“What happened to Teddy?” Teia whispered as Lew took her arm and pulled her into a corner. Unlike Izzy, they were in on the whole thing and wouldn’t let her just walk away.
“He did it, didn’t he?” Lew said. “He went out on patrol. He really did it.” His eyes gleamed with excitement. Maybe even with envy.
“And then got the shit beat out of him,” Teia said.
Anna sighed. “And he got his freaking picture in the paper.”
“I know!” Teia exclaimed. “It’s great!”
“Be quiet!” Anna hissed. They were supposed to be keeping this secret. “I have to go talk to him before class starts.”
Lew pointed a thumb over his shoulder and said, “He got called to the nurse’s office—”
“I know that. Can I go now?” She pulled her arm out of his grip and marched on.
“Anna—” they called after her, but she ignored them.
Yesterday, Teddy had called her before school and begged her to come help. He’d had a run-in the night before. She thought he was crazy for going out at all, for thinking he could battle crime, right wrongs, whatever, all by himself. That was why they were practicing as a team, but he just couldn’t wait, could he? Over the phone he kept insisting that the expedition had been successful. He’d stopped a real-live, honest-to-God robbery. He’d just gotten a little banged up was all, and he didn’t want his folks to know. She’d taken the bus to his town house, where he’d been hiding in the garden shed out back.
He’d been more than a little banged up. Anna wanted him to go to the hospital. But no, he’d made it through the night, he’d be fine. He’d turned invisible to get ice packs and aspirin without his parents knowing, staying in his bedroom long enough to convince them he was sick and couldn’t go to school. Somehow, they’d bought it. They went to work, so it was just Teddy at home.
He wanted her to help him wash the blood out of his outfit.
She just about killed him for that. She didn’t wash his outfit, but they ended up spending a couple of hours talking about what had happened, what he’d done right, and how it could have gone better. Her opinion: He should wait for the team to go with him next time. One against three were terrible odds, and sometimes even an invisible kid who could walk through walls needed someone to watch his back. He had to learn to phase out when someone hit him, the way he phased through walls. She told him that, and he defended himself, saying he couldn’t focus on so many things at once. Well then, he shouldn’t be trying to fight crime yet, should he?
That should have been the end of it, but then she had that talk with her mother. Her apparently omniscient mother.
She reached the nurse’s office just as he was walking out, closing the door behind him.
“Teddy!” she called.
He flinched, eyes bugged out, looking like he was about to run.
“We have to talk.” Before he could flee, she grabbed the sleeve of his uniform jacket and pulled him to a padded bench around the corner.
The bruise on his cheek had turned an amazing purplish-gray, spreading around his eye in a crescent. Otherwise, he didn’t seem too badly hurt. He favored his shoulder, but he could still move it. It could have been so much worse. Her big fear was that he would be knocked unconscious while invisible and not rematerialize. Just stay invisible forever, and she’d be the only person who could find him, zeroing in on him with her power and tripping over his body.
“I’m surprised you even came to school today,” she said.
“I could only stay away so long.”
“But you’re okay, right? What are you doing here?” She nodded toward the nurse’s office.
He looked changed. “As soon as I showed up, one of the teachers dragged me here. They kept asking questions about trouble at home.”
“They think you’re being abused?”
“Look at my face.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.” She resisted an urge to brush a flop of brown hair off his forehead. Weirdly, the bruise made him look simultaneously tough and vulnerable.
“I told her I walked into a door,” he said.
“You couldn’t think of a better excuse than that?”
He huffed. “I wasn’t thinking. It’s not important. I know what I did wrong. You’re right, I have to figure out how to phase out when people are hitting me. I’ll do better next time.”
How about avoiding getting hit at all? “That’s what we need to talk about. You need to back off.”
“It didn’t go perfect but I did okay—”
“You have to back off,” Anna said. “My mother knows it was you.”
He stared. “What? That’s impossible, how could she?”
“I don’t know, but she does. It’s her thing, she’s a control freak.”
“But how does she know about me?”
“She keeps tabs on everybody.”
“So it’s not enough that she’s president of the richest company there is, she has to spy on everybody?”
Flustered, Anna waved him off. “I don’t know, she’s paranoid. That’s not the point right now. You need to cool it because she’s watching.”
He thought for a minute, so grim and serious she almost laughed. “I can’t back off now. It’ll go better next time, I know it will. I need more practice.”
“Crime’ll still be there in a month or two. You need more practice where someone isn’t trying to kill you.”
“But that’s just it, how am I going to get practice using my powers when there’s danger if I’m not really in danger?”
“That’s a stupid argument,” she said. “I worry about you, Teddy.”
“Well. Thanks for worrying.” Even with the giant bruise, his gee-whiz smile lit up his face. It was hard staying mad at him.
“Any time.”
The warning chime sounded, a bell tone that was meant to be soothing but managed to be annoying as it echoed through the halls, because it meant they had five minutes to get to class. Anna didn’t much want to go to class at the best of times.
She hooked her arm around Teddy’s and hauled him away from the nurse’s office. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“What if I go out with Teia or Lew? Or Sam? We can watch each other’s backs—”
“So you can get in twice as much trouble?”
He brightened. “You could go with me.”
“I’d be useless.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’re not useless,” he said, but the words were rote and they both knew she was right. He added, “Maybe you shouldn’t worry so much.”
Her mother’s words from yesterday’s after-school conference echoed. Math quiz, she wished. “Somebody’s got to worry, the rest of you sure aren’t.”
They arrived at the second floor, north wing corridor, and history. Her first class. Teddy had chemistry. What he really needed were some physics lessons—pressure, velocity, force of impact.
“Are you saying that you want me to quit?” he said.
“No, it’s not that. I just … you could have been killed.”
“I could get killed crossing the street—”
“That’s another stupid argument.”
“We have to keep going. We’ve started this. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”
That all depended on whom you talked to. Which sounded like something her mother would say.