The Trials of Renegade X (24 page)

“Well, Perkins,” I say, “I guess I should be getting home for dinner.”

Riley glances at the cuckoo clock on the wall that, to my disappointment, doesn’t actually do anything on the hour, since the cuckoo part is broken. “It’s not even four.”

“But dinner’s at five, and I wouldn’t want to risk being late. I mean, I know
some
people don’t take these things very seriously, but that’s not how it is at
my
house.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Zach comes back and sits down, watching us intently.

“Nothing. Just that it was really rude of you to skip out on dinner the other night.”

“It was?” Riley wrinkles his forehead, scrunching up one eyebrow. “But
you
said it was okay. In fact, you specifically said that I
wouldn’t be missed
.”

“Well, I have been known to be wrong on occasion. Because, see, my stepmom invited you, and she was real disappointed that you took her invitation so lightly. Especially after you promised you were staying.”

“I ... I didn’t really promise, did I?”

“You said you’d
love
to stay for dinner.
Love
. That’s what
you
said, and she thought you meant it for some reason. And my dad was disappointed, too. You know how he hates letting down his fans.”

Zach gapes at him. “You could have met the Crimson Flash?!
What
is wrong with you?”

Riley stares guiltily at the coffee table, but otherwise ignores him. “He didn’t let me down—I’m the one who didn’t show up.”

“Right,” I tell him, “but he feels bad, because you wanted to meet him. And my stepmom thinks you don’t like her, and after you seemed like
such a nice boy
.” I shake my head.

His mouth falls open a little. He swallows. “I didn’t know they felt that way. Because
you
said—”

I hold up a hand. “I didn’t know, either.”

“Sure you didn’t. Now the Crimson Flash hates me. And your stepmom, and she seemed really nice.”

“Well ... They don’t
hate
you. They’re just disappointed in you.”

“Good job,” Zach says, scowling at Riley.

“And,” I add, “they’ve been on my case all week to invite you over again. But I should probably just tell them you stood them up for a reason and that it’s never going to happen. Because it’s not like you
want
to come over or anything, right?”

“Well, that’s not ... that’s not true.” He bites at his thumbnail, looking worried. “I mean, I
could
come over. If they want me to.”

“They do. Really badly. And you’d be doing me a favor, since then they’d stop hounding me about it.”

“Do it,” Zach says. “I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.”

“You should come, too,” I tell him. “My dad would be upset if he knew you were a fan and I didn’t invite you.”

He looks like he’s going to explode. “Riley, now I’m going to
kill you
if you don’t say yes.”

“Okay, okay.” Riley holds up his hands. “We’ll have dinner at your house.”

“Yes!” Zach jumps up from the couch and punches the air, then looks like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. “What day? Can we come over tomorrow? I’ve never met anyone from TV before. Do we have to dress up?”

Riley groans and rubs his face with his hands. “God, Zach. Calm down. It’s not a big deal.”

“Uh, yeah, it kinda
is
.”

“If you have to freak out, do it somewhere else.” He shoos him away. “You’re bothering us.”

“But—”

“Go
away
.”

“Fine.” Zach rolls his eyes, as if Riley’s the one exasperating
him
, and then takes off for his room.

“What?” Riley says when he catches me smirking at him.

“Nothing.”

“He’s never going to shut up about it, you know. I’m going to have to hear about the time he met the Crimson Flash for the rest of my life.”

Especially if Zach and Amelia fall in love and get married and have tons of babies. But I’m getting ahead of myself. They just have to like each other long enough to go to Homecoming. After that, they’re free to go their separate ways.

I pick up the dead controller from the coffee table, looking it over now that Zach’s gone.

“There’s no way the battery’s just dead,” Riley says. “I’m pretty sure I heard you zap it. Once you knew you were going to lose, of course.”

“Yeah, right. I was
so
winning. One more hit and you were done.”

He shrugs. “If only the controller still worked, we could have a rematch. But now we’ll never know.”

“Or ...” I make waves of electricity flow across my right hand, holding the controller in my left.

“Are you crazy?” Riley whispers. “What if Zach comes back and sees you? Do you
want
someone to find out?”

I ignore him and make a big show of bringing my right index finger and the controller together, zapping it again. Nothing happens. At least, not at first. I start to say, “Well, it works on TV,” when the light on the controller flickers back on.

I blink at it, then press the power button. The whole system starts up. “Wow. I can’t believe that actually worked. But I guess now we can have that rematch.”

Riley’s staring at me. Really seriously. Like he not only can’t believe that just happened, but he also just figured out the secret to the universe. “Forget the rematch, X.”

“Why? Because you know you’ll—” And then it dawns on me why he’s staring at me like that.

Our eyes meet as we exchange a look of understanding, and then I toss the controller on the couch and we both hurry down the hall to his room.

Sarah’s in the living room, in front of the TV, when Riley and me get to her house. She has it on the news and is scowling and shaking her head as the anchors talk about how there’s been a surge of innocent people turning themselves in to the police today.

“Those idiots,” Sarah grumbles, folding her arms and sinking down in the poofy easy chair she’s sitting in.

“Hey, Sarah,” I say. I’m holding the personality enhancer, which now at least lights up after I zapped it again. I’m assuming that means it works, though neither of us was exactly eager to be a test subject.

Sarah glances up at me, then at Riley, from her position in the chair, which looks like it’s trying to swallow her whole. She grips the armrests and pulls herself out of it. “Can you believe this?” she says, waving her hand at the TV. “I was trying to get guilty people,
criminals
, to turn themselves in. And instead there are all these cases of good people taking themselves to the police because they forgot to pick up their kid from daycare or get the oil changed in their car.”

