Author: phoenixnz
Title: The Losers Club
Characters: Clark, Lois, Chloe, Pete, Abby, Oliver, Martha, Jonathan, Lex
Genre: AU
Rating: PG
Warnings: Firstly, this is not Clark Kent as you know him as he's adopted by the Queens. Second, there is a death mentioned in the chapter of a recurring character in the show. This also starts right at the beginning but while canon events like the FOTW do get a mention, this is more about the relationships (at first) and how those events affect them.
Summary: Clark Queen has been orphaned twice over and lives with his mother's cousin in Smallville. It's a pretty normal life. He goes to school, he does chores and he has good friends. Even if the other kids consider them the biggest losers in school. Then Clark's life is turned upside down when Lois Lane comes to Smallville.
a/n: I originally envisioned a slow-burning romance between Clark and Lois, but it isn't turning out that way, so this is a story of friendship. I plan a second part to the story, however which will include romance.
a/n2: Reposting these first chapters as they were lost due to the server crash.
Chapter One
Clark shivered uncontrollably, his whole body aching with the cold and pain. Normally the temperature didn’t affect him, but this time was different. He’d been in the same position for an hour at least. He’d lost track of time.
Pain shot through his lower legs as he tried to shift his body on the cross, trying to figure out how he could actually get off this thing. It looked like the guys that put him there weren’t coming back any time soon.
Damn Whitney and his stupid friends, he thought.
The blond jock had always been jealous of Clark, ever since he’d come to live in Smallville. Whitney’s parents owned Fordman's Department Store in ‘downtown Smallville’. If it could be called downtown, since it was really only one main street. Sure, there were a couple of other streets with various stores, but Main Street was the central hub of the town’s business district, catering to the town’s population of 45,001.
Fordman’s had started off in the early 20th century. Whitney’s great-great-grandfather had opened up the store in about 1919. It had just been one building then. A little general store catering for the local farmers. It had expanded three times since that time.
The Fordmans were one of the wealthier families in the town. Until Clark had gone to live with Martha and Jonathan Kent, Whitney had probably considered his family second in wealthy status only to Nell Potter and her niece, Lana Lang, who also happened to be Whitney’s girlfriend, despite the fact she was a freshman and he was a senior at Smallville High.
Nell had adopted Lana after her parents, Lewis and Laura Lang, had been killed when Lana was three. The couple had been coming to pick up their daughter from her aunt, who had been looking after her while they’d gone to a homecoming game. They had been killed when their car exploded from the impact of a meteor from the infamous meteor strike of 1989.
It was too bad for Whitney that Clark’s parents were considered the richest in Star City. Or they had been. Robert and Laura Queen had been on a plane which had disappeared off radar in the Pacific when Clark was six.
“It never stops.”
Clark looked up and frowned. It was dark but he could just make out the face of the man standing in front of him. It was familiar. Jeremy Creek. Clark’s best friend Chloe had discovered that Jeremy had been in a coma in the state infirmary for twelve years. She suspected what had put him in the coma was a blast of radiation from the same meteor strike. He’d been strung up in the same predicament Clark currently found himself in.
Smallville High apparently had a tradition. The football jocks would choose a ‘loser freshman’ and string them up on a cross in Miller’s Field, calling it the Scarecrow. It was a form of hazing. Jeremy had been chosen that year.
Jeremy started to turn away, but Clark called out to him. “Help me,” he said.
The man, who seemed not to have aged a day since the meteors, shook his head.
“I thought if I punished them, it would stop.”
“Please …”
“You’re safer there,” the other boy/man responded.
Clark frowned, wondering what Jeremy meant by that. He’d learned that three former jocks, from around the same time Jeremy would have been at the high school, had been attacked and taken to hospital.
He hung on the cross, struggling weakly to break the bonds. He had no idea why his strength had left him. He felt weak and nauseated, his body aching and feverish. He remembered when he was about ten, Jonathan had come down with a bad flu and had been laid up for a couple of days. The aches and pains he was describing sounded exactly like Clark was feeling now.
