Not Your Sidekick (10 page)

Tendrils of smoke waft from Abby's hair in delicate spirals.

“Yeah, I'm, er, working on an experimental robotics project for the company,” Abby says. “I used to work on the seventh floor in the main research department, but I've got my own projects I can focus on down here. I like it; it's quiet and being around the Mischiefs' business is great. I was just up there helping the team with a quick thing.”

“Cool, I didn't know you were into robotics. I was kinda telling M you were wasted as the receptionist. Not that you couldn't be a receptionist if you wanted to, I mean, you're really talented and… ahhh…”

The bodysuit is skintight. Jess blushes, looking away from how fitted the workout clothes are on Abby and…

She's just gonna stop speaking now.

Abby pats her hair until all of the sparks are out. “Did you need me for something?”

Jess tries to get up and Abby's chair continues to spin until Jess grabs an armrest to stop it.

“Yeah, I, uh, I was super-daydreaming during English today and totally spaced out. Didn't pay attention at all. Did you take notes on Rhinehart's assignment for next week? And how many chapters we're reading tonight?”

“Sure. Ah, it's just chapter five. And I don't have the notes for next week with me, but I can message them to you later, if you want.”

Jess grins. “Awesome.”

She trudges back to her office, continues with the never-ending process of filing, and congratulates herself for a successful interaction with her crush. She whistles to herself.

M comes back twenty minutes later, suit clanging, with another box.

“Hey, M, are you like super-strict on the dress code here? Obviously, you're wearing a hunk of metal, and Abby's running around getting her suit caught on fire and now is wearing yoga gear,” Jess says. “I mean, it would be super-simple if I just came to work in the clothes I was already wearing for school.”

“Sure, you can wear whatever you want.” M waves to the empty lab around them. “No one will care.”

They work in silence for until Jess' curiosity gets the better of her.
How old is M, anyway? Is she another high school student, like her and Abby? Has she worked for the Mischiefs for a long time? Does she know them personally?

“You know, I won't tell anyone who you are,” Jess says slowly, smiling. She looks up at M, at her face panel, hoping she looks sincere. “I mean, you already had me sign a nondisclosure agreement about the company and all the supervillain stuff. And I'm sure Mischief would find a way of keeping me quiet anyway.”

M stands up. “That's not really the issue. I'll leave you to your work.” She scoots backward, exits abruptly, and clanks down the hallway.

“Okay then,” Jess says, eyebrows raised. She thought that she and M were getting along pretty well. She guesses the question is too personal.

Ch.6...

At lunch the next day, Jess takes a bite of her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and promptly spits the thing back out. “Ugh, it's still frozen inside!”

Bells nudges his container of carrots and celery sticks toward Jess. “You can have half my sandwich if you want.” Today his hair is bright pink and looks soft despite the product in it to get it to stand so high. Jess loves seeing Bell's looks. He enjoys bright colors in both his hair and outfits, and changes his hair about every week.

Jess has only tried to dye her hair once, with Bells' help, but her thick black hair refused to hold the color longer than a week.

Jess smiles, accepting the egg salad sandwich as Emma sits down next to them. She holds a lunch tray with a dismal offering—sad-looking protein nuggets and cold tater tots.

“So how has work been? Monroe Industries treating you well? Have you destroyed any robots yet?” Emma asks. She picks at her lunch until Bells pulls out another sandwich from his backpack and hands it to her.

“Oh yeah, no, it was great. It's just, boring office work. Like I said, I don't do any of the robotics stuff, I'm mostly in a file room, and their files are a mess because they moved, but yeah, it's cool. Abby Jones works there too.”

Emma's eyebrows nearly reach her hair. “Abby? Wow. I wondered what happened. I mean, out of nowhere last week she just drops out of the volleyball team and Coach is like
Hey Robledo! Here's a new uniform!
I mean, I'm happy to be on varsity but I can't really replace her, you know. They just picked me because I was the best JV player, but the volleyball team still sucks without her.”

“Aw, you're great, though, you have that awesome spike,” Bells says.

Emma shakes her head. “Spiking is useless unless you have someone to set up the shot. And Abby was the best setter.”

“Yeah.” Jess takes a thoughtful bite out of Bells' sandwich.

Emma nudges Jess, then catches Bells' eye and both of them giggle.

“So…” Bells starts.

“So… what?”

“You still like her, right?” Emma teases.

“You guys are never letting that go, are you?” Jess tries to fight the hot blush rising on her cheeks, but she can't. It only gets worse when Bells and Emma start laughing. “Oh, come on, I never made fun of you for liking—what's-his-face all last year!”

