The Posterchildren: Origins Read online

  “Just shlep my crap up Golgotha,” June muttered to herself. “Sounds like fun.”

  The driver probably would have helped her if she’d asked him to, but she wasn’t interested in taking any helping hands. Old June would have, but she’d left Old June back in the JFK terminal with her mother. She was New June now, and New June didn’t need anyone’s help.

  When he popped the trunk, she yanked her two over-full suitcases out of the back and started the climb.

  She wasn’t the only tragic Sisyphus laboring up the hill, fortunately. There were three other kids bravely dragging their worldy belongings to the summit. She caught up with the nearest one, a slim boy with curly dark hair and an unfairly small backpack. He was whistling, like the psychological endurance test laid out before them didn’t bother him at all. Maybe he didn’t get it. Maybe he’d figured out how to get someone else to carry his junk. There was no way that everything he owned could fit in one backpack, after all.

  “They didn’t say anything in the brochure about torture,” June puffed. She had to give her rolling suitcase an especially hard tug to get it clear of a sinkhole. She was trying to avoid the more obvious dips and rocks, but her luggage wasn’t all-terrain certified. It wasn’t built for this. Neither was June.

  “It’s not that bad,” the boy grinned, flashing dimples.

  June was just about to launch into a bulleted list of everything that was wrong with his opinion, but she was interrupted by a bellow of “Hey! You guys! Hi, you guys! Gosh, I’m so sorry I’m late!”

  The bellow belonged to the big blond putz charging down the hill to meet them. He was built like a linebacker, all broad shoulders and thick arms, but he was wearing a pressed button-up shirt and a sweatervest. A pair of thick-rimmed glasses dangled off one ear, knocked askew during his run. He stopped short so quickly, she was a little worried that he was going to pitch forward and roll on past them.

  “Welcome to Foundation!” He took June’s luggage from her with a smile, hefting the bags like they were full of clouds and pixie dust. Those muscular guns were not for show. “Sorry, the Commander usually does the campus tours, but he had a...he had somewhere else he had to be today. He asked me to take over, so I’ll be showing you around. I’ll go ahead and get these up to the forum. The other new students are already there.”

  And then he turned on his heel and ran back up the hill.

  “C’mon,” the kid with the backpack said, laughing. “You heard him. We’re almost there!”

  “I don’t need a cheerleader,” she said, throwing back her sweaty hair with a toss of her head.

  The dry grass evened out to a manicured lawn, and the lawn stretched up to a squat gray building. Backpack-guy opened the double doors for her with a flourish that she ignored. The tour guide and the other two new kids— a gangly guy in suspenders and a girl with her hair done up with a sparkling rainbow ribbon — were parked by the pile of bags.

  “You made it!” The tour guide said when he saw them in the doorway. June had hoped that she’d have a minute or two to catch her breath, but she had a feeling that he would drive them forward with the sheer force of his perkiness. “I know you’re all probably rarin’ to go, but I need to do a quick headcount before we start the tour. I hope you don’t mind.”

  And the big lug genuinely sounded like he hoped that taking the time to call attendance didn’t offend anyone. June pushed her sweaty bangs out of her eyes with a snort.

  “Go for it, champ.”

  He gave her a smile like a flash grenade, then peeled back the first page on his clipboard.

  “Lau, Lan.”

  The other girl raised her hand. One end of her scintillating ribbon fluttered in tandem. It might have just been the angle that June was standing at, but it looked like the ribbon was slowly changing colors. It must have been fiberoptic or something. She made a mental note to ask her where she’d bought it.

  “Hovick, Junip— ”

  “It’s June,” June said, sparing him a short wave. Lan’s shimmering ribbon reminded her of how gross her hair was, so she started pawing through her purse in search of a hair tie.

  “Petrov, Maksim Mick...Mick-ha...?”

  “Maksim Mikhailovich Petrov,” backpack-guy finished in the booming voice of an announcer, his black curls flopping as he bowed. “Prrrrrresent and accounted for!”

