The Ables Page 16

  Dad wore glasses with tiny lenses and had short brown hair. His nose was a little on the large side, but he was otherwise what I would imagine most women would call handsome. And skinny. His brain could move a tractor trailer, but his body was anything but buff.

  My little brother was almost exactly what I had pictured. Blonde, with braces. A wiry kid. Skinny as a pole. He had some freckles on his face and just the slightest amount of baby fat still in his cheeks.

  Having sight for the first time was a bit like a drug to me. It was intoxicating. After she sent Patrick off to bed, my mother came over and gave me the biggest hug of my life while simultaneously bawling her eyes out. It was both heartwarming and a little awkward. She was so overcome with emotion in the moment that she could barely put a sentence together between sobs of joy. I caught the word “proud” and the word “love,” and I’m fairly certain she mentioned how happy she was for me that I was finally able to see.

  My dad, on the other hand, cracked one of his trademark cheesy jokes. He stuck out his hand for a handshake and made like it was our first meeting. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said, smirking at his own hilariousness, “My name’s John, and, well, I’m your father.” I didn’t mind the cornball humor, though. Not this time.

  Oh, and I got to see myself, of course. That was more than a little weird. I think most sighted individuals are so used to looking in the mirror that it’s probably hard to imagine what seeing yourself for the first time would be like. I was me … but I was also a complete stranger. I was a fair bit skinnier than I had thought, which clearly ran in the family. And my haircut was a ridiculous embarrassment of disheveled brown locks. I wasn’t particularly attractive, but I wasn’t ugly either, which I scored as a win. Even though I’d run my hands over my own facial features hundreds of times before, I was still surprised at my own appearance and how it all came together.

  It was unsettling. I felt somewhat disembodied as I stared at myself through Henry’s eyes. I wondered how people with sight could possibly stand to look at themselves in the mirror on a daily basis.

  After dinner that night, the guys took me to see the beach. James teleported us to a spot where his family vacationed in North Carolina, and they all waited patiently while I finally took in the view. It was even more expansive and infinite to look at than it was to hear. I’d wanted to see a lot of things throughout my life, but I never wanted to see anything as badly as I wanted to see the ocean. And just a few months prior, it had been an impossible pipe dream.

  But along with the awe-inspiring sights, this new gift also taught me a lot about the world and the little details I’d never known were there. You’d be surprised the things you don’t really ever think about when you can’t see. Like how bright the sun is on a particular day. Or whether your clothes match. Or how vivid and amazing the colors of autumn can be. Or the fact that Henry was black-skinned.

  Some things just never occur to you when you’re blind.

  Race had never even been a consideration for me—it’s easy to be color-blind when you’re also regular-blind. The revelation didn’t affect me either way, really, aside from its unexpectedness. The color of his skin was just another one of those details to which I’d never given much thought.

  I thankfully got most of my slack-jawed awe out of the way prior to the SuperSim. By the time the event rolled around, I was fairly used to having occasional sight, such as it was. I’d gotten comfortable with it, and Henry and I had begun to work well together as a team.

  ***

  “I can’t believe how many teams there are,” Bentley exclaimed. “I mean, I knew there were a lot of people dressed up today at school, but I didn’t think there were this many.”

  We were standing in the Freepoint Circle Plaza, the general gathering place for all participants in the SuperSim. Circle Plaza was just a fancy name for the odd circular intersection in the center of town. Dad said it was called a roundabout. It was one of my most reliable landmarks—I could always tell when the car was holding the long left turn every driver had to make around the large statue of Lewis Freepoint that stood at the epicenter of the city. It’s one of the many ways I was able to keep my sense of direction about me. It was nice to finally see what it looked like.

  “People were dressed up at school today?” It was news to me.

  “What?” Bentley asked, absentmindedly. “Oh yeah. You know how at regular high schools they let the football team dress up in their jerseys on the day of a game?”

  I did not. “Um, no?”

