The Society of Super Secret Heroes

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - LABOR DAY

  Chapter 2 - FIN’S SECRET

  Chapter 3 - WELCOME TO FOURTH GRADE

  Chapter 4 - THE GIFT OR THE CURSE

  Chapter 5 - SODAMAN AND SPRAYBUDDY

  Chapter 6 - NO MERCY

  Chapter 7 - THE TATTLETALE FERRET

  Chapter 8 - THE CRAB THAT FLEW

  Chapter 9 - THE BEGINNING

  Chapter 10 - TILL DEATH DO US PART

  Chapter 11 - FINCH FLIPS OUT

  Chapter 12 - CORNERED!

  Chapter 13 - TO PUNCH OR NOT TO PUNCH

  Chapter 14 - THE MISSION

  Chapter 15 - SUPER-TRADE

  Chapter 16 - YARD SALE TODAY

  Chapter 17 - SHELL SHOCK

  Chapter 18 - INVITING TROUBLE

  Chapter 19 - NIGHT CLIMBERS

  Chapter 20 - BUSTED

  Chapter 21 - THE INSURANCE POLICY

  Chapter 22 - VANISHED!

  Chapter 23 - AN URGENT MISSION

  Chapter 24 - DROWNED HOPES

  Chapter 25 - A SURPRISE FOR THE SURPRISERS

  Chapter 26 - MAKE A WISH

  Chapter 27 - THE PRESENTATION

  Chapter 28 - THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GIFT

  Chapter 29 - ONE LAST TRY

  Chapter 30 - THE CAPE’S SECRET

  Dutton Children’s Books

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  PUBLISHED BY THE PENGUIN GROUP / Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. / Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) / Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England / Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) / Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) / Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India / Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) / Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa / Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2007 by Phyllis Shalant

  Illustrations copyright © 2007 by Dan Santat

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CIP Data is available.

  Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books,

  a division of Penguin Young Readers Group,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  www.penguin.com/youngreaders

  eISBN : 978-1-101-11790-3

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  TO HERB, MY SUPERHERO

  1

  LABOR DAY

  It was a holiday for most people, but not all. The workers at the fast-food restaurants were still serving burgers and fries. Lifeguards were still guarding swimmers at the town pool. Many busy moms and dads were catching up on household chores. And superheroes were doing their best to save people before the first day of school tomorrow.

  “Hurry, the Horrible Hypnotizer is getting away!” Finch shouted as he rounded the corner of the house. “Keep your eyes closed in case he turns around. If he puts the chicken trance on you, you could be laying eggs for the rest of your life.”

  The guys were right behind Finch, running with their eyes shut, too. It was a good thing they knew the yard so well. Rajiv felt the azalea hedge scratch at his T-shirt. Kevin’s fingertips brushed the drainpipe that ran down the side of the house. Elliott was laughing so hard, he tripped over the apple-tree root that was shaped like an alligator—and bumped into Finch.

  Smack! Thud! Pop! Crash!

  Finch opened his eyes. His sister, Mimi, was sprawled on the front walk.

  “You pinheads! Why don’t you look where you’re going?” she shouted. The contents of her pool bag—towel, wet bathing suit, magazine, hairbrush, suntan lotion, and lip gloss—were scattered everywhere. She swept her long brown hair out of her face and smirked at the boys. “I bet you were playing stupid-heroes again.”

  Finch reached over and handed her the pink flip-flop that had flown off her foot. “Sorry. But we weren’t playing. We were practicing saving the world.”

  “Get real, will you?” Mimi stood up and brushed off the back of her shorts. “You’d better not play that baby game when you start fourth grade tomorrow— unless you want to be known as the class losers all” year.”

  Mimi (as in “Me! Me!” Finch thought) was going into seventh this year. She acted like she knew everything. It really drove Finch crazy, especially when she was right.

  With one hand on her hip, Mimi watched the boys collect her things. She didn’t help. She just stood there in one of her many supermodel poses. This time it was the round-shouldered, droopy-eyelids one that made Finch think of a grouchy lizard.

  Elliott stooped down to retrieve her suntan lotion from under the hedge. “Ooh, I feel dizzy,” he said as he stood up. “I guess it’s the sun or something.” He pressed a palm to his forehead and closed his eyes.

  “It’s probably from eating junk food all day,” Mimi sneered. This summer she’d only been willing to eat yogurt, salads, and tofu.

  “Who are you, the Food Police?” Elliott groaned. His hair fell in his eyes as he bent forward and hugged his middle. Before Mimi could answer him, he began to gag. Everyone stepped back.

  “Ack . . . ack . . . ack . . . blechhh!” Elliott was convulsing like a human volcano. A splat of yellow vomit flew through the air. It landed on Mimi’s bare foot.

  “Yeee-uck!” Mimi squealed. She flapped her foot. The vomit flew off and skipped twice on the front path before it settled down.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll clean it up.” With his bare hand, Elliott snatched up the mess and tossed it on his palm. The vomit bounced lightly.

  Mimi’s nostrils flared in a very unmodelish way. “That’s rubber vomit!”

