I spied Megan on the lawn at the center of a group that was sword fighting with brightly colored pool noodles. And there was Noah. Uh-oh—Trussman was with him, a microphone thrust under Noah’s chin, while a cameraman filmed everything. I had to get over there!
A series of food tables had been set up in a line. I dropped to all fours and began to crawl under them. Reaching the end would put me as close to Noah and Trussman as I was ever going to get. I had no idea what I planned to say to them. My only purpose was to break up the interview. Maybe the sight of me up close and personal would be enough to remind Noah to watch his mouth.
I scrambled out of my tablecloth tunnel so intent on reaching Noah that I didn’t notice the hefty frame that stepped in to block my way.
“Curtis.” Hashtag’s iron grip locked onto my shoulder. “What are you doing here, man? You’re not invited.”
I played the only card I had. “Well, yeah, but Noah really wants me.”
The injured lacrosse star shook his concrete head. “Nice try. Noah’s real disappointed in you, man. He told me. He still likes you, but you haven’t been a great friend to him these days. And anyway, it’s not up to him to invite you. It’s up to Megan. And she didn’t.”
“Just let me talk to him,” I pleaded.
Hashtag didn’t give an inch. “I don’t want this to get ugly—I promised my dad out of respect for your brother-in-law in the service. But you’re not staying. Go home to your vicious dog.”
What could I do? I turned around and headed for the gate. Not that I was giving up, but staying at the party wasn’t an option anymore.
As I passed the sundae bar, I reached into one of the topping bowls, grabbed a fistful of peanuts, and jammed them into my pocket. It was the beginning of Plan B.
I ducked into the yard of the Mercurys’ next-door neighbors. It wasn’t my first time there. This was where Noah and I had ended up after hopping the fence on superkid morning. I remembered there was a big knothole in one of the wooden slats. The two of us had crouched there, soaking wet and shivering, watching the propane truck sink to the bottom of the pool. From there I had a full view of the yard and the entire party. I could even see Noah and Trussman on the opposite side of the pool deck. It would have been perfect—if I could read lips. The problem was I couldn’t hear them. There was too much background noise between their interview and me. I had to get closer. But how was that going to happen with Hash Taggart on the prowl?
That was when I noticed the low-spreading elm tree that dominated the yard. It was gigantic—it must have been here fifty years before there were any houses on Staunton Street. One gnarled branch extended up over the fence and out across the Mercury property.
Even while I was climbing up the trunk, I had a vague sense that I was starting on something that the Daniels might one day call a Donovan Classic. Sure, I knew it could turn out badly. But there was also a chance that it would totally work. Regardless, I had to hear what Noah was telling that lousy reporter. That part was mandatory.
About fifteen feet up, I reached the branch and began to shinny out over Megan’s yard. It was a lush elm, with plenty of leaves to hide my presence. If anybody looked up, hopefully they wouldn’t notice there was a guy perched there, spying on the party.
The limb rose at first. Then there was a knobby intersection where the main branch dipped and extended over the pool. As I crept forward, I kept an ear out for conversations below. At first, it was just a muddle. When I concentrated, though, I could pick out individual voices. It was hard to miss Noah’s nasal twang—especially when I pushed on close to the very end of the branch. I was directly over the pool now. There weren’t too many kids in it because three girls were performing a synchronized swimming routine. Megan’s little brother bobbed close by, sunning himself on an inflatable float.
Trussman was still interviewing Noah. They stood on the far side of the water, no more than fifteen feet from my position. I locked in on their exchange, straining to make out every word.
“What do you remember about the interior of the propane truck?” Trussman was asking.
Don’t answer! I screamed in my head. It’s a trap!
I couldn’t very well shout a warning, so I did the next best thing. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the peanuts, selected one, and bounced it off the back of Noah’s head.
Ha! Bull’s-eye!
He looked around in shock, which Trussman interpreted as avoiding the question. “Come on, Noah,” he probed. “The way you jumped in, you must have been looking straight down at the seats. What color were they?”
I threw another peanut, this one harder. Noah jumped like he’d been struck by lightning.
“Black? Blue? Gray? Red?” Trussman prompted. “You must remember. You have an eidetic memory. You said so yourself.”
This was trouble. Even an eidetic memory couldn’t remember what it never saw. Black! I exhorted silently. Black!
But telepathy didn’t work, so I threw a few peanuts this time. One of them must have hit Trussman, because he looked around too.
So far so good. If he was searching for what was pelting down on him, he wasn’t asking questions. I was almost starting to enjoy myself—which usually meant something bad was about to happen. But I was too lost in the moment to consider that.
I reached for another peanut—and something warm and furry nibbled at my hand. Startled, I glanced down and almost swallowed my tongue. A giant gray squirrel was on the branch with me, helping himself to my stockpile of peanuts.
I snapped my hand back as if I’d been burned and momentarily lost my grip on the limb. A rain of peanuts hit the pool. At the last second, I managed to grab the branch again, swinging around to the underside. Now I was hanging there in full view of the entire party.
Noah was the first to spot me. “Hey, isn’t that Donovan?”