  There was one show-off in every group, June mused as she continued to root around for a scrunchie. God, she despised teenagers.

  “Willard, Jack.”

  “Yeah,” Mr. Suspenders said. His sheer apathy was inspirational.

  “Everyone’s here,” the tour guide said cheerfully, clapping his hands. “Great! So— ”

  “Oh, so you’re too good to introduce yourself, then?” June interrupted, arching an eyebrow at their fearless leader. “I see how it is.”

  The big guy gave her his best goldfish impression.

  “Oh. You...?” He blinked rapidly, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Oh. Well. I...I’m Ernest. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m sure you are.”

  She couldn’t find a hair tie in her purse, but she did find a semi-melted, semi-flattened, but possibly edible candybar. Seeing as she’d burned roughly ten thousand calories challenging the hill, June decided that she deserved a snack.

  Ernest cleared his throat before she even had a chance to unwrap the candy.

  “I’m, uh. I’m sorry, Ms. Hovick, but I’m gonna have to ask you to throw that away.”

  “Excuse you?”

  “It’s the rules?” Ernest said, his voice squeaking a little on the question. “We’ve got a diet, see, and— ”

  “Tolerating all of this fresh air isn’t enough?” June demanded. It was difficult to look threateningly down at someone when you only came up to the middle of their chest, but she gave it her best shot. “I have to eat healthy, too?”

  Ernest looked completely flummoxed, red to the tips of his ears.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, shaking his head. “I’m just...trying to warn you, I s’pose. The RA will go through the stuff you brought with you. Unhealthy fats and sugars are monitored. I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just how it is.”

  “You people are monsters,” June announced, unwrapping the candybar and taking a large bite. “You want my candy? Fight me.”

  He held his clipboard to his chest like a shield.

  “I’d really rather not,” Ernest said, very quietly.

  “Then I’m going to pretend this exchange didn’t happen.”

  “That’s fair, I guess.” Ernest took a deep breath, then visibly collected himself. “Can we start the campus tour now, maybe?”

  “Lead on,” June said with an expansive wave.

  “Okay,” Ernest said, nodding. “So this is the forum. We use it for the big school gatherings, since it can hold all of the students in all of the blocks all at once. You’ll be back here on Saturday. That’s when they’re going to announce the second block scores.”

  “Doesn’t really pertain to us, does it?” Jack asked. It was the first substantial sentence that he’d said. Well, the first substantial sentence that June had heard him say, anyway. She might have missed a mumble or two. He spoke quietly, slowly. Her candy wrapper made more noise than he did.

  “Well, yes and no. You all haven’t been paired yet. You’ll find out who your partner is then, same as everyone else.” Ernest started walking, expecting them to follow. “If you didn’t know this already, the Academy is split up into blocks of three years. Some of the posterchildren here attend from first block on through the third, but you only really need to be here for the third block. At the end of every block, we’re tested. We get a score out of fifty. So the more blocks you go through, the more points you get. You’re scored by how many points you’ve earned out of the ones possible for you. I was born here in Foundation, so I’ve been attending the Academy since I was eight. That means that when they announce my total, I’m judged by how man
y points I’ve gotten out of a hundred. The first and second blocks, you’re on your own. But the third block— ”

  “You get a partner!” Lan finished with a delighted smile. “I’ve read all about it. The system’s awesome. Almost everyone that makes it through the capstone year gets placed with a public hero team. Since we’re new, we get paired with someone who has been here their whole life, basically. Right?”

  Someone had done her homework. June didn’t regret skimming the information packets, though. There had been an awful amount of numbers involved, and statistics bored her.

  “Right,” Ernest said, equally delighted that someone had an interest in what he was talking about. Jack looked like he’d tuned out halfway through his answer, and June was more interested in her candybar. The jury was out on whether or not Maks gave a crap. With his perpetual lopsided grin, it was hard to get a read on him. “That way, they’ve got more of a chance. The regular students are paired off by score, but the staff will choose your partners specially. They want everyone to succeed, y’know?”

