Free Sidekicks by Jack D. Ferraiolo

Monkeywrench flew out. “So long, Phantom! See you around! HA-HA-HA-HA!”
    â€œAre you all right, Bright Boy?” Phantom Justice asks.
    â€œYeah … Monkeywrench rabbited, though.” I take my fingers off my mask, but it starts to fall off, so I quickly slap it back on.
    â€œIs there something wrong with your mask?”
    â€œUhh …” Oh boy. My mind feels like its been wiped clean. I stand there with my mouth open, not sure how to even begin to explain. Before I have a chance to try, reporters start streaming into the warehouse.
    â€œCome on,” Phantom says, then leaps up the boxes and out the hole in the ceiling. I follow, still holding my mask in place.

Phantom Trent keeps looking over at me as he drives. When he’s acting like Trent but still dressed like Phantom Justice, I call him Phantom Trent … never to his face, only in my head.
    â€œI’m fine.”
    â€œDo you want to talk about it?”
    Do I want to talk about it. Do I want to talk about my complete and utter failure to protect the single most important aspect of my job—the one thing above all others that I need to keep secret, and not reveal to ANYONE, least of all the sidekick to our most dangerous enemy, because it turns every norm I’ve ever known into a possible “hostage-to-be-used-for-leverage”? Do I wantto talk about how one of the prettiest and most intelligent girls in school is the sidekick to a criminal mastermind/sociopath, and yet still manages to be more popular than I am? Do I want to talk about how I’m actually a little excited by the fact that I’m probably going to see a lot more of Allison Mendes, even if this does lead to my death and the city’s eventual destruction? Sure, I’ll talk about it. Right after I figure out if I’m going insane or not, I’ll talk about whatever you want.
    â€œYou know, you can’t just go off half-cocked like that and start attacking people,” Trent says.
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œYou attacked Monkeywrench before the fight started. You’re supposed to wait for your cue.”
    â€œOh. Right. That.”
    â€œYeah, ‘that.’ What else would I mean?”
    I don’t know … maybe our archenemies finding out our secret identities? “Nothing,” I say.
    â€œIt was reckless,” he says. “We hadn’t had a chance to survey the scene. What if the warehouse was wired and one of them had a detonator?”
    â€œYou mean like that time you attacked Pocks?”
    Phantom Trent shoots me an annoyed look.
    Pocks was a plus/plus villain we faced off againstabout four or five times. Now, we’ve gone against some serious mouth-breathers in our time, but Pocks made the dumbest of them look like Stephen Hawking. First of all, the name: Pocks. He intended it to be Pox, like “a pox on your firstborn” kinda thing. It’s a horrible name, any way you slice it. I mean, who still uses the word
pox
? But then, he made things worse by spelling it P-o-c-k-s, because that’s how he thought it was spelled. So that’s what he had printed on his business cards. That’s right. Business cards. He even stopped in the middle of one of our fights to hand me one. I still have it. It says, “Pocks—Agent of Mayhem! A Pocks on You!” He could have knocked me out right then and there, because I just kept staring at the card, not sure what to do. He didn’t touch me, though. He said he liked that I really read it … that I let it all sink in. He didn’t start fighting again until I had put the card in a safe place (he wanted to make sure I didn’t lose it; they were kind of expensive to print).
    So one day, about ten months ago, Pocks manages to score himself a boatload of explosives, which you know right from the start is not going to end well. He spends the whole night wiring up about half of the cars in a used car lot. Why a used car lot?