He heard the sound of a car engine. It sounded to him like it was an expensive car and wondered if it was Lex. The son of Metropolis billionaire Lionel Luthor had recently moved to Smallville. Clark wasn’t exactly clear on why the twenty-one-year-old son of one of his father’s business acquaintances had moved to the town, but they weren’t exactly friends and he wasn’t about to ask. He did know that Lex was now running the Luthorcorp fertiliser plant, which was nearby.
They’d met a few times when Clark had had to go with Jonathan and Martha to fulfil his family’s social obligations. He’d always found them boring. Lex could often be found hanging out at the bar or hiding in the coat closet reading comics.
“Clark? Clark Queen?”
He squinted as a beam from a flashlight shone in his eyes and realised the bald man was the one holding the light.
“Lex?”
“Ah geez!” The man dashed forward, quickly undoing the ropes that bound Clark to the cross. “Who did this to you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
As the last of the ropes fell away, the necklace Whitney had placed around his neck also fell to the ground. The effect was almost instantaneous. He looked down at his hands. The cramping pain which had seemed to have turned his hands into arthritic claw-like appendages was gone; as was the stomach cramps and the nausea.
“You should see a doctor,” Lex said.
“I’m fine,” Clark told him, grabbing his clothes. He had a feeling that whatever Jeremy had planned, it had something to do with the school. The same school where his best friends, Chloe, Pete and Abby were attending the homecoming dance.
An hour later, his friends were none-the-wiser as they came out of the school gymnasium to find several of the jocks’ trucks in a pile in the parking lot. Whitney Fordman’s truck was at the very top.
Clark watched from the shadows as the blond football captain stared in dismay.
“Serves you right for calling me a loser and stringing me up,” he said quietly. Not that the other boy would have heard any of that.
He could see Chloe laughing. When he and Pete had told her about the homecoming ‘tradition’, she had wanted to write a scathing editorial damning the hazing. Abby, who had been the target of considerable hazing herself, had egged her on. It was never a good idea to encourage Chloe when she was on one of her crusades. She had only been living in Smallville a year or so and had already managed to get herself involved in various scrapes.
Clark smirked as he left the school grounds. The Losers Club wins again, he told himself. Maybe the rest of the school would never know who was actually responsible for what happened to the trucks, but he still got a sense of satisfaction out of it.
He was up late the next morning. Martha had called up the stairs telling him to hurry up or he would be late for the farmers’ market.
Why the older couple continued to sell their produce at the market when they didn’t really need the money, Clark didn’t know.
As he lugged a bushel of apples off the truck to take to the stand, he complained about it to Jonathan.
“You know your father’s will stated the money was to be held in trust until you’re eighteen.” He’d refused to use any of the money, saying it was for Clark’s future, although they apparently had enough of a stipend from the estate to allow them to hire a couple of hands and were debt-free.
“I just don’t get why you don’t just hire someone to run the stall,” he said.
Jonathan ruffled his hair. The blond farmer was almost as tall as Clark.
“Hard work keeps a man honest, son. Do you think your father just sat around in that office of his contemplating his business investments? No, he actually worked for Queen Industries’ money.”
Clark had been too young to really understand what his father did and had barely even seen his father’s office by the time his parents had disappeared. Oliver would have understood it better, he supposed, feeling a slight twinge of grief.
His brother, Oliver, had been almost nine when Clark had been adopted by the Queens. The elder boy had been spoiled but doted on his younger brother.
According to the adoption records, Robert and Laura Queen had been planning on visiting Laura’s cousin, Martha Kent, the day the meteors had struck Smallville. The car they had rented from an agency in Metropolis had broken down on the highway and Robert had been looking for a passing vehicle when Oliver had become bored. He’d wandered off into the cornfield, his mother chasing him, when the meteors came down. They’d found a little boy and assumed he was lost.
