Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight Read Online Free PDF

mentioned, Paragon is a big, hulking guy with more muscles than a gym on Fire Island, yet no one has managed to figure out who he is when he’s not in uniform. He’d told me the secret to keeping my identities separate was to essentially become invisible in “civilian mode,” and doing that takes a certain skill.
    If you told the average person to become invisible, they’d do their best to blend in and be like everyone else. That technique could work, but not as well as Uncle Hank’s method. If you really want to walk through the world incognito, it’s better to go the opposite direction, and make yourself as different from the average Joe as possible. When you stand out, some people will avoid you, some will ignore you, and the others will have such a strong image of you burned in their brains that they’ll never be able to tie that image to the heroic persona you’re trying to keep under wraps. Paragon does that by wearing ill-fitting suits, stooping, and affecting a nasal twang. He also likes to play the klutz. That way, no one suspects that mild-mannered schlub, Hank Hancock, is the mightiest man in the universe.
    That was the tactic I’d chosen to protect my identity. All the news coverage about the Scarlet Knight over the years, along with the other heroes operating in other cities, had attracted a lot of attention, especially from teens. When kids like Zipper, Shadow, and I had joined the fray, heroes were seen as freaking cool. Unfortunately, I’d sort of created an archetype for what cool kids (or at least kids who liked to think they were cool) thought a sidekick looked like. I was athletic and a wisecracker. Pop’s constant moving had taught me how to make friends easily and had developed my social graces. None of that would do after I’d become a hero’s sidekick, not if I wanted to deflect attention from myself. So Bobby Baines became the complete opposite of the Squire’s cool, public image.
    First, there was the matter of my build. I’m not ripped like Paragon, or even as well-built as most of the guys on the high school football team, but I’m not a ninety-eight pound weakling either. I would use clothes to hide the shape of my body—wearing XXL t-shirts over XL sweatshirts over tank top undershirts. Then, when that had inexplicably become the fashion, I switched to oversized button-down shirts with half-undone neckties and cargo khakis with rolled-up cuffs: classic nerd chic. If that caught on, I’d spend a few dozen hours watching teen melodrama television shows or swallow my self-esteem, buy an issue of “Teen Hunks” magazine, and pull a one-eighty away from current trends.
    Then there’s the hair. It took about twenty minutes to get my hair tousled enough to look like I always had a bad hair day, but not so messy that it looked like I’d done it on purpose and risk being fashionable. The crowning touch was the horn-rimmed glasses—a tribute of sorts to Prism—and voilá , a geek so hopelessly out of touch and un-hip that there was no way in Hell he could ever be a hero. Tights wouldn’t be caught dead on someone like me.
    No woman is fussier about her hair and clothes than me, even if I do it for an entirely different reason. An hour in front of a mirror and careful selection of the perfect clothes from my wardrobe lets me transform myself from who I really am, into who I want people to think I am.
    I finished dressing for school and studied myself in the mirror. With my new hero identity, a lot of this work might be unnecessary. The Knight’s helmet completely covered the face of its wearer, which had saved Uncle Jack from ever needing to take drastic steps. Instead, he’d dressed and acted like a geek because deep down in his heart, he’d been one.
    I could go down that road too. Maybe if I added more actual armor, like greaves, vambraces, gauntlets, and a proper breastplate, the costume would hide my physique while I was in hero mode, instead of out of it. Then people would