Bigger, Badder, Nerdier Read online

  She was not a librarian to be trifled with. Not only was she frightening, she had also invented the Very Dismal System. It was a way to never locate the books you wanted. The system was so confusing that even Xen’s brilliant coding mind couldn’t crack it. He had tried, but he always ended up passing out.

  It was a shame that our library was trying to keep me out because I like to read. My favorite things are manuals and instruction books. It’s comforting to me to understand how things work. I also enjoy reading information on the internet and visiting sites like Clickapedia. But books are the best way for me to cram my head with things that other people don’t even know about.

  We reached the library doors, and Owen tried to pull them open. As we’d expected, they were locked. I heard Nerf and his dim-witted friends running down Q Hall and getting closer.

  Knowing Nerf couldn’t see us, Mindy clapped. I’m not sure what she was hoping to do, but the hinges on the library doors cracked and burst. The four of us jumped forward and slammed into the doors. They fell over and crashed against the floor. Xen went down with them, so I reached out to pull him up.

  “No way!”

  “What’s Nerf doing here?” he screamed.

  I pulled Xen up without answering, and we ran into the library after Mindy and Owen.

  A lot of people at our school think the AV Club is a bunch of geniuses, but it was a boneheaded move to believe that we could run into the library and expect to find a way out. We all knew that Mrs. Shh had long ago barricaded the back doors with bookshelves so she would be protected from things like air raids and junior prom season.

  The four of us froze and stared at the impenetrable wall of bookshelves. There was no way we were getting out through the back.

  Nerf and his pile of friends stormed in through the doors Mindy had knocked down earlier, and they stopped a few feet behind us. I could hear Mindy breathing hard while Xen, Owen, and I were breathing even harder.

  None of us wanted to turn around and face the music, but we were trapped and had no other choice.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lamer

  “Now, what do we have here?” Nerf asked in a weird-sounding voice.

  We turned around and what we saw almost caused us to fall over.

  For some strange reason, Nerf and his friends looked like they were dressed up as LAME!

  We all knew that Nerf admired our supergroup. Ever since he had witnessed us taking down the Fanatics two months ago, he has been a huge fan. He’s worn homemade LAME T-shirts and drew our logo on the school walls. Nerf has talked nonstop about what amazing superheroes we are. He repeats any story he hears about us to everyone. Of course, he doesn’t know we’re LAME. If he did, there’s no way he would want any part of it. But here he was with Mud, Weasel, and Mud’s new girlfriend, Millie, doing some sort of cosplay and dressed up as us.

  I glanced at my friends. They looked more confused than I was.

  “Who are you?” I asked Nerf.

  “We are your worst nightmares,” he replied.

  Owen panicked. “You’re a small space that I have to share with a pinching clown?”

  “They’re not your literal nightmares,” Mindy whispered.

  “Splimpt,” Owen said, using his favorite word. “That’s a relief.”

  “Quiet,” Nerf ordered. “Don’t you recognize us? We are LAME.”

  “More like LAMER,” Mindy mumbled.

  “What did you say?” Mud asked angrily.

  “Hey,” Xen said bravely, “we’re not looking for trouble.”

  “Really?” Weasel said. “Then what are you doing?”

  “We were just running to the library to get a book,” Xen lied.

  “Right,” Nerf said with a laugh. “People don’t like books. You broke the office door, you broke the library doors, and now we’re gonna broke your faces.”

  “Yeah,” Mud’s girlfriend, Millie, said. “Break your faces.”

  I wanted to use our powers, but if we did, our secret identities would be exposed, and our lives would be messier than they currently were. It looked like I was going to have to just stand there and get my face broken.

  “You could just let us go,” Xen suggested. “There’s a one hundred percent chance we’d be grateful.”

  “That’s okay,” Nerf said. “I don’t think Darth Susan would like us to do that.”