Excited shouts rose from the partygoers.
I couldn’t tell if anyone else heard it, but I sure did—the branch made a crunching sound back at the trunk. My squirrel definitely noticed. He beat a hasty retreat out of there, scampering along the top of the fence just ahead of disaster. No such luck for me. Disaster was my middle name.
With a crack, the limb gave way at the giant knot. The end of the branch swung suddenly down, taking me with it. It lurched to a stop at a right angle and I kept on going. I lost my grip and dropped like a depth charge, hitting the water in a spectacular belly flop. The splash must have been visible from outer space.
If there was an Olympic record for synchronized swimmers evacuating a pool, those three girls shattered it. It earned a mocking ovation from Megan’s brother, who was still on the raft, bobbing in the waves created by my unexpected arrival. The poor kid had no idea that the broken branch was hanging over him like a diamond drill bit.
I sucked in a lungful of air, kicked off the bottom, and launched myself upward. I broke the surface like an undersea missile, aimed for the Mercury kid, and wrestled him off the raft.
He managed one syllable of protest. “Hey—!”
The hanging branch came down, spearing the float, which exploded with a loud pop. I pulled for the side, towing Megan’s brother. I was a decent swimmer, even with my shoes on. I didn’t want to think about the condition he would have been in if I’d left him on the raft.
Megan gawked at me as if I’d just dropped out of the sky—which I had.
“Donovan, what are you doing here?” Noah exclaimed. “You weren’t invited!”
Leave it to the guy with the 206 IQ to take everything that happened and come up with that.
20
SUPERPROTECTIVE
CHLOE GARFINKLE
>
With the governor’s visit drawing close, the superkid’s name was on everybody’s lips. Channel 4 News had decided to cover the assembly live on The Russ Trussman Hour. Russ had come to the Academy to interview the robotics team about Noah before the big event.
W
hat a joke. I seemed to be the only person in Hardcastle, kid or adult, who could see that Noah was taking credit for something that had happened without any help from him or anybody else. I couldn’t even get my own parents to believe that the propane truck must have hit a bump and changed direction on its own, missing that house entirely. Everyone wanted a hero, and Noah was the guy. Worse, my dad actually accused me of being jealous.
>
On top of it all, we were still having trouble with Heavy Metal, and Oz didn’t want to let a reporter into the lab. The last thing we needed was for rumors to get out that our award-winning robotics team was cooking up a dud for the governor. So we got called to the library one by one for the interviews.
“In all the years you’ve been in the gifted program together,” Mr. Trussman asked me, “has Noah ever struck you as being particularly athletic?”
I laughed out loud. “Noah?” There were so many words that could be applied to Noah—brilliant, innovative, peculiar, nerdy, awkward, scrawny. Athletic? Never.
“The window of the propane truck measures thirty-six inches wide, twenty-four inches high, and five feet off the ground. To dive through an opening that size—one that’s moving—requires a perfect combination of strength, agility, and timing. You’ve known Noah for some time. I’m just trying to get a sense of how that remarkable ability evolved.”
That was when it hit me. I usually caught on much quicker than this.
>
My first reaction was: Finally, someone else with the brains to see through this sham!
But almost immediately after that, I thought about Noah. This wouldn’t be a vague rumor spreading around town that the superkid wasn’t quite on the level. This would be a news story on Channel 4 telling everybody that their hero was a fraud. He would be branded a con artist, a liar, and a joke. And his biggest fans would become his worst enemies of all, because he would have made them look so stupid.
Well, tough.
>
In spite of that, I felt my lower jaw tightening with determination. It was nothing against Russ Trussman. He was only doing his job. But was I going to help him ruin Noah’s life? Not a chance.
I looked Mr. Trussman straight in the eye. “It’s amazing what some people can do in a crisis.”
He asked a few more leading questions, but I mumbled only yes or no answers. Eventually, he gave up and cut me loose. I returned to the lab, and Jacey headed to the library to face the reporter.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about what I’d just done. On the one hand, I’d just protected someone I was pretty sure was duping the whole community. On the other . . .
>
Back in class, Oz had taken over the controls from Donovan and was trying to get the robot to behave. Sometimes it executed commands perfectly. But every now and then, it was almost as if Heavy Metal had a mind of his own. He’d stop when he was supposed to go. He’d turn left when the joystick moved right. Despite all our brainpower, we couldn’t figure out if it was a software problem, a hardware problem, or even an issue with the wireless hub that interpreted signals from the controller.
We just didn’t know, and it was driving us nuts. And if the rest of us were frustrated, Abigail was losing her mind. After Noah, she was the smartest on the team. Knowing was ultra-important to her, so this was more than just a setback. It was an identity crisis. Plus, the governor’s visit was barely a week away. Whatever this was, she needed it solved yesterday.
“It’s Noah’s fault,” she complained. “We’re going to look like clowns in front of the governor thanks to him.”
I regarded Noah, who was at a computer, scanning through endless lines of software code. “Come on, Abigail, why blame Noah? He’s just as stumped as any of us.”