Further investigation had found that the little boy’s birth parents had been killed when their car had overturned after it had been struck by a meteor. Feeling sorry for the child, who couldn’t have been more than two or three, Laura had suggested to Robert that they adopt him.
The truth was much, much stranger. Robert and Laura Queen had been part of a so-called secret society, called Veritas. Working with a philanthropist and scientist, Virgil Swann, they had discovered a message from the stars. The message told of the arrival of a child named Kal-El.
The scientist had also discovered that a distant planet, which his own advanced tech had found, had suddenly disappeared from the galaxy. Assuming the message was a cry for help, he had shared this information with the others in the society. Lionel Luthor, Edward Teague and the Queens had been the only members.
Knowing Lionel would have used the boy to aid him in his own ambitions, Robert and Laura had managed to calculate where and when Kal-El was likely to arrive and had put off a business trip to go to Smallville. Fortunately, since Laura’s cousin happened to own a farm there, they had the perfect cover for the trip.
Coincidence or not, Lionel had also been in Smallville the day of the meteor shower, negotiating a buyout of the local creamed corn factory, which was now a Luthorcorp fertiliser plant.
Jonathan and Martha had been coming back from town when a meteor had struck the ground, very near to where the Queens’ car had stopped. The truck had overturned. Luckily, Robert had seen the accident and had immediately gone to help.
Clark hadn’t known any of this until some years later. When his parents had disappeared, he and his brother had been sent to live with Martha and Jonathan. Laura had wanted her boys to be raised in a ‘normal environment’, rather than grow up spoiled.
Oliver hadn’t taken so well to farm life. He’d been a moody teenager, on the cusp of adolescence. He had wanted to stay at his boarding school in Metropolis, but Jonathan wouldn’t hear of it. The older boy had started freshman year at Smallville High. His attitude hadn’t improved by the time he graduated. Instead of spending a summer working on the farm, he decided he was old enough to do what he wanted and that was partying on a yacht owned by Queen Industries.
That was the last Clark had seen of his brother. Grief-stricken over losing his brother just a few short years after losing his parents, he had begun acting up. Jonathan had finally taken him aside and told him the truth about his adoption, explaining why his parents had chosen for him and his brother to be raised in Smallville if anything happened to them. The Kents had known the truth about Clark and agreed to protect him.
“Hey Queen,” a voice said almost nastily. “Stop staring at my girl.”
Clark looked up and glared at the tow-headed jock.
“I wasn’t staring at your girl, Fordman,” he replied.
“Yeah, well, whatever. Loser.” He looked around at the young brunette talking with Martha. “By the way, I need that necklace back. It’s Lana’s favourite.”
“Well, you better go back to the cornfield and look for it,” Clark told him.
“You don’t have it?” Whitney’s voice was almost a squeak as he realised how much trouble he would be in if his girlfriend learned he’d somehow lost her favourite necklace.
Clark had so many choice words he wanted to say to the jock. If the other boy hadn’t chosen him as the Scarecrow, then he wouldn’t be in trouble with Lana.
“She’s gonna kill me if she finds out …” Whitney wailed.
“Well, gee, that’s too bad.” Clark turned away, almost knocking Lex over. “Oh, Lex. Didn’t see you there.”
He helped Martha and Jonathan pack up. Lex walked with him.
“You want to tell me what that was all about last night?” he said.
“Just a stupid prank,” Clark said. “By some friends of mine.” That was a lie, but he didn’t feel the need to explain himself to the man.
“Yeah?” The bald man raised an eyebrow. “Well, if that’s what a friend does to you, I’d hate to see their enemies.”
Jonathan approached them. “Clark, what is holding you up? Oh, hello Lex. I heard you’d moved here.”
“Yeah, my father’s idea of ‘introducing me to the business’,” he replied, rolling his eyes. Clark smirked. He’d read in some article that Lex had been expelled from Metropolis University over an incident which had been very quickly hushed up. The older man had told him he’d wanted to do anything but work with his father.
