Searching for Super Page 4

  Benny leaned forward and rested his head on the table. He let out another groan. “When I burp, it smells like medicine and crossword puzzles.”

  “That’s what you get for breaking the superhero diet,” I said.

  “There was a small possibility the pudding was made out of goat’s milk,” Benny replied. “Speaking of that, I need to get home so I can feed my goats.”

  “You know those goats are just pretend, right, Benny?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Benny said. “But they have feelings. Virtual feelings. When I’m gone, they miss me.”

  I pulled out my phone and checked the time. We’d been at the senior center all of twenty minutes. We still had forty minutes left to go.

  I checked the bite marks on my ankle. Monroe had bitten me before Juanita roped him into a chess tournament. He was currently trash-talking a World War II veteran in the corner, even though the old man was beating him soundly.

  Juanita left a group of people who were putting together a puzzle and came over.

  “Hey, guys.” She smiled. “It’s even more fun when you actually . . . you know . . . talk to the people.”

  Benny groaned and burped.

  I looked around the room. There were several groups playing games at a few tables. Others were cross-stitching and talking. A group of men and women were tying a quilt. I almost wished Monroe would start biting my ankle again, just to liven things up.

  “Sorry, Juanita,” I said. “Benny and I are used to more . . . action than this.”

  Juanita pointed to three women set apart from the others. “If you want action, you should go join those ladies in the corner.”

  One of the women was playing a game of solitaire. Another knitted, and a third had a roll of yarn she was winding into a ball. They were speaking quietly, but looked pretty animated.

  “Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands in mock protest. “Let’s not get crazy. I don’t think even Benny and I could handle that much excitement. I mean, look at that. One of them is making a yarn ball! Yeehaw!”

  Juanita gave me a stern look. “The woman playing cards is a Bailey. The two with yarn are Johnsons.” Juanita glanced around, then leaned forward and lowered her voice. “If you really want to learn about the family business, you should go and talk to three ladies who have lived their entire lives as superheroes.”

  “What do you think?” I asked Benny.

  My brother let out a rather loud belch. He pounded himself on the chest. “There we go. The pudding is tucked safely into bed. Sure. Let’s go talk to them.”

  Benny and I wandered over to the ladies. When it was clear we were walking toward them, they stopped all conversation and focused on their yarn and cards.

  “Uh . . . ,” I said. “My name is Rafter, and this is my brother Benny. We’re here to . . .” To be honest, I had no idea why we were there. “We’re here to talk.”

  The woman with the yarn ball didn’t even look up from her project. “That’s nice, boys. But we’re doing just fine on our own.”

  There was a second of awkward silence.

  “We’re Baileys,” Benny said.

  They suddenly became much nicer.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

  “Come sit down, you can help me with my solitaire.”

  “We thought we were going to have to stop our reminiscing, but you’ll fit right in.”

  Benny joined the woman playing cards. I sat next to the lady with the yarn ball, whose name was Merry.

  Merry motioned to the other two women. “Barbara and Judith were just discussing the communist uprising in South America. We seem to be a little fuzzy on the exact dates and details.”

  “I’m telling you,” Judith said, her knitting needles never slowing down. Her gray hair was curled and piled on top of her head like a beehive. “It was nineteen-hundred and forty-six. I remember because of the locusts.”

  “The locusts?” Barbara said. “Was nineteen-hundred and forty-six the only year they had locusts?”

  “No, but Bolivia was especially damp in forty-six. Cochabamba alone had over two inches in April. You know what they say—water in April, locusts in May.”

  “Two inches sounds to me like average rainfall for Cochabamba,” Barbara said. She laid a card on the table and drew another from the top of the deck. “Tell her, Merry. And it wasn’t Bolivia where they had the uprising, it was Cameroon.”

  “Ha!” Judith burst. “Cameroon is in Africa. It’s a little hard to have a South American communist uprising in the heart of Africa. Tell her, Merry.”

