Reject High (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 1) (9 page)

“What can
you
do?”

I rolled my eyes. “Just stay on my good side, and you won’t find out.”

He seemed satisfied with that answer. “It’s been ten minutes,” said Selby, checking his watch. “Almost twelve, actually. What should we do?”

“Go home, Selby,” I said with all seriousness.

“No way.” He ran to the house and stepped through the hole in the screen.

Before I knew it, my feet carried me after him, up to the front porch and inside of the living room, which was full of boxes. I was on edge enough to call on my powers. If Peters wanted to fight me, he’d better be halfway invincible, too. I must have been too freaked to notice there was
another
light on inside of the house. I waved my hand for Selby to stay put. With nothing left to lose, I closed in and turned the doorknob.

Inside, Peters was still in bed, but grasping Rhapsody’s wrist with his left hand and aiming a shotgun at me with his right. “Mr. Champion,” he said, as if he expected me.

I held up my hands in surrender. I’m pretty sure if I crashed through levels of road without a scratch, I’d be bulletproof, but it’s a chance I’d rather not take. “Can you put the gun down, please?”

He shook Rhapsody, who loudly sniffled.
How had he seen her in the first place?
“You lack control,” he said. “You need to learn control before it’s too late.”

“Let her go,” I said, wondering if I had to disarm him to end this quickly. The sound of police sirens wailed in the distance. We had maybe two minutes before this got worse. Hopefully, Selby had enough sense to get out before that happened. 

“You
were in that wreck,” he said, completely convinced. “You survived. How?”

“Let her go and I’ll tell you.” Still upset, Peters hadn’t noticed I’d moved about three inches closer to him since opening the door. “Put the gun down, Mr. Peters.”

He let go of Rhapsody and cocked the pump, giving me a split second to grab the barrel and squeeze it shut. Unfortunately, I missed. Peters aimed and a loud BOOM echoed inside the room. He pumped it again, but this time, I crumpled the gun like a piece of paper. Rhapsody scrambled to my side of the bed. Both of us sprinted toward the back door. Police sirens approached from all directions.

We were stuck.

Rhapsody had the bright idea to peek into the alley, where she saw a policeman readying to hop the gate. She pointed into the air, like a baseball player calling for a home run. “That way. You have to jump us out of here. Now.”

My heartbeat raced. Rhapsody hopped up into my arms and I caught her. A million things raced through my mind. Before I had time to process any of them, I scrambled to the edge of the deck, bent my knees, and sprung into the night sky.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I actually pass a science test

The next morning, Rhapsody limped back to the seat we usually shared on the school bus. We both needed sleep, but hey, our science teacher shot at us last night.

In other words, it wasn’t happening.

We agreed to continue attending school for the next week and act normally while we did. No use drawing attention to ourselves by playing sick or leaving. We both knew the teachers and the police aren’t stupid. Sooner or later someone would see something or hear a conversation about what we’ve been doing and then what?  

“Those are some hot shoes,” she said, staring at my feet. I was wearing a cheap pair of white canvas sneakers Debra bought me that look like water socks. I shredded my good pair last night. “How did you explain
that
one?”

“I got out before my stepmom noticed.”
Alright, so there are two things I suck at – moving on the fly and jumping at a given angle.
“How’s the leg?”

Her zipper-covered black cargo pants covered up her bandage. “Cut’s deeper than I thought. I told Máma I cut myself on a nail during dungeon duty – not because I fell from the sky and landed on a roof.”

“Nice.” I was not amused.

“She’s taking me to the doctor for a tetanus shot after third period. A normal mom would have threatened to sue and gotten me out of detention, but Ruby says I need to learn my lesson and serve my punishment.”

Hopefully, if she was examined further it wouldn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary, like she had been infected by aliens or something. I might watch too many movies. “Sorry.”

“Just
practice landing
, will you? I have to go to class today, so they know where to find me.”

“How?
Get a running start and jump to Canada?”

“However.” She moved her leg and winced.

For a while our conversation stayed light, until I said, “Selby’s going to have questions.”

She thought for a while. “He needs answers.”

I’d figured that out last night when I snuck back in and tried to get some rest. It was one of the five million things I thought about. He should have his own crystal, unless we planned for him to be with one of us every hour of the day. Bullets would bounce off of me, and she could disappear at will. But if Peters knew about Selby being there, too, he’d hurt him.

Giving an unpredictable source of power to a guy who cut people for fun still didn’t seem like a good idea.