  “Doh, no—it’s super-vomit.” Elliott slipped the fake vomit back into the big, deep pocket of his cargo shorts.

  As the guys cracked up, Mimi grabbed her bag and swung it at them. It caught Finch right in the chest.

  “Oww! Hey, that hurt!”

  “A real superhero wouldn’t complain about a little pain,” Mimi said as she flounced toward the house. “Good luck in school, super-babies. You’re going to need it.”

  “Yech, she said the S word,” Finch grumbled when she was gone.

  “Don’t worry.” Raj clapped a hand on his shoulder. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, he winked an eye. “She’ll probably have a fit tomorrow morning when she can’t find this.” He flashed his empty palm to the group. Then he closed it into a fist. When he opened it again, Mimi’s lip gloss was there. “Ta-da! Ra
j the Remarkable strikes again,” he crowed.

  “Cool,” Kevin and Elliott both exclaimed.

  “Yeah, great trick,” Finch said. Usually he admired Raj’s skills as a magician, but right now his heart wasn’t in it. At the beginning of summer, when he’d learned that Rajiv Shah, Kevin Chan, and Elliott Levenson—his three best friends—would be in his class, he’d been really psyched. Last year, none of them had been in Mrs. Rooney’s room with him. But now that the time was here, Finch wasn’t feeling so enthusiastic about going back to school. Mimi had told him that the fourth-grade teachers were as mean as trolls. They gave tons of work. They didn’t even let the students have snack time.

  “Where’d you get the vomit?” Kev asked Elliott.

  “I found it on a Web site called Gag-o-Rama that sells funny stuff. It’s supposed to be pizza vomit. Did you see the bits of pepperoni in it?”

  “Yeah, gross. The person who made it is a real artist.” Kev was an artist himself. So were both his parents. “Let’s get to work on the comic. We should finish it today, because tomorrow”—he drew a finger across his throat—“we’ll probably have the H word--homework.”

  “All right.” Finch opened the front door. It felt like it weighed a ton.

  “Super Ferrets!” Rajiv cried as Cubby and Rosie came scampering at them across the hall floor. The two furry ferrets, one as pale as cream and the other the color of cinnamon, tumbled at the boys’ feet. Rajiv picked Cubby up and draped him around his neck. Elliott wore Rosie.

  They piled into Finch’s room and sat down on the floor to play with the ferrets. But first they had to shove Finch’s pajama bottoms, an empty chip bag, a sticky glass, towels, dirty socks, comics, a Batmobile, and other stuff into the corners. While Finch searched his desk, his buddies slid Cubby and Rosie across the floor like hockey pucks. It was the ferrets’ favorite thing to play. But as the game got wilder, they crashed into each other. Rosie went skittering off into Finch’s closet.

  “Come back here!” Elliott crawled into the dark, crammed space and poked under the junk that was jumbled on the floor. Suddenly there was a scrabbling noise. Rosie ran out.

  “Fin?” Elliott’s voice sounded muffled. “You know that report on dolphins you lost last year? I think I found it. Hey, I didn’t know you still had this!”

  Finch quit hunting around in his desk and looked up. El was crawling out of the closet with his old superhero cape—a jewel-green beach towel decorated with yellow lightning bolts and green satin strings that tied around the neck.

  Stop dragging me—I am not a floor mop!

  For a moment Finch imagined he’d heard the cape complaining. Ugg. The day-before-school jitters were really driving him crazy.

  He snatched the cape out of Elliott’s hand and flung it back into the closet. “I don’t wear that thing anymore. I didn’t even know it was in there. Besides, you still have Ruff on your bed.” Ruff was the stuffed dog Elliott had gotten as a baby. His mother had brought it along with her on the day she’d adopted him.

  Elliott’s eyes bugged out. “So?”

  “So I still have Urp on mine,” Raj said, reminding them of the cheerful sock monkey his grandmother had made for him. “And Kev has Blue Bunny. Calm down. Let’s get back to the comic.”

  Finch extracted the latest edition of their series, Super Ferrets, from the mess on his desk. This one—Super Ferrets’ Swim Olympics—was the first they’d done since last spring. The guys wrote the stories together, but Kev drew all the pictures.

  “We’re up to the part where Rosie climbs the shower curtain to get ready for her dive.” Kev reached for a black marker.

  Elliott peered over Kev’s shoulder. “That reminds me of a new joke I made up. Who is the wizard who lives in the bathroom?”

  Kev shrugged. “I give up.”

  “Harry Potty!”

  All four guys cracked up. The ferrets loved it. They got up on their hind legs and began doing the weasel war dance, bobbing their heads and crying dook, dook, dook, dook. Then they jumped on each other.

  “Wait, I’ve got another one,” Elliott said before they’d stopped laughing. “What is the name of Harry Potty’s school?”

  “What?” Raj asked.

  “Buttwarts!”

  This time, the boys dooked like Rosie and Cubby.

  “Shh, I think I just heard someone knock,” Kev said.

