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Keeper Chance hasn’t been an E.V.I.L. villain for long, but there are two things he knows:
One: Nothing is ever as it seems. That goes double when you’re up against a doppelgänger. It’s going to take patience and perseverance for Keeper and villainous teammates Toby and Y to figure out who is who and why someone who can be anyone would want to kidnap a senior member of E.V.I.L.
Two: It helps to have time on your side. But the doppelgänger seems to have recruited flunkies who can bend time to their will. Even worse, there’s Toby’s brother, who’s no slouch when it comes to being a parental snitch.
Before the clock runs out (or back), it’ll take a showdown with the time benders—not to mention some seriously vicious cats—to unmask the imposter and end the mayhem. Someone is going to have to step up and save the day. But will it be an E.V.I.L. hero…or a H.E.R.O.?
THE Love dojo sat in quiet isolation surrounded by serene woods, perfectly manicured fields of grass, and meditation gardens containing an occasional tea house overlooking a lily-pad-filled pond. The entire property was the cornerstone of class and exhibited the art of dignity at its finest.
The middle-aged man, known within the E.V.I.L. villain community as Showboater, was an absolute affront to everything for which the dojo and its owner stood. This offense was made worse by the fact that Showboater was currently spraying glitter about the dojo’s empty hallways like a farting unicorn. The loss of bling was a natural side effect of the villain’s excessively sequined pants, rhinestone-bedazzled jacket, and glitter-shedding short cape. Luckily, it was one in the morning, so nobody was around to notice.
Truth was, nobody would have noticed at one in thebafternoon, either. That was Showboater’s skill. The more he showboated, the more flamboyant he was, the more he disappeared. It was a skill that served him well as an E.V.I.L. villain.
Showboater victory-danced his way through the building and down a barren hallway, and kicked open a door at the end. He jumped inside, dropped to a knee, and jazz-handed it with everything he had. “TA-DAAAA!”
There was no response. Showboater looked around.
The room was empty and dark, except for the moonlight coming through the large windows overlooking the grounds. He rose to his feet and scanned for security cameras. Seeing none, he quietly closed the door and calmly walked over to a wall lined with bolts of fabric. Showboater put a finger to his mouth in thought and started systematically studying the textiles.
“Too flashy. Too pink. Too shiny. Too last season. This one was out before it was even in. Honestly. What was Vogue Love thinking?”
Vogue Love was married to Sensei Love. Sensei ran the dojo, teaching the best of the best. His skill was martial arts. Vogue dressed the best of the best. Her skill was making the perfect fabric and designing the perfect outfit for an individual’s skill and personality. Fashionable and functional, but first and foremost fashionable.
“Ah, this has potential.” Showboater ran his hand down a bolt of dark blue fabric. He stopped and touched his fingers together. They were tacky. “What the Wicked Witch of the West? It’s like a herd of banana-eating three-year-olds manhandled this fabric with their grubby mitts.”
Showboater continued down the line. “No. No. No. Praise Emperor Palpatine! This is it. This is the one.”
The chosen fabric was black. It was rigid and yet fluid. How did Vogue do it? Were those specks of gold hidden in the weave? A masterpiece of textile.
Showboater removed the bolt of fabric from its spot and carried it to the door. He placed his ear against the doorjamb and listened for any sign of late-night activity in the hallway. Silence. Showboater inched the door open, peeked out, and left the room with the bolt of fabric.
Getting into the dojo had been easy. Showboater had snuck into the back of a work truck before it had entered the dojo’s grounds, then showboated his way into the fashion wing, where he’d hidden in a closet until he was sure everyone was asleep. Getting out was going to take some doing. He would find an exit, preferably not alarmed, on the west side, where the forest was about a quarter mile from the building. He could disappear in the trees, make his way over the security wall, and be back in the nearest town before morning and before Vogue would notice her fabric had been stolen. The latter inevitably resulting in a hissy fit Showboater did not want to be around to see or hear.
Showboater crossed from the east wing of the building to the west and stopped, listening. Footsteps?
“Crud.”
