The Trials of Renegade X (15 page)

He and Sarah exchange another glance, only this time they look guilty. Or at least Sarah does. She swallows and looks away, pretending to be interested in her laptop, the one with the all the superhero stickers on it, including the one of the Crimson Flash. She flips the lid open, then closes it again.

“What’s that?” I ask, crossing over to the bed and reaching for the gadget.

Riley grabs it, pulling it away before I can touch it. He puffs up his chest. “Get out of here, X. Sarah already told you, we’re busy.”

An electric tingle runs up my spine, making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. God, I hate this guy. “Sarah, I
really
need to talk to you. I have to show you something.” I glare at Riley and add, “In private.”

“Can’t it wait?” Sarah presses the lever on the side of her chair and lets it sink closer to the floor.

“No. And what were you two doing?” I eye the gadget Riley’s trying to hide behind his back, but I can’t get a good look. What with him not being invisible and everything. Why don’t they want me to see it? Is Sarah making gadgets for
him
now? Like I can’t guess that from the fact that they were working on it together. It doesn’t explain why he’s hiding it.

“Well ...” Sarah sighs. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”

“Great. I want to talk to you, you want to talk to me. I don’t see any need for a third person in that equation.”

“That’s exactly what she needs to talk to you about,” Riley says. “About you. Being a complete and total douchebag.”

“Who, me?” I pretend like I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Sarah?”

Sarah smooths out the fabric of her jeans. She wraps a long, messy blond strand of her hair around her finger. “You
have
been acting like a jerk lately. To Riley, I mean.”

Okay, but did she ever consider the fact that I wouldn’t need to be a jerk if he didn’t go around thinking he’s better than me all the time and trying to steal my sidekick? He hasn’t exactly been a bearer of olive branches or anything. More like a thrower of lighter fluid.

I sit down next to him on the bed, a little closer than he’d like. I can tell because he gets all nervous, probably remembering that time I sat on him. I sigh, like this is all a big misunderstanding. “I hope this isn’t about what I wrote in your notebook the other day, about us being BFFs, because
obviously
that was a friendly gesture.”

Obviously. Just like
this
is. I slip my arm around his shoulders, like we really are BFFs or something. Though that might just be something that happens on TV, since I don’t think I’ve actually ever put my arm around any of my BFFs’ shoulders, unless it was Kat and I was about to make out with her.

It does the trick, though, because Riley flips the hell out and jumps up from the bed. At least he doesn’t break any bones this time, though you’d think he’d have learned his lesson by now. “Dude, what the hell is your problem?!”

My problem is that he’s obviously trying to hide something from me. They both are. But now that he’s not blocking the gadget anymore, I snatch it off the edge of the bed to inspect it.

Riley’s eyes flash with understanding as he realizes he’s been duped. He makes a grab for it. “Give it back!”

I quickly pull it away, out of his reach. My victory doesn’t last long, because then he tackles me, shoving me down and trying to scrabble over me to get to it. I toss it to the far edge of the bed and bring my knee up, slamming it into the side of his stomach.

“
Boys!
” Sarah shrieks.

Riley falls on top of me and catches himself by jamming the heel of his palm into my ribs. He lunges for the device. I shove him away and scramble to beat him to it. There are a lot of flailing limbs, and then I twist around and get a leg under me and push myself across the bed. My fingers close around the handle of the device, and I jerk my arm back and pull it over to me.

And accidentally smash my elbow into Riley’s face. Oops. He cries out in pain and climbs off of me, holding his nose.

Sarah glares at me like I’m some kind of monster as she rushes to Riley’s aid. As if I would do something like that on purpose, while there were witnesses present.

A metallic, coppery smell fills the room as blood gushes from his nostrils, seeping under his hands and dripping on his shirt. His voice is muffled and nasally when he says, “I’m going to
kill
you.”

He
says
that, but he’s the one who’s bleeding, and I’m the one with the device, and I don’t see him coming over here for round two. “You’re the one who attacked me,” I remind him. “Plus, it was an accident.” Plus, he and Sarah are keeping secrets from me and I want to know what’s going on.

