I considered waking the family, but I was raised to believe that bothering people (in dumpsters) late at night was a sign of bad manners. Next to the dumpster there was a parked car. I pulled open the front door and yelled, “Get in!”
We all scrambled into the beat-up car and locked the doors behind us. I was hoping no Fanatics had seen us, but the swarm was too smart and too observant. They surrounded the car and began pushing and banging against it from all sides while taking pictures and blinding us with their flashes.
“What do we do?” Owen hollered.
I felt around for any keys. Sure, I didn’t have a license and it was illegal to be driving, but this was an emergency.
I searched everywhere near me, but there were no keys. I couldn’t think straight due to all the Fanatics pounding on the car windows and taking flash pictures.
“Mindy, whatever you do, don’t clap!” Xen yelled. “We need the windows to stay in place.”
“I thought you said my gift wasn’t real.”
“It probably isn’t, but just in case it is, don’t test it now!”
More Fanatics swarmed the car. They began to rock the vehicle side to side, lifting it a little more with each shove. They were screaming about the Throwing Sand movie and how unfair life was while warning us that we were done for.
I took out my inhaler and inhaled like it was the end of the world—which it very well could have been. I tried to calm myself as I took stock of our situation. No matter how I viewed things, it didn’t look good.
There were constant camera flashes going off. It looked like we were circled by a bright pulsing light. I could see some of the girls already posting the pictures. There was a good chance that my parents would see a picture of me taken moments before I died.
I honked the horn but that just made them angrier. I was upset with myself for not paying more attention in Car Hacking class. I needed the dumb car to start. As I thought about it … it started!
“What happened?” Mindy screamed.
“I don’t know,” I yelled. “It just turned on!”
“Well, splimp, get us out of here!”
“But I don’t know how to drive!”
“It’s simple, really,” Xen hollered. “Engage the car’s gears by putting it into drive and step on the gas.”
I did as I was instructed, and the car lurched slightly. The car’s motion drove the already out-of-control Fanatics mad. I didn’t want to run any of them over, but I also didn’t want to die. I pressed lightly on the gas and the car began to roll forward. Some Fanatics moved out of the way, but one held on tightly to the roof.
I swerved carefully, and the poor Fanatic rolled off the roof and onto the grass. I flipped on the headlights, and Mindy honked the horn as I drove forward.
“Now!” Mindy shouted. “It’s clear!”
As I pressed down on the gas, the car shot onto Elm Street. I turned as hard as I could to avoid hitting a tree, and the vehicle fishtailed.
I drove down Elm Street at lightning speed. At least I thought I was racing until Owen pointed out I was going only seventeen miles an hour. I guess it just felt fast because I had never driven before. I rocked up the speed to almost twenty-three miles an hour. The new velocity helped me easily outrun our assailants, which is an above-average way of saying they were Fanatics with a thirst for selfies.
I turned onto Oak Street and drove over a couple of lawns. Then I destroyed a few small bushes and wounded at least two mailboxes before I made it to my house. I pulled up onto the front lawn and the car shuddered to a stop. We all sat in silence for a few moments, trying to calm our beating hearts.
“That was way too close,” Mindy said. “We’re lucky you found the keys.”
“Um … I didn’t find any keys,” I whispered. “I think I started the car with my mind. I just thought about it starting, and it did.”
To test my theory, I imagined the vehicle starting up again, and instantly the motor revved to life. I thought of it turning off, and it shut down.
“No fair!” Xen complained. “I can’t do anything!”
“Mind control?” Mindy said in awe. “Can you manipulate other things? I mean, can you levitate something?”
I imagined Mindy’s backpack floating. It didn’t move. I glanced at an old chair on my front lawn, but it didn’t do a dang thing. I thought of the car starting up, and it did. One more thought, and the car turned off.
Owen and Xen were impressed—Mindy not so much.
“That’s kind of an awkward superpower,” she said.
“And clapping isn’t? Let’s just get inside my house before anything else attacks us.”
The front door to my house was barricaded, but I shifted a few boards, and we climbed in. My parents were asleep. Obviously they thought I was somewhere else safely hiding.
“Can we sleep here?” Mindy asked. “I’m not walking home, and I don’t want you driving me.”
“Sure.”
“Wait, maybe we should stay up and figure out what my gift is,” Xen said.
“I think we should sleep on it,” Owen said. “I’m pooped. Also, Tip, can I use your bathroom?”
Owen used the bathroom while Mindy, Xen, and I built a giant fort in the living room. A lot had happened in one day, and we were bushed. There was no use trying to stay awake to figure out what to do, or if Xen had a gift. Right now we needed sleep. Owen returned from the bathroom, and we all fell asleep feeling safe in our blanket-fortified fort.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Important Origins
My dad is always the first one up in our house. He drives a supply truck on the edge of town for work. It’s a dangerous job but only because he isn’t a very good driver.
While he was eating breakfast, he looked out the window and noticed the strange car on our lawn. His complaining about the car woke all of us up. We could hear him from the living room.
