Dad’s hair—what little he had left—was sticking up and his eyes were blurry with sleep. As he shuffled into the kitchen, I smiled at his familiar plaid pajama pants and University of Alabama T-shirt. “Why are you soaking wet?” he asked. “She fell in the pool,” Mom explained. Unlike her, he seemed to take that in stride. “Gotta be more careful, kiddo,” he told me, walking up to Mom. He put a hand on the back of her neck, pulling her toward him to kiss her temple.
I guess I should be icked out that I have parents who are obviously still so in love—and to be honest, sometimes, I am—but there was also something . . . comforting about it. I thought of Ryan, wondering if we got married, would we be like this in twenty years?
“So did you win?” Dad asked, and it took me a minute to remember what he was talking about.
“I did,” I told him. “But I left the crown in Ryan’s car.”
Dad squinted. “That doesn’t sound like you. Hope you weren’t distracted. Do I need to get my shotgun?”
“Ew,” I said as Mom nudged him with her elbow.
“I don’t think any firearms will be required to get Ryan and Harper down the aisle one day,” she said, winking at me.
Mom loved Ryan, especially since he’d been so great after everything with Leigh-Anne.
“So now that she’s home, will you finally get some sleep?” Dad asked Mom.
The lines around her eyes deepened as she smiled. “Sure will,” she said, but rather than heading back to her own bedroom, she walked me up to mine.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked, hovering in the doorway.
“I will be once I take the hottest shower in the world.”
Mom smiled again, but it was faint and kind of sad. And then her eyes drifted to my open closet, where my Cotillion dress was hanging in its plastic bag. “It’s such a gorgeous dress,” she said softly. “I just wish . . .”
I held my breath, waiting for the tears. But this time, Mom gave a tiny shake of her head and said, “Anyway. You’ll be beautiful. Oh, and Miss Saylor called tonight. There’s an extra—”
“An extra rehearsal on Monday, I know.” Twisting behind me, I reached for the dress’s zipper. “Amanda and Abigail told me.”
Mom crossed the room, helping me unzip. “You know I think Cotillion is a wonderful thing, but sometimes I wonder if Saylor doesn’t take it a little bit too seriously. Before she took it over, the girls had maybe three practices for the entire thing. Now it seems like you have three a week.”
Last week we’d had four, but I didn’t say that to Mom. “Miss Saylor just wants it to be perfect.”
Mom pursed her lips, and for a second, it was like she was Old Mom again. The mom who laughed more, who had a weakness for gossip, who didn’t wait up for me before it was even my curfew. “Pine Grove’s Cotillion has been going on for fifty years, and there was never one hiccup until Saylor Stark took it over. Do you know how much mistletoe she makes the Junior League pay for? I tried to tell her that just because our town’s Cotillion takes place a month before Christmas, there’s no need to re-christen Magnolia House ‘Mistletoe Manor.’ That stuff is expensive.”
Saylor Stark, with her gorgeous clothes and her silver hair and her impeccable manners, was kind of my hero. I mean, I put up with her nephew because I liked her so much. But it was nice having old, gossipy Mom back, so I nodded in sympathy. “She’s also really strict about where we stand. That’s what all the rehearsals are about. Making sure we’re all standing in a perfect circle.”
“Ridiculous,” Mom said on a sigh. “Anyway, go take your shower and get some rest.”
“Will do!” I said brightly, waiting until she shut the door to drop my grin. As soon as I heard her footsteps heading downstairs, I shimmied out of my wet dress and dashed into the shower. Once I was out, I threw on some flannel pajamas, snatched up my laptop, and headed into my walk-in closet. There was little chance of my mom coming back, but I didn’t want to freak her out any more than I already had tonight. I was not going back to Dr. Greenbaum.
The first thing I did was Google “superhero,” but that just got me a bazillion way too detailed Wikipedia entries on Marvel comics. A search for “Mr. Hall, janitor, Grove Academy” turned up absolutely nothing, which wasn’t too surprising. What was surprising was that a search of “Michael DuPont, history teacher, Grove Academy” brought up only his faculty page on the Grove Academy website. That was weird. All of the Grove faculty are super accomplished; most of them are former college professors, and Googling any of them brings up either a book or paper they’ve published, or a lecture they’ve given at some academic conference. But there was nothing for Dr. DuPont. Almost like he hadn’t existed before he came to the Grove last year. Chill bumps broke out all over my body, and I reached up to pull a fluffy pink robe from a hanger. Wrapping it around me, I thought back to my fight with Dr. DuPont. He had called me something, some weird word I’d never heard before. “Pal” something.
