The Ables (53 page)

“There’s no building in town big enough to convert into a school,” Bentley said matter-of-factly. “They’re going to have to split us all up.”

“You mean there’s no such super power as ‘instant school creator?’” I asked playfully.

“Sadly, no.” He smiled back, tolerating my joke.

“I, for one, wouldn’t mind just having a year off from school,” James added.

“Ha! Yeah,” I said sarcastically.

“Good luck with that one,” Henry said, dabbing a napkin on his face. “They’ll make us sit out in the street for classes before they cancel a school year.”

“I hear they may be sending us all to Goodspeed,” Bentley said. And he would know, his father being on the board and all.

I shook my head at that notion. “All of us? Where would they fit us?”

“What, are they going to make us all hold hands and teleport there every morning?” Henry said, giggling.

“Yeah, actually, that’s one of the suggestions they’re talking about.”

“Oh, good grief,” I blurted out. “Freaking adults.”

Bentley scooted his chair back away from the table. “We better get going if we’re going to make use of the daylight.”

“Freddie,” I said, pointing at the table, “don’t forget your inhaler.”

We all pushed back from the table and started standing up. Henry hurriedly stuffed a few more pieces of breadstick in his mouth. He didn’t bother chewing before speaking. “Tell me again … why are we practicing in the summer when there are four more months before another SuperSim?”

“Because we want to get better, dummy,” I answered, slapping him on the top of the head playfully. We headed outside and took a right, heading in the direction of the cornfield.

“But we saved the day,” Henry objected. “We’re the big heroes now, right?”

“Donnie saved the day,” I corrected him, “Not us.”

That brought the group to a momentary silence, as everyone thought about our friend. We’d barely talked about it with one another, and I figured it would be a long time until we did. It was still pretty fresh.

“Besides,” I said, determined to get us back to cheerier subjects, “Even though we played a part in saving the day, our track record in SuperSim competitions is still pretty awful.”

Henry had to agree with that one. “That’s for sure.”

We rounded the corner of Ashbury Street, heading west. There were blue tarps patching up holes on the roofs of the houses all around Freepoint, and construction crews were everywhere, sawing and hammering and drilling. Tree limbs, even entire trees, were stacked along the side of the street in nearly every neighborhood. Everywhere you looked there were signs of the recent destruction but signs of recovery as well.

“Did you end up getting in any trouble over those cameras, after all?” I asked Bentley. The authorities in Freepoint, my father included, had been pretty shocked to discover that Bentley had a network of cameras covering 30 percent or more of the city. I believe my father referred to it as “unconstitutional” and “really, really, very illegal” when he’d learned about it.

“Heh,” Bentley chuckled. “Actually, no.”

“What? How is that possible?” Freddie asked. Bentley definitely had a knack for getting away with things.

“Well …” he replied, “I’m not really supposed to say.”

“You can’t leave us hanging like that,” Henry said. “That’s cruel. You can’t tease us like that.”

“Well,” he said, weighing whether he should tell us. “I was going to get in lots of trouble. Until the chief of the protectors came to my house to see the whole operation. And once I started showing him and my dad how all the feeds worked, they got real quiet.” He smiled. “Turns out the citizens of Freepoint are pretty adamant that the board and the protector force find a way to keep something like what Finch did from ever happening again. So instead of punishing me for the cameras … they bought ‘em.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said, clearly impressed.

“Yup. They actually ended up purchasing the cameras to use as their own security monitoring system to protect and patrol the city.”

“Unbelievable,” Henry muttered. “It’s illegal if a kid does it, but if the adults do it, it’s totally okay.”

We continued on across Baker Street, only a few blocks from the cornfield.

“Too bad, really,” I said. “Those things came in pretty handy that night, you know? Would have made a killer edge in SuperSim competitions.”

“You’re not kidding,” James said.

“Well, all I said was that I sold them the camera system, not that we wouldn’t be able to use it anymore.”

“You got them to give you permission for us to use it?” I was beyond impressed.

Bentley just grinned that grin he has when he knows he’s outsmarted everyone. “Who said anything about permission?”

At that, we all shared a smile and a laugh.

“I mean,” he continued, “I did build the system, after all. I think if anyone would be able to tap into it without getting noticed, it would be its creator, don’t you?”

We could see the cornfield now, only two blocks away. And I could see it more crisply and clearly than ever now that Bentley had made some modifications to my camera. He’d even created a special pair of glasses for Henry with a computer screen built into the clear lenses. It didn’t obscure Henry’s own vision if he needed or wanted it. But once activated, Henry was able to see my high-def camera feed without carrying around a laptop.

“So …” James said, his usual optimism shining through again, “what are we practicing today?”

“I think it’s time for Phillip and Henry to start learning a new ability,” Bentley replied.

“What?” said Patrick, in one of his rare breaks of silence.

“Yeah, I’m with Patrick,” I said, scoffing. “What are you talking about?”

“I think we pretty much proved that Phillip only has the one power, Bentley,” Henry reminded us, “as impressive, and frankly, as scary, as it turned out to be.”

“I said ability, not power,” Bentley said with a smile. He turned to look at me as we walked. “I was re-watching the footage from that night again yesterday,” he continued.

