Super

4 - I Only Spoon Two Guys: Ben and Jerry

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them... Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

– Rob Siltanen

Despite leading this mysterious double life where I work with supers and plot to take down a super villain, I still had to go to school like any other normal teenager. Unfortunately, that meant two things. One, I was a living, breathing target. Crammed in one small high school of no more than six hundred students when the aforementioned super villain already knew who I was was probably the worst thing to be.

Another issue was that I couldn't sit still. I had to go to school like normal and pretend everything was okay, but a lot had happened over the last week and now I was antsy, almost as ADHD as Ardie (the infamous Lodestone) himself! Then there was that.

Lodestone's secret identity was no longer a secret (not to me, anyway) and I couldn't help staring at him in the halls, watching him do mundane things like talk to his friends or pick what passed for spinach casserole at our school out of his teeth after lunch.

See, with Lila it was fine because Lila was not normal and therefore she didn't do normal, mundane things. Instead, she fangirled about other supers, refused to eat the cafeteria's mystery meat, and rambled on and on about her crazy double life. With Ardie, it was different. He was in the grade below so I never saw much of him, but when I did, he never once mentioned his other personality or any of the other supers unless they were in the news. 

It was like he had two completely different personalities: one with a mask and one without! So naturally, it surprised me when on Wednesday, he ignored that rule, sat at our table, and started in on the hero talk with so much gusto that Lila was forced to stare at the both of us and try to figure out how the heck we knew each other.

"Collins." I looked up at the use of my last name just in time to see Ardie slam his lunch tray on the table and plop down on the seat next to mine. Lila sat opposite us with her eyebrows in her hairline. "Did you see the report on Channel 44 yet?"

"No, Ardie, I've been in school," I rolled my eyes, "there's not exactly a T.V.–"

"Alright cut the attitude and look," Ardie thrust his phone into my hands and pressed play. Being a sophomore, he probably would have gotten his ass kicked for treating a junior like we were equals, but then again, Ardie was a super and probably didn't think twice about the bullies in the school. He was only a little taller than me, but his presence was intimidating enough, well, to those who knew about his alter ego.

Meanwhile, I watched the Channel 44 broadcast in horror, my gut wrenching and threatening to throw up yesterday's "spinach casserole" as the beautiful news reporter droned on.

Yesterday's heroes and tomorrow's super villains, it seems, as human fireball "Arson" was spotted teaming up with villain "Alloy" to rob a bank earlier this morning. Some grainy footage played in the top right corner of the screen showing Arson, in his fiery orange and red body suit – complete with flame decal plastered across the chest and arms – glowing sunset orange as he high-fived Alloy who was busy lugging sacks of money into a van. Lila straitened a little at the mention of "Alloy". Unfortunately, Brady (a.k.a. the villain Alloy himself), being Lila's brother and all, went to this school too, but we couldn't exactly expose him without exposing Lila so we were forced to live with a super villain in our midst.