  “Well … they do. And, um, it’s sort of like that. Kids in the SuperSim get to wear their costumes during school hours on the day of a SuperSim.”

  “You mean to tell me,” I began, putting my mind around a new concept, “that all day long today, other kids were wearing capes and masks and stuff …” I paused, still in disbelief, “and nobody said a single word about it?”

  “Yup,” it was Henry, sounding like he was enjoying this a little bit.

  “Yeah.” Bentley this time.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little weird?” I felt like I had a fair argument.

  “Yup,” Henry agreed.

  Bentley tried to find a logical explanation. “I guess maybe it was such a public thing … such an obvious thing—I mean, to a person with sight, it was obvious. And maybe it was so obvious that it didn’t need to be discussed?”

  Nobody could instantly find a reasonable explanation for things the way Bentley could. I had to admit that he made a fair amount of sense. Why would people feel the need to talk about things that were blatantly obvious? And yet I hear people talk about the weather all the time, and nothing could be more obvious than that.

  My next thought I said aloud. “I wonder what else I’ve missed out on knowing about just because it was so obvious to everyone else that no one bothered to mention it.”

  The group fell quiet, and for a moment I feared I’d dampened everyone’s good spirits with my stupid self-pity.

  “Mrs. Crouch’s nose is pretty huge,” Freddie suddenly offered, quickly sneaking in a quick puff of his inhaler before continuing. “I bet you didn’t know that. And I bet you no one talks about it either,” he added.

  That comment brought a roar of laughter from almost everyone.

  “He’s right, man,” Henry said between snorts. “It’s totally enormous!”

  The mood lightened considerably after that. I was just about to launch into a story about a former piano teacher who had a giant nose when I was unintentionally interrupted by a stranger.

  “Right on.” The voice came from behind me. I heard a couple more voices echo his sentiments. Henry turned his head and looked up in time to see only the backs of their matching hooded superhero costumes, so he had no clue as to their identity. The jacket backs read “Vipers,” which I found to be a pretty uninspired choice.

  “Thanks,” I said sheepishly for the hundredth time since the hearing.

  I’d become a bit of a folk hero. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow the little accident with my powers had made me a star. It must have been the shared bond between kids when it came to teachers, their common adversary. The entire school was still talking about it.

  I’d gone from a blip on the high school radar to everybody’s new best friend, almost overnight. The way the kids were fawning all over me, you would have thought I had mooned the principal or found an error on a teacher’s test. I was popular. I didn’t exist for the entire school year up until this moment, and suddenly, I was the center of attention. I was “that kid who nearly killed a teacher.” I think even Chad Burke would probably have had a little more respect for me if he were still around.

  By association, most of my friends were now considered pretty cool, too. The girls would say things to Henry and Bentley like, “You were there?!” and “What was it like?” These were the cheerleaders and the most popular girls in school, flirting with special ed kids. It was truly insane.

  We were the underdogs who ha
d taken on the school board—attacked the school board, literally—and won. We were the envy of every kid in town. Instead of being the joke, the disabled kids now had some street-cred, even though we had come by it accidentally. And credibility was definitely important, especially for something like the SuperSim.

  Many of the students who had joined teams for the event were taking it quite seriously. Some of them were like college fraternities, with chants and secret handshakes, the works. Across the circular patch of grass, there was a team in purple jumpsuits doing some kind of dance routine to pump themselves up. There had even been pledges and initiations for some of the more elite teams.

  Most had picked out names for their teams as well as costumes.

  “Those guys look ridiculous,” Henry said softly as soon as the Vipers were safely out of range.

  “Green boots, green pants, green hoods, and green jackets,” I said, shaking my head.

  Bentley agreed with my fashion take. “Entirely too much green. Plus, vipers aren’t even green in real life.”

  “Ugh,” Freddie said.

  Our team had opted to go costume-free, much to my father’s relief—he considered it silly to wear a special outfit just to fight crime, as most modern professional custodians did. But we did pick out a team name.