“I don’t know how you watch that stuff,” I said. I knew I would go to my deathbed without ever watching the video feed of the showdown with Finch. It would be too painful, too emotional, for me to relive it.

“I thought you said those cameras didn’t record anything,” Henry remembered aloud. “They just streamed live video, right?”

“Well, that was true. Up until the moment we left Central Park for Freepoint.” He grinned devilishly.

“Why am I not surprised?” I asked.

“Anyway,” Bentley refocused the conversation, “something
huge
stood out to me. You, Phillip, have been holding out on us.”

“Here we go again,” I said. “I promise I’m only a telekinetic.”

“Oh, I know,” Bentley countered, “but you can do things with that power that you didn’t tell us about.” He had a playful edge to his grilling, but I had no idea where he was going.

“What are you talking about?” I asked a bit more pointedly.

“Well, you can move objects with your brain, right?”

“Duh!” Henry chimed in. Bentley just ignored him, politely waiting for my reply.

“Yeah, of course. You know that.”

He kept going. “And a human being … well, they’re made up of matter and atoms, right? They’re objects, wouldn’t you say?”

As usual, I couldn’t quite figure out where Bentley was headed. “I guess so.”

“And you had those guys, Finch and his men—”

“His grandfather, actually,” came Henry’s voice in its correcting tone, “Thomas Sallinger, if we’re going for accuracy.”

“Sorry,” Bentley said, not missing a beat. “Your grandfather and his men. … I’m not sure if you remember this or even know this … but you had them suspended up off the ground for a long time, just using your power.”

“And you threw your grandpa into the wall a few times, too,” Henry reminded us. He was likely to never stop reminding me.

I did remember all of it. I was on a seven-week streak of recurring nightmares that relived the most traumatic bits of that night, and it was turning me into an insomniac. But I still didn’t get his point. “So I can move people. What’s your point, Bentley?”

“If you can move objects, and people are objects, and
you’re
a person … well, then, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to fly.”

That shut us all up pretty quickly as we contemplated what Bentley was saying.

“You mean ‘fly’ fly?” I asked.

“Why not? If you can lift another person into the air twenty feet and toss them through the air using your powers, why couldn’t you achieve a similar effect to flying by using your powers on yourself?”

We stepped up onto the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and found ourselves in our favorite spot … the cornfield.

“Throw myself into a wall?” I asked, showing my skepticism.

“Throwing yourself into the air,” he said emphatically. “And then … around. I don’t know how it works. I’m just saying you should think of yourself as an object you can move, and move yourself in a motion that makes you fly through the air.
You
have to figure out how to do it. But you know it’s possible.”

I looked at Bentley with a mixture of disbelief and intrigue. I had to admit, he made a fair bit of sense. I smiled. “I guess maybe that
could
work.”

“It
will
work, Phillip!” he added exuberantly.

“It’s going to take me forever to learn how to do it.”

Bentley just looked at me with that puppy-dog expression, and I caved.

“Okay, we can try it,” I said cautiously.

“And, Henry?” Bentley continued, “I want to start playing around with your ability … seeing what you may be capable of that we haven’t considered.”

“You know I’m game,” came my reply.

“You have the ability to place a thought or an image into someone else’s mind. That ultimately means that for a short period of time, you take control of their image-rendering processes.”

Henry waited all of three seconds to get impatient. “And?”

“It’s time to see what else you can control in other peoples’ minds.”

I looked back out over the city, its appearance forever changed by the events of that night. But there were no more sounds of crackling fire or explosions. No more screams.

I thought about Donnie and the sacrifice he made to save us all. I thought about how he probably didn’t even realize all that he was doing: protecting his friends was just instinct for Donnie … part of his DNA. I wondered if he ever even knew he had all those abilities until he needed them.

I thought about my mother and how unfair it was that she was gone from me. I knew that if she were alive, she’d chastise me for dwelling on her death instead of moving on with my life. But it didn’t change anything. I kept on dwelling.

And I thought about my own actions and how little I’d managed to do right in the year since learning about my powers. It didn’t feel good, but I knew that I wasn’t half the man Donnie had been. I knew I probably wouldn’t have been able to sacrifice myself blindly the way he did to save others. I would have been too scared.

But that’s the point of Freepoint, I suppose … to help foster heroes for the future. And after the carnage caused by my own flesh and blood, there were going to be a whole lot more disabled heroes in the special ed class next year. They would need someone to look up to. A leader.

One thing I knew for sure: I was no hero, not yet. Not compared to Donnie. But I would be someday soon.

I looked back at Bentley and smiled. “Okay, let’s do it,” I said. “Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? We’re custodians,” I said, beaming.

“Ugh.” It was Henry, which shouldn’t be a surprise. “Can’t we change that name while we’re at it? I hate being a freaking janitor.”

“Words only have the meaning assigned to them by current culture,” Bentley said, without expounding.

“What?” Henry asked.

“Custodian only means janitor in this current culture. As recently as one hundred years ago, the word meant merely a guardian or protector of something important. The word once had strength, and it will again.”

“It will,” I added, “as long as we have anything to say about it.”

The End