Sidekicked Read Online Free Page B

have to worry about.
    Not the one who needs saving.
    I head downstairs to eat.

3
HOW I GOT OUT OF GYM CLASS
    J enna was right. Mr. Booner really is a terrible health teacher. He doesn’t know the names of any of the parts of the brain, instead simply calling them “the front part,” “the left part,” and “the right part,” and “that bumpy thing in back.” He insists that the bigger your forehead, the smarter you are. He uses Shakespeare and Ben Franklin as evidence. That his own hair has receded probably factors into his argument.
    Apparently he is a cool gym teacher, though, pretty much letting the fat kids sit in the corner during dodgeball and counting every pull-up you do double if your arms are like Twizzlers, which mine are.
    I wouldn’t know, of course, because I never go to gym. That would be fourth period on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which happens to conflict with my participation in our school’s highly selective environmental club, otherwise known as the Highview Environmental Revitalization Organization.
    Our job is to keep the trash off the streets.
    I’m not kidding. That’s what our T-shirts say: H.E.R.O. WE KEEP THE TRASH OFF THE STREETS. There is a picture of a teenager dressed in a cape and tights, slam-dunking a crushed tin can into a recycling bin. Our club’s faculty sponsor designed them. I guess the thought was that nobody would put two and two together because it was simply too obvious. Sometimes it’s the thing that’s right in front of you that you keep looking over.
    There are only six of us in the program, the only one of its kind in Justicia, maybe the only one of its kind in the world; at least the only one I know about. It’s basically a training program for would-be sidekicks, who then become would-be Supers. Kids with powers who hope to use them someday to fight the forces of evil, save damsels, help the meek inherit the earth, that sort of thing. Saving the environment is just a cover, though we do spend a few days each year planting trees and planning recycling drives to keep up appearances. Nobody ever questions the time we spend together—you can’t say that cleaning up the environment is a waste. Besides, our program director can be very convincing when he wants to be.
    His name is Mr. Masters, and in addition to being the head of H.E.R.O., he is also the eighth-grade science teacher. A tall, clean-shaven, square-headed man who looks a little like a bald Lurch from The Addams Family , he has a forehead that would make Mr. Booner proud. Mr. Masters always wears horn-rimmed glasses and patterned sweater vests over long-sleeved solid-color shirts, and he keeps a tarnished old rail conductor’s watch on a chain tucked into his right pocket.
    Like the rest of us in H.E.R.O., Mr. Masters isn’t exactly normal . That watch is the thing. His thing. The key to his power. No one besides him is ever allowed to touch that watch, and most people who are around when Mr. Masters checks to see what time it is find themselves feeling a little lost, wondering what they have been doing for the past minute or so. Sometimes it can even make you forget what you were thinking or doing long before that. That’s the kind of watch it is. The time-stopping, memory-befuddling kind.
    Both his father and his father’s father used that watch to various ends, not all of them noble. His great-grandfather, Michael Masters, first found the watch during a hunting expedition in Kenya. It saved him from being gored by a rhinoceros—at least, that’s the story. His grandfather, Roger Masters, used it when fighting the Nazis, often catching unsuspecting German soldiers off guard, leaving them wondering where their rifle had gone and why there was a grenade in their lap.
    Mr. Masters’s father, on the other hand, used it to steal—wallets, cars, artwork, you name it. He was one of the few men to be kicked out of