Showboater moved down a side hallway and listened again. The footsteps were still coming toward him.
“Double crud.”
He quietly hurried down the hallway and took a left. He needed to hide. There was no way he could properly showboat with the giant bolt of fabric in his arms.
Showboater chose a door and slipped inside. “Oh, just awesome,” he said, in an overly dramatic woe-is-me fashion. “Of all the doors to choose. Now here I am in the belly of the beast.”
Sensei Love’s office was just like Sensei Love. All business. It was minimalist and cold, with two insanely-uncomfortable looking chairs placed in front of his modern desk.
Showboater circled around to the back of the desk, placed the fabric against the wall in a corner, and moved the mouse on the dustless desktop. The monitor came to life showing a rotation of security feeds. It looked like Showboater could exit from the office windows. If he danced in a straight line, he might be able to go undetected between two cameras.
He moved the mouse up, and the screen went back to sleep. Next to the monitor was a picture of a little girl with red hair in pigtails. She had a dripping ice cream cone in each hand and was delivering a snap kick toward the camera. Showboater smiled at the photo, then noticed a tray with manila folders. The tab on one of the folders read KEEPER CHANCE.
Showboater removed the folder, placed it on the desktop, and opened it.
“Great googley moogley!”
Showboater’s head snapped up. The footsteps were outside the door. He grabbed the file, shoved it down his shirt through the neck hole, went straight into his best dance move, the running man, and boogied his way into a corner of the room.
Sensei Love entered and looked around. Saw no one, went to his desk, and began scanning through the folders in the tray. When he came up empty, he walked over to a file cabinet positioned on a wall near the door and continued his search.
Clearly perturbed at not finding what he was looking for, Sensei returned to the desk and woke up the computer. Instead of using his fingerprint to gain access, he did something completely uncharacteristic. Sensei said some extremely colorful words, mostly about himself in the third person, complained about fingerprints over facial recognition, and left the office.
Thank goodness, because Showboater wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep the showboating up. He was now done with doing the shopping cart, had moved into the sprinkler, and was sweating up a storm.
Showboater waited a few seconds, which seemed more like hours, until footsteps could no longer be heard in the hallway.
He didn’t know who was scarier: the real Sensei or the man who had just been in Sensei’s office and was clearly an imposter. Showboater had to get as far away from the dojo as possible, and fast.
He opened the window and climbed out, leaving the bolt of fabric behind, and took off at a sprint for the woods, not worrying about being seen by the real Sensei or setting off any alarms. The folder was still safely hidden away in Showboater’s shirt. He had an overwhelming feeling that the fake Sensei had been looking for Keeper Chance’s file. It needed to be hidden someplace safe until Showboater could get help.
THE man known as Chaos had entered Peachmont High School through a back door. It hadn’t required a key or a crowbar. All that was needed was a chain of mildly catastrophic events causing the lock to fail and rendering the security system inoperable.
His footsteps echoed throughout the halls, and his boots squeaked on the tile floors. “Why do empty schools always feel like a haunted, abandoned mental institution?” Chaos whispered to himself. The idea was probably left over from the irreparable psychological damage done around four decades ago, when he suffered through the horrors of high school.
Chaos’s penlight flickered across painted concrete brick walls, illuminating flyers for chess club and theater tryouts. He found his destination, language arts room 347, at the end of the hall. Chaos opened the door, went straight to the teacher’s desk, and started rifling through the drawers, searching for papers belonging to the fifth-period class. He opened the period five folder and thumbed through it until he found Keeper Chance’s story. It had an 80 percent grade, and written in red pencil was Great effort!
Chaos read the story and rolled his eyes. “Puh-leaze!” He was hardly the literary type, but he knew a slapdash job when he saw one. The paper was solid C material, and this teacher’s comment was completely insulting to Keeper’s lack of effort.