Clark followed the two men to the stall where Martha was selling someone a basket of produce.
“Oh, Lex, how are you, dear? I heard you had an accident the other day.”
Clark looked at the man, raising an eyebrow. “What’s this?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Lex replied. “I just lost control of my car.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised with the way you drive, son,” Jonathan joked. The bald man shot him a dirty look but the farmer just laughed. Clark had heard the couple talking about the way Lionel treated his son and they’d always tried to be friendly with the younger man.
“Sounded to me like it was more than that,” Chloe interjected, coming up behind them. She’d obviously heard part of the conversation.
Lex turned to stare at her. “And you are?”
“Chloe Sullivan. My dad is your plant manager.”
Lex nodded. “Oh. Of course. What were you saying?”
“I have a contact at Smallville Med,” she told him. “Oh, I also edit the Torch.”
Lex looked even more confused. “The Torch?”
“It’s the school paper,” Clark told him. “Chloe, shut up.”
The blonde reporter shook her head and clearly refused to back off. As much as Clark enjoyed her insatiable curiosity, there were some moments when she just didn’t know when to quit.
“My contact said you not only drove your car off of Loeb Bridge, but you also drowned. If that idiot truck driver who actually caused the accident hadn’t pulled you out, you’d be dead.”
She went on to explain that the accident had happened when some baling wire had fallen off the truck and rolled into the road. Lex had tried to avoid it, only for one of his tyres to blow out and he lost control of his Porsche. The truck driver had already admitted fault for the unsecured load.
Lex looked uncomfortable as Martha immediately began looking him over with concern.
“Lex, my goodness! I do hope you were thoroughly checked out at the hospital.”
“Uh, yes, ma’am, I was. I’m fine. Just a couple of bruised ribs, that’s all. I consider myself very lucky.”
Chloe turned to Clark. “We’re going to the Beanery. Wanna come?” From her demeanour, it seemed like she had something important she wanted to talk to him about. Clark saw Pete and Abby looking at a stall a few feet away.
He looked guiltily at his guardian. “Um, I kinda have to stay here and help,” he said.
Jonathan clapped a hand on his back. “You’ve earned the rest of the day off, son. Just don’t forget you have chores later.”
“Yes sir.”
He went with his friends to the town’s coffee shop. Chloe ordered herself some coffee, a complicated concoction that apparently consisted of about four shots of espresso and some kind of syrup. It was a joke among the Losers Club that Chloe was so addicted to the stuff that they swore instead of red blood she had coffee in her veins.
As they all sat in a booth, Clark looked at his friend.
“So, what’s up?” he asked, wondering if she’d somehow discovered that he’d been responsible for the truck pile the night before.
Instead of talking about the dance, she began talking about her cousin. Lois Lane was a few months older than Clark and was a sophomore. Her father had been in the army.
“Well, you know how Uncle Sam died a few months ago?” she said.
Clark frowned, then remembered. Lois’ father had been out on inspection when the jeep he’d been travelling in had crashed into a ditch. The general had fallen out and hit his head. He’d lain in a coma for several days before he’d passed away.
Chloe explained that it had taken time to settle everything to do with the accident and what little there was of Sam Lane’s estate. Lois’ mother had died years before. Lois had been living with the family of one of the officers on the last base her father had been stationed at.
“So, what’s going on?” Abby asked. Clark smiled at her. She had terrible acne which marred her pretty face and had shaken her confidence but she was sweet and funny and he’d always liked her. When the jerks tried to bully her, he was always the one who would put a stop to it. As much as the other guys called him a loser for hanging out with the rest of the losers, they usually backed off. Clark was the tallest guy in his year and he could be intimidating if it wasn’t for the fact that he was tripping over his big feet most of the time.
“Lois is coming to live with my dad and me,” Chloe announced.