  “Finch? Boys?”

  Finch’s mom, Elaine Mundy, opened the door. She was tall and slim with long, straight brown hair like Mimi. Fin was more skinny than slim. He mostly looked like his dad. They both had dark, curly hair and ears that stuck out. Mr. Mundy could actually wiggle his.

  “I’m going to fire up the grill for a barbecue,” Mrs. Mundy said. “Who wants hamburgers? Who wants tofu burgers?”

  “Are the tofu burgers for Mimi?” Elliott asked innocently as he pushed his long hair out of his eyes. “ ’Cause I think I heard her say she wanted pepperoni pizza.”

  2

  FIN’S SECRET

  After the barbecue, the guys climbed up to the lookout platform Fin and his father had built in the biggest tree in the yard. They lay on their backs and watched as the sun sank lower in the sky.

  Raj checked his watch. “This is the last hour of our last day of freedom together,” he said in a voice of doom. “And the last day of being superheroes. Tomorrow we’ll just be students.”

  “We can still be superheroes at lunch. We don’t have to listen to Mimi,” Elliott protested.

  Kev sat up. “Forget it. No one at school is going to catch me pretending anymore.”

  “Kev’s right,” Raj agreed. “I don’t want to be the class joke.”

  The guys were silent for a while. Then Finch said, “What if we weren’t pretending?” His words seemed to hang in the air like the last note of a bird’s song.

  Raj rolled onto his side to face him. “What do you mean?”

  “Superheroes help people who need it and keep bad stuff from happening. They fight for truth and justice. We could try to do that together. We could be like the X-Men or the Fantastic Four.”

  “Yeah, but superheroes have superpowers,” Kev pointed out. “Where are we going to get ours—the mall?”

  Elliott giggled. “Yeah, maybe there’s a shop called Powers ‘R’ Us.”

  Finch felt the tips of his ears turning red. “I guess it’s a dumb idea.”

  Raj sighed. “Not dumb, just impossible. I guess we’ll have to be ourselves.”

  “I don’t think that’s so bad,” El said.

  That night, Finch tossed and turned until he was wrapped up in his sheets like a mummy. What if Mimi was telling the truth? What if all you did in fourth grade was work, work, work? He didn’t think he was ready for so much maturity. Last year, Mrs. Rooney had given the class a little free time on Fridays. If Fin’s desk wasn’t overflowing with junk, she let him use the school photocopier to run off Super Ferrets for kids who wanted to read it.

  Suddenly he felt it again—the pulling sensation. It was as if a giant magnet were in his closet, drawing him to it. “No!” he murmured as he grabbed the sides of the mattress.

  I am here, Master.

  Now it was talking. This was ridiculous. Finch put a pillow over his head. But his legs were practically sliding off the bed on their own. For a moment he listened to make sure no one was up. Then he reached into his closet and snatched the cape up off the floor.

  When he was five, he’d found it at a garage sale his mother had insisted on stopping at on their way to her lawyer’s office. It was the year his parents got separated. They’d told him it would just be for a bit. Finch had worn the cape to kindergarten every day while he waited for his father to move back in. That never happened, but at least he’d met the guys. They’d played superheroes on the playground each afternoon. A lot of other kids joined in too, but at the end of the term, Finch, Raj, Kev, and El were one another’s best friends.

  What he’d said today about not wearing the cape anymore
wasn’t exactly true. He’d stopped wearing it in first grade when some older kids started calling him Towelman. Instead he’d started sleeping with it like an extra blanket. Finally, when it didn’t cover his feet anymore, he’d stowed it in the closet. But sometimes, after the lights were off, he still took it out. He knew he was too old for it—and he was going to stop. He just needed it one more night.

  He folded the cape into a square and set it on top of his pillow. When he laid his head down, he imagined he felt a cool breeze against his cheek.

  Sleep well, Master.

  3

  WELCOME TO FOURTH GRADE

  Five lines were written on the chalkboard when the students arrived.

  Mr. Slope Burns

  Birthplace: Felton, California

  Likes: Yoga, Music, Animals,

  Cold-Weather Sports

  Dislikes: Wearing a tie

  Mr. Burns didn’t look old enough to be a teacher. He had unruly, orangey-red hair and wide cheeks with freckles. He was so skinny, his head nodded on his neck like a bobblehead doll. “Sit anywhere you want,” he said as the students looked around the room. He’d already set up the desks in little clusters of twos, threes, and fours.

  Right away kids began dashing around, climbing over desks and other kids to be near their friends. Bam! Pierre tossed a chair to Alex, but Alex didn’t catch it. Tyler and Mike were having a tug-of-war with a desk, although there were plenty of empty ones still around. Someone tripped Kayla Keyes, who got a bloody nose and had to go to the nurse’s office.

  Finch, Raj, Kev, and Elliott dove for a group of four desks near the back wall. It was a great spot—far enough away from the teacher so they could whisper jokes and stuff. Then two boys crash-landed into the set of desks on their left.

  “Ugg,” Finch groaned. He turned away, but not quickly enough.