Super Nobody (Alphas and Omegas Book 1) (9 page)

“Yes?” one of the secretaries asked him, and
not politely.

“I'm...I'm supposed to come down to the
counselor's office.”

“All students are attending an emergency
assembly. Go back to your class.”

“I got a message...” he said hopelessly, and
waved it at them.

“Give it here,” she said. Her eyes widened
the instant she saw his name on it, and she stammered for him to
head into counseling room A.

Counseling room A was just as bland and
boring as the rest of the main office. In a little six by six foot
space, someone had crammed in a gray metal file cabinet, a large
desk, and two chairs in front of that desk. The only things on the
desk were a framed picture of a smiling man and his family, and a
black nameplate that said C. Busey.

A lot more interesting than the room was the
man sitting behind the desk. It certainly wasn't C. Busey, because
Michael knew Mr. Busey. This was the human cannonball from Friday
night, alive and looking healthy. And wearing clothes that weren't
on fire.

“Hello there Michael,” he said with a smile,
and gestured to the chair. “Have a seat.”

“You're...you're...” What had Trent said?

“Mr. Springfield. My students call me
Jebediah.”

Something clicked way back in Michael's mind,
and it had something to do with Charlotte. She was showing him a
cartoon from fifty or a hundred years ago, and Springfield was
there, somewhere. Jebediah Springfield exactly.

“But that's...isn't that...the Simpsons
right?”

His smile deepened. “My name isn't actually
Jebediah, it's a nickname. I'm surprised you know of the show. Most
students don't.”

“Why do they call you Jebediah then?” he
asked.

“I wear a raccoon skin hat,” he said. “In my
wilderness survival courses.”

A thousand questions suddenly winked out in
Michael's mind. He was suddenly trying to picture this man with a
hat that had a tail hanging off the back, and it was hilariously
difficult to do.

Springfield must have seen it, because he
continued to smile. “Can I call you Michael? Great. Michael, I'm
not a teacher over at Marcus Patterson. In fact, I'm just one of
the counselors over there. My job's at the high school.”

“Oh...kay.”

“I wanted to thank you for what you did on
Friday night.” Oh yeah, Friday night. When Trent had LIGHTNING
COMING OFF HIM. That Friday night. “You'll notice everything here
is sort of normal. Back to normal, as normal as you could get.
Anyway, this is after we had probably thirty injuries, none of them
really bad except for Mr. Samuelson. And you and Trent.”

“And you.”

Springfield smiled. “Yes. You may have
questions for me.”

“And you're going to answer them?” Michael
asked. He felt like, between his grandfather being weird on the
phone and the fact that Trent was an Active, people were keeping a
lot more secrets than they were telling.

“I'll answer everything I can,” Springfield
replied.

“Okay,” he said. “What happened to
Trent?”

“Hm, a good place to start. Well, some people
in the world go Active. It's a difficult process figuring out who,
but it usually happens starting at age thirteen, up to around
twenty. One time a twenty-three year old man went Active, but we've
never heard of anyone older than that. Predicting it isn't an exact
science, at all.”

“How many people go Active?”

“Maybe one in a million,” he said. “Maybe a
few more, but a lot of times they're in terrible situations. Some
die. Others go totally crazy. So right now, with eight and a half
billion people on the planet, we think there might be eighty five
hundred. Less than ten thousand for sure.”

“Wait a second!” he cried. “The gym was
fixed! You went through the wall. You lived!”

“I'm an Active,” Springfield said.

“You're...”

“Surrounded by a force field. Go ahead, throw
something at me.”

“Throw...”

Springfield took the nameplate, tossed it
into the air, and it bounced off a place about three inches from
his head. There was a crackling sound, like someone bunching
together a cheap plastic bag. Michael found himself speechless.

“Yeah,” he grinned. “Pretty awesome
right?”

“But...but...”

“Right, the gym. We have a few Actives in our
program here.”

Program, what program? Michael's mind was
filling with more questions.

“How many Actives?”

“Somewhere around a hundred.”