I thought I’d get in trouble, but because I usually do what I’m supposed to, my parents didn’t even consider that I could have been the one who parked a car on the lawn. I was a little bothered that they didn’t think I was cool enough to do something like that.
My mom thought the car was probably left by someone who didn’t have the money to fill the gas tank. Petrol was expensive, and sometimes it was just cheaper to abandon your vehicle on someone’s lawn instead of filling up.
My mother stopped thinking about the car to complain to my father about her job at the Informant Hut at the mall. All day long, people would come in and tell on their friends and neighbors. My mom would then sell the information to the government and reward the people for being snitches. She hated everything about her job. But at least she had one.
“It’s going to be crazy today,” my mother said. “We’re having a sale. Give us two secrets, and we’ll pay for three.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by after work,” my dad said. “I have a few things I could sell to you about my co-workers.”
As much as I wasn’t enjoying listening to my parents, I wanted to sleep. But I couldn’t because my friends and I had to get going.
These days showing up late for school is not a good thing. The government doesn’t allow kids to miss any school unless they have a legitimate excuse.
If you have too many absences, they send you to Correction School, which is a big, ugly building behind our school where they force you to earn extra credit by breaking up old concrete for the gravel factories.
“We can’t be late,” I said urgently as I nudged Xen.
“You know Nerf’s still going to mess with us,” Xen pointed out.
“That’s a splimp of a lot better than cracking gravel.”
All four of us crawled out of our blanket fort.
“Wait,” Mindy asked. “Did I dream that we had some weird abilities last night? Or was that real?”
“It was real,” Xen complained. “You guys can do freaky things, but not me.”
Sleep had made me forget about the spiders and the fact tha
t I could start a car with my thoughts. I imagined the vehicle in the front yard turning on, and we all heard it come to life. My father ran outside with his assault shovel to see what was happening.
“Try starting something else,” Mindy suggested.
I looked around and spotted our beat-up microwave in the kitchen. I thought of it being on and just like that, it came to life and began humming.
“Pretty cool,” Owen said enviously. “You can heat up burritos from across the room. By the way, I can still hear really well. I can hear Darth Susan at school. She’s yelling at some kid for showing up without a shirt on.”
“You can hear that far away? It’s like miles.”
“I can hear what I want to hear and shut out what I want to shut out. Like, right now at my house, my mom is telling my dad about how bad my grades are. She’s also talking about how much trouble I’m going to be in for not coming home last night. I think I’ll stop listening now.”
“I guess I’m not that jealous of your gift,” Xen said.
We stopped talking and took turns washing up in the laundry room sink. Then we had a fast breakfast of wheat and stale marshmallows. Good food wasn’t easy to come by. In the olden days, my mom would go grocery shopping and come home with all kinds of amazing things—frozen meals, sandwich stuff, fruits and vegetables. Now, whenever she goes shopping, she has to fight for whatever she can get her hands on, and it’s never anything delicious.
The government doesn’t do much to help. They actually made things worse by creating their lousy food parallelogram to let us know what we should be eating.
With our stomachs full of wheat, marshmallows, and worry, we headed back to the place where we knew we’d still be in trouble—school.
The streets were clear this morning, and there was a blood-moon sun with slight ash in the air. Owen heard a group of angry men three streets over, but they were nothing to worry about because they were heading in the opposite direction from us.
Carefully we made our way over to Otto Waddle Jr. High Government Outpost. We moved between trees and houses and crouched behind bushes and burned-out cars. Owen’s ability to hear far away was super helpful, but he was struggling with hearing us close up.
When we were a few blocks away from WADD Xen spotted a car coming down the road and Owen listened in. He heard Nerf bragging about his driving skills and talking about how good he looked in a tank top.
I couldn’t believe it. Nerf was driving? It was against the law for him to be behind the wheel. Sure, I had done a little driving last night, but that was an emergency and in the dark. Nerf was too young. Besides, driving in the daylight was forbidden unless people were going to and from work.
Dashing across the street, we crouched down behind some overgrown bushes. Through the leaves I focused my mind on the car Nerf was driving, and just like that, his engine turned off. The vehicle rolled to a stop in the middle of Elm Street.
Owen was the only one with amazing ears, but we could all hear Nerf swearing now. He hopped out of the car with Mud and Weasel and a couple of other Jocks.
Keeping hidden, we continued toward the school. I was happy about my new ability. There’s never been anything special about me, but now I was like a psychic key that could turn things on and off.
We got in the security hole and walked down Q Hall without anyone giving us grief. In fact, people seemed to be ignoring us as we walked through the school. One of the Goths had a perfect chance to make fun of me when I tripped and hit the water fountain, but he said nothing.
In first hour, no one laughed at my hair or hit me with spit wads. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Maybe things were different today. Maybe what we had tried to do yesterday had secretly inspired the masses to stand up for themselves. Maybe we were some sort of heroes everyone now respected.