Emma looks at Bells, and they both burst into giggles.

“Okay, maybe I lovingly joked about it with you, but that's different! The two of you crush on people all the time! I don't know how you do it. You just… like someone? Or you ask them out? Or then it goes away? Or you like someone else? But like…” Jess sets down the sandwich. “You both have dated people. I've never… I don't even…”

“It's okay; it's all out of love,” Emma says, drawing Jess into a hug. “So, what's it like? Do you have intense sessions of eye contact? Do you work together?”

“No, not at all, like I barely even see her. We're on the same floor, but she does this complicated robotic stuff for the company, and I'm in the back sorting files for this side project.” Jess stares at the sandwich and nudges a stray piece of egg back in.

“Aw. Well, you get to hang out with her, at least?” Bells says.

Jess shrugs. “Maybe. There's another girl, M, that works there too, she wears a mecha-suit. I've been hanging out with her mostly; she's pretty cool.” The words are already out of her mouth before Jess remembers the NDA she signed, and then she runs through the clauses. It was mostly about Master Mischief, and secret patents, and stuff like that. Mecha-suits aren't extremely common, but Jess knows lots of hi-tech factories use them, so it's probably okay to talk about them.

“A person in a mecha-suit? Like Master Mischief used to clunk around in?”

“Kind of. Monroe Industries is a tech company, so it makes sense.”

Bells laughs. “Oh gosh, remember when Mischief did that thing where he like, put soap all over the golf courses and then activated the sprinklers?”

Emma nods, then laughs. “I totally haven't seen that video in a while, it's great. Here, let me pull it up.”

Emma pokes about on her DED until she finds the video: a grainy holo of the golf course, its perfectly manicured grass startling green against the red-gold landscape of the desert. Jess and Bells lean close to see the projection, and Jess can't help chuckling before she even sees it happen. Then there's movement, sprinklers going, bubbles floating everywhere, and in the midst of the chaos, Master Mischief strikes a dramatic pose. Then, he attempts to fly out of the bubbles, but the suit freezes up. He gets a foot high in the air before the suit clanks to the ground, when Smasher and Shockwave arrive on the scene, apprehend him, and hand him to the authorities.

“This is your favorite part, here,” Emma says, rewinding the holovid with her fingers and pausing on the exact moment Master Mischief strikes his pose. Bells dissolves into peals of laughter, shaking as he slumps onto Emma's shoulders, and she props him up. “Look, I think there's one of this bit on a loop.”

Jess grins as she scoots back, watching her friends.

A stray curl falls in front of Emma's face, and Bells tucks it behind her ear. Emma scrunches her nose and looks up at Bells, who looks away quickly.

Jess bursts into giggles.

“What?” Emma asks.

Bells' eyes widen.

“Ah, did you see this holo of this cat Bells sent last night?” Jess says, deftly changing the topic.

The image of Master Mischief's
suit malfunctioning sticks with Jess, and the next time she's at work, she eyes M's mecha-suit until finally she can't bear not knowing. “Is your suit waterproof?” she blurts out.

“Oh God, yes, my—er, Master Mischief discovered that not having a waterproof suit was incredibly debilitating. Especially after the soap bubble incident.”

“I thought the soap idea was pretty funny.”

“Yeah, good, it should teach the country club not to waste water. Those fairways are ridiculous. We live in a desert!”

Jess pauses. She always just thought the Andover Heights Country club paid for the water. Images from her history holobooks flick through her mind, of people desperate for clean water during the time of the Disasters. There are always public service announcements from the Collective about using only the water you need, but Jess never really thought about where the water had to come from. Those desalination plants and reservoirs always just seemed like a distant certainty, but it must take a lot of time and resources to get that water to where it's needed. “I didn't think about it like that. Everyone just said it was to be funny, you know, like how Mischief's always doing these pranks—”

“Yeah, because the press is too busy following Smasher's newest hairstyle or like, I dunno, whatever they want to focus on. I guess our town isn't so bad, but my dad says even if the Mischiefs spelled out exactly what they were trying to do, the media would probably still mess it up.” M's face panel lights blink colorfully.

“I knew about the cheese! It was spoiled,” Jess says.

“Yeah, thank God for Net conspiracy theorists. I loved your T-shirt, I think it's great that you have one.”

Jess grins. “My parents hate it.”

“Ahahaha, most people think the shirts are dumb. Or that the Mischiefs are dumb. I know better—well,
we
know better. Like, don't you think it's weird that we don't know much about historical heroes?”

“What historical heroes? We know that Captain Orion's grandfather was the first one who researched the meta-gene and the different ways it was expressed after the X29 incident.”