“Alright,” I said. There had to be another way. “Will you be back for dungeon duty?”

She sighed. “Ruby won’t want to keep me out any longer than she has to, so probably.”

“We’ll do it then.”

At the end of the bus ride, we noticed Selby’s white football jersey pacing at the front steps to Reject High. So much for waiting,

Selby spotted us and ran in our direction. For a linebacker, he was
slow.
I bet even I could outrun him.

Before he reached us, Rhapsody grabbed my elbow and said, “Let me do the talking.”

I had no problem with that.

Breathless, Selby rattled off questions with so many curse words in between them that my ears burned. Most of them had to do with Peters and the shotgun blast he heard from outside of the house, which meant by the time Rhapsody and I were airborne, he couldn’t have seen us.

“Slow down. We can’t talk about it here,” she warned.

I knew where we were headed. Instead of hanging around with them, I cleared the metal detector scan and made my way to the basement. To my surprise, Janitor Brad had left the door unlocked. I went down, turned on the lights, and found the pliers, a hammer and a nail. We had ten minutes or so before school started. Whatever she intended to tell him, if would have to be
fast.

Selby and Rhapsody entered the dungeon right behind me. The face of the big, tough football player paled. “Why. . .are we in
here?”

“No one will look for us in here,” I said.

“Yeah.” He looked around and breathed heavily. “I can see that.”

Rhapsody hit him in the chest with her hands.
“Focus.
What is it with teenage boys and brains?”

I watched her show him the necklace Cherish had given her and explain to him what it empowered her to do. When he didn’t believe her, she did something new. Her brow furrowed and her fingertips slowly vanished, then the rest of her hands.
How did she learn how to do that?
Peters said I didn’t have control. If I had some, maybe Rhapsody wouldn’t have gotten injured last night. It could have been worse, and almost was.

Selby started visibly sweating. “Uh, and, what can
you
do,
Jason?”
He struggled to say my name, instead of “freak” or something smart.

“Punch holes through walls,” I said, trying not to smile. “And jump pretty far.”

He must have remembered the lunch room where he’d passed out. “How do you turn it on?”

Rhapsody allowed her hands to re-materialize. “I think of something – fear, anger, whatever gets me going. I calm down and they turn off. We have to move.”

Using the light from her cell phone, Rhapsody navigated us to the emerald deposit. She grabbed a hammer and nail, and I used pliers to free a long, sharp piece the size of a golf pencil. Rhapsody’s eyes met mine, and in that instant I knew we thought the same thing.

Like she had told Selby, I stirred up my emotions and used my fingers to cleanly snap the crystal in half. Satisfied, I handed one of them to her and pocketed the other one.

Rhapsody glued it in a different necklace holder – a black pouch with a hole in the end and a cap at the top. She gave it to Selby. “Don’t take this off.”

“I won’t,” he said, slipping it underneath his football jersey. “Can we go now?”

Had Selby been this panicked the entire time? True, it was a lot of information to swallow at once, but I’d pictured him to be the hardened bully who’d beaten me to the ground, not the punk who fainted in the lunchroom. Did he have a secret fear of spiders or boxes?

“No, Mr. Selby. You can’t leave.
Not yet.”

I knew that voice. Peters, armed with a handgun and silencer, stood at the top of the stairs.

All of us stood with shock. Even if Rhapsody made us invisible, what were the odds he wouldn’t randomly kill us by firing into the air? Selby had no clue whether or not he had a power. If he did, it might be useless in this situation. I was our best shot at freedom. He could empty his entire clip and never hurt me.

“Do you know how hard it is to explain to policemen why your double-barrel shotgun looks like a French horn?” he asked me.

Something about this scene – other than the fact a teacher was pointing a gun at me for the second time in a matter of hours – didn’t seem right. Rhapsody must have sensed it too, because she disappeared. Tears seeped from Selby’s closed eyes and his shoulders shook. He was a jerk, but he didn’t deserve to die.

I tried to shield him, but he was twice as wide as I was and our science teacher could still kill him. Peters fired the gun three times – once at where Rhapsody used to be, then me, and at Selby. I heard a crash, wood shattering, and metal pieces banging together.

Rhapsody lay on the ground, unconscious, and Selby had somehow landed headfirst into a wooden shelf, which collapsed around him. Before I realized it, Peters had gone up the stairs.