  We’d discussed it over lunch about a week earlier, and it was agreed by all six of us that we wanted a name that was true to our identity and our spirit of teamwork. Well, to be honest, only five of us agreed on that. Donnie wasn’t really the voting type. He raised his hand once in a while when everyone else did, but sometimes he’d just sit there and say nothing. We usually assumed he would let us know somehow if he ever had a strong opinion about something, though we had absolutely no evidence to suggest that.

  Once we reached a group decision on the line of logic we wanted to follow to choose our team name, I knew immediately what it would be. I recalled Mrs. Crouch’s Custodial Studies discussion and the original protectors who overcame their insufficient numbers to defeat the Haladites.

  So we named ourselves the “Ables.”

  “Good luck, gimps,” I heard suddenly. I didn’t have to wait for Henry’s images to know it was Steve Travers, Chad Burke’s old partner in bullying crime.

  “Get bent,” Henry said. Donnie’s presence made all the difference, of course, allowing Henry to cop an attitude with someone that could pretty much kill or injure Henry any way he wanted to in a one-on-one matchup.

  Henry was looking at their team uniforms, which consisted of high-tech, lightweight body armor and chest plates emblazoned with the word “Punishers.”

  “You think you’re hot stuff now that you won your little court case, is that it?”

  “It’s not really about what I think, Steve,” Henry said. “But I do know that of all the pretty girls that have come up to talk to me tonight; the prettiest was probably Beth Franklin.” He paused for effect. “Isn’t …” another pause, feigning politeness, “I mean, isn’t that your girlfriend?”

  Steve said nothing, but you could tell by his posture and expression that he was boiling within.

  Henry kept hammering. “It’s really about what other people think, you know? And … beth … she sure seemed to think I was pretty hot stuff. She was one of the ones asking for my autograph, right, Phillip?”

  I didn’t want to get involved in this kind of conversation at all, but thankfully, Steve didn’t give me a chance to anyway.

  “Yeah, you just keep thanking your lucky stars that Chad’s not here and that your friend, the big man, is,” Steve said, trying to sound more threatening than he actually did. “Or I would tear you to pieces.”

  “Get lost, Steve,” I said, finally speaking up, if only to end it. “We don’t want any trouble.” Always trying to make peace. I would have made a good mediator.

  “We’ll see you little punks on the battlefield,” he said, laughing. The rest of his team of upperclassmen jocks cackled as well, and they all turned their backs and pushed their way up to the front of the crowd.

  “What a jerk,” Henry muttered.

  “Eh, he’s nobody without his master,” Bentley said flatly.

  “Everybody’s a nobody when Donnie’s around, isn’t that right, buddy?” I asked.

  Donnie made sort of a half-grin. It was a common reaction for him.

  “You totally owned him with that thing about his girlfriend, Henry,” Freddie said, laughing.

  “I also totally made that up,” he replied, the sound of a mile-wide smile in his voice.

  We all had a good laugh at that, and then we enjoyed another when Bentley pondered about the conversation Steve Travers would later have with the poor unsuspecting Beth Franklin.

  “It’s kind of chilly,” Bentley observed flatly. It was getting colder, all right, with Halloween right around the corner. The leaves had started falling in earnest over the last week, crunching under my feet. Fall was in full swing, and the evening air was crisp.

  I stood there in silence for a moment, watching the other teams via Henry’s vision and marveling at how the temperature change between peoples’ breaths and the night air allowed me to see a little puff of smoke as they exhaled.

  We’d been briefed in full on the SuperSim proceedings multiple times in school over the last month. The rules were drilled into our heads—they were pretty simple rules, really. Don’t hurt anyone, don’t sabotage, and don’t cheat. That was basically it. The rest of what lay in store for us was a mystery. We were all left to discover and stop the fictional crimes throughout town on our own. There would be no maps, no list of instructions, no tips.

