The 6th Power (2 page)

Could stay home and watch television, but I had exactly one thing to look forward to that summer, and that thing was downtown. I looked around again and stepped onto the sidewalk. Okay. Here we go.

Coralberry is a pretty boring town. Most of the grownups who lived there worked in The City, so after seven in the morning, things got quiet. My family lived on Rosenberg Street, along with a lot of other families. There were plenty of kids around, doing the things that kids do when they’re not in school. You know, if you have a normal life.

A few blocks down and I came across Perryn and Wyatt, a couple of fifth graders. They had set up a bike ramp on the street using pieces of plywood. Looked like fun. Shame I couldn’t join them, but Nate Holland fell into one of three categories for the kids of Coralberry: 1) someone not worth paying attention to, 2) someone not to be friends with because you’d get grief from his brothers, or 3) someone to harass because his brothers do it and it looks like fun. For Perryn and Wyatt, I was usually in category three. Fortunately, they were busy, so I was able to walk by without getting more than a dirty look.

Another block down and I heard someone bouncing a basketball. Not Chet and Robert. Chet used to play basketball, but he had to give it up when he and Robert got held back in the eighth grade. The bouncing got closer and the bouncer turned the corner onto Rosenberg Street. It was a girl. I knew her, but I couldn’t remember her name, of course. She was one grade ahead of me. Tall and pretty. Red hair in pig tails. Strictly category one. She didn’t even spare me a glance as she passed by.

It made sense that Chet and Robert would choose that moment to ambush me. They did enjoy an audience. I’d been on edge since I left the yard, expecting it to happen, so I almost nodded when I heard them running up behind me. I slowed my pace and closed down.

“Hey, shrimp.” Chet spun me around. Robert was right behind him. They were both smiling. Chet’s smile was almost peaceful, as if all was now right with his world. He was carrying his glove and his aluminum baseball bat.

The girl had stopped and was looking back at us. Perryn and Wyatt rode their bikes over and stood there, smiling, knowing that something good was coming. The Holland brothers always put on a great show. I dropped my eyes and tried to concentrate on the fact that Mr. Clifford’s lawn needed to be mowed. I did not want to concentrate on how my cheeks were burning or on that awful feeling I get in my chest right before I start crying. I told myself that I wasn’t going to lose it in front of all of them. I didn’t really believe myself, though.

Chet ducked his head and looked me in the eye. “You owe us an apology, you know.”

I should have immediately said, “I’m sorry,” but Chet’s words were so ridiculous that my mouth froze. Unfortunately. Chet sighed, as if he had been hoping that it wouldn’t come to this, and motioned to Robert. My world turned upside down and started to smell really bad.

The twins held me over a fresh deposit that was so huge, it could only have been made by the Harvey family’s Great Dane. Dad had been complaining for months about them not keeping the beast in their yard, and at that moment, I completely agreed with him. My face was inches from the poop, close enough to scare away the flies. 

Chet cleared his throat. “Now then, shrimp. Apologize.”

Words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them. “For what?”

“For what?” Chet repeated, sounding stunned. “Why, we went to all the trouble of making you breakfast this morning, and you just spit it all over the place! That… that just hurts our feelings. Doesn’t it, Robert?”

Robert grunted. Perryn and Wyatt laughed. My vision started to get watery.

“I know that school is out,” Chet continued, adjusting his grip on the waist of my jeans, causing me to drop an inch, “but I believe that learning is a year-long pursuit.” Despite the circumstances, I nearly broke out laughing at that. “Apparently, you need to learn some manners. I don’t have a lot of time right now, so we’ll have to continue this lesson later. But for the time being, I want you to apologize.”

My head was starting to pound. I knew that if I opened my mouth to speak, I’d hear that quaver in my voice, that weak little sound that I absolutely loathed.

Chet sighed. “Come on. I’m getting tired of holding you and I’ve got to get to practice. Just apologize and we’ll let you up.”

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. Landing face-first in a big pile of dog poop didn’t seem so bad by comparison. But not doing Chet’s bidding wasn’t even an option. I took a deep breath and said, as loud as I could, “I’m sorry.”