  Nerf jumped forward and tackled me. I fell against the edge of a book pit that Mrs. Shh had dug to imprison students with overdue book fines. I could hear my friends fighting Mud, Weasel, and Millie. Nerf gave me a knuckle sandwich right in the breadbasket. Normally I would love a sandwich, but this one made my stomach upset. I scrambled to stand up, and Nerf grabbed me by the wrist to keep me from running away. I saw Mindy standing next to me and being held in place by Millie. I turned my head as far as I could to the right and saw that Xen and Owen were also on their feet and being held captive by Mud and Weasel.

  Nerf said a few mean things before they marched us to the gym bathroom. There, they used zombie-strength duct tape to stick us to the wall.

  Mud looked confused, bewildered, stumped, and baffled all at once.

  The four of them laughed for a few moments, and then Nerf took out a can of spray paint and climbed up me and Xen to paint something on the wall above us. They left the bathroom, laughing it up while putting us down.

  We hung there on the bathroom wall, desperately trying to get ourselves off. I turned on the hand dryers and lights a couple of hundred times, but that didn’t help. Owen tried to listen us free. That too failed. Mindy took Owen’s suggestion and attempted to snap us loose. Every time she snapped, the tape stayed put while other bits of the bathroom and ceiling fell apart. After getting hit on the head by ceiling tiles a dozen times, she gave up. I think Xen tried to burp his way out of the tape, but he might have just been nervous.

  An hour or so later, Tyler, the school janitor, came into the bathroom and found us hanging there.

  Tyler ripped some pieces of tape free, and we fell to the ground in an embarrassed heap of Geek. He looked around at the spray-painted wall and all the things that Mindy had broken with her clapping.

  We thanked him and then took off out of the bathroom and through the security hole. It was completely dark outside now, and Owen could hear a group of Fanatics roaming around two streets to the west and three streets south.

  “This bites,” Owen complained as we all stood there rubbing our tape burns.

  “What is Darth Susan up to?” Mindy said, growling. “Is it her idea to have Nerf and his Neanderthals acting like LAME?”

  “I still think her cruel-planner could have some answers,” Xen insisted. “But it’s not in her office.”

  “No,” Xen whispered. “Not her house.”

  I nodded solemnly.

  “This is madness,” Owen hissed. “No one’s ever gone to her house and lived to tell about it.”

  “That’s not true,” I argued. “No one’s ever tried.”

  “Splimpt. Do we have to be the first?”

  “No,” I said. “But LAME does.”

  Mindy was right about the tagline. Without saying another word, the four of us slipped behind an abandoned RV that was parked in the middle of the street and went from Geek to LAME by changing into our outfits.

  We had no time to lose!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Honk Loudly

  None of us had ever been to Darth Susan’s house, mainly because none of us had ever wanted to go. But we knew where she lived, because she was constantly bragging about it.

  Darth Susan loved acting like she was better than others. Which was silly, seeing how the world was falling apart just as much for her as it was for everyone else. Her housing development was called the Aspen Breeze Electric-Gated Neighborhood. It had a ten-foot-tall electric fence around it, but there were tons of holes in the fence. The holes allowed the Fanatics to get in without any problem. Also, Darth Susan’s neighborhood was near the government imitati
on-dairy factory, which meant that at any point during the day or night, there were Half-Deads walking through her streets in a dazed and tired state as they headed home from their jobs.

  I had never wanted to visit Darth Susan. In fact I would be happy to never know anything personal about her. But if we wanted to be the kind of semi-superhero group that could be taken seriously, we needed to find out what she was up to. Superheroes don’t get to pick the jobs they want. I’d love to be like Dindo the elf king from the Elf Scrimmage game and spend my afternoons rescuing delinquent trolls from the Hall of Cake and Frosting.

  But I wasn’t like Dindo. I was a member of LAME, and because of that I had a confusing and odd duty to protect uncool stuff, like my school.

