“Down in the basement.”
He frowned.
Down in the basement, Kelsey and Josh heard the doorbell, followed a minute later by Josh’s mother calling, “Kelsey! Your dad’s here to pick you up!”
“I thought you lived nearby,” Josh said.
“I do.” Kelsey sighed. “It’s…well, it’s just me and my dad, and he gets worried. I told him I’d walk home, but…” She tilted her head in a what-can-you-do? manner. Josh understood perfectly.
Josh and Kelsey trotted up the stairs from the basement, and as they did so, they heard a man’s voice in the midst of saying, “—downstairs by themselves? Mrs. Miller, I can’t say I’m thrilled about that. A boy and a girl together should have an adult with them at all times.”
“At their age? What do you think could possibly happen?” Josh’s mother sounded amused.
Kelsey’s father didn’t. “It’s different for you. Your son is a boy.”
“Most sons are.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes. You mean my son can’t be trusted.”
“I didn’t say—”
Josh and Kelsey chose that moment to emerge from the basement. Kelsey’s father looked relieved when he saw his daughter and held out a hand to her. “Time to go, Kelsey.”
“Daaaaaaaaaaad,” she said, dragging a one-syllable word into three. “Stop treating me like I’m a little kid.”
“She’s been saying that since she was a little kid,” Kelsey’s dad said to Josh’s mom. “Well…thank you for having her over.”
“It was our pleas—”
She didn’t get to finish the word pleasure because Zack had already taken Kelsey firmly by the hand and was heading down the walk toward his car, parked in the driveway. Doris noticed that Zack was limping slightly.
Kelsey managed to get a wave off before her father ushered her into the car.
“Strange man,” murmured Doris, and Josh had to agree.
Some time after Kelsey had left, and Josh had been forced to admit to himself and to his mother that he’d had a really good time with her, he overheard his mother talking on the phone in the kitchen. She said his name as he happened by, so he backed up and listened carefully, even though he knew he shouldn’t.
He was pretty sure that his mother was talking to Mrs. Farber. His mom was being all defensive, and saying that she knew what was best for her son, and Josh just had an active imagination was all, so why not leave him alone, and he didn’t need to start going to mental doctors to help him deal with his problems because he was dealing with his problems and they just didn’t like the way he was doing it, and why couldn’t they just keep their noses out of her and Josh’s business and stop threatening them with social services, and she was a good mother and where did Mrs. Farber get off making her feel like she wasn’t, and yes, that’s exactly what she was doing, don’t deny it, and she had nothing more to say, good-bye, click. (The click was the sound of the phone hanging up, which Josh—in his mind’s eye—envisioned in comic book terms as CLICK.)
He thought he heard her gently crying then. He hated that. Seeing his mother cry always gave him a weird, uneasy feeling in his stomach. “Mom?” he called softly.
He heard her snuffle quickly, trying to pull herself together, and she said, “If this is about dinner, honey, I haven’t started—”
“No, it’s not about dinner. Are you okay?”
She stuck her head out the kitchen door. “How long have you been standing there?”
He shrugged.
“What did you hear?”
Another shrug.
“Josh…” She stepped out of the kitchen and crouched to face him. Taking his face in her hands, she asked tentatively, “Are you…happy?”
“About what?”
“About…anything. Everything.”
“Sure.” It seemed a silly question to him.
“Are you positive?”
He still had no clear idea what they were talking about but decided that staying with the affirmative would be the best strategy. “Yeah.”
“Good.” She kissed him on the cheek and ruffled his hair. “What would you say to pizza tonight?”
“I’d say, ‘Hellloooooo, pizza.’”
CHAPTER 4
“IN THE NEXT SHOCKING ISSUE…”
Josh lived for the first Wednesday of each month, because that was when his subscription copy of the latest Captain Major arrived. The mailman—mailwoman, actually, in Josh’s case—knew better than to bend the flat package containing Josh’s comic and try to shove it into the Millers’ mailbox. Instead she would always ring the doorbell in the morning (they had a fairly early morning mail delivery) and place the package reverently in Josh’s eagerly awaiting hands.
Josh would then rush with it to the breakfast table, carefully unwrap it, and eat his cereal with one hand while turning the pages with the other. On Captain Major days he refused to pour milk into his cereal, preferring to eat it dry rather than risk dripping anything on the precious pages.
Doris was sleeping in. She’d been up until all hours the previous night, working a party for one of her clients. Doris earned a living cleaning other people’s houses in one of the wealthier sections of town, and occasionally she’d pick up additional money by serving drinks at parties or working in the kitchen. Josh had woken up when he heard the front door close and glanced at the glowing numbers on his digital clock: It read half past two. Josh shook his head. Adults were so strange, having late parties on school nights.
So it happened that Josh was by himself when he read the story line that would radically reshape his life. Slowly, as he turned each page, his spoon began to shake more and more, until it was trembling so violently that the Cheerios went skittering. He felt a distant thudding in his forehead, and three quarters of the way through he had to turn back to the cover to make certain that this was indeed the latest issue of Captain Major and not some other title that had been delivered by mistake.
