Hero by Mike Lupica

night, neither one of them ever mentioned it. And Zach certainly wasn’t going to bring it up, especially not to Kate. He wasn’t going to tell her that he’d not only gone in there alone, he’d gotten in the middle of a mugging or managed to scare off a perv or whatever it was he’d done.
    But whatever he had done, it had felt amazing.
    When he’d finally gotten into bed that night, it had taken him what felt like hours to get to sleep, that was how excited he was. How amped .
    Like he hadn’t just faced down his own fears, he’d finally put a face to the Bads and stared them down.
    Looked them in the eye and chased them off for once.
    He had to admit, he did think about going back the next night. And the night after that. But he’d stayed inside the apartment, kept himself busy at his computer. One time he even made it as far as the elevator, feeling those feelings coming up again like a bad moon rising, before he heard his mom, back from her trip by then, say, “Going somewhere?”
    Standing there between the foyer and the living room.
    Zach was quick enough on his feet to say, “I had a crucial Knicks question for Lenny, but then I remembered like a dope that he’s already gone home.”
    “How about you go back upstairs and focus on some school questions,” his mom said. “So maybe that B in history becomes the A that it ought to be.”
    She went back into the living room. Zach followed her, watched her grab her book off the coffee table and settle in on the couch.
    “But what if the B is happy being a B?” he said. “What if it turns out that it was an overachieving C before it shocked the world by becoming that B?”
    She gave him one of those mother-of-all sighs.
    “Be gone,” she said, pointing up the stairs.
    “What if it’s that one B that’s making all the other B’s in the world so darn proud?” he said.
    “Go.”
    He went upstairs and worked on history for a while. When he was done, he went out on the balcony and stared out at the park, wishing his mom hadn’t caught him before he could sneak out. He thought about going back on his computer. But he wasn’t in the mood to be researching his dad tonight, reading about him instead of talking to him.
    He was missing him too much.
    That never stopped. That was something he couldn’t let go of, the way he couldn’t let go of his suspicions—his belief— that the accident wasn’t actually an accident. There were times when he wanted to talk about it with somebody, with his mom or Kate or somebody who wouldn’t look at him cross-eyed when he opened up about this stuff. But he hadn’t come up with anything beyond his own conspiracy theory.
    And the one time he had run it by Kate, she’d acted like she pitied him.
    Poor, sad, deluded Zach Harriman.
    As much as Kate Paredes loved being right, she was dead wrong about the crash that killed his dad, and one of these days Zach was going to prove it.
    And there was no way she understood him and his feelings, because Zach wasn’t close to understanding them himself.
    What did he understand on nights like this, clear as the lights of the city in front of him?
    His dad was never coming home.
    Zach would sit out on the balcony, and for a few minutes he would think this was like all the other missing-dad nights in his life. For a few minutes he would feel exactly the way he used to when his dad was away, and trick himself into thinking he was coming back next week.
    But then a much worse feeling would come in right behind it, like he’d been sucker-punched, and he’d remember all over again.
    His dad had promised to take him to a Knicks game soon. And over the Christmas break, he had promised they’d go skiing, just the two of them, up in Vermont. All those promises, and more, would never come true now. So that was the emptiest feeling of all.
    It was why what should have been good memories now felt like bad ones, because they hurt too much. When his dad used to surprise him and come back early