“WHAT?” he shouted. The math sizzled through
his brain like a lightning bolt. That meant there should be a
hundred million people in the area, and he knew there were maybe
five thousand people in the entire town.

“Relax Michael.”

“But that doesn't make any sense. There
aren't...there aren't even enough people here to have one.”

“You're right.”

“But how...”

“I'm afraid we've come to the place where I
can't answer.”

“But why?”

He seemed to regret not being able to answer
Michael. “I wish I could. I won't lie to you, Michael, but my hands
are tied.” He held up his hands like invisible handcuffs were
restraining him. “I've signed agreements. You find out the truth
for yourself, that's no problem. But if you find it out from me,
let's just say there's someone in charge who would make Trent seem
like an baby throwing a temper tantrum. So I can't do that.”

“But...”

“Yes, sure, but you won't tell anyone, sure.
Like there isn't anyone on staff who wouldn't know if you were
lying.”

“Like read my mind or something?”

“Like that. Or something.”

“So was everybody okay, you know, after the
thing?”

Springfield smiled at him. “Very good of you.
A true knight. Well, Don Samuelson is going to make it, we think.
There were a few other minor injuries, but everyone is going to be
all right.”

“And they're...okay. I mean okay.”

“Well, I'm going to be seeing students all
week here, if you should know. And all the other counselors at
Marcus Patterson and the High School. We'll need to do a battery of
tests on everyone who was at the dance that night.”

“And Davey Rightman.”

“I heard about Davey Rightman. Yes him too.
Anyhow we figured you were a bit of a special case. Since you threw
a water cooler, and later yourself, at Mr. Millickie. Since you
were responsible for keeping him from hurting anyone else.”

Michael looked down at his shoes, wondering
why they were suddenly so interesting, and why exactly his face
felt like it was on fire.

“And your mother should be giving you a phone
today.”

“Mother...a phone. Okay.”

“My number's going to be in there, just in
case you feel like you want to talk about anything that's going on.
You don't want to talk to your mom, I understand. It happens a lot
in middle and high school. But if you want, any time, day or night.
I don't care if you wake up at three in the morning and want to
tell me something you don't think is very important, you call me,
okay?”

“Uh...okay.” There it was again, that divide.
It was there and no pretending otherwise, even though Springfield
seemed like a decent guy and all. He just wasn't the right age.

“I think the assembly ought to be about
done,” Springfield said cheerfully. “Why don't you head out and
meet up with your friends.”

The halls were filling up with the normal
crowd of young people, with the occasional teacher towering
overhead. A few of the seventh graders were getting taller too, and
some of the teachers had never been tall to begin with. It was
starting to become difficult to see the difference, but only
starting.

After a time Charlotte came up to her locker.
She brightened up as soon as she caught sight of him.

“Hey Michael,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. “What happened at the
assembly?”

“You weren't there? I thought everybody was
supposed to go. You know, I thought I would see you there.” Yeah,
he thought, there were only two hundred something students in the
sixth and seventh grades. “Anyway they just talked about Actives.
Pretty cool.”

“What did they say?”

“Some old guy talked about how Actives can
get their powers when they have a lot of stress. Most of them start
out around our age. Mostly they just wanted to answer questions.”
And how far those questions went before they couldn't be answered
anymore? He had never heard the term confidentiality agreement
before, but he understood the idea. Somebody had to shut the truth
up, to stop knowledge from coming out.

“I guess there are only maybe one in a
million, and we might have just seen the only Active in the whole
state.”

Not likely, Michael thought. Then he wondered
why the school was lying to them.

“Anyway if we see anybody doing anything
weird, we're supposed to tell a teacher or Samuelson.”

“Whenever he gets out of the hospital.”

“Yeah.”

“What did they mean by weird?”

She shook her head as they made their way out
of the school and into the fresh April air. “Like somebody jumping
off a building trying to fly. They had some pretty nasty pictures.
This kid in Idaho set himself on fire. Another one jumped in front
of a bus.”

