He had his informers and advisors like any smart king in his kingdom.

And Teddy was telling him about the kid who’d just burst onto the scene; how, while not an actual threat to his place as king of the school, this kid had still nonetheless moved up a notch on the totem pole without the king’s blessing, or even seeking his permission, first.

Yeah, I hadn’t really wanted to be anything in school but gone and back in the shed working on the wings, until suddenly I was part of the group. And it was nice. Until that Riechert jerk decided it was time to restore some order to the universe. In the cafeteria about two weeks after I had my picture in the paper, he started with the catcalls. I’d been asked, asked mind you, to sit at a table with regular guys. Not the nerds, and not the football team, but regular guys, you know? When little bits of popcorn began to fly over at me, hitting my head and falling into the soup I’d bought for lunch.

I turned, and Reichert was smiling at me.

I smiled back, thinking it was a bit of good-natured play between me and someone else who wanted to be my friend. Well, big mistake. Reichert had wanted me to slink away from my table and eat lunch with the nerds, or maybe go a step even lower and eat by myself in the Library.

But I was feeling a little cocky. Wouldn’t you? I picked up one of the popcorn pieces out of my soup and tossed it back at him.

It splatted on his jacket.

Worst thing I could’ve done, really. The smile dropped from his face. He stood up, and all his football buddies stood up beside him, following his lead. Two tables over, I saw Teddy stand up too, and push his glasses up over his nose as he tried to look as tough as Reichert and his group.

Reichert marched over to me. My new friends either found a reason to leave the table or started looking at the floor.

And me? I was so clueless I didn’t have a single idea what was going on. I’d spent so much of the last few years in the shed working on those damned wings I’d totally missed what you were supposed to do and know about the hierarchy in high school. There’s folks there who get seriously, blisteringly angry if someone tries to move up where they've been placed, and if you don't know how to fight it . . .

And, well, I didn’t.

“What the hell is this?” Reichert asked when he got to my table, pointing to the splat the size of a dime on his blue-and-white football jacket.

“Tomato soup,” I said. I was stupid, but not so stupid to think this was going to be friendly banter between equals. “Want some more?”

He grabbed me and landed a half-dozen punches before a teacher intervened. I had a black eye and a fat lip, he had a one-day suspension and a letterman jacket with a splat of soup on it. I called it even.

Things went back to the way they were. No one talked to me anymore. Reichert found new victims. I guess he figured that in my case, the horse had made a run for the fence and had been given a good whuppin’. Case closed.

But it wasn’t closed. Not for me. Not by a long shot.

See, before I didn’t care if no one talked to me. I didn’t care if I ate lunch alone every day. I didn’t miss it because I didn’t know what I’d been missing.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

But now? Now I knew what it was like. I knew what it was like to walk into a room and have someone shout out a hello to me. I knew what it was like to have a girl bat her eyes at me. I knew what it was like to have a group of guys subtly pull me into the conversation, be it about cars, girls, or why we all hated the English teacher.

But now I was on the outs. Again. With everyone. Even the three or four guys who considered themselves beatniks wouldn’t bother with me, because no one wanted to incur the wrath of Reichert and his little crew of footballers.

A taste of honey’s worse than none at all. And I found out that was truly the case.

No more.

One day, as I was walking to school and had Reichert drive past me for the five-hundredth time or so, the kids in his car jeering at me as they drove past, I realized something:

I was being their victim because I chose to be.

I couldn’t choose who my parents were. I couldn’t choose how much money they made. I couldn’t choose what side of town I lived on, and I couldn’t choose what town I lived in, yet.

But I could choose what I said, and what I did, and how I was going to respond to them all. I could choose how I was going to use what I had between my ears. I could choose to be a victim, waiting for the American Airman to show up and make me his sidekick (unlikely; at sixteen I was already on the outer edges of age for a gig like that), or I could choose to be the hero of my own story, and find a way to take on the Tom Reicherts of the world and win.

Because, I realized, there was always gonna be a Tom Reichert in my life in one way or another. The whole thing had made me look at the adults around me with different eyes. I saw how Mr. LaHoud, our Biology teacher, would suddenly go from being all lively in class to being quiet and deferential when the gym teacher and football coach, Mr. Sension, would enter the room for a pep talk about the upcoming game. I saw how Miss Addison, the Math teacher, would get all quiet behind her desk and look at the floor when the Vice Principal Mr. Gaynor would come into class unannounced, all huffy and puffy and ready to spit blood because someone had flushed a sock down the toilet again.

I realized there was a pecking order even among the adults, and I decided that I was gonna stand above it any way I could.

I was tired of Reichert leading the charge against me. So one night during spring break I tried something I hadn’t tried before.

I put together a pretty simple setup- a bag of slops strapped to my chest, with a little pin I’d pull, like a grenade, to open the thing up and drop the whole mess.

Yeah, the first of the gadgets that went on the Mothman’s amazing, high-tech wondersuit. A bag of slops, taken out’ve the garbage cans out back of the butcher shop on main after everything closed down for the night. I guess everyone’s gotta start somewhere, huh? Well, like I did before, I practiced. I did night flying now, after my folks had hit the sack about nine every night, I took the wings out for a spin, and practiced. Not just flying, nosir. Flying up, and then indexing the wings just right and diving. I’d gone from studying how a seagull would flap and drift and move forward to being a hawk, climbing and then diving down to my prey.

Yeah, I get the symbolism now, too. But there was a practical reason for that kind of attack; it was way easier to hit something you dropped from altitude when you were diving straight down than when you were flying over it. The hawk move was ‘way more accurate than trying to pretend I was a B-17 bomber. Of course, B-17s were a couple of years down the road, but you get the idea, right?

So for the first time, I did some night flying. I saw things differently as the sun started to go down, and the lights in the stores and houses started to wink out. I was ready for it all; I’d taken the wings out a spin or three, and counted at speeds how long and how fast I’d have to go and in what directions I’d need to go in order to reach my target. Streetlights could help, but only so far. Fort Orlan was such a burg that it didn’t have streetlights anywhere past main street, but I could use them to light the way and point me in the right direction to my destination.

Moonlight did the rest. Dad’s Almanac told me when the next full moon was gonna be, and because of that when midnight rolled around I had no trouble seeing the place bright as day.

Getting to the swanky part of town was easy, then. And Reichert had been kind enough to bully his parents into getting him a car that’d been painted a nice, bright white...

----

TO BE CONTINUED...