Unexpected Consequences

10. Donkey & Debbie Yates

LET ME TELL you about Donkey. No, not the one from Shrek, though I'd prefer that Donkey to my Donkey. At least the fictional one was funny; mine was just plain annoying.

It was a little known fact around Revere's time that when something good rises, something bad must rise, too. It was Newton's third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. A bunch of supervillains popped up when Revere was declared a superhero, but in the gap between his time and mine, supervillainy remained generally silent. Then came Red Soldier, and with him came villains. Remote Man and Lex were the biggies, but there were smaller ones, too, the little blips that were easy to take care of.

And that, my friends, brings me to Donkey: a bored college kid who figured out how to make a freeze-ray and declared himself a supervillain. Why the name Donkey? Beats me. Believe it or not, he chose it himself. He first popped up in late June when he froze a bank attendant's feet to the floor. He spent so much time gloating that he never got a chance to get near the vaults. Taking him down had taken only one punch, and I'd crushed the freeze-ray in the process.

Well, good old Donkey got out of jail, rebuilt his freeze-ray, and was now taunting me from the middle of a little park closed in by four apartment buildings. I half-expected him to pull down his pants and moon me just to live up to his name.

I was crouched on the railing of a second-story fire escape balcony with my face in my hand and my elbow on my knee. Donkey was freezing random things just for kicks. Blast! There went the swing set. Blast! There went the fence. There wouldn't even be any property damage—the ice would melt within an hour in this heat, but he still laughed with every pull of the trigger.

"Dude," I said, dragging a hand down my face. "What are you doing?"

He turned and pointed the ray at me, but I knew from prior experience that he didn't have the guts to freeze me. At least not all of me. "I'm just having a little fun," he said. "Do you know how annoying it is to be young in this world? Work work, study study, blah blah, get judged for everything."

My eyes rolled so far back that I almost saw the inside of my head. I forgot that most people assumed I was a grown man, and that Donkey wasn't aware I was actually younger than him. Work, study, blah, and get judged for everything—I got it all, but unfortunately for me, it didn't matter.

"Why don't you just go home?" I asked, exasperated. He was barely evil and not worth the jail time, and I could tell he wasn't stupidly crazy. He was just bored, and playing with me was the best pastime he could come up with.

"Nah." He raised the ray and froze my foot to the railing.

With an annoyed sigh, I looked down at my encased-in-ice foot. Then I looked directly at him with an eyebrow raised as I jerked my foot out, the ice shattering and falling onto the ground.

"No!" He screeched and hit the side of his ray. "I made the ice stronger this time!"

"You still failed," I said flatly, hopping down from the railing.

Donkey backed away with a groan. "Study thermodynamics, they said," he mumbled under his breath. "You'll be great at it, they said."

"You are great at it," I said through closed teeth, the compliment sour in my mouth. "Freeze-ray? That's cool. Just use it for something other than ticking off a superhero, okay?"

He looked at me through goggles that were way too big for his face. "The heck else am I supposed to do?"

"Literally anything," I snapped. "Look, I'll let you go, just stop and...well, stop."