Archvillain (8 page)

“You’re wrong about that. Everyone likes him, but they all want things from him. Do you know he was
staring at his pizza for five minutes before I came over and explained what it was and how to eat it? And a whole crowd was standing there, just watching him watch it. No one said anything. They worship him, but they won’t interact with him.

“It’s lonely being him, Kyle. His powers set him apart.”

Kyle felt something strange in his chest just then. Was it … sympathy? For Mighty Mike?

Impossible!

But in a way, Kyle understood. Until Mighty Mike had arrived, Kyle had been in the same position — set apart by virtue of his superior brainpower. The other kids worshipped him, adults feared him, but no one would just
talk
to him….

Except for Mairi …

It was cold out and his breath and Mairi’s breath plumed up and out, joining and mingling, then drifting off into the night sky.

Mairi shivered.

“Mairi, I’m really busy,” Kyle heard himself say.

She frowned at him, then opened her mouth to say something.

Then she changed her mind and pressed her lips together tightly before turning and walking away, silent.

Kyle almost called after her.

Almost.

I will admit that I felt bad, watching Mairi walk away from my house. I watched her go down the driveway and then turn left at the sidewalk. At any point, I could have shouted for her to come back.

But it wouldn’t have mattered. No matter what I say, Mairi is still under Mike’s spell, like everyone else in Bouring. Words won’t suffice. I have to
act.

Once I’ve disposed of Mighty Mike, Mairi will come around. She’ll see him for what he is. Or was.

My bedroom is inefficient for work space, so I’ve taken over the basement. When I was younger, my father would putter down there on weekends, but now the place is nothing more than dusty benches covered with dusty tools.

I figure he won’t mind if I commandeer it. And the best way to make sure he won’t mind is simply not to tell him.

I’ve gathered everything at my disposal — old computer parts, a broken TV, the video camera (Dad finally told me where it was), pieces of yard tools. In short, everything that wasn’t spoken for, I’ve collected and brought to the basement, where my plans will begin.

Oh, from such innocent remarks are empires built!
Dad’s comment about the camera reminded me
why
it was broken in the first place. I had taken it to school in the third grade to record one of my greatest pranks: the Pantsing of Mr. Columbus.

Mr. Columbus was a long-term substitute, in for Mrs. Greene, who had had a baby. He was annoying and stupid and clueless. Moreover, he seemed to
enjoy
being annoying and stupid and clueless. He delighted in punishing kids for no reason, tormenting those who could not immediately answer his questions, and mocking those who lived in fear of him.

Of course, he had to be stopped. In fact, the other kids
begged
me to do something about him.

Mr. Columbus wore suspenders every day. Red suspenders on Valentine’s Day, bright green suspenders for St. Patrick’s Day, polka dots, rainbow stripes, sky blues, and on and on. I imagined his closet at home, endless row upon endless row of suspenders, hanging among his cheap polyester slacks and frayed-cuff button-down shirts.

So I used a pair of garden shears, a gallon of semi-gloss paint, four yards of nearly invisible fishing line, and a complicated system of gears and pulleys, and one day while Mr. Columbus sat at his desk, glaring at us, I remotely snipped his suspenders in the back.

When he stood up to yell at someone, his pants dropped to his ankles.

(He was wearing embarrassingly tight bright red underpants, from which his legs jutted like the ends of a hairy wishbone. How mortifying for him.)

I, of course, had videotaped the whole thing, planning to hack into the local news broadcast and really embarrass Mr. Columbus, but I was sold out by the very same kids who’d begged me to pull the prank. As Mr. Columbus yelled and ranted, his face nearly as red as his skivvies, everyone turned to me, gazing in mute awe and indictment.

When Mr. Columbus grabbed my arm to drag me to the principal’s office, he jostled my backpack and broke the video camera.

Still. It was worth it. Mr. Columbus wasn’t quite polite after that, but he was a little more mild. And he certainly treated me with a little respect.

Which is what really matters.

But that was three years ago. I was younger. Not as bright. Not as capable.

Now it’s time for … the Pants Laser!

