The Adventures of Beanboy Read online

  Sam stood very still. Which was somehow worse than when she was flinging her bony arms and snorting out arch-nemesis fog.

  “Girl?” Sam’s voice was low. “Did you call me a girl?”

  “Uh—”

  I cut a look at Noah, who raised his eyebrows in a kind of forehead shrug. What was the right answer here? I mean, she didn’t act like a girl. She didn’t walk like a girl or talk like a girl or dress like a girl or hit people like a girl. But technically she was, well, a girl.

  “Um. Yes?” I said.

  Sam narrowed her eyes. Opened her mouth to say something. Probably something I couldn’t repeat out loud, in case my mother was listening.

  But somewhere up the block, a bell jangled against a glass door. Sam stopped. Shot another glance over her shoulder.

  I glanced, too.

  “Stop it!” she barked. “Can you just for once stop being such a Beanboy?” She poked me in the chest. Hard. “Turn around, ’cause you’re not going this way.”

  “But . . . I have to,” I said. “My house is this way.”

  Probably not my best strategy. Tactical Tip of the Day: Never tell a Zawicki where you live.

  She snorted arch-nemesis fog in my face. “Then you’ll have to go around the block.”

  “Around the block? That doesn’t even make—”

  I was going to say “sense,” but I never got a chance, because here’s what she did next: She reached out and, before I knew what was happening, ripped the plastic sack from my hand. Flipped it like a Frisbee and sent it skittering behind me across the wet sidewalk.

  It skidded over the concrete. Skidded over the cracks. Skidded smack into a puddle.

  And for a second, it floated. For that short little second, Caveman’s plastic sack kept H2O safe and dry. For a second, I had hope.

  Till she ripped my backpack from my shoulder and heaved it into the puddle. Splattered muddy water all over me and Noah. Crushed the sack and my comic book and my tiny bit of hope to the bottom of the puddle.

  And I just stood there, frozen, and let her do it.

  I’d spent my whole life thinking—hoping, dreaming, daring to believe—that no matter how gutless I appeared to the naked eye, no matter how . . . invisible, somewhere inside me, somewhere deep down where even I could barely find it, beat the heart of a superhero. And now, when I finally had a chance to prove it, when I could have stepped in and saved my comic book, could have stopped Sam Zawicki, could have finally become my true superhero self, what did I do?

  Nothing.

  Not one dang thing.

  I told myself it was because she caught me by surprise. Because I wasn’t ready for her. I wasn’t expecting her to be standing there on Quincy Street, and I sure wasn’t expecting her to throw my comic book into a mud puddle. I mean, who expects that?

  A superhero would. A superhero’s lightning fast reflexes would never become frozen by surprise.

  I snapped out of my stupor and dragged my backpack and my comic book from the puddle. I shot a quick glance over my shoulder.

  Sam was gone.

  I scanned the street. Saw mostly college students. Plus one rickety old guy carrying a rickety old paper bag out of the thrift shop, with something fluffy and pink billowing out the top.

  But Sam Zawicki had vanished.

  I poured a stream of water from my Caveman sack. Peeled my drowned comic book from the plastic and gave the soggy pages a flap. Stale, gritty puddle water flecked my face.

  All I can say is, when Noah and I rule the world, comic books will be waterproof. Also fireproof, wrinkleproof, bulletproof, and stain resistant. But mainly waterproof.

  Noah wiped the splatters from his glasses. “Beecher’s bus’ll be pulling up to your house in approximately”—he clicked his watch—“two point six minutes.”

  Three

  I left Noah and the bassoon wheezing on the sidewalk halfway to our house.

  “Too bad you don’t have your bike,” he called after me.

  Yeah. I sprinted through the rain and cold down Quincy Street.

  Through the park.

  Across the tennis court.

  Hurdled the net.

  More or less.

  Okay, less.

  Raced down Van Buren Street, sucking wind, the soggy comic book and its life-altering secret tucked under my arm.