He holds back a scream of rage, sounding like an angry elephant.

“Are you happy now?” Sarah snaps at me. She tells Riley she’s going to go get a towel, but not before glancing back and forth between us, like she’s not sure she should leave us alone together, even for a few seconds.

I take this opportunity to inspect my prize. The dial on the side moves from green to red. The green side is marked
better
, the red side
worse
. So descriptive. I hold it up. “If this is some kind of homemade sex toy, you could have just told me.” Instead of letting me touch it. Not that I really think that’s what it is—I hope not, anyway—but I don’t get what the big secret is. “A hint? You want to turn it to the side that says
better
.”

Riley’s face turns bright red, and not just because his nose is bleeding. “It’s a personality enhancer.”

“And you didn’t want me to know that Sarah’s going to use it on you?” Wouldn’t it be easier to just, like, get a better boyfriend?

Sarah storms back in the room with a clean towel and an ice pack.

I wave the device at her, even though she’s still glaring at me. “You’ll never really change him, you know.” A common mistake girls make, at least according to all the sappy made-for-TV movies Amelia watches.

“She wasn’t going to use it on
me
, you idiot,” Riley says.

Not him? I turn to Sarah. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but you’re great the way you are. You don’t need this. I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

She makes an exasperated noise. “Damien, I was going to use it on
you
.”

“What?” I do
not
like the sound of that.

Riley smirks while holding the towel to his face. “You’re the one who needs the attitude adjustment.”

Sarah hands him the ice pack. “I want all three of us to get along. And I know you two could be friends”—we both make disgusted faces at that—“if you could just, you know. Go with it.”

“So, what, you were going to change my personality in order to force me to be friends with him? And,” I ask Riley, “you were okay with that?”

He takes the towel off his face and winces at the sight of all the blood. “I don’t like you.”

“Obviously, since you attacked me.” Completely unprovoked, I might add.

“But I like Sarah, and if she says we could be friends ... I’ll try it.”

“Uh, right.” Easy for him to say—he wasn’t going to be on the receiving end of some “personality enhancement” treatment she concocted. Plus, I can tell from his tone that he doesn’t really believe we could ever be anything but enemies. He must
really
like Sarah. “So, you two were conspiring against me.”

An electric charge burns beneath my skin. Sarah’s supposed to be
my
friend. I’m supposed to be able to trust her. And then Mr. Perfect comes along and ruins everything, like he can just waltz into Sarah’s life and take her away from me. I get up from the bed, anger boiling inside me. I’m still clutching the personality enhancer, though I try not to squeeze it too hard in my rage, not wanting to give Sarah yet another reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to touch her gadgets. Especially since I’m guessing Riley hasn’t broken any.

“You’re overreacting,” Sarah says. “We were trying to help you. Like an intervention.”

“An intervention? For my personality? I think that’s called
not liking
someone.” It’s also called
betrayal
. “I thought we were friends, Sarah.”

“We are. I just wanted you two to get along! You’re both important to me, but all you do is squabble.”

“Squabble” is putting it lightly. Riley must agree, because he goes kind of pale at that, though it might just be the blood loss.

“And it’s not like it would have been permanent,” she goes on. “We were going to put you back to normal, once you’d had a chance to get to know each other. It was just a time out.”

That must be what the “worse” setting was about.

Electricity twitches in my palms. I clench my free hand and hold the device tighter so neither of them sees. And pray I don’t go all electric again and, like, take out the wall. A little zap flickers from me to the device. A couple of lights flash, and then the dial twists by itself, over from “better” to “worse.” Which I hope nobody noticed. “Face it, Sarah. The Invisible Douche and I don’t get along. And we never will.” If she doesn’t want us fighting, she should just get rid of him.
That
would solve it.

“At least Riley’s willing to try and work things out with you,” she says.

