley.

  Henry also greatly increased the speed at which the signal from his brain reached my own—which meant that the images were closer to real time. And he found a way to send them in frequent succession, like a pulse. It wasn’t quite like a live video feed, but it was a far cry from the single still “photograph” I’d gotten in the school board hearing. I wasn’t sure how much it would aid my powers, because there were still enough gaps in the pictures to keep me from truly knowing where everyone and everything was at every instant. If the bad guy was running away, for instance, I wasn’t confident the staggered images would time out correctly for me to be able to use my abilities to stop him.

  We practiced in the cornfield, in Henry’s backyard, and even while just walking around town. He would pick an object around us and challenge James or me to move it in some way, using the visuals from his mind. There were some accidents along the way, as you might suspect, though none as serious as the one at the hearing.

  James knocked down a paper boy by mistake on one occasion. Poor guy had made the unfortunate decision to ride directly between our position and the trash can on the sidewalk, which just so happened to be the object Henry had challenged James to move. Oops.

  I also broke a few windows, which pretty much tapped my already-measly allowance. And there was one night this old lady on Harrison Street threatened to call the cops on us after I tried moving her cat. I admit that it wasn’t one of my better choices, but it didn’t work anyway. Cats are incredibly fast.

  But all the ups and downs were worth it because we learned so much about our potential when working together … as well as our limitations. As an example, Henry’s images were too slow for me to be able to move the cat. And they weren’t quick enough for me to spot the cyclist James had nearly decapitated either. But stationary objects … those were no problem. I could even move something as large as a park bench. All I could really do was slide the bench across the ground, but Henry was still impressed.

  I’d also managed to squeeze in some time to truly appreciate this new gift of “sight,” such as it was. During the hearing it had been thrust upon me unex
pectedly, in the heat of a stressful moment. But over the next few weeks, I was able to relax and enjoy the fact that I could finally see. My eyes were still broken, but I could see, at least as long as Henry was around. Bentley and Freddie worked on the plans for the SuperSim, while James and I were under strict orders to simply spend as much time with Henry practicing our “sight” as possible.

  The first thing I noticed was how wrong I’d been all my life about the relative size of things. Sure, through touch and acoustics, I had guessed pretty accurately at the size of my bed, my bedroom, or the refrigerator. But stop signs were way bigger than I’d expected. Stoplights, trees, various buildings, birds … anything I hadn’t regularly put my hands on in life, I’d gotten all wrong.

  Henry indulged me multiple times, bless his heart. I had him over for dinner one night so I could finally see what my family looked like. I had to hide it from Patrick, of course, even though my mom and dad both knew what was really going on. They made small talk with Henry while I gaped at how beautiful they all were.

  I had assumed my mother was pretty, though I’m not sure why. Maybe every boy believes his mother is pretty. But I was wrong; she was beautiful. I’m sure some of my early experiences with this new ability were colored by the euphoria of simply putting visuals to my life around me, but she looked like a knock-out to me. An angel. Brunette, hair down to her shoulders, with a small frame, and the kindest eyes you’ve ever seen. She was nothing like I had envisioned and yet everything I expected her to be all at once. They all were.

  My father was a very tall man, which I’d known previously but hadn’t fully grasped. He had to duck under some of the doorframes in our house. I wondered if my inherited genes might help me grow as tall as he was. Would I be ducking under doorframes in the future?