  The two continued arguing, and Merry leaned over to me. “I tend to stay out of these discussions. My memory isn’t what it used to be, and I’m not so good at making up statistics.”

  I wasn’t so good at talking with adults. But there was something about Merry that put me at ease. Her hair was cut short and she wore horn-rimmed glasses that were connected to a beaded necklace. Her fingers worked deftly as she rolled the yarn into a larger and larger ball.

  I tried to think of something interesting to talk about. “Where are you from?”

  “Do you mean now, or before all of this craziness happened?” Merry asked, and then went right on talking without waiting for an answer. “I used to live in Phoenix. Judith, Barbara, and I shared the same nursing home. Then one day we got worthless powers and suddenly nobody was visiting us anymore. We called around and found out you nice folks in Split Rock had escaped the attack, so we moved down here. Still in a nursing home, of course.” She motioned to Juanita. “She’s quite the girl, you know. Taking time out of her busy day to come and visit us old and worthless superheroes.”

  “You’re not old and worthless,” I protested. But to be honest, it sounded uncomfortably close to how Benny and I had been describing them just a few moments before.

  “You can’t argue with facts,” she said, smiling. “All three of us are old. And our worthless powers are especially worthless. When Barbara snaps, it sounds like bagpipes. Judith can sneeze and keep her eyes open at the same time. All I can do is grow a mustache on my left kneecap.”

  I saw Benny’s eyes go wide, and he opened his mouth, probably to ask if he could see the mustache. I shook my head at him. He scowled and went back to playing cards.

  “No, sir,” Merry said. “Our days of being useful are long gone.”

  “It’s not your power that makes you super,” I said. “It’s what you do with that power.”

  Merry stopped her rolling. She looked at me over her glasses. “That’s quite a profound thought from somebody still wet behind the ears.”

  My face felt warm. “It’s something my grandpa said.”

  “Well, your grandpa sounds like a smart man.”

  Benny asked Judith what she was knitting.

  “I’m knitting anti-chafing pads,” she said. “Have you ever worn supersuits?”

  Benny scowled and shook his head.

  “The chafing is horrible, especially during the wet months.” She held up one of her pads. It was about the size of a pancake. “Pin one of these to your tights, and your chafing worries are over.”

  “Superheroes don’t chafe,” Benny said.

  Judith looked like she was about to argue, but just then Juanita came up behind us. “Sorry to break things up, ladies. Your bus is here to take you back to Sunshine Terrace.”

  “Ah, man,” Benny complained. “It was just getting interesting.”

  Benny brought over Merry’s walker, and we helped the women out to the bus. We said good-bye and promised to see them again, and Monroe even gave Merry a hug. Then, as soon as the bus drove away, Monroe kicked me once in the shins and ran off, whooping and hollering.

  “Well,” Juanita said. “Do you guys want to come in and help clean up?”

  “Can’t the other people take care of that?” Benny asked. “We need to get working on the important stuff.”

  Juanita had turned to go back inside, but Benny’s comment made her freeze.

  “That’s
not what he meant,” I jumped in, trying to save Benny. “It’s just . . .” I couldn’t tell Juanita about Thimon’s powers. I’d promised. “Benny and I are tired of hunkering down. It’s time we find out where the Joneses are hiding so we can do something important.”

  Juanita faced Benny and me. The frosty look on her face made me take a step back.

  “You both keep using that word,” Juanita said. “Important. Are you saying what I’m doing isn’t important?”

  “No,” I protested. “This is all really good. It’s just . . . not very big. I mean, you’re helping a few people at a nursing home. But what we’re working on . . . it could save the whole city.”

  It had been fun to talk to Merry and the other ladies, but this seemed so obvious to me. Hanging out at the senior center was small and unimportant. I was a superhero. I wanted to do something bigger.

  Juanita took a step toward me, her face angry. “There are over eighty superheroes in this city. They’ve been here for three months. And do you know what we’ve done in that time?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing.”