“Sarah, there’s nothing to ’work out.’ Sometimes people just don’t like each other.” I look to Riley for some sort of agreement, but he’s slumped down on the bed, pressing the ice pack to his face and not paying attention.

“If there’s nothing to work out, then maybe you should leave.” Sarah marches over to me. She holds out her hand for the personality enhancer.

I don’t give it to her. “Come on, Sarah. You don’t mean that.”

“You can come back when you’re ready to play nice.”

“Sarah, that’s basically banishing me
for life
. You can’t do that. And you expect me to give this back to you, after what you planned to do with it?” Which, for all I know, she
still
plans to do with it.

“Drop it,” she says, like she’s talking to her dog.

And like Heraldo, I obey. I set the device in her hand, but only reluctantly.

There’s a little jolt as the device makes contact with her skin. A visible spark. She blinks, staring at her hand and looking dizzy for a second. She wobbles a little on her feet.

I put a hand out to steady her. I am, after all, still her friend, and a way better one than Riley, since he’s on the bed, nursing his injury, and not even noticing that anything’s wrong. I mean, not that anything
is
wrong, since it was just a little static electricity, right?

And by a little, I might mean
a lot
, and that it wasn’t static at all, but came from my hand. Which might make her wobbliness my fault, if you think about it, which I’m not going to.

“Are you okay, Sarah?”

Something flickers in her eyes. She blinks a few times, and then a wicked smile curves one side of her mouth, making her look really evil for a moment. She shakes her head and the smile disappears, leaving her perfectly normal again.

Weird.
But, whatever. I’m sure it was nothing. And that it didn’t have anything to do with my new power. Or her gadget.

Sarah seems to remember what she was doing before the shock, then points to the door and says, “
Out
.”

Chapter 11

RILEY SHIFTS UNCOMFORTABLY IN his seat across from me at the dining table on Tuesday afternoon. He has his book from Intro to Heroism out in front of him, along with his binder and the worksheet with our assignment printed on it.

I fold my hands on the table and smile at him. I haven’t said a word since we sat down, which was, oh, almost ten minutes ago. I’ve just been watching him squirm, waiting to see how long it will take before he gives in and makes the first move.

Finally, he taps his pen against the paper and says, “We should probably get started. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can leave.”

“Wouldn’t want to miss an episode of
Train Wrecks
.”

“
Train Models
,” he corrects me, like I didn’t already know that.
Train Models
is a stupid, boring show where some old guy repairs model trains. Really slowly. I’m pretty sure even Sarah thinks it’s boring, though I know she watches it with him anyway.

And if he wanted to be home in time to watch it, he shouldn’t have insisted we meet at my house. Like he didn’t want me anywhere near his family or something, though I was already planning on flattering the hell out of his mom and making her wonder why her son was being so hostile to such an obviously nice young man.

He clears his throat and reads from the assignment sheet. “
In a team of two, list and discuss the five rules from the League Treaty you feel are most important.
”

This is supposed to teach us teamwork. And I know Miss Monk partnered us up on purpose because she knows we hate each other—after all, I did spend fifteen minutes of class on Monday talking to an empty chair I pretended I thought Riley was sitting in, even though he was across the room and
not
invisible—and she wouldn’t let Riley out of it when he whined to her after class that he couldn’t work with me.

“So,” Riley says, “what are your top five?”

There are more than five? “The first ones.”

“Uh, the third rule says that heroes don’t cause unnecessary bodily harm, even to their enemies. Are you sure that’s your favorite?”

I grin at him. “It’s my favorite one to
break
.”

“You haven’t even read them, have you?”

I shrug.

“Damien,” Helen says, stepping out of the kitchen, a dishtowel in her hand, “does your friend want to stay for dinner?”

“My ’friend’?” Does he look like someone I would ever be friends with? “How do you know this isn’t Kat in disguise?” I reach across the table and take his hand, rubbing my thumb lovingly against his palm. “Come on, ’Riley,’ let’s go up to my room and ’study.’”