Lance hated going into history late, especially when it was full of football players who loved making him look stupid.
The door was closed, so he knocked, then stepped inside. Mr. Herman turned midsentence and held out his hand for Lance’s admittance slip. Lance gave it to him. “Sorry I’m late,” he muttered.
“Care to explain why you are?” Mr. Herman asked.
Lance wanted to say no, that he’d prefer not to talk in front of the whole stinking class, but that would only drag it out. He decided just to blurt it. “My sister’s car caught fire. Big family drama. Fire trucks and everything.”
There. It wasn’t the whole story, but enough to get him off the hook.
“That sounds like a valid excuse,” Herman said.
There was a snicker across the class. “Lance has lots of family drama,” Randall, the second-string quarterback, said. “He’s a big superhero, you know.”
Lance felt the heat in his cheeks as he dropped into his seat.
“Yeah, Mr. Herman, he’s a CIA agent and spends his spare time fighting crime and rescuing damsels in distress.”
The class laughed. Lance ground his molars but didn’t speak. April Pullen, his friend who sat behind him, patted his shoulder.
“He was shot in the heart just a few months ago,” the tight end said.
“With a silver bullet,” Randall spouted.
Lance had learned months ago not to respond when they started down this road. But April spoke up. “Not the heart, the lungs.”
“Oh, yeah,” the quarterback said. “The lungs. He was dead for four days, and then miraculously revived, so he could return to his life of saving the world from crime.”
“And then these Martians landed in his backyard and beamed him up.”
The class was enjoying this. Lance grinned, pretending he enjoyed it, too. “Randall knows ’cause he was beamed up with me. Too bad about those brain experiments they did on him.”
Now the class laughed with him.
“All right, that’s enough, guys,” Herman said. “Lance, we’re glad you made it. I was just telling the students that we’re fixing to have a little quiz tomorrow.”
Great. Lance got his book out of his backpack and opened it. He didn’t even know what chapter they were in. How would he ever pass a quiz?
After class, he took his time packing his binder and book back in his backpack, hoping his tormenters would clear out before he left the room.
“You okay?” April asked him.
Lance shrugged. “Sure. Just a bad morning.”
“Don’t let them get to you. They’re jerks.”
More than once, he’d thought of showing them the scar on his chest, or bringing in his medical records or the newspaper articles about his kidnapping and attempted murder. But it wasn’t worth it. They could see it if they read his Facebook page, but he hadn’t wanted to friend most of them. And few of them had tried. No one had cared enough to even do a Google search about him, which would have confirmed his story. But even if they learned it was true, they’d just find something else to ride him about.
He’d gotten off to a bad start when word got around that he was the infamous Emily Covington’s brother. Her reputation had a way of keeping the gossip mill churning.
When Lance mentioned to a teacher in front of a class that he’d been shot in the lung last fall, word spread like wildfire that he wove these outlandish tales because he was jealous of his sister’s notoriety. He’d become the class joke. Every effort he’d made to prove the truth only made him seem more delusional. Eventually he’d quit defending himself.
Only April, who marched to a different rhythm, had given him the time of day. But that wasn’t so bad, because April was a cute misfit. He stayed awake nights plotting how to cross the threshold from friendship to romance with her. If he could get up the nerve, he planned to ask her to homecoming.
“Come on, Mr. Spock,” she said, taking his hand and pulling him up. “Tell me about the fire.”
Feeling better, he got his backpack and followed her out.