“Very good,” Chet said. “Now I want you to admit that you are a little girl, that you wear little girl’s underpants, and that they have ponies on them.”

Well, that did it. Tears started to fall and my breathing turned to gasps. Another chapter was going to be written in the lore of Rosenberg Street. Wyatt and Perryn and the girl with the red hair would share the story with the whole neighborhood by sundown. So I cried. I cried because of the embarrassment and the helplessness and…

“Let him go.”

Her voice was quiet. She almost sounded like she was making a suggestion, rather than giving an order. Still, the Holland brothers were brought up short. I even managed to stop my blubbering long enough to look at her. She was standing in the middle of the street, holding the basketball, and even though her words were timid, she looked fierce. And pretty. I mean, clearly she was a crazy person, but she was really pretty.

“Butt out,” Chet offered. “Now.”

The girl shook her head and said, a little more forcefully, “He’s apologized. Let him go.”

I listed to one side as Chet released my shoulder. “Hey!” he barked, pointing at her, “unless you want to…”

The threat, however, was cut short when Chet’s watch beeped. He looked at it and swore. “Great! Now I’m late for practice.”

They dropped me. I managed to land on my elbows and roll away from the poop. Chet loomed over me and said, “By the way, nice eyebrow.” Then he turned and ran off, Robert struggling to keep up.

Chapter 3

I
t would have been nice to just to lay there on Mr. Clifford’s lawn and recover. It would have been nice to just lay there for the rest of my life, but the audience was still there, so I managed to stand up.

“Are you okay?” The girl had moved closer. I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want to see the pity and the disgust in her eyes. The bike-dudes were still laughing. I kept my head down, nodded once and took off.

I ran down Rosenberg Street, not really thinking about where I was going, just trying to get away. I’d traveled this sidewalk hundreds of times, so I could manage it even though my eyes were all blurry.

By the time I reached downtown, it was pretty much over, other than wiping off the tears and the snot. I knew from experience that if I waited a few minutes, the red blotches on my face would fade. I slowed to a walk.

The road I was on went through downtown and eventually met up with the highway. The highway led to Westertonville, where Dad caught the train every day. The train would get you to The City. Or you could get on the Interstate and go all the way to California. Disneyland. Movie stars.

All I had to do was keep walking.

That was ridiculous, of course. I couldn’t run away. I was just a kid. Someone would see me and tell the police and they’d pick me up and drag me back and things would be even worse than before. So I was stuck in Coralberry, in my house, with the twins, until one of us managed to graduate from high school. With the twins being held back and with my memory problems, it was hard to tell who would escape first.

I sighed. Those kinds of thoughts never did me any good. I needed a distraction. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot to distract you in Coralberry. If you want to have fun, you leave town. Westertonville has a mall and a movie theater. Coralberry just has a library and a few shops downtown. Fortunately, one of those shops was my absolute favoritest place on the planet, the place I’d been trying to get to since I woke up that morning.

Coralberry Comics and Collectibles.

I’d been reading comic books for as long as I could remember. Each Wednesday, New Comic Book Day, I’d make my way to the shop and spend my allowance on stories of kids with fantastic powers who put the hurt on bad people.

The appeal was understandable, considering my circumstances.

The shop itself hadn’t changed in forever. Big sign over the door. A bell rang when you walked in. Counter on the right. New comics hanging on the wall to the left. White boxes with old stuff were lined up the middle. Sports memorabilia and role-playing games in the back. The place was clean, well-lit, and smelled kind of lemony. It was also empty, but the door leading upstairs was open. Mr. Magellan, the owner, had an office up there, and I knew that the ring of the bell would soon bring him down.

I turned to the new books that he had put up that morning, fingering the money in my pocket. Sure enough, within a minute I heard the soft slapping of sandaled feet behind me.

“Mr. Holland,” the voice was deep and warm, “how are you doing?”

I turned around and smiled for the first time that day. “Not bad,” I lied. “You?”

