Chapter 3 – True Confessions
I didn’t talk much on the way back to the truck. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen with my own two eyes. Faedra was a super. My mind raced with a thousand different questions. Why hadn’t she told me? Had she always been a super and just been hiding it? Why was she hiding it? Practically every super-not I knew (and there weren’t that many) wanted to have a superpower like almost everyone else.
What bugged me more than all of the questions that I had was an underlying sense of betrayal. My best friend was hiding something from me. Not just some little something like, ‘Hey, I forgot to tell you I borrowed a pen from your desk’, but a BIG something. This was huge.
By the time we strapped our seatbelts on for the ride home, Faedra knew something was up.
“You okay, Dylan?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied.
Chandler cranked up the engine and mercifully turned on the radio, cranking it up really loud so we could hear it over the wind as we headed back home.
Faedra lived a few blocks away from me, and Chandler dropped her off first. As he pulled up to my house to drop me off, I reached forward and turned off the radio.
“Hey, don’t touch my tunes, man,” he said.
“Faedra’s a super,” I blurted out without any introduction. Chandler looked at me with a quizzical look on his face.
“What sort of a joke is that?”
“It’s no joke,” I replied. “When she saved you from falling off the top of the overlook... I saw her feet. She was standing on thin air.”
He was silent for a few seconds before he responded.
“Well, do you think you could have made a mistake?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I know what I saw. She was definitely levitating.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, ‘whoa’. She’s been lying to me... to both of us, for who knows how long.”
“That’s sooo not cool,” he replied. “Are you going to confront her about it?”
“No... Who knows whether she would try and deny it? I mean, she may even be a double for all I know.” I turned and looked at Chandler. I wanted to see how he would react to my next question. “Will you help me spy on her? I need to know the truth, and I obviously can’t trust Faedra to tell me right now.”
I could tell he was going to say yes. Chandler got this look when he was really stoked about doing something, and he had that look right now. He started nodding his head up and down before any words came out of his mouth. “Oh, yeah. I’m in, alright. And I know just how to do it.”
* * * * *
After dinner that night, I got a text from Chandler that he had a plan. After texting back and forth for about an hour, we had all the details worked out. He had gotten some miniature drones for his birthday that had some awesome, high-performance cameras. The plan was to follow Faedra around whenever she went outside of her house and see if we could find any proof of her using her power (or powers, as the case might be).
Saturday turned out to be the perfect day for our little recon operation. Faedra sometimes worked with her dad on one of his old cars on Saturday mornings. When I called her to see what she was doing for the day, she said that she was free after lunch, but working on a car with her dad until then. I called Chandler to tell him the good news, and he came right over.
Chandler parked his truck at my house, and we walked the rest of the way to Faedra’s, so we wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. There’s a little park right across the street from her house, and we found a bench just far enough away so that we wouldn’t be seen from her house if she happened to come out the front door. Then we went to work.
Chandler popped open the plastic briefcase he’d brought with him and took out a small drone. “Hold out your hand,” he said to me. I held out my hand, and he placed the drone in my palm. It was light as a feather, and not much bigger than, well, a drone that could fit in the palm of your hand.
I watched as he took out a hand-held controller with a couple of knobs on it, a joy stick, and a video monitor that was about four inches by five inches. When he flipped on a switch, the video screen showed a picture of an area of the park right in front of us, where the drone was facing.
“Cool,” I said.
“Now, let’s see what Faedra’s doing with her dad,” he said with a smile on his face. As he worked the controls, the little drone gently rose out of my palm and then zoomed across the street in the direction of Faedra’s house. A few minutes later, Chandler had succeeded in landing the little spy machine on the top of a privacy fence post with a good view of the garage out behind her house. We could see the front end of one of her dad’s muscle cars sticking out of the garage.
“Can this thing zoom in or something? That’s a long way off.”
“Oh, yeah, this baby’s got...”
He proceeded to rattle off some geek-speak about how powerful the camera was and what it could do. I caught something about a powerful zoom, advanced audio capabilities, and excellent stability in flight. I finally put my hand up to flag him down.
“Okay, First Officer Spock, I get it – it’s a powerful camera that can zoom in. So let’s see it work,” I said, motioning to the video screen. He plugged in some earbuds to the controller and handed me one of the buds, then proceeded to zoom in on the garage. We waited about ten minutes before we first heard, then saw, Faedra and her dad walking out of the house and towards the car.
“So, what’s on the agenda for today, Dad?” Faedra asked as they walked.
“Well, I thought we’d change the oil in the Mustang and then take her for a spin to the ice cream shop.”
“Cool,” she replied.