Title: The Losers Club
Characters: Clark, Lois, Chloe, Pete, Abby, Oliver, Martha, Jonathan, Lex
Genre: AU
Rating: PG
Warnings: Firstly, this is not Clark Kent as you know him as he's adopted by the Queens. Second, there is a death mentioned in the chapter of a recurring character in the show. This also starts right at the beginning but while canon events like the FOTW do get a mention, this is more about the relationships (at first) and how those events affect them.
Summary: Clark Queen has been orphaned twice over and lives with his mother's cousin in Smallville. It's a pretty normal life. He goes to school, he does chores and he has good friends. Even if the other kids consider them the biggest losers in school. Then Clark's life is turned upside down when Lois Lane comes to Smallville.
a/n: I originally envisioned a slow-burning romance between Clark and Lois, but it isn't turning out that way, so this is a story of friendship. I plan a second part to the story, however which will include romance.
a/n2: Reposting these first chapters as they were lost due to the server crash.
Chapter One
Clark shivered uncontrollably, his whole body aching with the cold and pain. Normally the temperature didn’t affect him, but this time was different. He’d been in the same position for an hour at least. He’d lost track of time.
Pain shot through his lower legs as he tried to shift his body on the cross, trying to figure out how he could actually get off this thing. It looked like the guys that put him there weren’t coming back any time soon.
Damn Whitney and his stupid friends, he thought.
The blond jock had always been jealous of Clark, ever since he’d come to live in Smallville. Whitney’s parents owned Fordman's Department Store in ‘downtown Smallville’. If it could be called downtown, since it was really only one main street. Sure, there were a couple of other streets with various stores, but Main Street was the central hub of the town’s business district, catering to the town’s population of 45,001.
Fordman’s had started off in the early 20th century. Whitney’s great-great-grandfather had opened up the store in about 1919. It had just been one building then. A little general store catering for the local farmers. It had expanded three times since that time.
The Fordmans were one of the wealthier families in the town. Until Clark had gone to live with Martha and Jonathan Kent, Whitney had probably considered his family second in wealthy status only to Nell Potter and her niece, Lana Lang, who also happened to be Whitney’s girlfriend, despite the fact she was a freshman and he was a senior at Smallville High.
Nell had adopted Lana after her parents, Lewis and Laura Lang, had been killed when Lana was three. The couple had been coming to pick up their daughter from her aunt, who had been looking after her while they’d gone to a homecoming game. They had been killed when their car exploded from the impact of a meteor from the infamous meteor strike of 1989.
It was too bad for Whitney that Clark’s parents were considered the richest in Star City. Or they had been. Robert and Laura Queen had been on a plane which had disappeared off radar in the Pacific when Clark was six.
“It never stops.”
Clark looked up and frowned. It was dark but he could just make out the face of the man standing in front of him. It was familiar. Jeremy Creek. Clark’s best friend Chloe had discovered that Jeremy had been in a coma in the state infirmary for twelve years. She suspected what had put him in the coma was a blast of radiation from the same meteor strike. He’d been strung up in the same predicament Clark currently found himself in.
Smallville High apparently had a tradition. The football jocks would choose a ‘loser freshman’ and string them up on a cross in Miller’s Field, calling it the Scarecrow. It was a form of hazing. Jeremy had been chosen that year.
Jeremy started to turn away, but Clark called out to him. “Help me,” he said.
The man, who seemed not to have aged a day since the meteors, shook his head.
“I thought if I punished them, it would stop.”
“Please …”
“You’re safer there,” the other boy/man responded.
Clark frowned, wondering what Jeremy meant by that. He’d learned that three former jocks, from around the same time Jeremy would have been at the high school, had been attacked and taken to hospital.
He hung on the cross, struggling weakly to break the bonds. He had no idea why his strength had left him. He felt weak and nauseated, his body aching and feverish. He remembered when he was about ten, Jonathan had come down with a bad flu and had been laid up for a couple of days. The aches and pains he was describing sounded exactly like Clark was feeling now.