By the time he got to the final, horrifying end, he felt a lump in his throat that he would have been certain was stuck cereal, except that he had stopped eating six pages earlier. He wanted to go running to his mother, to have her read it, to have her assure him that it couldn’t be true, that it was all just a terrible, awful mistake. He ran upstairs, the comic clutched in his shaking hands. Peering in through the open doorway to her bedroom, though, he saw her sleeping, wrapped in a blue fuzzy blanket. She looked so peaceful that he couldn’t bring himself to wake her.
So, violently stuffing the comic into his backpack, Josh headed off to school like a sleepwalker. It was a measure of just how upset he was that he didn’t take care to first put the comic into a Mylar snug bag with a cardboard backing.
The first half of the school day was a blur. Josh was ready when called upon and answered all questions when asked. But he didn’t remember a moment of it. He was functioning entirely on autopilot.
When recess came, Josh was even more isolated than usual. He took himself off to a tree at the far end of the grounds, slumped against the trunk, and just stared off into space. He was so out of it, he wasn’t aware that Kelsey had come over to him until she said his name very loudly right in his face and clapped her hands. He stared up at her, and it took his eyes a moment to focus. “Oh. Hi,” he said listlessly.
“Josh, what happened?”
Josh and Kelsey had been hanging out for the better part of a month. As much as Josh would have been loath to admit it, she really wasn’t bad for a girl. She had continued to try to sell him on the joys of Archie comics, and he’d done his best to seem interested. More important, though, their friendship had actually moved beyond comics into the arena of video games. It turned out that Kelsey was a devastating Forbidden Dragon Realm IV player, and various situations within the game that had been thwarting Josh as a single player had melted when Kelsey had teamed up with him.
Now he stared up at her lifelessly, as if all the joy had left him forever. “Josh,
” said Kelsey with growing concern, “what is it? Is something wrong with your mom?”
“Worse,” he said tonelessly.
“Well…what?”
Without a word, he reached into his backpack and withdrew the comic. Kelsey’s eyes widened in shock. She immediately noted the less-than-mint condition and knew it was out of character for Josh to treat one of his precious comics that way.
Clearly something truly horrific had transpired between the covers of the latest issue of Captain Major. She made a mental note of the fact that Josh considered something happening in a comic book to be more earth-shattering than something happening to his mother, but she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised by that.
“Josh…?” She knew she didn’t have to prompt him much. He needed someone to talk to, and she was obviously that person.
“They’re criminals,” he said.
“What?” She stared at him, uncomprehending. “What are you talking about?”
“Captain Major…it’s…” He was having trouble putting the words together. “The whole comic’s changed. Captain Major…it turns out that in the past, before he became a superhero…the whole reason he became a superhero…was because he killed people.”
“What?”
“A lot of people. It…” He was shaking his head, and all the blood was draining from his face. “It turns out that he used to work for the Mob. He killed people for the Mob.”
“You mean he was a hit man?”
“Right. His real name was Butch Longo. And then he was assigned to kill this guy who owed the Mob money, and it turned out the guy was actually his brother, and so he turned around and killed the Mob guys he worked for and then created this whole new identity for himself, the identity of Bruce Lance, which has always been his secret identity as Captain Major. But now his identity has been revealed—”
“Revealed? You mean everybody now knows that Bruce Lance is Captain Major?” Kelsey was stunned. A superhero’s secret identity was always kept under wraps. No matter what.
“Yes. And now the police are after him because of what he did as Butch Longo, and the Mob has sent a squad of killer ninjas after him. Everything’s changed in one issue…everything. It doesn’t read like the same comic anymore. And now the Captain and Mascot are on the run, but that’s not the worst part.”
“It gets worse? How could it possibly get worse?”
Without a word he flipped to the back of the comic and held it up for her. She looked at the last page and could scarcely believe what she was reading.
“‘In the next shocking issue…because you demanded it…the death of Mascot’? What does that mean? Because who demanded it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who ‘you’ is.”
“Well, we’ve got to find out.”
“How?”
“On the internet. That’s how you find out everything.”
“My mother doesn’t let me go on the internet.”
“Why not?”
“Because she says it’s filled with sick, stupid people.”
Kelsey frowned. “How would she know?”
“She goes on the internet all the time.”
“So do I.”
“She even keeps a regular, like, diary….”
“You mean a blog.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so…if I’m on the internet and so is your mother…wouldn’t that make your mom and me sick, stupid people?”
Josh’s mouth opened to reply but then closed. “I dunno.”
“Look…after school, come over to my house. We’ll go on my computer and we’ll see what’s going on, okay?”
Hope began flooding into Josh, providing some light in a sea of darkness. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sure.” Then he frowned. “Are you sure I can come over? Your dad…I don’t think he likes me much.”
“Aw”—and she waved it off—“that’s just him talking tough. He’s not as bad as you think.”
