The Vigilante's Handbook (Misfits #1)

Seventeen: Oh No, She's a Morning Person

I woke up to Stitch's sharp elbow in my back and our two blankets draped over both of us.

The two of us had been shoved to the bunk above the cab by Lucia before the sunset and hadn't been allowed down since then. She said that if we were kept up there then we would get into less trouble. There was less of a chance of us running away in the dead of the night to Julien's team, is what she meant

That thought of begging for a spot on Julien's team had not occurred to me until she mentioned it. Two days ago I would have been certain that he would find all of us a job to do and place in whatever shelter they had found. Now I wasn't so sure. For one, he had always been a stickler for rules. Getting him to stay at my apartment past curfew for a date night had taken fifteen minutes of convincing, but it had also earned me my first kiss, so I couldn't complain. Breaking curfew by ten minutes was very low on the academy's scale of good and bad. Taking three refugees from the enemy team was much higher.

Lucia had nothing to fear, I wasn't going anywhere. Neither was Stitch. He wasn't exactly a stealthy person so sticking us up on this bed was enough of a deterrent for him. He wouldn't be able to get off of it without falling or stepping on someone. At the very least he would wake up Foster who was on guard in the early hours of the morning when Stitch woke me up.

The person she should have been worrying about was Miguel. He was on ground level, sharing the table bed with his cousin. I could tell that he wasn't asleep either. It must have been impossible for him to find a comfortable position on his half of the bed. It was only five feet long at best while he was well over six feet. Plus it was still missing all of its cushions, so he was left with only a blanket for comfort.

He was pretending to sleep through the dim morning light as is broke through the windows with their lack of curtains. I saw his eyes move behind his lids restlessly and his breathing deliberately slow into deep calm breaths before he gave up.

I thought about trying to sleep again once I had kicked Stitch back to his side of the bed, the side away from the ledge. The last thing he needed after passing out last night was a concussion. But once I was up it was difficult to turn my brain off. It needed breakfast and conversation.

When the sky was light enough that I could get away with calling it sunrise, I jumped down from the bed. My sudden appearance from above startled Foster awake in the driver seat of the motor home. So much for guard duty. He looked like his eight hours hadn't been interrupted by anything except me.

I landed my jump on Miguel and Lucia's bed in a way that would least disturb them, but it still stirred Miguel awake or told him it was time to stop pretending to sleep. While everyone else was still sleeping, I whispered to Foster, "I won't tell anyone you fell asleep on duty if you do the honors of waking up Lucia. I'm giving you three seconds to decide." In his delirious state of having just barely woken up, Foster didn't understand what I was saying. So when I started counting he didn't even have the brainpower to look scared. I counted in one breath. "One. Two. Three."

Halfway through three, his eyes grew wide when he understood what I was talking about. "Wait, no!"

But it was too late. Miguel had the foresight to cover his ears before I shouted, "Foster fell asleep! Can he be on house arrest too?"

It is not a good idea to startle an RV full of gifted teenagers. Learn from my mistakes.

Lucia was closest to me, so I immediately felt the brunt of my mistake when she threw her blanket in my face and kicked both legs into my sternum. Stitch screamed and with his shout came a blast of static energy that made my hairs stand on end.

Ariana and Cody from the back both had knee jerk reactions too. Ariana's gift found the first thing it could and animated it. Which explained the shower curtain flying off its rod toward me. Cody did his best interpretation of Valentine's singing. It didn't make any ears bleed like hers, but it was close..

On top of it all Foster got so spooked by the sudden superpower output that he panicked, made himself intangible, and went to catch me from Lucia's kick. It was a nice thought but not great execution. I fell hard on the wooden floor. Surprisingly, Lucia didn't break any of my bones. I took a deep breath to make sure I didn't have a bruise or cracked rib. The breath passed through my lungs without issue or pain.

Maybe Lucia pulled her punches when she was tired. Usually a kick at her full, super-enhanced strength was enough to fracture bones at the very least. Rumors were milling through Paramount Lake that she had killed a man with a single kick before she came to the academy.

"Are you all ready to hike to the friendly forest fast food joint and get something for breakfast? Because I'm starving. Maybe we could stop at Pine and Oak Grocery Store after and get toothbrushes. You all have some nasty morning breath." Only in the mornings did people think I was a ray of sunshine, and then they never took the time to appreciate it.

"You are not going anywhere," Lucia said as she sat up with a yawn. "The three of you are still on house arrest. I wasn't joking." She mistakenly pointed at Foster, whose hands were still partially through my skull, instead of Miguel. It was good to know even she got tired. "The rest of us will find something to eat." Then she slipped into Portuguese without realizing it.

We all freshened up as best we could in our limited circumstances. I hadn't been lying when I said that we had morning breath, and there was no way to take care of it. We didn't even have water to swish around our mouths or baby wipes to clean off the dirt on our skin that came with camping in the woods. The best I could do was run my fingers through my greasy, matted hair and tie it back in a ponytail.

Miguel was rummaging through the kitchenette cabinets as if someone had left a drugstore worth of toiletries behind. Unfortunately, they didn't.

We took turns using the porta-potty the RV was equipped with. For now, it was a better alternative to squatting in the trees. I tried not to think about what would happen when we filled it up. The tank couldn't be that big.

Back in the day Grandma and I had rent a tiny trailer and driven through Nova Scotia for a week to get to her new house. Between the two of us, we had to empty the tank--which, might I add, is nasty--twice. With seven of us and one toilet? I could only hope we wouldn't be stuck in the woods long enough to deal with the problem.

As it stood, we wouldn't have that problem if we didn't find anything to eat. We got ready to a chorus of growling stomachs. There was no food in the cabinets except a bulging can of green beans that had expired a year before I was born. It raised the question of how long the RV had been here and how long Paramount Lake had been planning on dropping us unprepared into the wilderness.

Lucia finally left nearly an hour after sunup only after we understood our instructions for the day: Sit in the RV like a scorned puppy in the corner. Those hadn't been her exact words, but they might as well have been.

I didn't care much for what she assigned us to do. All I wanted was for her, Ariana, Cody, and Foster to leave. I had never had to make this much small talk with them in the history of the academy. We might have grown up together, but the only thing we had in common was the genetic mutation or nuclear radiation or whatever it was that gave us our gifts.

When they left, Stitch crawled back onto our bunk like he intended to follow Lucia's instructions. I fully believe that if not for my bad influence he would have. After all, even though he was now an official misfit, Stitch still wanted to fit in more than anything else. If fitting in meant lazing around in the RV all day and probably freezing to death, then so be it.

Writing Act 3 has killed me. I'm dead now. This is a ghost of me typing. I hope you appreciate my dedication to updating if I came back from being dead to post. 

(It's been a long weird day. I apologize.)

m burton