He heard the sound of a car engine. It sounded to him like it was an expensive car and wondered if it was Lex. The son of Metropolis billionaire Lionel Luthor had recently moved to Smallville. Clark wasn’t exactly clear on why the twenty-one-year-old son of one of his father’s business acquaintances had moved to the town, but they weren’t exactly friends and he wasn’t about to ask. He did know that Lex was now running the Luthorcorp fertiliser plant, which was nearby.
They’d met a few times when Clark had had to go with Jonathan and Martha to fulfil his family’s social obligations. He’d always found them boring. Lex could often be found hanging out at the bar or hiding in the coat closet reading comics.
“Clark? Clark Queen?”
He squinted as a beam from a flashlight shone in his eyes and realised the bald man was the one holding the light.
“Lex?”
“Ah geez!” The man dashed forward, quickly undoing the ropes that bound Clark to the cross. “Who did this to you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
As the last of the ropes fell away, the necklace Whitney had placed around his neck also fell to the ground. The effect was almost instantaneous. He looked down at his hands. The cramping pain which had seemed to have turned his hands into arthritic claw-like appendages was gone; as was the stomach cramps and the nausea.
“You should see a doctor,” Lex said.
“I’m fine,” Clark told him, grabbing his clothes. He had a feeling that whatever Jeremy had planned, it had something to do with the school. The same school where his best friends, Chloe, Pete and Abby were attending the homecoming dance.
An hour later, his friends were none-the-wiser as they came out of the school gymnasium to find several of the jocks’ trucks in a pile in the parking lot. Whitney Fordman’s truck was at the very top.
Clark watched from the shadows as the blond football captain stared in dismay.
“Serves you right for calling me a loser and stringing me up,” he said quietly. Not that the other boy would have heard any of that.
He could see Chloe laughing. When he and Pete had told her about the homecoming ‘tradition’, she had wanted to write a scathing editorial damning the hazing. Abby, who had been the target of considerable hazing herself, had egged her on. It was never a good idea to encourage Chloe when she was on one of her crusades. She had only been living in Smallville a year or so and had already managed to get herself involved in various scrapes.
Clark smirked as he left the school grounds. The Losers Club wins again, he told himself. Maybe the rest of the school would never know who was actually responsible for what happened to the trucks, but he still got a sense of satisfaction out of it.
He was up late the next morning. Martha had called up the stairs telling him to hurry up or he would be late for the farmers’ market.
Why the older couple continued to sell their produce at the market when they didn’t really need the money, Clark didn’t know.
As he lugged a bushel of apples off the truck to take to the stand, he complained about it to Jonathan.
“You know your father’s will stated the money was to be held in trust until you’re eighteen.” He’d refused to use any of the money, saying it was for Clark’s future, although they apparently had enough of a stipend from the estate to allow them to hire a couple of hands and were debt-free.
“I just don’t get why you don’t just hire someone to run the stall,” he said.
Jonathan ruffled his hair. The blond farmer was almost as tall as Clark.
“Hard work keeps a man honest, son. Do you think your father just sat around in that office of his contemplating his business investments? No, he actually worked for Queen Industries’ money.”
Clark had been too young to really understand what his father did and had barely even seen his father’s office by the time his parents had disappeared. Oliver would have understood it better, he supposed, feeling a slight twinge of grief.
His brother, Oliver, had been almost nine when Clark had been adopted by the Queens. The elder boy had been spoiled but doted on his younger brother.
According to the adoption records, Robert and Laura Queen had been planning on visiting Laura’s cousin, Martha Kent, the day the meteors had struck Smallville. The car they had rented from an agency in Metropolis had broken down on the highway and Robert had been looking for a passing vehicle when Oliver had become bored. He’d wandered off into the cornfield, his mother chasing him, when the meteors came down. They’d found a little boy and assumed he was lost.