  Ernest pushed open the double doors on the other side of the forum. After their brief stint indoors, the sunlight was dazzling.

  “It’s like this year-round,” he said, gesturing up at the sky. “Old Professor Maillardet figured that the training would be a heck of a lot more effective if the fields weren’t rained out for most of the year. The rest of western Oregon’s got two seasons: the rainy season, and August. Foundation’s climate controlled. It’s always in the mid-seventies.”

  It really was pretty, June had to admit. The Maillardet Foundation’s campus was a sprawling green thing dotted with rustic cabins, ivy-laced brick buildings, and running tracks. She hung behind the group for a moment, just soaking in the view. For the next three or four years of her life, this was going to be her home. This was it.

  An unexpected surge of homesickness knotted in her ribcage. Between the year-round training schedule and the cost of plane tickets back east, it was going to be a long time before she saw Marcy or Gerry again. She tried not to think about it, but once that ugly realization unfurled, it was hard to uproot it and toss it aside.

  “You’re not thinking about ditching the peer tour, are you?” An amused voice asked, jerking her out of her thoughts. Maks— he of the stupid theatrics and tiny backpack— had stayed behind, too. He obviously thought that their moment of bonding over shared torture meant that they were going to be friends or something. That was cute, but not really June’s style.

  “There’s no way that Big Hunk over there is one of our ‘peers’.”

  Maks laughed again. It was a full-body thing with him, not just a movement that involved his mouth and lungs. It was kind of obnoxious.

  “You don’t know who he is, do you?”

  “Trouble in a sweatervest?” June muttered, frowning at the tour guide’s rapidly shrinking form. He had yet to realize that he’d lost half his group.

  “That’s Ernest W. Wright,” Maks said, waggling his eyebrows. “The Commander’s kid.”

  Everyone knew who the Commander was. It was impossible to stumble your way through an average American existence and not be familiar with the Commander’s smiling face. His very white, very straight teeth beamed from billboards and lunch boxes. Everyone knew the rough-hewn chunk of muscle and white bread patriotism that was John Wright, the Commander. June wasn’t big on the capes as an institution, so she didn’t follow all of the spandex-clad justice-fighters, but the Commander was iconic. Even his rogues respected him.

  And the hot mess in the sweatervest was his son. It looked like making bad first impressions was something that New June had adopted from Old June, in spite of her best intentions. How was she supposed to know that he was related to America’s favorite superhero?

  “Oh,” June squeaked, her throat tight and dry. After a moment’s thought, she added, “Still not gonna fork over my candy.”

  °

  The campus tour took longer than Ernest had anticipated, but he still got home well before his father. Friday was spaghetti night in the Wright household, so as soon as he’d kicked off his shoes in the foyer, he went straight into the kitchen. After washing his hands, Ernest put on his apron— rule number one of the Wright kitchen: protect your good clothes— and started chopping the onions, garlic, and olives.

  He couldn’t remember the first time he’d made spaghetti all by himself, but he’d had to stand on a stepstool to do it. At this point, he could make it with his eyes closed. His dad had taught Ernest to cook as soon as he’d been able to reach the counter while standing on tiptoe. They were both impervious to extreme temperatures, so burning himself had never been something they’d had to worry about.

  Ernest enjoyed cooking. Between teaching two subjects at the Academy and saving the world every once in a while, his father was a busy man. He tried to lighten his load, even if it was just by doing things as small as cooking meals for the two of them.

  Heating the pans and putting water on to boil, he went over the campus tour in his head. He’d never done it by himself before, so he’d made a couple of mistakes along the way, but it’d been okay. Ernest had been living in Foundation for his whole life, so he knew every square inch of the campus. He was pretty sure that he’d shown the new kids all of the important things— Devil’s Club Lake, the mess hall, the dorms, the training facility, and the academic buildings— and at least Lan and Maks had seemed interested. Two out of four wasn’t bad, was it? Jack didn’t show much of an interest in anything, and June was...

