25 - Attack of the Mutant by R.L. Stine - (ebook by Undead)

 
 
1
     
     
    “Hey—put that down!”
    I grabbed the comic book from Wilson Clark’s hand and smoothed out the
plastic cover.
    “I was only looking at it,” he grumbled.
    “If you get a fingerprint on it, it will lose half its value,” I told him. I
examined the cover through the clear wrapper. “This is a Silver Swan Number Zero,” I said. “And it’s in mint condition.”
    Wilson shook his head. He has curly, white-blond hair and round, blue eyes.
He always looks confused.
    “How can it be Number Zero?” he asked. “That doesn’t make any sense,
Skipper.”
    Wilson is a really good friend of mine. But sometimes I think he dropped down
from the planet Mars. He just doesn’t know anything.
    I held up the Silver Swan cover so he could see the big zero in the
corner. “That makes it a collector’s item,” I explained. “Number Zero comes before Number One. This comic is worth ten times as much as Silver Swan Number One.”
    “Huh? It is?” Wilson scratched his curly hair. He squatted down on the floor
and started pawing through my carton of comic books. “How come all your comics
are in these plastic bags, Skipper? How can you read them?”
    See? I told you. Wilson doesn’t know anything.
    “Read them? I don’t read them,” I replied. “If you read them, they lose their
value.”
    He stared up at me. “You don’t read them?”
    “I can’t take them out of the bag,” I explained. “If I open the bag, they
won’t be in mint condition anymore.”
    “Ooh. This one is cool!” he exclaimed. He pulled up a copy of Star Wolf. “The cover is metal!”
    “It’s worthless,” I mumbled. “It’s a second printing.”
    He stared at the silvery cover, turning it in his hands, making it shine in
the light. “Cool,” he muttered. His favorite word.
    We were up in my room, about an hour after dinner. The sky was black outside
my double windows. It gets dark so early in winter. Not like on the Silver
Swan’s planet, Orcos III, where the sun never sets and all the superheroes have
to wear air-conditioned costumes.
    Wilson came over to get the math homework. He lives next door, and he always
leaves his math book at school—so he always comes over to get the homework from me.
    “You should collect comic books,” I told him. “In about twenty years, these
will be worth millions.”
    “I collect rubber stamps,” he said, picking up a Z-Squad annual. He
studied the sneaker ad on the back cover.
    “Rubber stamps?”
    “Yeah. I have about a hundred of them,” he said.
    “What can you do with rubber stamps?” I asked.
    He dropped the comic back into the carton and stood up. “Well, you can stamp
things with them,” he said, brushing off the knees of his jeans. “I have
different-colored ink pads. Or you can just look at them.”
    He is definitely weird.
    “Are they valuable?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He picked up the math sheet from the
foot of my bed. “I’d better get home, Skipper. See you tomorrow.”
    He started for the door and I followed him. Our reflections stared out at us
from my big dresser mirror. Wilson is so tall and skinny and blond and
blue-eyed. I always feel like a dark, chubby mole next to him.
    If we were in a comic book, Wilson would be the superhero, and I would be his
sidekick. I’d be the pudgy, funny one who was always messing up.
    It’s a good thing life isn’t a comic book—right?
    As soon as Wilson left, I turned back to my dresser. My eye caught the big
computer banner above the mirror: Skipper Matthews, Alien Avenger.
    My dad had someone at his office print out the banner for me for my twelfth
birthday a few weeks ago.
    Beneath the banner, I have two great posters tacked on the wall on both sides
of the dresser. One is a Jack Kirby Captain America. It’s really old and
probably worth about a thousand dollars.
    The other one is newer—a Spawn poster by Todd McFarlane. It’s really
awesome.
    In the mirror, I