  The four of us stayed in the shadows and worked our way quickly to Darth Susan’s house. Owen kept his ears open and helped us avoid government curfew drones. He also kept an ear open for any Fanatics who were tearing things up, or trashing people, or mocking what they saw online.

  When we got to the gate at the entrance to the Aspen Breeze Electric-Gated Neighborhood, we kept walking along the fence line until we found a hole we could slip through. Electricity runs through the wire, so we had to be careful not to come in contact with any of the metal.

  “I never thought I’d be risking my life to visit Darth Susan,” Owen said loudly as we carefully slipped through.

  “Shhhhh,” Mindy insisted.

  “I hope we’re not actually risking our lives,” Xen complained. “We’re just doing some sleuthing, right?”

  “Danger sleuthing,” I pointed out.

  Once we were all through the fence, we crept behind a row of burnt trees. Even though Darth Susan’s neighborhood was an electric-gated community, it was a lot like everywhere else in Piggsburg. Most of the houses had heavy security doors and windows and makeshift fences around torn-up lawns. Some had extra fences, and some were damaged from falling drones or Fanatics who had picked the yards apart. Most of the owners had stopped caring if their places looked nice.

  “Can you hear anything?” I asked Owen.

  He turned his head slowly, listening for any trace of Darth Susan’s voice. His eyes lit up softly as he spoke.

  “I can hear two people in that house over there.” He pointed to a big house with a tall wooden fence around it. “They’re arguing about who gets the last cup of powdered wheat milk. I can also hear a bunch of Half-Deads one street over making their way home. I don’t hear any Fanatics, and no noise from Darth—wait, I got her.” Owen’s eyes went dark. “She’s in her house, talking to Becky.”

  Mindy shivered. “I hate that lizard.”

  A Half-Dead dairy worker walked through one of the nearby holes in the fence. His shoulder bumped the fence, and a jolt of electricity shocked him into momentarily looking more than half dead.

  “Maybe we should get out of here,” Owen said. “Darth Susan isn’t saying anything important, and it’s not like we can just bust into her house and look at her planner.”

  “We’re not going to,” I reminded him. “LAME is.”

  “But that’s us,” Owen reminded me.

  “I know, but if the world doesn’t have LAME to fight its battles, who does it have? If children have no one to believe in, then what do they have? If a single person goes to bed tonight feeling hopeless, have we not failed?”

  “We fail all the time,” Xen reminded me.

  “And lots of people go to bed hopeless,” Mindy pointed out. “Have you looked around lately?”

  “Fine,” I said, bothered. “Maybe we’re not much, but let’s at least go to her house and see what we can find out.”

  “Okay,” Mindy agreed. “But if she’s talking baby talk to her lizard, I’m out.”

  As we made our way to Darth Susan’s house, we passed two Half-Deads who were so tired they didn’t recognize the four superheroes walking right by them. I’m not going to lie—it would have been nice to be noticed.

  Yes, some people in Piggsburg were aware of us. Just last week we put out a fire at the high school. The fire had started when the Science Clique got into a magnifying glass war with the Optics. Even my dad had heard about us from a couple of his co-workers. They had told him there were some superheroes in town who had fantastical powers.

  I didn’t have the heart to inform my dad that the fantastical powers involved clapping and burping and me.

  So we had a rising reputation, but tonight probably wouldn’t change things, because there was no one other than uninterested Half-Deads to witness what we were doing.

  When we got to 1616 Faded Luster Way, we stood under a dead tree and stared at the evil lair. Darth Susan’s house was small, and the windows had bars over them. Her yard was rock and gravel, with thick green weeds growing everywhere. The front door was wooden and had a metal doorknob that looked as big as my head. Only two of her windows were lit up; otherwise the whole place was dark and foreboding.

  “Is she saying anything now?” I whispered to Owen.

  “What?”

  I repeated myself a little louder.