I typed “superhero pal” into Google, but that just brought up some truly disturbing Batman/Robin fanfiction. So I tried “warrior pal.” That got me a bunch of World of Warcraft sites. I sighed, scrolling down, about to give up when a word caught my eye: “Paladin.”
That was it. That was the word he’d used. I clicked on the link and a definition popped up. “Paladin: an honorable knight; defender of a noble cause.”
“Laaaaaame,” I whispered. I much preferred superhero.
An hour later, I’d read pretty much everything the internet had to offer on the subject of Paladins and I was more confused than ever. The word was used to describe everything from high officials in the Catholic church to French knights to a class of warrior you could use in—ew—roleplaying games.
But even with all the definitions, one thing remained the same. Paladins were warriors and protectors, charged with safeguarding a specific person or place.
That didn’t sound particularly super. I slumped against the wall of my closet, pulling the robe tighter around me and burying my chin in it. Shouldn’t I get to fly? Or at the very least, shoot laser beams out of my eyes?
Feeling like a complete moron, I stood up and focused as hard as I could on my closet door. No matter how hard I stared, no laser beams. I even tried muttering “laser” under my breath, but nothing.
That done, I gave a few experimental hops, trying to see if I could levitate even for a second. When that didn’t work either, I briefly considered trying to jump out the window, but then I remembered Mom’s expression when she’d found me in the pool.
So no lasers, no flying, but super-strength and an ability to kick some major ass. That was something.
I sat back down on the floor of my closet, turning back to my computer. I had a couple of tabs open, and when I went to close the one about superheroes, a boldface paragraph caught my eye: “Perhaps the most defining characteristic of the superhero is a willingness to sacrifice for the good of others, even to the point of laying down his or her own life.”
A shiver went through me. Mr. Hall had done that, apparently. And I knew that whole spiel about great responsibility coming with great power, but dying . . . that didn’t seem worth a few measly superpowers. Even laser beam eyes weren’t worth getting gutted by a scimitar-wielding history teacher.
But, I reminded myself, technically Mr. Hall hadn’t been a superhero. He’d been a Paladin, and that was . . . different, right? And what—or who—had been his noble cause?
What was mine?
The next morning, I woke up early and drove to the library, checking out a bunch of DVDs. I spent the rest of the weekend holed up in my room with all three Spider-Man movies, the new Superman, and X-Men 1–3. I already owned Batman Begins, so I watched that, too.
Bee and Ryan both called my cell, and while I talked to Ryan, telling him I wasn’t feeling so hot, I let Bee’s calls go to voice mail. I felt awful doing it, but it was too risky to talk to her. Lying—okay, not lying, exactly—to Ryan was one thing, but Bee was tougher. She’d bought my whole “I got sick” thing Friday, but I’d been lucky. Normally, her Best-Friend Sensor was a lot more finely tuned than that. Besides, it might be too tempting to spill everything, and until I had a better handle on what was going on, that didn’t seem like the best idea.
So I dedicated myself to my mission, and by the time Monday morning rolled around, I had definitely figured some stuff out. First of all, I had gotten totally screwed on the “origin story” front. All superheroes have origin stories, like how Bruce Wayne’s parents get killed and he goes to Tibet or whatever, and Superman is an alien, and Spiderman had that radioactive spider. Me? I kissed a janitor in the school bathroom. Also, from X-Men, I learned that the people who seem to know what the eff is going on usually come find you, take you to a secure location and tell you . . . well, what the eff is going on. So the way I saw it, some organization had clearly sent Mr. Hall to the Grove to protect something or someone. And Dr. DuPont had clearly come to the Grove to take that thing/kill that someone. And then that shadowy organization had fixed the bathroom with . . . um . . . magic or something (okay, so I wasn’t clear on everything) so no one would know what happened.
Now, all I had to do was go to school and act normal and wait for them to find me.
Easy. Provided no one else tried to kill me, of course.
Usually, Ryan drove me to school, but when I called him Sunday night, I told him I was going to drive myself Monday.
“Okay,” he replied, a little hesitant. “Is . . . Harper, is everything okay? I mean, I’ve hardly heard from you this weekend; you said you weren’t feeling great . . .”
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “It’s just supposed to be really pretty tomorrow, and I haven’t driven my car in, like, forever.”
There was a pause, and I waited for Ryan to suggest I just pick him up instead. But then he sighed. “Right, I get that,” he said at last. “No problem.”