  The houses on my old street whipped past in a blur of rain-soaked color: the dark red of Noah’s front door, the yellow shutters of Emma Quinn’s old house, the sturdy blue my mom had painted our house.

  Well, the house that used to be our house. I ran my hand along the slick wet slats of the wooden fence as I hurtled past. Past the gate, the front walk, the orange in the tire swing—

  Orange in the tire swing?

  I swung around and jogged backwards, panting out white puffs of breath.

  The tire swing was still there, right where it had always been, hanging from the gnarled oak where our dad hung it when Beecher was little. Only now it was planted with . . . flowers. A thick bunch of dark orange, kind of spiky, furry-looking . . . flowers.

  Flowers in our tire swing. It was like another piece of our family had just peeled off and blown away.

  I puffed down the street and through the alley. Popped out at the corner of Eighteenth and Polk. My house—the house where we lived now, or at least, some of us did—loomed out of the drizzle, two stories of ancient brick and curly white trim. By the time I stumbled into the yard, I was way past sucking air. I could taste my lungs in my throat. I bent over, hands on my knees, sweat steaming out of my hair.

  And saw the back of the little yellow special-ed bus rumble off in a cloud of exhaust.

  I straightened up. Spun around.

  Waiting on our curb: nobody.

  “Beech?”

  I scanned the front yard. He had to be here. Somewhere. I couldn’t lose him, too. The MacBeans were unraveling like a ball of twine. If I lost Beech, there’d be nothing left.

  Nothing but me, and I’d be dead, because my mom would kill me.

  I whirled around. Where was he? I was only a minute late. Two max. I slid my cell phone from my pocket to check. Okay, more like five or six. But still, where could the kid—

  I spied the glow-in-the-dark Spidey backpack lying in the wet grass by the porch steps. A bony elbow in a red hoodie poked out from behind one of the big square porch posts.

  “Beech. Man. You scared me.”

  “I know.” My little brother leaped from behind the post, teeth bared, fingers gnarled into fake monster claws, glasses sliding halfway down his red nose. “I a monster. Rahhhrrrr.” His roar hung on the chill air.

  “You’re a monster, all right.” I snatched his backpack from the grass, climbed the steps, and pushed his glasses up.

  He looked up at me, his hands still twisted into claws. “I hiding.”

  Case File: Beech-Man

  Status: Total Goober, if you want to know the truth. Since Goober isn’t actually an official category, he’s technically a Sidekick. Mine, apparently.

  Base: the MacBean family apartment

  Superpower: Grinding his brother’s last nerve. If you think that isn’t a superpower, you haven’t met Beech.

  Superweapon: Stubbornness, pure and simple

  Real Name: Beecher MacBean

  “I know. That’s what scared me.” I looked at him—hard. Tried to make my raspy voice sound serious. “What if I couldn’t find you?” I waved my phone. “What if I had to call Mom?”

  Beecher stared at my phone. “Tall Mom?” He has trouble with c’s. They come out sounding like t’s. “No tall Mom. I sorry.” His claws drooped to his sides. “I want to be a surprise.”

  I let out a breath. “You don’t have to be sorry. You’re a really scary monster.”

  He glanced up. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I handed him his Spidey backpack. He started to wrestle the straps over his shoulders.

  And spied the soggy comic book under my
arm.

  “Eight-two-oh!” His way of saying H2O. “New one?” He let his backpack drop to the porch. “Tool.”

  “Yeah. Well.” I peeled the comic book from my armpit. “Not completely cool.” I shook the pages. Dirty puddle water sprayed over both of us.

  Beecher narrowed his eyes. “You drop it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I dropped it.”

  He nodded. Patted my arm. “No worry,” he said. “I drop stuff, too.”

  He wrapped both hands around the front door knob and cranked it open. I picked up his backpack, pulled the mail out of our mailbox—the top one—and we thumped into the warm, dry entry hall.

  Our house, like most of the old houses by the university, was split into apartments. One door opened onto narrow steps that teetered down to the basement, which our landlord called a cozy garden apartment, I called a festering sinkhole, and Rosalie, the music student who lived there, called the best she could afford on her pitiful scholarship budget.