  “This is ridiculous,” Mindy whispered loudly. “If we do get inside, how do we even know her planner’s there? And if we find the planner, who knows if she wrote anything revealing.”

  A pack of Half-Deads shuffled across Darth Susan’s front yard and down the street.

  “Well, we won’t know until we find out.” I was being stubborn. “So, here’s the plan: I’ll start her car and get the horn honking. When she hears it, she’ll come out to investigate. Xen and I will slip into her house and try to find the planner. You and Owen stay here, and if she decides to head back inside, break one of the windows to warn us.”

  Due to falling satellites, misguided drones, and screaming Fanatics, most buildings in Piggsburg don’t have glass in their windows. It also doesn’t help that many are busted by stray rocks that people throw when they’re bored.

  Amazingly, Darth Susan’s house still had a few windows with glass. If necessary, Mindy could break one to warn us.

  “Um…” Mindy said. “It’s not much of a plan.”

  “And what about Becky?” Owen asked. “That lizard could be trouble.”

  “I have lizard repellent,” Xen exclaimed. “I made it last week out of some things I found in my dad’s junk drawer.”

  Xen pulled out a small jar that had holes in the lid. He shook some blue dust around our ankles and legs.

  “We’re good,” he reported.

  I didn’t feel any better, but I didn’t want to hurt Xen’s feelings.

  So, still hiding behind the dead tree, I thought of Darth Susan’s car starting up and it did. I thought of the horn turning on and it happened. The noise was loud. In no time at all, the front door opened. Darth Susan stepped out, waving a flyswatter for protection. She had curlers in her hair and green lotion on her face, and she was wearing a robe made out of old towels.

  Nobody answered her, and the car horn continued to sound.

  “If you’re messing with my vehicle, you’ll pay dearly!” she warned.

  No answer. More horn.

  Darth Susan stepped all the way out and stomped through her rocky yard and toward the driveway. She was saying words that could easily get her into trouble. These days the government has drones that fly around listening for people who say words that the law thinks are offensive. Sometimes the drones will zap you, or they’ll take your picture so that the government can bring you in to defend your vocabulary. Of course, people with money just pay the government a fee, and they get permission to say anything they want. Obviously, Darth Susan had paid someone, because she was using the kind of words no educator should.

  As soon as she reached her car, Xen and I slipped out from behind the trees and moved up to the house. We ran across the porch and went in through the front door without being noticed.

  I had hoped the planner would be lying out in the open, on a table or couch, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. We dashed around the space carefully
.

  “What if it’s in her room?” Xen asked, sounding worried.

  We both looked toward a door on the right, off the kitchen. A board hanging on the door read …

  Neither one of us wanted to see Darth Susan’s bedroom. It was one thing to snoop around her house, but it felt much worse to go into her private quarters.

  “We have no choice,” Xen said.

  He was right. We had gotten this far, and now, for the sake of all man, woman, and zombie kind, we had to look.

  The car horn was still honking, so we knew that Darth Susan hadn’t found a way to shut it off yet.

  I nodded at Xen.

  He gulped and then nodded at me.

  Sometimes average superheroes have to do average things they don’t want to do.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Caught in the Act

  We pushed open Darth Susan’s bedroom door and carefully walked in. There were a couple of lit candles on a shelf. I was surprised to see that she had a bed. I had always pictured her sleeping on a nest made from old grocery bags. Her lizard-child, Becky, was sleeping on a big pillow in the corner and didn’t seem to care that we had walked in.

  “It’s the lizard repellent,” Xen whispered.

  On the bedroom wall, there was a picture of Darth Susan and her pet:

  Xen gagged. “That’s not right.”

  “There’s not much that’s right with the world these days,” I said. “Now look for … there it is!”

  I pointed to a small desk in the corner. Sitting on top of the desk was the black cruel-planner. Stepping closer, I carefully opened the planner. Most of the dates were blank and cruelty-free, but when I flipped to the page from last Tuesday …