“So he’ll be okay with my being at your house?”
“Oh, heck no. But we’ll sneak you in. It’ll be fine.” She smiled. “Trust me.”
Josh trusted Kelsey. He did. But somehow he didn’t think it was going to be fine.
Getting Josh into Kelsey’s house wasn’t that big a challenge since Kelsey’s dad wasn’t there. “That’s why he doesn’t want me having you over after school. It’s because he’s not home,” Kelsey explained. “He’s at work.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a police officer.”
Josh began to feel a buzz in the back of his skull.
Mascot’s danger sense goes off. The police, once the allies of Captain Major and Mascot, are now after them. Yet in order to determine the truth of the charges leveled against them, Mascot has to penetrate deep into the heart of enemy territory. His pulse pounds furiously as he contemplates the terrible risk should he be caught. Can he and Large Lass, his unwilling ally, possibly elude the—
“Josh!”
“What?”
“You were just staring off into space. Are you okay?”
“Fine. I’m fine.”
She shook her head in wonder. “You are so strange,” she said. Then she gestured for him to follow and headed up the stairs to her room. He followed, glancing around to make sure that neither police officers nor ninjas were ready to leap out of the woodwork at him.
Kelsey’s room was painted in cheery blues and yellows. There were posters around of various pop singers, none of whom Josh recognized. Her bed was neatly made, which impressed Josh since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d made his bed. It always seemed kind of pointless to him: Why make it when by bedtime you’re just going to mess it up again?
Kelsey’s computer was already up and running. Slinging her backpack onto her bed, she sat down and started typing away.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“A comic book discussion board.”
“A discussion board?”
“It’s like a big public bulletin board where people get together and talk about whatever.” She glanced over at him. “How can you not know that? I thought everybody knew that.”
It took her a few minutes of poking around before she finally found something called www.comicnewsforum.com. Josh was amazed as images from various pages appeared on the screen, interspersed with what appeared to be news items about comics.
“Hold on,” Kelsey said. “I’m running a search for threads about Mascot.”
Moments later a dozen threads with “Mascot” in the header appeared.
They started reading.
It took ten minutes to get the gist of it.
They read in silence, but the entire time Josh felt as if he were standing in a pit of quicksand and sinking slowly, slowly, down.
“They hate me,” he said in dazed astonishment.
“You? Josh, they don’t even know you. If they knew you like I know you, they’d really like you.”
The nature of her compliment went right past Josh. “They hate him,” he amended. “They hate Mascot. Everybody hates him. I don’t…it’s…did you see the things they said?”
She nodded grimly.
Josh pulled himself to his feet and faced the screen, leaning forward so he could see it better. He read from one post: “‘Mascot was just a lame, desperate device that was stuck in by Stan Kirby two years ago to try and pump some juice into an outdated, over-the-hill comic book. They can’t kill Mascot off soon enough for me.’” He scrolled to another comment and kept reading: “‘This bold new direction for Captain Major has been too long in coming. It’s probably going to be lousy, but at least props to them for listening to us and knocking off the lame boy sidekick.’” He turned to Kelsey and said, “What do they mean, ‘listening to us’? What’s he talking about?”
“Let’s keep looking,” she told him.
She tapped away on the keyboard.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Okay, what it looks like is that they had a contest
online. Readers could write in to decide whether or not Mascot should be killed off in the course of this new upcoming story line. They voted overwhelmingly for him to die. There’s even…wow,” she said. “They leaked the pages.”
“What do you mean?”
“Here. Look.”
Josh screamed and stumbled backward, his hands waving about as if he could knock the picture out of his head.
“Get it away! Get it away!”
“Josh!”
He hit the floor, trembling violently, and this time when his eyes stung, he made no effort to keep the tears back. “I’m going to die…I’m going to die….”
“Josh!” Kelsey was shaking him, trying to get his attention.
“I’m going to fall off a bridge and die—”
“Josh, you’re not him! You’re not Mascot!”
“I know that!” Josh said. “But everything that happens to him happens to me, too! You can’t deny that!”
“Sure I can! He’s a comic book character! You’re real!”
“But we keep having the same things happening to the both of us!”
“It doesn’t make any sense!”
“It doesn’t have to make sense! It’s a comic book!”
Kelsey shook her head helplessly, unsure of how to respond. Finally she said, “We don’t know for sure that he dies. That’s where the sequence ends; maybe in the next pages, he survives somehow.”
“And I’m supposed to…what? Keep my fingers crossed that that’s what happens? What if he doesn’t? What do you say then?”
“‘Whoops?’” she suggested. When she saw that he was retreating into himself—and not knowing what else to do—she went back to the comic book board and started reading other threads. Josh just sat there. The initial trembling that had seized him wore off, but he still remained seated with his knees pulled up to his face and his chin resting on them, his arms hugging his legs.
“This is unbelievable,” she said after a while. “I’m looking at these other threads about other comics…and the guys here are complaining about everything. Everything.”