Pantsing was a time-honored tradition. Kyle himself had never actually been pantsed — no one would dare! — but he’d seen it done any number of times and he’d successfully pulled off the World’s Most Advanced Pantsing with Mr. Columbus.

The idea of visiting similar humiliation on Mighty Mike was so delicious that Kyle couldn’t stop salivating. Sure, it wasn’t the same as exposing Mike’s space alien origins, but it would be a start in making people stop taking the kid so seriously. First, humiliation. Then, once the public turned against him … the final blow. Exposure. The truth. It would be beautiful.

He worked late Thursday night into Friday morning, until his mother — bleary-eyed with sleep and wrapped in a ratty old robe — yelled at him from the top of the basement steps.

“What on
earth
are you still doing awake at this hour? What are you doing down there? You have school in the morning!”

School was about as meaningful to Kyle as a slug was to an eagle, but he dutifully slunk off to bed, telling Erasmus to play an alarm two hours later, when he could be sure his parents were fast asleep. He woke up, slipped down to the basement, and spent the remaining hours of darkness toiling away until the sun came up and it was time to get ready for school.

On the bus, Mairi ignored him. He once again felt the pangs of regret, now growing stronger. But he had to stay steady, resolved. Once he humiliated Mighty Mike in front of Bouring (and the world?), she would come around. It was Friday. Mighty Mike Day was tomorrow. He didn’t like being on the receiving end of her cold shoulder, but it would just be for one more day. One more day and then everything would be better. He knew it.

During school, he couldn’t focus on his teachers, not that it mattered. He spent his time furiously scribbling in his notebook, writing the equations and computer code that he would need to complete the Pants Laser.

The design for the Pants Laser was flawless. It was, Kyle thought humbly, a work of such staggering genius that its mere blueprints would make scientists and engineers weep for joy. It used pieces of video camera, old pulleys from a ten-speed bike, some leftover screws, and the remains of a broken Game Boy. To anyone else, this
stuff was junk. To Kyle, it was the very building blocks of creation.

There was a problem, though. A big problem.

He needed a laser.

There was just no way around it, he realized, sitting there in Miss Hall’s history class, listening to her drone on and on about the Aztecs. It couldn’t be avoided. A Pants Laser needs a laser. It’s right there in the name.

He pulled at his hair. Miss Hall thought he was raising his hand and asked him to name the most important god in the Aztec pantheon. Without thinking, Kyle rattled off everything he knew about Huitzilopochtli, which was considerable. (Kyle had spent one night memorizing Wikipedia. Just because he could.)

Miss Hall stared at him as he rambled, but he was only paying attention with a fragment of his brain. A laser. He needed a laser. It didn’t have to be a powerful one — he could ramp up its power easily. He just needed the basic components.

As he babbled about Huitzilopochtli, he looked up at Miss Hall, who stood there, still staring, as if she wanted to break in and stop him but didn’t know how. She was standing in front of a screen she’d lowered to show the class examples of Aztec art projected from her laptop.

And she was holding a laser pointer! There was the telltale little red dot, bright against Cihuacoatl’s face like a radioactive pimple.

Sweet.

“I have to have the laser pointer,” he told Erasmus at lunch. For the second day in a row, Kyle wasn’t eating with Mairi. She was still angry at him. At least she wasn’t sitting with Mighty Mike — Mike had been summoned by the FBI to fly to Seattle and rescue some bank robbery hostages, so he wasn’t even in school right now.

Occasionally, Mairi would look over at Kyle, who sat at a table in the corner by himself, murmuring to Erasmus. With his earbuds in, everyone thought he was singing along to a song.

“You could just go buy one,” Erasmus reminded him in a very snarky tone of voice that Kyle didn’t think sounded like his own at all.

“I don’t have any money. I spent it all on the components to upgrade you, if you recall.”

“Money well spent,” Erasmus said. Erasmus was very self-absorbed, Kyle realized. That had to be a flaw in the music player’s original circuitry. After all, Erasmus had been patterned on Kyle’s own personality, and Kyle was very humble.