I could see Faedra smiling on the video screen. She was apparently relieved they weren’t doing some heavy-duty work on the car. I knew from previous conversations that she liked spending time with her dad but that she didn’t really like working on cars. She said that her dad never spoke about it, but that she had always suspected that he had wanted one of his kids to share his passion for cars – something neither her nor her little sister had so far shown much interest in.
I felt a little guilty, spying on her private time with her dad like this, but then I reminded myself why I was doing it in the first place, and my anger at her having deceived me about her powers quickly pushed any guilty feelings out of my mind.
“I’ll jack the car up if you’ll get the creeper and put it in front of the car,” her dad said.
Faedra went inside the garage and came back with a long board-like thing with padding on top and wheels on the bottom. I thought we had one in our garage at home, but Mom never used it.
“Ahh... darn it. The hydraulic jack isn’t working, and I’m out of hydraulic fluid. I’ve been meaning to go by the auto parts store to pick some up. If you’ll help me out, I’ll slide the stationary jacks under the car.”
“Sure,” Faedra replied.
I wasn’t entirely sure what happened next. As soon as Faedra replied to her dad, Chandler manipulated the controls and the camera started to zoom in for a closer shot. Faedra leaned down towards the car hood, and then her dad looked in the direction of the drone. It was almost as if he was looking right at it. Then, his arm moved like he was throwing something in the direction of the drone, and suddenly, the screen went black.
“What happened?” I asked Chandler.
“I don’t know.” He fidgeted with the controls. “The drone’s not responding.”
He popped the battery pack out of the controller and replaced it with a spare from the case. Nothing. Then he powered up another drone, and the video screen came to life.
“Hmm. The other drone must be malfunctioning, or maybe the battery went dead. Let’s see.”
I watched in silence as Chandler maneuvered the second drone out of the park, across the street, and towards where the first drone had been. It was no longer on the top of the post where he had landed it. He backed the drone up a bit and zoomed the camera out to look at a bigger area.
“Wait, I think that’s it,” I said, pointing on the video screen to a small black object on the ground just outside of the privacy fence.
Chandler zoomed the camera in on the black object. It was the drone... or a better description would be that it was what was left of the drone. It looked like it had been shot with a bullet. One of the propeller blades was gone entirely, and all that was left of the camera was a mangled hunk of plastic with a few wires sticking out of it.
“Whoa, what in the world happened to it?” I wondered aloud.
“Very interesting,” Chandler replied. He repositioned the camera and took a peek over the fence. Faedra and her dad were nowhere to be seen. Then he zoomed the drone straight up to get an aerial shot of their entire property. Off to the left, Faedra’s dad could be seen walking around the front of the house. He was about to turn the corner along the side of the house where the drone had crashed.
“Get out of there before he sees the drone!” I said excitedly.
Chandler didn’t respond, but his brow furrowed as he quickly manipulated the flight controls. He flew the drone over the privacy fence and landed it just inside of their yard so that it wouldn’t be seen by Faedra’s dad. He had landed it with the camera pointing towards the fence, and we could see through the slits between the planks as Faedra’s dad walked by, then stopped and bent down right where the crashed drone was.
I held my breath for what seemed like a minute. Chandler was probably doing the same thing. Neither of us spoke the whole time. Finally, Faedra’s dad stood up and walked away.
Chandler waited about thirty seconds before he powered up the drone's propellers and flew it back to where we were seated in the park. Once he landed it on the ground in front of us, he let out a sigh.
“Whew... that was close,” he said.
“Yeah. What in the world just happened?” I asked. Chandler said nothing, and just shook his head from side to side while staring at the drone. Finally, he stopped shaking his head from side to side and started moving it up and down. “I’m gonna figure out what happened, but I can’t do it here. I have to download the video footage to my computer back home.”
The alarm on my cell phone went off.
“Yeah, and I’m due to show up at Faedra’s on my bike in fifteen minutes. We better get going.”
* * * * *
Chandler dropped me off at my house, and I made it back to Faedra’s on time. We went riding on one of our favorite trails near her neighborhood. The trail ran through an old plantation that the county government had leased for ninety-nine years and turned into a recreational park. Half of the trail along the back side of the plantation was covered by a canopy of trees which shielded us from the sun. It was still early Spring, and it was nice to have a cool breeze blowing down from the direction of the mountains.
My anger at Faedra for having been deceptive had been cooled somewhat by the fact that I was now hiding something of my own from her, so we actually had a good time. I said something that made her laugh at one point, and when I looked over at her, her hair was blowing in the wind and... well, I felt something. It was weird. We’d been friends for so long and I’d never been attracted to her like that before. Now that I knew she was a super, I should’ve just put those thoughts out of my mind.
We pulled off the trail and stopped for a drink of water. Right before we did, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. It was a text message from Chandler.
You’ve got 2 c this! Great pix from video. WOW! Come by aftR mtg.