  “Exactly!” I said. “That’s what Benny and I are trying to change.”

  “Three months,” Juanita continued. “We don’t even go on patrol any more. Did you know that crime is on the rise?”

  Juanita looked from me to Benny and then back to me. “You said we should leave the little stuff to the citizens—that we should focus on the big stuff. But we haven’t even done little stuff! We spent years fighting each other, damaging the city, and once we find a real threat, we go into hiding! We act like we’re powerless.”

  That made me angry. “Juanita, if you hadn’t noticed, we are powerless.”

  Even as my mouth said it, my brain told me it was a mistake. Juanita looked like I’d slapped her in the face.

  I braced myself. Juanita was already angry, and now I was ready for her fury.

  But that isn’t what happened. Juanita’s shoulders dropped and she looked down at the ground.

  I felt like a bully right then. “Juanita . . . ,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  My friend turned her back on me and walked off.

  I thought about going after her, but I didn’t know what else to say. What I’d said was true.

  “What do you think, Benny?” I looked over at my brother.

  “I think I want more pudding.”

  I sighed, rubbing my forehead with my hand. “We might have to go on this adventure without Juanita.”

  On the way home, Benny and I saw an old man get his briefcase stolen by a man wearing a hoodie. Nobody stopped the man as he raced down the subway stairs. I stopped at a newspaper stand and read the front-page headline:

  CRIME SOARS

  We spent the night looking for information about the Joneses on the internet. We found nothing.

  The next day was the last day of school. Usually that was a big event, but I hardly even noticed what we did. There were more important things going on. To make matters worse, Juanita didn’t show up.

  When we got home, we spent more time on the internet with the same results. The Joneses were nowhere to be found.

  It was hopeless without Juanita.

  That night at dinner, Dad got a call from Grandpa. Dad hung up and told us the news.

  “Uncle Ralph, Aunt Carole, and Cousin Jessie have gone missing.”

  5

  TODAY YOU MUST EXCEL AT HUNKERING DOWN

  Now we knew. The Joneses were on the move.

  But so were the Baileys. Of course, the Joneses were probably more organized.

  “Benny, stop bumping me.”

  “You’re doing it wrong. Here, let me.”

  “Boys, both of you back up.”

  Dad pulled us away from the piano in the living room. He played the first few lines of Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A Minor, and a secret door opened in the living room. After a little more pushing, which ended with us just letting Benny lead the way, Rodney, Benny, Dad, and I all filed downstairs into the root cellar. Mom and Thimon stayed upstairs to clear the dishes.

  Our root cellar wasn’t an ordinary root cellar. Actually, to be honest, I didn’t even know what a real root cellar looked like. But our root cellar was a large underground area where we kept our secret super equipment.

  We all filed into Rodney’s computer room.

  “How is the technology stuff coming?” Dad asked. “Have you gotten anything back online?”

  Rodney sat down at his keyboard. There were empty energy-drink cans and snack-cake wrappers cluttered around the desk and floor. He wiggled the mouse and began to type.

  “It’s complicated.” Rodney pointed to a large computer hard drive under the table. “As soon as I get this computer online, we’ll be able to share all our strategic systems again, but we’ll also be vulnerable to the Joneses. If they hack us, they’d have access to everything—bank accounts, identities, the location of our headquarters. I have to be sure that we’re secure before I put us back online.”

  “All right,” Dad said. “You’re the computer expert. You know what’s best.”

  Rodney’s new power didn’t exactly help him get things working again. He had the ability to stop his fingernails from growing.

  Rodney pulled out a rectangular touchpad the size of a phone. “For now, the only way for anybody to access the stuff on this computer is if they are in this room, and if they are me.”

  He put two fingers on the pad. A voice sounded over the speakers. Handprint recognized. Please enter your password.

  Rodney typed in a password long enough to be a paragraph. In another moment he had the Bailey family locator app pulled up on the screen. The locator showed where every superhero in the city was.