“You could always swipe some money from your mother’s purse,” Erasmus suggested. “Or grab her credit card and order it online.”

“I don’t have time to wait to have it delivered,” Kyle told him. “Mighty Mike Day is tomorrow. And besides, if I
have
to steal, I’d rather steal from Miss Hall than from my own mother.”

“You’re too sentimental,” Erasmus sniffed. How could a machine sound so disapproving?

“Sentimental? I just don’t want to steal if I don’t have to.”

Erasmus said nothing, but his silence was somehow disapproving.

“Look,” Kyle said, “I have to live with my mother. If she catches me stealing, it’s more complicated than a teacher catching me.”

“Can I suggest you don’t get caught?” Erasmus said in a tone of voice that communicated his belief that Kyle was incapable of doing so.

“Shut up,” Kyle said, and turned Erasmus off.

One of these days, Erasmus would figure out how to turn himself back on, and then Kyle knew he would be in trouble.

Kyle had never stolen anything in his life. He didn’t believe in it. Stealing was
wrong.
Stealing was for desperate
people, people with no options, people who didn’t know better. People who just didn’t care.

Kyle wanted the world to wake up to its own foolishness, but that just meant shoving people’s faces in their own idiocy. It didn’t mean actually hurting anyone or taking their property.

After shutting off Erasmus, he spent the rest of lunch trying to come up with another option, but even his considerable brainpower came up short.

Coming up with a plan to steal the laser pointer was vastly easier than coming up with a plan
not
to steal it. Kyle was starting to see why crooks didn’t just go get jobs.

When school was over, Kyle didn’t get on the bus. He lurked outside near some tall, fat boxwoods that flanked the front door to the school. When no one was looking, he ducked behind the boxwoods and hid there until everyone was gone. Then he sneaked around to the back of the school and found a maintenance door. It was locked, but Kyle’s superstrength came in handy — he ripped the doorknob off with a single pull and the door creaked open.

The teachers must have been almost as eager to get out of school as the students — Kyle didn’t see anyone as he crept along to Miss Hall’s room. He stuck to the shadows and the alcoves but occasionally put on a burst of superspeed when he needed to be out in the open.

She hadn’t locked her room, which was a good thing — he wouldn’t have to break another door.

Nor had she locked her desk. She was, Kyle decided, practically
begging
someone to steal from her. She pretty much deserved it. It would be a lesson to her to be more careful in the future.

He rifled through her desk, finding the little penlike pointer in record time. He snatched it up and flicked it on just to make sure he had the right object. It would suck to steal a random pen.

The red light came on, stabbing at the ceiling. Kyle grinned.

Now he just had to get home without the bus.

Not a problem.

Kyle soared over Bouring, the wind whipping his hair, the breeze invigorating and alive.

He
loved
to fly. Sometimes when he flew, he could almost stop thinking.

He hadn’t flown like this in days. He usually sneaked out to the mine for some power-testing time when his parents were asleep, but it wasn’t the same as being out in the open air during the day, with nothing above him and the world below him, where it belonged.

It was still early in the afternoon, so he flew high, worried that someone might identify him.

As he flew, people down below pointed and jumped up and down. They thought he was Mighty Mike.

Feh.

Kyle slipped his earbuds in and switched on Erasmus.

“Flying in broad daylight,” Erasmus said. “Smooth move. Are you
asking
to get caught and dissected in a government lab somewhere? ”

“Shut up and play some music,” Kyle told him.

His parents wanted him to attend the Mighty Mike Day parade, but Kyle would have none of that. He spent some time in the basement, in what was quickly becoming his combination lab/workshop, and built a brain-wave manipulator. It distracted him from the Pants Laser for an hour or two, but it was necessary. Since he’d cobbled it together quickly out of an old VCR, a broken cell phone, and two bike chains, it would only work on his parents, but it should suffice.

The brain-wave manipulator was roughly the size of a shoe, so Kyle very cleverly put it in a shoe box, with a hole cut out of one side for the alpha waves to come out. He wasn’t sure if cardboard could block alpha waves, but why take a chance?