  Another door led to the first-floor apartment, where two astronomy students, Joe and Samir, lived with the pieces and parts of Larry, the enormous telescope they were building on the fire escape. My bike was parked by their door, a five-dollar bill tucked between the spokes of the front wheel. Besides my mom’s car, my bike was our building’s only transportation, and I was doing a pretty steady business renting it out on rainy days.

  I unwound the money and tucked it in my jeans pocket. I’d put it in our jar later.

  A wide staircase led up to our apartment, the whole second floor, tucked under the eaves. I hauled our backpacks up to the landing and collapsed. Beech sat down at the foot of the stairs and heaved himself up backward—thump, thud-thud, thump, thud-thud—one step after another. The kid doesn’t have depth perception, which means he can’t tell how far down is. Which means he’s always afraid he’s going to fall. It’s not his fault. Something happened when he was born. He didn’t get enough oxygen in his brain right at first. So he doesn’t do everything the way everyone else does.

  It’s kind of embarrassing to watch a nine-year-old scoot up the steps butt first, but honestly, it’s easier than trying to drag him up the normal way, his bony fingers clamped around my wrist, his fingernails dug into my veins, and his air-raid-siren voice screeching in my ear.

  We didn’t have this problem at our old house. Our old house didn’t have steps.

  When he finally reached the landing, I climbed the rest of the stairs and unlocked our door. I left it open, dropped our backpacks by the kitchen table, and peeled today’s sticky note off the fridge. Mom had stuck it to the twenty-dollar bill under one of the fridge magnets.

  I was way too old to have my mom giving me love and kisses on a sticky note, but I was glad she put them on there. It made Beech feel better.

  Mom wouldn’t be home till after we went to bed. Since she’d gone back to college, she’d been more of a rumor than an actual person. She worked all day, went to class all evening, and studied all night. We had collected evidence of her: wet towels hanging in the bathroom, half-written term papers scattered across the kitchen table, clean socks that magically appeared in our underwear drawers while we were asleep. Plus our finely tuned MacBean Family Sticky Note System. So we were pretty sure she still existed. We were hoping that one day, when she graduated, she’d show up in three dimensions again.

  I slid the money onto the counter by the phone. “You hungry?” I called to Beech.

  He crawled through the door. Climbed to his feet. “Nope.”

  He backed the door shut and reached for the note. Ran a stubby finger over Mom’s printing. He couldn’t read, but he knew what the heart and the lips meant.

  “Awww,” he cooed at the note. “I love you, too.”

  He kissed it, then stuck it by the phone, next to the twenty-dollar bill.

  He poked at the rumpled mess of a comic book. “This.”

  I looked at it. The big secret that would forever change H2O’s universe was right here in my hand. And it was too wet to read.

  I sighed. “We have to let it dry first. Don’t make that face. I want to read it as much as you do. More, probably. But look—the pages are all stuck together. You don’t want to mess it up, do you?”

  He frowned. “You already mess up.”

  Well, yeah.

  “Here, I’ll set it by the radiator.” I propped H2O, pages fanned out, beside the rattling beast under our fogged-up window. “See? It’ll be dry pretty soon. While we’re waiting, I can make pancakes.”

  That caught his attention. For about a nanosecond. “Bear?”

  I nodded.

  He considered this. Then the nanosecond was over. “Nope.”

  “But you love teddy bear pancakes.”

  “Nope.”

  “If we have pancakes, we can save the pizza money and put it in the jar.”

  That stopped him again. For a fraction of a nanosecond.

  Then he knelt down beside the radiator. Pointed at H2O. “This.”

  He looked up at me with his cockeyed, scrunchednose squint. I’m sure he looked all cute and innocent to the unsuspecting bystander, but I had experience with that squint—nine long years of experience—and there was nothing innocent about it. That squint meant Beecher MacBean was locked onto H2O like a fighter jet locked onto its target, and there wasn’t enough pancake syrup in the world to pry him loose.