“Yeah, but there must have been more meta-powered people who found out about their abilities right after the flare,” M says. “Why is Lieutenant Orion one of the few heroes mentioned in the history books?”

Jess shrugs. “He's not the only one,” she says. “I mean, there were a bunch of people, Gravitus, Photon—”

She really doesn't know much about Gravitus or Photon or any of the early meta-humans other than Lieutenant Orion. “There probably weren't a lot of people documented until after Lieutenant Orion because well, people were just figuring out about meta-humans back then. And it wasn't until Lieutenant Orion was established as a hero that the vigilantes started stepping forward.”

“I've never thought about it like that. What about…”

Talking to M is easy. Jess enjoys the electronic cadence of her voice. Emma and Bells have been encouraging her to use this time to get to know Abby, but the minute she gets in the same room as her crush, she gets distracted by the color of her lips or the way she scrunches her nose as she types, and freezes up.

Jess' seventeenth birthday is a
relatively quiet affair; her parents take her and her friends out for dinner and cake. Emma gives her a set of collector's edition Captain Orion comics and Bells hand-painted the covers of three new journals for her to write in.

Jess sits back, full of food. Bells and Brendan play with the light-up display that reads “JESS” in colorful blue lights, a gift from Brendan. It's a thoughtful present, and Jess is thankful for the dinner at her favorite restaurant.

Her parents haven't said anything to her about not presenting with any powers, but they're probably waiting until Emma and Bells go home.

“Oh, isn't that Elizabeth Phang?” Jess' mom asks.

Sure enough, a few tables away, Elizabeth looks as if she's out with her parents.

“Why didn't you invite her to your party? You two used to be such good friends,” Li Hua says.

“Not really. Uh, we were gonna go see a movie, right?”

“Yes, the movie starts in twenty minutes; thank you for dinner, Mrs. Tran,” Bells says as he gets up.

They make their escape before it gets awkward.

“Happy birthday to youuu,” Emma singsongs at her.

“Thanks, you guys.”

They've bought tickets, and Jess
and Emma are waiting for Bells to come back with the popcorn. He does, but he's also staring at his DED and frowning. “Sorry, guys, there's an emergency at the restaurant; my parents need me to come back.” He hands them the bucket of popcorn and gives them each a quick hug before running off.

“Bells! Do you need a ride?” Jess calls.

“Ah, my brother is picking me up, thanks!” Bells calls back, running toward the parking lot.

“That sucks,” Jess says as they sit. “He was really looking forward to this one, too.”

“Isn't his older brother away at college?” Emma asks, narrowing her eyes.

Jess munches on popcorn. “Simon works weekends sometimes.”

“Do you think Bells is mad at me?”

“No, why would you think that?”

Emma shrugs. “I haven't seen him around much. We used to hang out all the time after school, and I know he works at his family's restaurant, but not that much, you know? And since you started working too, it's like… I think he doesn't want to hang out with just me, you know? These past few weeks it's just been him coming up with these lame excuses, like… I'm doing homework or I'm dyeing my hair tonight; we used to do that together, and I…” she trails off, a forgotten piece of popcorn in her hand.

“That does sound weird. I'm sorry, I've been super-busy at work after school and …”

“I know, I know, you're hanging with your girl. And I miss all three of us spending time together, and for some reason… I dunno. Bells is just being weird, you know? Do you think he's dating someone secretly, and why would he hide it from us?”

“No idea.”

* * *

Friday nights, they usually plan
to hang at Emma's house; they always rewatch a few episodes of
The Gentleman Detective
before watching the newest episode. Bells is late. Jess and Emma have already seen three episodes when they hear the doorbell ring. Emma beats the Robledo's MonRobot to the door and flings it open.

After a few hours of “Hey, where's Bells?” and “What is that supposed to be anyway? Ugh, Bells would know,” and “Jess, Bells said today that he was coming, right?” Jess thought Emma would be pleased to see their friend. But instead of giving the expected hug, Emma stands in the entryway and gives him a flat stare.

“Hey, where've you been?” she asks.

“Oh, I had family stuff. Ran late,” Bells says.

“Like what? My mom ran into your mom at the grocery store. Apparently everything is chill?”

“I like your new hair,” Jess says, trying to diffuse the tension. She doesn't want her two best friends fighting. “Did you get extensions? It looks great longer; I like it a lot.”

Bells blinks. “Ah, no, it must be the way I've styled it.”

“Oh, so you had time to go do your hair, but you don't have time to message me and say you're gonna be late? What's going on with you, Bells? You know you can tell us anything, I just—feel like you don't trust us anymore.”