The Rise of Renegade X Read Online Free PDF Page A

a light dings on the opposite wall. A new set of doors opens up, and I step into the elevator. Once inside, I press the button marked V . Not V for villain , but V for vault . Talk about a walk-in closet.
    Once the elevator stops, I get off and use the key I stole from Mom to open the door. The inside of the vault looks like Mom’s been beating up five-year-old girls and stealing their stuff. The carpet is pink. An old rocking horse sags in one corner, with fading red bows tied around its ears. It’s almost buried by a pile of stuffed animals. A stack of old diaries dominates the center of the room. And when I say stack, I mean a three-foot-by-three-foot cube. Mom still writes in her diary every night, and she’s kept every single volume she’s had since she was seven.
    My chest tightens as I approach the stack. I’m not worried about Mom catching me so much as I am reading about her exploits. The truth is in this pile of R-rated literature. Great. Time to get to work. I put on a pair of latex gloves. Hopefully Mom won’t notice someone’s disturbed her diaries, but if she does, this way she won’t be able to prove it was me. Without the gloves, my X would be a dead giveaway, even if she didn’t have my prints on file.
    The diaries are arranged by date. My stomach twists as I slip the one from seventeen years ago out of the pile. It’s green and smells like lighter fluid. I smile—maybe Mom considered burning it. A promising sign.
    Luckily Mom likes to keep her diary nice and readable and doesn’t write on the backs of the pages, making my job here a little easier. I flip through the book, trying to only catch the dates and not the content. Yikes. My eyes spot the words leather, cape , and … vibrator . I think I’m going to be sick. Heat rushes to my face, even though there’s no way Mom knows I’m reading this. Life would be so much easier if mothers stuck to making cookies and moonshine and didn’t have sex. Not that Mom ever makes cookies.
    I find a section dated during the month of my conception.
Dear Dairy ,
     
    She spelled diary wrong, and the writing leans heavily and is hard to read, like somebody wrote it in a hurry or in a panic.
The Mistress of Mayhem has struck again. What have I done? I need more men in my life. Or at least one good one. If I had, I wouldn’t have acted out of desperation. One kiss wouldn’t have turned into a hundred, with his hands sliding down my back and me tearing my suit off. And his. So much for secret identities .
     
    I scrunch my eyes closed. My ears are so hot, I wonder if my superpower has come in and I’ve somehow inherited laser ears. I take a deep breath. I can do this.
It happened so fast. One minute we were fighting our way through the subway tunnel, locked in a high-speed chase, and the next thing I knew we were in the subway bathroom, locked in a fast embrace .
     
    Do you think Mom will notice if someone pukes on her diaries? Do you think she’ll have to analyze the puke in the lab, or do you think she’ll instinctively know it was me?
I lost my shoe in the toilet, and my hairpin fell to the floor and bounced under another stall from all the commotion. We didn’t say anything the whole time—that would have ruined it—and I closed my eyes to keep my lasers at bay .
Now that it’s over, I wish I’d controlled myself. I can’t believe I did it in a dirty bathroom stall with the enemy, with
     
    That’s the end of the page. I look to the next one, my face burning and my palms sweating inside the latex gloves. This is it. My father is—
a foil pan and a turkey baster. Can you believe that? I tell Mother that I’m going to cook Thanksgiving this year, and she brings over all the supplies, even though it’s not for six months! She thinks I can’t cook, that I can’t take care of myself! I’m twenty-two years old, and I’m doing just fine on my own. She’s always treated me like a baby, even after I got my V, like it didn’t mean anything