  “Fine.” I gathered up H2O. “Let’s go read a wet comic book.”

  Beecher climbed to his feet. “Tool.”

  Four

  Case File: H2O

  Status: Superhero

  Base: A secret laboratory in the North Atlantic

  Superpower: A freak accident changed the molecular structure of his body so that he is now 100% water. For most people, this would be a real bummer, and H2O does experience dark moments of soul-searching despair (dark moments of soul-searching despair are pretty much a standard requirement in a superhero), but he’s learned to harness his waterpower into superhuman strength, speed, and vision.

  Superweapon: Physics, pure and simple. He possesses all the properties of water, including the ability to exist in three separate states of matter. Mastery of physics comes in handy when you’re fighting a mad scientist over control of the known universe.

  Real Name: Marcus Poole, founder of NAUTICA Enterprises

  Beech and I perched on the edge of the tub, damp towels hanging over the shower rod above our heads. The leftover scent of Mom’s mango shampoo wafted around us.

  I turned Mom’s blow dryer to low and trained it on the H2O cover.

  “More.” Beech grabbed the dryer and flipped the switch to high.

  The dryer roared. Wet pages whipped about.

  “Hey!”

  I wrangled the dryer from his hands. Smoothed out H2O. The cover was torn. Pages were coming loose from the staples.

  “I sorry.” Beech shrank back onto the edge of the tub and clasped his hands together in his lap. He leaned against me. “Hurry,” he whispered.

  I turned the dryer to low and blew the page dry.

  Beech touched the page. “Dry.” He flipped it over and pointed. “More.”

  I trained the dryer on the next soggy page.

  Madame Fury’s laser flashed from red to ice white and split into six beams, each shooting toward H2O like a missile, freezing him on contact. H2O struggled to reach the school.

  I peeled the next page free. Beecher bounced up and down on the edge of the tub.

  He grabbed my arm and gave it a squeeze. “You rot.”

  H2O stretched his frozen body toward the burning roof. Flames licked his fingertips. His hands melted and dripped onto the school in a steaming hiss.

  “Uh-oh.” Beecher poked a finger at the damp page.

  “It’s okay.” I held the blow dryer steady. “H2O can handle it.”

  Yeah, he’d lost a hand. Major problem for a standard human being like me or Noah. But H2O could freeze, melt, evaporate, condense—in pieces or as a un
it—then reassemble his particles and return to his normal liquid self. It sapped his strength for a while, but eventually he recovered. It was one of the perks of being composed entirely of water.

  I turned the page and aimed the blow dryer.

  Okay, that was a problem. H2O remained suspended by the freeze beam. The molecules of his hand—now a wisp of steam—drifted toward the stratosphere, while his arm was trapped as liquid in Madame Fury’s lab flask. Hard to reconstitute yourself when your body parts were in three different places, in three different states of matter, with one of those states floating through the atmosphere as water vapor, restoring itself who knew where—a river, a pond, possibly a toilet bowl.

  But H2O had been in tough spots before. He’d been diluted. He’d been polluted. He’d been sealed into a giant Ziploc bag and anchored under the polar ice cap.

  And just when you were sure he’d finally met his end, he reached deep within himself, pulled out previously untapped reservoirs of strength and courage, and thundered back, more powerful than ever.

  I smoothed the page over. Advertisement. Peeled the next soggy page free. Another ad. And another. Then the back cover: ad.

  I stared at the comic book. That was it? That was how Episode Nine ended? What about the big secret? The explosive development that would rock the Overlord universe?

  I flipped back. Maybe I’d lost a page when it skidded into the puddle. I didn’t remember one tearing loose, but with Sam Zawicki around, it was hard to keep track. Things happened fast. I flipped back again.

  Every page: damp, wrinkly, hanging on by one staple, but present and accounted for.

  Beecher, his face scrunched in confusion, looked up. “More?”

  I rifled through to the first ad.

  And that’s when I saw it. It wasn’t an ad at all. It was put in by the Dark Overlord comic book company itself.

  Beecher jiggled my arm. “Read.”