“That’s not the real Noah,” she said bitterly. “He’d solve this in a heartbeat. That’s the superkid, and he’s too distracted by his own press.”
“You know as much about Heavy Metal as he does,” I reminded her. “Why don’t you fix it?”
“Dream on.” She sighed wanly. “As much as I hate to admit it, this problem calls for a supermind, not a superkid. And right when we need him most, he’s lost planning his next big interview.”
She probably had a point, and I couldn’t help shooting a stink eye in Donovan’s direction for his own role in this hoax. The sooner it ended, the better.
I stepped away from Abigail and came up behind Noah, pretending to be studying the screen over his shoulder. “Russ Trussman is on to you,” I whispered in his ear. “He knows you’re not the superkid.”
He nearly broke his neck searching the lab for Donovan. Donovan, who’d been crazy enough to tell me he was the superkid!
“Did Donovan put you up to this?” I probed.
He actually tried to get up and walk away from me. I grabbed him by his skinny shoulders and plopped him back in the chair. “Noah, I’m trying to help. You could get in big trouble—”
Donovan was heading our way, a concerned expression on his face. I spoke quickly. “At this point, it’s too late to confess. But after the governor’s visit, you’ve got to stop playing hero and hope all this dies out. And whatever you do, watch yourself around that guy Trussman.”
Donovan arrived in time to hear the last part. “What about Trussman?”
“This isn’t a game anymore,” I hissed. “Trussman smells a rat and—”
I was interrupted by a high-pitched whirring that filled the lab. At the top of Heavy Metal’s stainless steel body, a door slid open. We saw the propeller first as the miniature drone rose out of our robot and hovered there over our heads.
All eyes turned to Oz, who had the joystick in his hands.
He shook his head. “I didn’t do anything. It just happened.”
Everyone on the team understood what that meant. If the robot could deploy its drone with no command from any operator, then Heavy Metal was completely out of control.
We just stood there, staring up at our runaway drone.
“If it won’t respond to the joystick,” mused Noah, “how are we going to get it down?”
Nobody had an answer for that—nobody except Donovan. He snatched Oz’s jacket from its wall peg, jumped up on the teacher’s desk, and launched himself into the air. He captured the little craft inside the folds of the blazer, fell lightly to the floor, and handed the coat—drone and all—to Oz.
It got a round of applause from the robotics team.
That had always been the thing about Donovan.
>
21
SUPERSUPPORTIVE
HASH TAGGART
Okay, here’s my deep, dark secret: My arm was fine. I hadn’t felt any pain for weeks. I was totally ready to go back to the lacrosse team.
So what was the problem? I guess I was scared. Not of reinjuring it. Lax was a tough game, but I was a tough guy. At least I thought I was.
The thing was that the Hornets were on a winning streak. They were playing like champions—and without me, their captain. What if I came back and we started losing?
It wasn’t impossible, you know. That kind of consistency, game after game—no way could it last forever. But if my return put us into a skid, no one would see it that way. They’d think it was my fault, period. Because I was a showboat or a ball hog or even a jinx. Because I put my shoulder pads left side first, instead of right, and somehow offended the lacrosse gods. Sports fans could be crazy superstitious that way.
Or—and this one really hurt—people might say it was because I had never been as good as I thought I was.
So I stayed on the disabled li
st. I hadn’t worn the sling in a while—people would have seen through that in a heartbeat. I sat on the bench with the players, giving them advice and encouragement. I wasn’t an athlete exactly, but I was definitely part of the team, only in a support role. Athletic supporter—hmmm, that didn’t sound so good, but you get the point, right? I was being supportive—the way the cheerleaders were.
Funny, I’d never appreciated the cheerleaders before this season. I always thought of them as kind of an accessory for the players, like cool uniforms. You know, something to make us look good. But they were athletic supporters too. They had a coach. They held tryouts. They practiced every bit as much as the players did. They developed routines the way the Hornets worked on new plays.
Megan had always tried to tell me these things, but I guess I never listened. It was the Youkinator who made me take the cheerleaders seriously. And it wasn’t just because he was the superkid—although that was a big deal. Being friends with a real-life hero wasn’t something that happened to everybody.
Youk may not have had a superpower—but that was what made him so awesome. At first glance, he had less than nothing going for him. Yet against all odds, he was the best of all of us. The superkid, sure, but so much more.
Watching Youk as a cheerleader was like watching a caterpillar change into a butterfly. From my spot on the sidelines, I had a front row seat for that. Okay, he was never going to be fantastic, like Megan and some of the girls. Remember, though, Noah used to be the dweeb/shrimp/goober/stick-bug/klutz who knocked down the human pyramid and sent Vanessa to the emergency room. Back then, he reminded me of Beyblade or maybe the Tasmanian Devil—a spinning instrument of destruction that flattened everything in its path. Now he was steady on his feet; he moved in time with the cheers. When there was music, he kept the beat. He was fine.
Megan definitely did not agree. “If that’s fine, I’d hate to see what you call terrible!”
Despite the fact that Youk had saved her life, she was just about the only person in town who didn’t appreciate the superkid.