  June was something else entirely. She didn’t look, talk, or act like anyone he’d met before. She’d looked him straight in the eye and challenged him to a fight, even though she was short and soft-looking and had trouble carrying her own luggage up the hill.

  Ernest grinned stupidly at the sauce he was stirring. June was something else, alright. He’d swung by the library on his way home and had requested her file. It was a thin, flimsy little folder, since her active poster abilities had only been identified a few months prior. She was fifteen, but the board had decided to put her with the new group starting the first year of their third block. She was older than the rest of them, sure, but she was way behind on the physical training that a posterchild needed. If they didn’t pair her with someone who could pick up the slack, she didn’t have much of a chance of graduating into the capstone class.

  That was a sobering thought. He liked her. Ernest didn’t meet people that treated him like a person, not The Commander’s Son, very often. Or at all, really. His dad cast a wide, long shadow.

  As if on cue, he heard the front door open. He quickly finished straining the noodles and set the sauce to simmer.

  “Hi, Dad!” Ernest called over his shoulder, dumping the noodles in with the sauce. “How was it?”

  His father didn’t say a word. He just pursed his lips and shrugged off his coat, dripping in the doorway. Judging by how wet and wrinkled his clothes were, he had to have been standing in the rain for quite a while. His hair was a tangled, wind-blown mess. Foundation was eternally between seventy-two and seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit, so sometimes, Ernest forgot that the rest of the world had things like unplanned rainstorms.

  “Funerals aren’t...they’re not s’posed to be nice, I guess,” Ernest said, turning off the stove and fumbling for words. He hated seeing his dad look so defeated. It wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what to say to make the grimness go away.

  “It wasn’t terrible, all things considered. I just wish it hadn’t happened in the first place,” his dad said, finally. He combed his hands through his wet hair, trying to tame it back down, then spread his coat over the back of one of the chairs.

  “I made spaghetti,” Ernest told him, like it wasn’t obvious from the pots and pans. He loosened his apron strings, taking it off and balling it up. He twisted the tomato-stained fabric between his hands. “I can have it on the table by the time you dry off. If you’re hungry, I mean.”

  His father seemed to
think about it for a few seconds. He loosened the knot in his tie, tugging it free.

  “I don’t have much of an appetite tonight,” he said, shaking his head. “Think you can wrap it up for me? I’d hate to see such a nice meal go to waste.”

  Ernest had been expecting that. He’d just wanted his dad to have the option of a hot meal after the day he’d been through.

  “Sure. Sure, I can do that.”

  His dad rolled his sleeves up past his elbows, opening and closing cupboards until he found a half-full bottle of whiskey and a glass. Ernest watched him pour a couple of fingers of whiskey, drink it, and refill his glass. It made his stomach hurt, but he tried to ignore it. Turning away, he dished up a pile of spaghetti.

  He sat at the kitchen table, so Ernest joined him. The glass of whiskey made a clear, pretty clink against the formica tabletop. Ernest dragged his fork through the spaghetti sauce, making abstract patterns. The noodles had smelled and looked so good before he’d sat down to eat. It was disappointing.

  “Thank you for taking the tour for me,” his father said, sipping his drink. “I’m glad I got a chance to send the old bird off.”

  Ernest didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything at all. All of the old news articles— and all of the framed pictures in their home— showed that John Wright and Corbin Underwood had been best friends, once upon a time. There was undeniable proof of it. In every photo, they stood side-by-side and hip-to-hip. But for as long as Ernest could remember, Corbin had been a name that he hesitated to use, like a dirty word or a curse. He only said Corbin when he had to, or he watered it down to Rook. It had the same effect as exchanging hell for heck or damn for dang. His father still frowned, but the lines at the corners of his mouth didn’t dig in quite as deep. His dad and Mal’s dad had been friends, but that era had ended before either of them were born.

  He twirled his noodles around the tines of his fork. A thought hit him as he contemplated the meat and marinara mess, so he set the fork down with the bite uneaten.