  “According to this, Uncle Ralph, Aunt Carole, and Cousin Jesse are at the movies,” Rodney said. “Riverside Plaza. Except . . .”

  “Except what?” I said.

  “Except this says they’ve been there for nine hours.”

  “Nine hours?” Benny asked. “Maybe they’re sneaking into different theaters to watch a bunch of movies.”

  “That’s definitely against the superhero code,” Dad said. “Riverside Plaza is close to us. I’ll head out there and call Grandpa on the way. You boys sit tight. Don’t leave the house and don’t answer the door. Today you must excel at hunkering down. I’ll call you as soon as I find out anything.”

  “I don’t want to hunker.” Benny chased after Dad. “Can’t I come with you?”

  “Sorry, son!” Dad called over his shoulder. “You don’t have your supersuit yet.”

  Benny returned to the room grumbling. “Stupid supersuits.”

  We waited. Rodney messed around on his computer. I watched, even though I didn’t understand any of it. Benny twirled his chair around in circles and then tried to walk across the room with his eyes closed. He finally stopped after he ran into the wall with his head.

  “Hey, guys.” Rodney sat up suddenly, his eyes bright. “Do you want to see the latest progress on the device?”

  He didn’t have to explain which device. Rodney had been trying to rebuild the device October Jones had used to take away our powers. We’d recovered it from the dump after our battle, and Rodney had been painstakingly trying to figure out how it worked.

  We followed him into the next room. I’d seen the device in various stages—a jumbled chunk of metal; laid out in pieces; partially rebuilt—but now, it looked like Rodney had created an all-new device that only barely resembled the old one.

  “Does it work?” Benny reached out to touch it, but Rodney swatted his hand away.

  “Um, don’t you think if I had it working I would have mentioned it?” Rodney said. Still, I could tell he was proud of the work he’d done.

  “It looks like it should work,” I said. “What’s missing?”

  Rodney sighed. “All the pieces are back together, but I wasn’t able to save any of the code from the drive. Without that, it’s like a
car without an engine. It looks nice, but it doesn’t do anything.”

  “Any chance of writing the code yourself?”

  Rodney shook his head. “I don’t think I could do that even with my superpower. The only way to get the code is to hack into the Joneses’ computer systems. Of course, before we can do that, we have to know where their systems actually are. We don’t even know where the Joneses themselves are, let alone their computers.”

  Rodney made it sound like we were light-years away from defeating the Joneses. But to me, it felt like we were so close. I could see the checklist in my head.

  “We have to hit the library tomorrow,” I told Benny.

  “But school is out,” Benny said. “It’s summer. I’ve got to start sleeping in.”

  “If we don’t find the Joneses, the Joneses will find us. I don’t want that to happen.”

  Rodney’s phone rang. He answered it, listened, asked a few questions, and then hung up.

  “Dad found their cell phones in the trash can in a Dumpster behind the theater. It seems pretty obvious. The Joneses got them.”

  6

  I’M THINKING I NEED TO TAKE UP TAXIDERMY

  “It’s hopeless.”

  A few days passed with no new developments. I finally got tired of sitting around at home, so we got special permission to go to the library. Mom and Dad weren’t happy about it, but we’d promised not to go anywhere else. We spent two hours looking at old newspapers that weren’t online. Twice I caught Benny playing the goat game on his phone. Needless to say, we hadn’t found anything.

  I’d texted Juanita four times. Once to apologize, twice to invite her to the library, and once to ask her if she’d been kidnapped by the Joneses. I’d added a smiley face to the last text.

  She hadn’t replied to any of them.

  “Come on,” I told Benny. “It’s time to go home.”

  Benny opened his backpack and passed over a hat and sunglasses to me, then put on his own hat and sunglasses. The only way Mom and Dad let us go out is if we wore this disguise. The hat and sunglasses were meant to keep us hidden. I think it made us stand out more than anything.