Chaos put the paper back inside the folder and left room 347 in search of precalculus, room 102. He had already hacked into the school’s systems and seen Keeper Chance’s schedule, report cards, and individual grades for assignments and tests. For that matter, he had been following Keeper’s educational career for quite some time, but there had been a particular comment on a recent report card, from this year’s math teacher, that interested Chaos. Keeper seems to rush through and finish early but doesn’t take the time to double-check his work.
Chaos was confident that Keeper didn’t need to double-check his work to know he had a solid 75 percent on a test. Based on Chaos’s observations, Keeper Chance could have finished a math test early, without double-checking, and received an A+ if he wanted.
Chaos found room 102. It wasn’t an internal room, so he turned off his penlight before he entered, not wanting to be seen through the windows. The moon was bright enough that he wouldn’t need the extra light.
Chaos followed the same motions as he had in room 347. He found the test, looked it over for corrections, folded it, and placed it in the messenger bag he wore across his chest. He couldn’t help but smile as he put the desk back in order, then left the math room in search of the nurse’s office.
Yes, indeed, Chaos had a good feeling about Keeper Chance. Not that he’d ever actually met Keeper. “Soon enough,” Chaos said to himself as he headed to the front of the school. “Soon enough.”
The nurse’s room was just past the main office. One door in and one door out.
Chaos searched through his bag and removed a screwdriver, along with a new door handle. It looked the same as the one currently on the door, but it had a lock that operated through an app.
He set to work removing the handle from the nurse’s door and replacing it with his own. He was halfway through tightening the new handle into place when headlights from a car flashed through the windows behind him. Chaos immediately flattened himself on the floor and waited. It was hard to say if it was school security or the police. Was it a routine drive-by, or had someone come to investigate the broken alarm situation?
The water fountain twenty feet away began to groan. Sparks shot from the wall where it was mounted, and water spouted out of the fountain’s bubbler, spilling over the side and causing a pool to form on the floor.
“Get it together, Chaos,” he whispered to himself. “You control chaos. It doesn’t control you.” Chaos closed his eyes and focused on his breathing.
The headlights disappeared. The sound of car tires faded into the distance. Chaos picked himself up, dusted off his coat, and pushed his half cape back behind his shoulders. The smell of smoke from the sparks began to fade, but there was no hope for the water fountain. There would be a major mess to clean up in the morning.
Chaos finished his handiwork on the nurse’s door, placed his tools back in his bag, and tested the handle.
“Excellent. Phase one complete.” Chaos looked at his watch. It was getting late, but that was no reason to not exit through the cafeteria in hopes of finding a post-midnight snack. He didn’t have to start watching the Chance house on Willow Street for another few hours. He wanted to be sure Keeper made it to the last day of school before spring break.
If you’ve ever lost a sock in the dryer, it might have been the work of the Evil Villains International League, E.V.I.L. And if your feet smell so bad, they keep you from making friends, you might be invited to join your local chapter–– like Keeper Chance was.
Keeper Chance grew up in the care of his nagging grandmother and his life was the poster child for unremarkable. But things become far more remarkable, and fast, when Keeper and another recruit face E.V.I.L.’s initiation test—and disasters begin to snowball.
Keeper quickly learns that nothing is easy, and nothing is ever as it seems. As he races against the clock to save his new friends, the stakes are high—not only for the survival of villainy, but for whether Keeper will discover his true nature. It turns out that everyone needs a hero, even a family of misfits who call themselves villains.
Alex Evanovich lives in North Carolina with her family. Her favorite Hobbit is Samwise Gamgee. The sorting hat says she’s a Ravenclaw. Her favorite Darth Maul is the one from Clone Wars with giant robot legs. And she’s never rolled a nat 20.
July 19
Hillsborough, NC
Orange County Public Library
Creative writing workshop, grades 6-12, free (registration required)
https://orangecountync.librarycalendar.com/event/draft-creative-writing-workshop-alex-evanovich-grades-6-12-19583
For school and library visits, contact Roberta Stout at Simon & Schuster,
[email protected]
For all other event and publicity inquiries, contact Morgan Maple at Simon & Schuster, [email protected]
For rights inquires, contact Celeste Fine at Park & Fine Literary and Media, [email protected]