In my second-hour Pop Culture History class, I sat in my desk at the back of the room as the teacher droned on and on about the history of movies.
Nobody said anything to me in that class either. Usually by this time in the day, I had been made fun of or bothered a few times. But it was as if I was invisible. A thought struck me.
It was possible. I mean I can start and stop things. Maybe those spider bites gave me the gift of invisibility as well. My spine tingled. I stuck my hands up in the air like I was asking two questions at one time. My teacher didn’t notice. I stood up and said,
Nobody did! I couldn’t believe it! My whole life I had dreamed of being invisible, and now it seemed like my dream had come true. I did a little dance and shook my butt at a member of the Dark Arts.
“Um, are you feeling okay, Tip?” he asked.
Apparently I wasn’t invisible after all.
I sat down as quickly as I could.
My face burned, and everyone laughed. I wasn’t invisible, just being ignored.
In my next hour class I wasn’t bothered again. I felt a bit let down. Yesterday the AV Club had done something really stupid and now nobody was giving us any credit.
At lunchtime my friends and I met behind the school in the burned-out shed. All of us had been left alone—not a single wedgie or pantsing to mention.
“Someone even held the door open for me,” Mindy said.
“Maybe they know we have powers,” I suggested.
“Right. You mean maybe they know you have powers,” Xen said, still pouting over his lack of spider-bite abilities.
Xen would have gone on complaining, but we heard talking just outside the shed. We all snuck out and peeked around the corner to spy.
Standing near the back of the school was a Goth student named Rick. He had wandered away from his group and was now being picked on by Nerf and his friends. It was a jam I had been in more times than I cared to count. And every time something like that happened, not a single person came to my rescue. I felt horrible for Rick, but there was nothing we could—
“Wait a second,” I whispered. “We could help Rick.”
“What?” Owen asked.
“Mindy,” I said with excitement, “do you think you can clap out one of the windows on the back of the school? That might scare Nerf into stopping.”
“I can try,” Mindy replied.
Nerf was standing next to a small window. He had his back to the glass, and Rick was shaking nervously in front of him.
Mindy reached out her arms and clapped twice.
The window didn’t break, but a flagpole nearby cracked at the base and came toppling down toward Nerf. He reached up to grab the falling pole, but it struck his shoulder and knocked him to the ground. Nerf’s friends just stood there looking as dense as they were while their leader struggled and whined from beneath the pole. He was okay. More humiliated than anything, I think.
For once Nerf truly looked like a log.
Rick took off as fast as he could, and we ran back into the burned-out shed.
“That was—” Owen started to say.
“Awesome,” I finished for him.
“I thought I could break glass, not poles.”
“You know what this means?” I asked. “We’re not just Geeks anymore. The grease piñata was a bust, but think of what we can do now. It’s like we’re a group of superheroes.”
“Great,” Xen complained. “So where does that leave me?”
“You can be the manager,” Mindy suggested. “You know, keep us organized.”
“What?” Owen asked Mindy.
“I said, he can be the manager!”
“We could use that hidden room in the kitchen as our headquarters,” I said. “Like a Geek Cave.”
“Well then, as manager I think our first job should be to make sure all the spiders are gone.”
“And we’ll need a name,” Owen said. “How about the League of Amazing and Magnificent Entities?”
We all stared at Owen.
“I like the word entities,” he said sheepishly.
“No offense,” Xen said, “but as manager I think I should point out that your new abil
ities aren’t really that amazing or magnificent.”
“Fine,” I said. “Then how about League of Average and Mediocre Entities instead?”
“You realize the acronym is LAME,” Xen pointed out.
“That sort of fits us.”
“Yeah,” Mindy agreed. “Plus, it’s under the radar and not too showy.”
“What?” Owen asked.
“We’re going with your suggestion,” I told Owen. “LAME it is.”
“Just remember,” Xen said. “With average power comes average responsibility.”
Mindy moaned.
“Sorry,” Xen apologized. “I just felt like one of us had to say that.”
“Okay then, we’ll be Geeks by day and LAME by night,” I cheered.
“Actually, it’s midday now,” Xen pointed out. “And we just took care of our first caper.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “We’ll be Geeks by day and LAME continually. Or at least when we need to be.”
I stuck my hand out, and the other three did the same.
I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the fact that we had all been bitten by spiders just yesterday. Or maybe it was because we were hopped up on Nerf getting a little flagpole payback. Or maybe it was because the wheat and marshmallows weren’t sitting that well with me. Whatever it was, I felt weird. Not a bad weird, just odd. Like something big was finally happening in my life.
Finn the crier cried out.
The four of us obediently headed back. All the other students at WADD had no idea of what a momentous event had just happened in the burned-out shed behind the school. LAME had been born, and because of that, justice was going to be served.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Threat
It might seem kind of lame to be excited about LAME, but I was. I could barely think of anything else the rest of the day. During classes, I tried sketching out potential costumes for myself and worked on coming up with a name.