Chapter 4: It gets slightly better? And then immediately it goes downhill….

I stuff my incomplete costume in a box in my room before burying it underneath a bunch of other boxes in my closet. I had stuffed it in an old briefcase and then shoved that under my bed. There was no chance now that someone would open it considering I changed the lock on it as well. 

I then pulled out a pair of gloves I had snagged from my dad's closet- not like he'd need it all the way up in the ISS. Besides I doubt he'd have a problem with his son having to use them to hide his secret identity considering this was maybe a life or death situation.

I mean superheroes are kind of rare here. Like, there are a few of them, but not as many as in the prime Marvel Universe.

I check my hands and the gloves thankfully fit perfectly. For some strange reason that I'll chalk up to comic book bullshit, my claws do not rip out of my gloves even though they are sharp as hell.

Not my problem. 

I head down the stairs and pad over to the fridge barefoot not making a single sound on the floor at all.

Apparently, the claws on my feet are far more useful than the ones on my hands considering they somehow help me grip better and make my steps near silent. It does kind of require me to be barefoot for it to work. Even with shoes on I have this whole new level of grace that I am basically silent.

I grab myself a carton of orange juice and chug it down before moving onto making something to eat.

I grabbed myself a bag of Doritos and began snacking down.

I laze out on the couch and turn on the TV to some sappy romcom before just vegging out. Before I know it my mom's car is pulling up to the driveway and her key is turning into the lock. 

"Ace? Are you here?" She asks in a tone that does not sound very pleased. Fuckshit. Did the school already call her? I thought I had time to tell her my side before she made any decisions.

I get up and quickly pull on a pair of socks to hide my toe claws before talking to her," Hey Mom… I guess you heard about what happened in school then?" I avert my eyes and rub the back of my neck as she folds her arms over her chest unimpressed. 

"I did in fact. I want you to tell me the truth. No half-truths, nothing? Understand?" At my nod, she seems satisfied.

"Did you punch Eugene Thompson into a locker?" I keep my eyes averted out of embarrassment. My silence is all the answer she needs. "Was he harassing-" I cut her off before she could finish her sentence," No. I… It was an accident... I'm sorry. I promise it won't happen again."

She stares at me and I feel horrible. I always hate it because she doesn't yell. That would be better. Instead, she always says the same thing.

"I'm extremely disappointed in you. I understand you're going through changes and you… you miss your dad but that isn't an excuse. I won't ground you or anything but I expect to see you apologizing to your classmate tomorrow when I take you in early."

I nod again as I reply.

"I'm really sorry about that Mom." Mom nods at me and takes a good hard examining look at me. 

"Did you get taller, Ace? Kids just keep getting taller every day…" She sighs and rubs her forehead exasperated.

"I'm not in the mood to cook tonight. You up for pizza or chinese instead?"

I peck her on the cheek.

"I'm fine with either but I'm leaning towards pizza. Call me down when it's here! I'm gonna do some homework till then!" I flash a quick grin at her and then head up the stairs ignoring her cries to, "Slow down!" 

I head up to my room and shut the door. Then I pull out my binder from my backpack containing all the homework we were assigned and get to work. I only had a slight advantage in these classes considering that I not only got inserted into this body a month or so ago.

If I had been inserted younger I could have made more plans, and thought ahead but honestly, considering the fact that the stuff we were doing in Midtown was stuff I had done before in my old school? I breezed through every single class I had.

I already knew Biology, Chemistry, and Physics like the back of my hand from all the revision I did for my exams in my old life and the other subjects were so easy I didn't even need to study that much to get to where the rest of the class was.

I didn't have my old notes though. They would've been so much more useful than the chicken scratch that the old AJ wrote and called 'notes.' I'm pretty sure my mom had to recheck to make sure it was me who the teachers were suddenly praising. I guess being rich and not having his dad around must have made old AJ a spoiled surly bastard.

Sucks to be him, I'm just superior. 

I put on some headphones playing, 'Sunflower' as I do my assignments. Honestly, this is even easier for me considering a lot of the teachers decided to start right from the beginning which means even less studying for me. The only subject I really struggled with was English.

Seriously I didn't know jackshit about prepositions or how to use an adjective. I just wrote whatever sounded good. Anyways, my assignments were all basic stuff like do these questions, multiple choice, bla bla bla. Etc. Simple stuff ya know?

I was done with it all after an hour or so and spent the rest of the time waiting for the pizza to arrive, while on my laptop, trying to come up with a way to help me locate crimes. I eventually settled on using a police scanner app that would report crimes.

I wasn't quite smart enough to hack into a police radio and swinging around randomly hoping to find crimes to stop was stupid.

I go onto the app store and download a police scanner app with 4 out of 5 stars and a decent number of positive reviews. While doing so I look out the window and spot a guy in a pizza delivery uniform with a pizza box walking to our door. That must be the pizza then. I wait five minutes for my mom to pay and then head down the stairs. 

We spend the rest of the night watching reruns of Star Wars and eating some delicious pizza. Then I wrote an apology to hand to Flash the next day and went to sleep. Hopefully, I wouldn't randomly develop four spider limbs or something... That would suck ass.