Blog of a Teenage Superhero

Chapter Three: Going Home

I wake up to a slap in the face. And then I'm hit with another. And another.

"Ow, ow, ow, OW!" I flail and kick the dashboard of Kai's Subaru. The boy yelps and flings his arms over the wooden paneling, lovingly stroking the built in cassette tape player I narrowly missed.

"Hey!" he cries. "Not cool, man!"

I clutch my face and sink down into the cracked leather seats, wool tufts floating up from the ripped seams into the darkness around me. Finn sighs from the back, his voice husky, and frankly, sleep-deprived.

"So are we going to school tomorrow? Today?"

I glance down at the broken camera strewn in my lap and scream. Head slammed into the headrest, face shoved into hands. I give your long, drawn out, Luke Skywalker "Nooooo..."

Kai grunts. "I don't think Monet can handle—"

"Have you ever not seen her acting irrationally? Honestly, I think she's right. I think she's fine."

Tears spring to my burning eyes and race down my face. Dabbing my cheeks with Finn's sleeves, I lean against the cool windshield, taking slow, even breaths. "Okay, okay." I bite my quivering upper lip and puff out my chest. "So I broke my favorite camera. So the mayor is conspiring with Masquerade. Okay, okay. Also, thanks, guys."

"You owe me ice cream," Kai says, the engine gargling as he backs the car out of the mud pit he hid it in. Dirt splatters the window, weaving brown with the streaks of gold bannered across the sky. "I'm crashing at your house. After we go to the doctor."

"Oh, man." I cough, choking up the last of the sludge in my lungs onto the back of my fist. When I lean back into the seat, I press myself so far into it you'd think I was trying to drown myself in the worn leather. "School. Why? Why did this have to happen on the first day of school?"

"Let's hope Masquerade is a high schooler." Finn crosses his ankles on the lid of the console, thumping it with his mud-crusted Converse. Kai yelps, fumbling over my lap for the feather duster velcroed to the passenger door. "We could identify him by the bags under his eyes. Also—now that you're okay and all—quit whining. This is your own fault, Monet, all 'Hey! This will be a fun way to end summer. This can't end badly. Nope. Not dangerous at all.'"

"Point taken." I pick up a half-dry highlighter, one of many, from the sticky cup holder and mark the back of my wrist. It's a habit, marking on my skin every time one of my merry band knocks me down a peg or six. When I'm old enough, I'll have them tattooed as reminders.

I got this. 'Born leader' ought to be my memoir title, right behind 'Defender of the Universe.'

"But yeah, yeah, sludge. Dangerous."

"Dangerous," Kai repeats, flicking Finn's ankles off the console with a swat of his feather duster. "You crushed your camera with a bare hand, Monet. And you don't look weird or anything, just kind of sludgy, but we should still take you to the doctor."

I sigh. "I gotta think of a plan. And I gotta take a shower. Let's just go home. Then I can have a real cry, with ice cream."

Kai grunts again, glaring at me over his shoulder. After another minute of furious dusting, he places both hands back on the steering wheel, where they should've always been. His black hair is ruffled under his Mets cap, shorter than Finn's mess but just as shaggy. Eyes, a dark brown. Skin, an even tan of the sun-kissed variety most surfer guys here sport. He even smells of sea salt, as opposed to me and Finn's smell of... sweat, mostly. Not all of us can be the sea's gift to Silver Dollar.

"Monet, are you sure—"

I pick up his cap and slap it back on his head, mussing his perfectly unkempt woke-up-like-this-and-I-looks-better-than-your-sixty-dollar-crew-cut waves. He groans. That's forty percent of his communication, grunts and groans.