Further investigation had found that the little boy’s birth parents had been killed when their car had overturned after it had been struck by a meteor. Feeling sorry for the child, who couldn’t have been more than two or three, Laura had suggested to Robert that they adopt him.
The truth was much, much stranger. Robert and Laura Queen had been part of a so-called secret society, called Veritas. Working with a philanthropist and scientist, Virgil Swann, they had discovered a message from the stars. The message told of the arrival of a child named Kal-El.
The scientist had also discovered that a distant planet, which his own advanced tech had found, had suddenly disappeared from the galaxy. Assuming the message was a cry for help, he had shared this information with the others in the society. Lionel Luthor, Edward Teague and the Queens had been the only members.
Knowing Lionel would have used the boy to aid him in his own ambitions, Robert and Laura had managed to calculate where and when Kal-El was likely to arrive and had put off a business trip to go to Smallville. Fortunately, since Laura’s cousin happened to own a farm there, they had the perfect cover for the trip.
Coincidence or not, Lionel had also been in Smallville the day of the meteor shower, negotiating a buyout of the local creamed corn factory, which was now a Luthorcorp fertiliser plant.
Jonathan and Martha had been coming back from town when a meteor had struck the ground, very near to where the Queens’ car had stopped. The truck had overturned. Luckily, Robert had seen the accident and had immediately gone to help.
Clark hadn’t known any of this until some years later. When his parents had disappeared, he and his brother had been sent to live with Martha and Jonathan. Laura had wanted her boys to be raised in a ‘normal environment’, rather than grow up spoiled.
Oliver hadn’t taken so well to farm life. He’d been a moody teenager, on the cusp of adolescence. He had wanted to stay at his boarding school in Metropolis, but Jonathan wouldn’t hear of it. The older boy had started freshman year at Smallville High. His attitude hadn’t improved by the time he graduated. Instead of spending a summer working on the farm, he decided he was old enough to do what he wanted and that was partying on a yacht owned by Queen Industries.
That was the last Clark had seen of his brother. Grief-stricken over losing his brother just a few short years after losing his parents, he had begun acting up. Jonathan had finally taken him aside and told him the truth about his adoption, explaining why his parents had chosen for him and his brother to be raised in Smallville if anything happened to them. The Kents had known the truth about Clark and agreed to protect him.
“Hey Queen,” a voice said almost nastily. “Stop staring at my girl.”
Clark looked up and glared at the tow-headed jock.
“I wasn’t staring at your girl, Fordman,” he replied.
“Yeah, well, whatever. Loser.” He looked around at the young brunette talking with Martha. “By the way, I need that necklace back. It’s Lana’s favourite.”
“Well, you better go back to the cornfield and look for it,” Clark told him.
“You don’t have it?” Whitney’s voice was almost a squeak as he realised how much trouble he would be in if his girlfriend learned he’d somehow lost her favourite necklace.
Clark had so many choice words he wanted to say to the jock. If the other boy hadn’t chosen him as the Scarecrow, then he wouldn’t be in trouble with Lana.
“She’s gonna kill me if she finds out …” Whitney wailed.
“Well, gee, that’s too bad.” Clark turned away, almost knocking Lex over. “Oh, Lex. Didn’t see you there.”
He helped Martha and Jonathan pack up. Lex walked with him.
“You want to tell me what that was all about last night?” he said.
“Just a stupid prank,” Clark said. “By some friends of mine.” That was a lie, but he didn’t feel the need to explain himself to the man.
“Yeah?” The bald man raised an eyebrow. “Well, if that’s what a friend does to you, I’d hate to see their enemies.”
Jonathan approached them. “Clark, what is holding you up? Oh, hello Lex. I heard you’d moved here.”
“Yeah, my father’s idea of ‘introducing me to the business’,” he replied, rolling his eyes. Clark smirked. He’d read in some article that Lex had been expelled from Metropolis University over an incident which had been very quickly hushed up. The older man had told him he’d wanted to do anything but work with his father.