“Rhapsody!” I screamed, wanting to tend to her, but the shelves creaked. On the top shelf was a machine labeled “mimeograph” that would smash Selby if it fell on him. I rushed over and caught it as the wood gave. After laying it down, I checked Rhapsody’s body for bullet holes and blood. There weren’t any, which didn’t make sense, unless Peters was a terrible shot.

I moved onto Selby and pulled him free from the wreckage. He had a dime-sized bruise on his forehead and nothing else. No bullet holes on him, either. To be on the safe side, I patted myself down. Not a scratch.

“Way to feel me up,” joked Rhapsody. “Hooking up with knocked out girls is a bad look for you.”

I helped her sit up and supported her by the shoulders. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah.”

In the light from one of the bulbs, my eyes caught a piece of metal sticking out of the concrete wall behind us. With as much focus as my ADHD brain could handle, I punched into it and crumbled the concrete from around the metal. It was a bullet!

I did the same a few feet away and found another fragment, which must have been meant for Selby. I guess mine bounced off of me, so I went to find it before someone else did and blamed us for it.

“What happened?” Selby asked, rolling over and rubbing his head. “Did I headbutt a wall?”

“Looks like it.” Considering Rhapsody’s nickname for me, I hated saying anything obvious. But it was true. He headbutted a wall. . .
and dodged a bullet?
“What do you remember, Selby?”

“Not much,” he groaned. “Wait, did Peters really shoot at us?”

Rhapsody grabbed my arm and pulled me to the side.
“Now
do you believe me?”

I agreed emphatically. “Since when can stuff pass through you
?”

She appeared lost. “Huh?”

I pointed to where I got the bullet from. “It didn’t miss you. It went through you and into the wall.”

Rhapsody shrugged and said, “Hmm. . .since I got shot at, I guess.”

An idea came to my mind. “Let’s go.”

The three of us composed ourselves and left the basement. Rhapsody and Selby followed me, unaware of what I planned. I had no intention of telling them, because I didn’t need to lose my nerve.

Once we neared room 105, I could sense their reluctance to go inside, but I didn’t hesitate. I walked in and strolled up to Peters, who was writing an equation on the board. When I cleared my throat, he turned in our direction. Selby and Rhapsody lingered in the doorway.

“Excuse us, Mr. Peters,” I said. For someone who had just been shot at, I was amazingly relaxed. “Since your ‘meeting’ with us ran over, we’re late for first period and need passes to get into class.”

The students, who were goofing off to begin with, settled down to watch what would come next. Sasha, who sat in the front row, waved at me and mouthed “hi.” I imagined Rhapsody sneering behind me. Asia sat next to Sasha and gave me the evil eye. 

“Where are you going?” he calmly asked us.

Where’s the gun? In his desk drawer, or his briefcase?

One by one, we replied. I said, “English.” Rhapsody and Selby said “Spanish” loudly enough for him to hear. He wrote our passes, handed them to me, and shooed us away like flies.

As soon as I was back in the hall, Rhapsody and Selby cornered me. “What was
that
?” they both asked me.

“We needed passes for class. We’re supposed to act normal,
right?”

Rhapsody cursed me with her eyes. “You’d better have more to say.”

“He wasn’t trying to kill us.”

“Really, Cap? You could’ve fooled me, being that
he shot at us.”
 

Selby scoffed. “You
are
as dumb as you look, Champion.”

“If he
really
wanted to kill us, Rhapsody, couldn’t he have done it outside of my apartment two days ago? Or last night – when he caught you? He
waited
for me. And Selby – we gave you a crystal. A minute later, Peters was in there shooting. That’s not a coincidence.”

Doubt slowly drained from her face. “Jason, your car accident.”

“What about it?”

Together, the three of us moved further down the hallway, to ensure we were out of earshot from Peters’ room. “Think, think
hard.
If he doesn’t want to kill us, what if he’s testing us to see what we can and can’t do? Could
he
have caused it somehow?”

I never saw the car that rear-ended us and sent us into a tailspin, but it couldn’t have been his. He didn’t hit us, back up down the highway, and try again. Debra might have seen it, but so far her memory of that day was full of holes. He might not have caused the accident, but he started my powers by hitting me with his car.

If Peters got someone to crash into us on purpose to prove some kind of scientific theory, he could’ve killed Debra to do it. That made me angry enough to toss him into the stratosphere.

“What do we do next, Cap?” Selby asked. Oh great, now
he’s
calling me “Cap,” too.

“What’re you asking me for?”

Rhapsody smiled. “Captains are in charge.”

I blurted out the first thing to come to mind. “I don’t know. We get help, I guess.”