“I guess they still qualify as ’guilty people,’” Riley says.

“What are you talking about?” I ask Sarah, pretending like I have no idea, since she still thinks I’m blissfully ignorant of her crazy exploits last night.

She sighs. “I put out some mind-control signals.” She conveniently doesn’t mention that she had to break into Wilson Enterprises to do it. Or that she abandoned Riley there to a bunch of killer robots. Though, to be fair, she might not have known about the robots part. But still. If anyone should be turning themselves in from feeling guilty today, it should be her. “They were supposed to get criminals to take themselves to the police because they actually felt remorse. But mostly it hasn’t been bad guys. It’s been people who feel overly guilty about normal mistakes. Some of them were even superheroes. And there haven’t been
any
supervillains.” Sarah peers over her glasses at me as she says that, giving me an accusing look. As if I’m personally responsible for this. “They apparently don’t feel guilty for their crimes.”

That or they know better than to buy computers from Wilson Enterprises. “How do you know who’s committed crimes or not?”

She ignores me, wrinkling her eyebrows at us. She takes in the fact that we’re both here and that I’m the one holding the personality enhancer, even though she gave it to Riley earlier. “Wait. Did you guys come here together?”

“Well,” Riley says, “we sort of, um ...”

I sigh and flop down on the couch. “I hate to break this to you, Sarah, but Riley and I are in love and will be going to Homecoming together. So I hope you didn’t already buy a dress.”

Riley looks like he’s going to die. “That’s not
—
”

“Is that your way of saying you guys aren’t squabbling anymore?” Sarah asks, grinning at us.

“Not ex— Er, well,” Riley says, stopping himself from blowing this, “something like that. I guess.”

“And we didn’t even need this thing.” I hold up the personality enhancer. Which, as far as Sarah knows, doesn’t work.

“Well, I
did
already get a dress,” Sarah says, still grinning. “So even though I know you don’t have a date, Damien, you can’t have mine.”

“What? Yes, I do. I’m taking Kat.” Assuming her parents don’t figure out why she wants to come home so badly that weekend. Though I’m pretty sure they don’t keep up with events at Heroesworth, so even if they’ll know she’s going somewhere with me that night—since apparently her
not
begging them to get to spend time with me is, understandably, highly suspicious—they probably won’t suspect anything. Which is good, because I don’t think they’d approve of her going to a dance at Heroesworth with me, even if her own school sent her there on that field mission last week. Which is also how I’m going to spin this if we get caught, telling them it was all in the name of homework.

Sarah narrows her eyes at me. “You can’t bring her to the dance. She’s a supervillain. She’s not allowed at Heroesworth.”

A supervillain who saved her boyfriend’s ass last night, after she abandoned him. “No one will know.”

“You’d jeopardize the safety of the entire school? A whole generation of heroes? For a
dance
?”

“Who said anything about jeopardizing anyone?”

“She goes to Vilmore. You can’t knowingly sneak her into Heroesworth! It’s—”

Riley clears his throat, interrupting her. “Hey, you said you got your dress?”

“Yeah,” she says, taking a deep breath and seeming relieved to not have to deal with me, since I am apparently being impossible. “I showed it to you last week, remember?”

“I forgot what it looks like. Can you show it to me again?”

“Yeah, sure,” she says, getting up from her chair. “And, Damien, you don’t have to have a date to come to the dance. You can hang out with us. It’ll be fun.”

Um, right. Because going alone and having to watch them make out all night sounds so appealing. But I don’t mention I’ll still be going with Kat, because I have more important things to worry about right now. Like shooting Sarah with the personality enhancer as soon as her back is turned.

“I’ll think about it,” I say, pretending to sound dejected, like she’s actually convinced me I can’t bring my girlfriend to Heroesworth. Kat being a supervillain is a minor detail, one no one has to know about, especially since she can shapeshift and make her thumb not have a
V
. She can even have an
H
if she wants. And what my fellow classmates don’t know about her won’t hurt them.

Sarah smiles at me and then turns to go to her room and get her dress. I hold up the personality enhancer, aiming it at her back.

Riley mouths,
Now
, not daring to actually say anything, in case she turns around.

I take a deep breath and pull the trigger.

The lights on the device flicker on. There’s a flash as a bright beam shoots out from the end of the personality enhancer and hits Sarah in the shoulder. It makes contact just for a split second, and then the beam sputters and dies. The lights on the device go dim again. A little curl of smoke comes out the end.

Sarah turns around, rubbing her shoulder and frowning, like she’s not sure what just happened.

I hide the personality enhancer behind my back, hoping I don’t look too conspicuous.

For a moment, I think Sarah’s going to put two and two together and call me on it, even though the device is supposedly broken. But then she seems to decide nothing happened after all and continues on to her room.

“
Voila
,” I say, holding up the device again and blowing the smoke from the end, like gunslingers do in old Western movies. “One Sarah, back to normal. Our work here is done.”

But Riley’s got this concerned look on his face, like he’s not so sure about that. “It didn’t look like it worked properly.”

“Oh, yeah? And what is it supposed to look like?”

“I don’t know, but probably not all flickery like that. And should it be smoking?” He takes the device from me and pulls the trigger again, aiming it at the wall. The lights don’t come on and nothing happens. “See, it’s broken again.”

“Yeah, but only
after
I used it on her. The beam hit her.”

“Just barely.”

“But she obviously felt it. And,” I add, pointing to the dial on the side of the device, “it was definitely on the ’better’ setting this time.”