  As we stood there shivering with a couple hundred other kids, I began to wonder if maybe there’d been some kind of delay. It seemed like it was taking a while to get things going, and the teams were understandably anxious.

  Where are all the adults?

  “They’re probably already in their hiding spots, waiting for the signal.” It was Henry, answering my brain’s silent musings again. It was becoming a regular thing with him, but I was at least getting used to it. His powers only let him listen in on completed thoughts—where someone is thinking in complete sentences. He could see pictures, too, of whatever you might be looking at. But as long as I was careful, I was able to avoid having him overhear any embarrassing or truly personal ideas. Plus, I sort of needed him to be actively using his powers if I wanted to see anything.

  “You’d think I’d be used to having you inside my head by now, but it still catches me off guard sometimes,” I said.

  “I’m like a ninja,” he replied, bragging just a little bit.

  “Okay, folks,” I heard a familiar voice say into a microphone, “We’re ready to begin.” It was Coach Tripp.

  All the chatter came to a standstill.

  “When I blow this air horn,” he continued, “that’s the signal to begin the competition. When you hear the air horn again, that’s the signal that the SuperSim is over. Either time has expired, or all the crimes have been thwarted. At the sound of that second air horn, you must—I repeat, must—stop everything you’re doing and return here to Circle Plaza for a debrief and the awards ceremony. I think there will even be refreshments of some kind.”

  A brief cheer went up from the students, because kids who don’t like refreshments pretty much don’t exist. But we quieted down again to hear what Coach Tripp said next.

  Only instead of Coach Tripp’s voice, we heard the air horn, which rang through the night air for a solid two seconds, loudly.

  And then it was gone.

  Everyone had been expecting the opening speech to continue, so the actual starting horn was a surprise. It caught most of the participants flat-footed. We all just kind of hung there in limbo for a moment before absolute madness erupted.

  Voices went up in a chorus of shouts and commands. Orders were given and battle cries were raised. I think I even heard one group yell, “To arms.”

  Circle Plaza exploded with movement and sound as t
he teams hurried to enact the strategies and plans they’d drawn up. In a matter of seconds, the plaza was nearly empty.

  “Where are they all going?” I asked no one in particular. Had I missed some announcement? Was there some obvious fact or strategy that we were foolishly overlooking?

  Freddie weighed in, sounding as confused as I was. “Should we be running somewhere too, then?”

  Henry echoed my thoughts. “They can’t possibly know where the crimes are taking place.”

  We’d spent all our planning time discussing how we could collectively apprehend or stop a criminal—it wasn’t as easy as you might think considering how many of our group’s powers were mentally based abilities. We hadn’t spent any time at all thinking about where or how to find the actual criminals. I guess we assumed that would be the easy part. We were so very wrong about that.

  There was a loud scream in the distance, and it startled me. It sounded like a woman. As soon as I heard it, I realized an important fact: every other team that took off running was already closer to that scream than we were.

  “That could be a crime,” Henry shouted.

  There wasn’t time to waste critiquing our own lack of planning. Bentley jumped right into battle mode. “Phillip, can you tell roughly where that scream came from?!” He was excited and speaking quickly, like someone who just drank six cups of coffee in three seconds.

  “It was about four blocks west, but I’m pretty sure it was a student,” I said. I was used to New York City noise, but the sound waves traveled a lot better in this quiet little town. My sensitive ears were one of my biggest assets on a team of misfits like this.

  “Phillip, even if it’s a student screaming, it could just as easily be a signal that there’s something there we should check out,” Bentley reminded me. “There could be some kind of clue or indication of another crime.”

  He was right, and I knew it. And even thinking about it for even a few more seconds could cost us dearly. I nodded my affirmation. “Let’s go, everyone. James, in the center; Maple and Grant, got it?”

  James stepped to the middle of the group nodding as the rest of us gathered around, placing our hands on him. As soon as we were all touching some part of him—or the person in front of us who was touching him—I gave the command. “Now.”