“I can’t complain,” Mr. Magellan said, returning my smile. His teeth and the remainder of his hair were really white. His skin and his eyes were cardboard brown. He was old and looked kind of frail, but the muscles on his arms stood out, probably from lugging boxes of comic books around. Mr. Magellan always wore a silk Hawaiian shirt. On that day, it was red, and it had an ocean wave cresting over the breast pocket. He looked like he’d be more at home on a beach than in a comic book shop in Connecticut.   

“So,” he said, settling on the stool behind the counter and rubbing his hands together, “school is out for summer. Do you have any vacation plans?”

“Not really.” I turned back to the comic books before the smile fell from my face. Dad was too busy at work for us to go anywhere, and I couldn’t even spend my usual week with Grandma because she was going on an Alaskan cruise.

“That’s too bad,” said Mr. Magellan. “Well, you can get some reading done, instead. There are a lot of good books to choose from this week.”

He was right. Too many for me to afford. I made my selections and placed five comic books on the counter.

“Let us see what you have here,” Mr. Magellan said, lining them up. “Ah. That’s what I like about you, Mr. Holland. You respect the classics.
Superman
,
Batman
,
Green Lantern
,
Iron Man
,
Justice League
.”

I shrugged and placed my ten dollar bill beside the books. “Unfortunately, I don’t have enough allowance to get them all. Which ones do you recommend?”

He pursed his lips. I knew that Mr. Magellan had read everything that he put up on the rack. If he said a book was worth buying, he was to be believed.

“That is a tough one. I would be hard pressed to choose what to leave behind.” He tapped his fingers on the counter, then looked up at me. “Now there’s an idea. I just got back from a convention late last night and I could use some help with unpacking all of my purchases.”

I looked around. Sitting by the back door of the shop were several sealed cardboard boxes.

“I think that ten dollars and an hour’s worth of work would entitle you to all five comic books.” Mr. Magellan held out his hand, smiling. “Do we have a bargain?”

Talk about a no-brainer. I’d spent a lot of time in the shop over the years. Some days, I’d look through back issues for hours without buying anything. Mr. Magellan was cool about it. He knew that I wouldn’t damage anything, and we’d talk about comic books and movies. Sometimes he’d even tell me stories that he’d learned when he was a kid, really cool tales about magicians and monsters. I’d told him once that he should write his stories down and publish them, but he’d said that some stories were only good if you shared them out loud.

In all the years that I’d been coming to Coralberry Comics and Collectibles, though, I’d never done any work there. But running a comic book shop was number three on my list of what-I-wanted-to-do-when-I-grew-up, right behind “comic book writer” and “anything that allowed me to move out of my house.” So I shook Mr. Magellan’s hand, my smile returning.

We unpacked boxes filled with back issues, baseball cards and role-playing sourcebooks. I told Mr. Magellan what was in each box, he checked it off his list, put a barcode sticker on it and typed something into his laptop. It was awesome. The best hour I’d spent in a long time. The only hard part about it was not pulling each of the comic books out of its protective sleeve and reading it right then and there. Mr. Magellan chatted as we worked, telling me about the different conventions and trade shows that he had gone to recently.

“A couple of weeks back,” he said as he typed in information about a twenty-year old issue of
Quasar
, “while we were packing up at the end of the day, a bunch of us comic book types got into a bit of a trivia contest.” He chuckled. “My word, I thought baseball card collectors were steeped in minutia.”

I stacked some packages of brightly colored dice on the counter. “What were some of the questions that they asked?”

Mr. Magellan thought for just a moment, raised an eyebrow and said, “What comic book featured the first race between Superman and the Flash?”

I shrugged.

Mr. Magellan tapped a finger on his temple and said, “
Superman
number 199.”

I nodded as if the answer had been on the tip of my tongue which, of course, was not the case. “Cool. What else?”

 “We had a string of questions about Jason Todd. What issue he first appeared in, what issue he first appeared as Robin, what issue he first appeared as the Red Hood. You know.”

“Did you know the answers?”

“Yes, sir.
Batman
numbers 357, 368 and 635, respectively.”

I shook my head. “Wow, how do you remember all of that?”