Sidekicked Read Online Free

onscreen—there’s just too much going on. I watch, breathless, as Jenna swings back and forth, gaining momentum. I see the Fox leap, deflecting the missile with an energy blast from her fingertips and severing the chain that holds me and Jenna with her sword. The camera traces our less-than-graceful fall, and by the time it jerks back up, the Fox has the Bee in her grip. The cameraman didn’t catch Jenna and me slinking away or manage to get a good look at our faces.
    I watch for a moment from the entryway, easily seeing and hearing the television from three rooms away, careful not to draw attention to myself. The news reporter is gushing about the Fox. “Remarkable,” she says over and over again. “Another day saved by Justicia’s newest Super.”
    â€œAnd that’s why we need to move,” I hear my dad say. “To a town with fewer freaks.”
    â€œYou mean the guy dressed up like a bumblebee, or the one shooting lightning from her eyes?” my mother asks from the kitchen.
    I close the front door with a little emphasis. My mother turns to greet me with a smile that is meant to only half mask the worry in her eyes. For a moment I think I’m done for, that my cover is broken. That somehow she has seen something, something in the frown of the boy on TV, something in the slump of my shoulders, something that only a mother would notice. My other life would finally be exposed, and I would have to come clean and tell them everything.
    How I am sworn to protect ordinary citizens like her from the evils that threaten them.
    How I spend three days a week training to fight crime.
    How I sometimes mix nitroglycerin in the bathroom sink.
    And it isn’t an entirely dreadful feeling, this idea of opening up to them, telling them everything. There would be consequences, of course, but we could endure them together, as a family.
    But her sad smile is just general maternal transference. Some where some mother has a teenage son who is dressing up in costumes and being suspended above vats of bubbling acid by men with artificial wings and military-grade weaponry. She’s just glad it isn’t hers.
    â€œHi, honey, where have you been?” She kisses me on the cheek.
    â€œI was working on a chemistry project,” I say, using the excuse that has been assigned to me this week in case of such an emergency.
    â€œYeah, Mr. Masters called and said you would be coming home late,” my dad says, eyes still suctioned to the television, watching as the Fox waves to the cameras before taking a flying leap over the pool house and disappearing. “You can call us yourself, you know. After all, that’s why we pay for that cell phone you insist on having.”
    â€œSorry, Dad,” I say, failing to mention that I left the cell phone at school, along with my utility belt—actually attached to my belt, right beside my cryogenic grenades and concentrated sleeping gas.
    â€œDid you hear what happened this time?” Mom asks, pointing to the TV that’s now showing cops rounding up a half dozen injured drones and piling them into an armored truck.
    â€œYeah. Crazy stuff,” I say, trying to sound impressed. I keep my hands in my jacket even as she hugs me. It may be a little suspicious that I don’t hug her back, but it’s better than showing off my raw, red wrists.
    â€œI just don’t know why anyone would do such a thing,” she says.
    â€œAnd where does somebody get that much acid?” my father adds.
    I shrug. “Like you said, they’re all crazy, every last one of them,” I say. “What’s for dinner?”
    My mother smiles, knowing I already know. I smile back at all the things she still has no clue about.
    â€œWe could move to Albuquerque,” Dad says. “Surely this kind of nonsense doesn’t happen in Albuquerque.”
    I don’t say anything, though I’m pretty sure Albuquerque has its own