Clark followed the two men to the stall where Martha was selling someone a basket of produce.
“Oh, Lex, how are you, dear? I heard you had an accident the other day.”
Clark looked at the man, raising an eyebrow. “What’s this?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Lex replied. “I just lost control of my car.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised with the way you drive, son,” Jonathan joked. The bald man shot him a dirty look but the farmer just laughed. Clark had heard the couple talking about the way Lionel treated his son and they’d always tried to be friendly with the younger man.
“Sounded to me like it was more than that,” Chloe interjected, coming up behind them. She’d obviously heard part of the conversation.
Lex turned to stare at her. “And you are?”
“Chloe Sullivan. My dad is your plant manager.”
Lex nodded. “Oh. Of course. What were you saying?”
“I have a contact at Smallville Med,” she told him. “Oh, I also edit the Torch.”
Lex looked even more confused. “The Torch?”
“It’s the school paper,” Clark told him. “Chloe, shut up.”
The blonde reporter shook her head and clearly refused to back off. As much as Clark enjoyed her insatiable curiosity, there were some moments when she just didn’t know when to quit.
“My contact said you not only drove your car off of Loeb Bridge, but you also drowned. If that idiot truck driver who actually caused the accident hadn’t pulled you out, you’d be dead.”
She went on to explain that the accident had happened when some baling wire had fallen off the truck and rolled into the road. Lex had tried to avoid it, only for one of his tyres to blow out and he lost control of his Porsche. The truck driver had already admitted fault for the unsecured load.
Lex looked uncomfortable as Martha immediately began looking him over with concern.
“Lex, my goodness! I do hope you were thoroughly checked out at the hospital.”
“Uh, yes, ma’am, I was. I’m fine. Just a couple of bruised ribs, that’s all. I consider myself very lucky.”
Chloe turned to Clark. “We’re going to the Beanery. Wanna come?” From her demeanour, it seemed like she had something important she wanted to talk to him about. Clark saw Pete and Abby looking at a stall a few feet away.
He looked guiltily at his guardian. “Um, I kinda have to stay here and help,” he said.
Jonathan clapped a hand on his back. “You’ve earned the rest of the day off, son. Just don’t forget you have chores later.”
“Yes sir.”
He went with his friends to the town’s coffee shop. Chloe ordered herself some coffee, a complicated concoction that apparently consisted of about four shots of espresso and some kind of syrup. It was a joke among the Losers Club that Chloe was so addicted to the stuff that they swore instead of red blood she had coffee in her veins.
As they all sat in a booth, Clark looked at his friend.
“So, what’s up?” he asked, wondering if she’d somehow discovered that he’d been responsible for the truck pile the night before.
Instead of talking about the dance, she began talking about her cousin. Lois Lane was a few months older than Clark and was a sophomore. Her father had been in the army.
“Well, you know how Uncle Sam died a few months ago?” she said.
Clark frowned, then remembered. Lois’ father had been out on inspection when the jeep he’d been travelling in had crashed into a ditch. The general had fallen out and hit his head. He’d lain in a coma for several days before he’d passed away.
Chloe explained that it had taken time to settle everything to do with the accident and what little there was of Sam Lane’s estate. Lois’ mother had died years before. Lois had been living with the family of one of the officers on the last base her father had been stationed at.
“So, what’s going on?” Abby asked. Clark smiled at her. She had terrible acne which marred her pretty face and had shaken her confidence but she was sweet and funny and he’d always liked her. When the jerks tried to bully her, he was always the one who would put a stop to it. As much as the other guys called him a loser for hanging out with the rest of the losers, they usually backed off. Clark was the tallest guy in his year and he could be intimidating if it wasn’t for the fact that he was tripping over his big feet most of the time.
“Lois is coming to live with my dad and me,” Chloe announced.
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