“Uch,” he said.

“Yeah. Uch.” She shrugged. “I know they just
want to keep kids from trying something really crazy. Everybody
wants to be special. What they don't get is that everybody already
is special. You make the choice to be special every day. Or you
just do the normal stuff, and you tell people you're bored because
you never try to do anything awesome. You don't need to break
physics to be special.”

Charlotte had always been pretty cool, but
Michael didn't understand until that point. It was like there was a
sunbeam shining down on her, the way she looked at the world. And
maybe Michael wasn't that dazzling, but he could definitely
recognize brilliance when the chorus of angels was singing right in
front of his face.

Like Grandpa always said, if it looks like
poop and smells like it, no need to taste it, you've got poop. Only
Charlotte was totally the opposite. She looked, smelled and sounded
like a goddess.

Oh no.

Michael couldn't get her out of his head all
that day or the next. He knew something was very wrong by the way
he dreamed that he and Charlotte were flying together, because they
were both Actives. He knew something was terribly wrong when they
came nose to nose, staring soulfully into each others' eyes when he
suddenly woke up.

Trent had made the world go wrong.

Grandpa came over to dinner the next night,
which wasn't normal at all. Usually they had dinner together on the
weekends, or whenever his dad came back from being away. This time
it was just his mother, Michael, and Grandpa. He felt the normal
needles from his mother, all the questions about how much homework
he had, what Mr. Wozniak was teaching that day, and how interesting
history was when she was a little girl. To top that off, Grandpa
started in too.

Was the math giving him trouble? Did any of
the other kids pick on him or look at him funny in the halls, or at
lunch time? Who was his favorite teacher? Did he ever stay after
class and talk to that teacher? What was the science all about?

He did his best to deflect the questions with
his normal shrug shield and grunt armor, but today he had to go the
extra step of parrying by shoving extra food in his mouth. Then he
had to endure his mother glaring at him when he tried to talk with
his mouth full.

“Michael Edward Washington Junior!” his
mother finally said. “Will you stop talking with your mouth full of
food. That is enough of that. Now, your grandfather asked you a
question.”

Grandpa sat back and folded his arms. His
smile wasn't cruel, or triumphant either. Michael thought he was
really just amused. He probably figured out what Michael was trying
to do.

“You don't want me to eat dinner?” he asked,
and drank some milk to show her just how good he was doing. He'd
even gotten most of his peas down his throat, which was saying
something.

His mother didn't have much to say to that,
but Grandpa did.

“Well kiddo, when you grow up a bit, you'll
see that adults like to have a bit of a chat over dinner. In fact,
a long time ago, dinner was three or four hours long. People just
talked and talked and talked, and their servants brought them
something to munch on every half hour or so.”

“Oh.” A four hour dinner, without the chance
to read or maybe catch an episode of
Minus
Human
every day, sounded pretty awful. Like when they told him that, long
ago, people didn’t have the internet. Shudder.

“There was an assembly at school today,” he
said. “I didn't get to go. I had to go talk to the guy from the
high school.”

“Now, was that so hard?” his mother
asked.

“And how did the conversation go?” Grandpa
asked.

“Okay I guess.” He quickly realized, by the
reptilian stare coming off his mom, that this wasn't going to be
enough. “He said he was a superhero. I mean Active. He had a force
field. So that was pretty cool.”

“Hm,” Grandpa said. “A force field.”

“Yeah, isn't that weird?”

“Weird how?”

Michael didn't know exactly, at first. “Well,
that he's a teacher.”

“Even Actives have to do something with their
lives, Michael,” his mother said.

“Yeah but, he could go out and stop people
from getting hurt, like he's a shield.”

“Ah,” Grandpa said. “But he's not super fast,
right? So he couldn't be everywhere at once.”

“I guess,” Michael said. “But then...what,
the military? The police? Why doesn't he go and do that? He could
take apart bombs.”

“I think these are good questions, and maybe
you should ask him. It's possible he just wanted to be a teacher,
and then he became an Active.”