Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (16 page)

I pulled out the battery and checked it. If it wasn’t still full, I couldn’t tell. “Doesn’t eat much power, either. That or these are super super-batteries.” Half a dozen of the batteries on the table had glowing purple stripes now. Ray had been busy while I worked.

Ray was right. This, finally, was a superhero toy. I wanted to play with my new gloves, but while my batteries were still charged, I personally felt drained.

I leaned against my work table, hard. “Tell you what, guys, I’ve had enough inventing for today. I’d like to go home and get in a game, if a certain someone will log in when he gets home instead of disappearing.”

So we did. I walked home to clear my head. Home was just close enough that it would be faster walking than trying to call my Mom. Now was not the time to get her thinking about the lab anyway. A few more days and I’d be ready to spring my surprise.

Tuesday Ray was still wearing black, but I had more important issues on my mind, like an upgrade tree to candy chainsaws that would counter the regeneration and duplication of zombie rag dolls. That, and one other thing.

“How is the science fair display going? You have to put it up tomorrow, correct?” Ray asked over lunch.

I put my arms over my head. I’d have dropped my head on the cafeteria table if pudding weren’t in the way.

“That bad?” he guessed, wincing in sympathy.

I grunted. “Yes. Not really. I’ve been hoping a blinding ray from heaven would illuminate me as to how to make the judges swallow an invention. I get it. Technically it’s a really fancy baking soda volcano. I just wanted a way around that, and it’s not coming.”

“It bugs me. The only reason The Machine won’t change energy and manufacturing forever is that there’s only one of it. That should be more important than the rules.” The scowl on Ray’s face didn’t look right, and I was glad when it disappeared. I glanced over my shoulder. His welcoming smile was directed at Claire, who didn’t seem at all ruffled by the flirty tilt to it. Had something happened between them? Was that why Ray was so laid back and distracted this week? I had to be imagining it, because they both turned their attention right back to me. Maybe Claire’s power hit Ray harder than it hit me.

That was a slightly less welcome topic than the science fair, and the venting had eased my nerves already. I kept up with it. “You’ve just described half of the inventions mad scientists make.” I needed a better term than that for people like me, but if it was good enough for Mech, maybe I was too sensitive. “Dad is It, he’s the top, the best, because he can duplicate and record his processes, and he can only copy maybe half the stuff captured from supervillains. Then when he hands his notes and samples over to regular engineers they tell him it might as well be moon language.”

“That just makes my point. You’ve built something beyond the scientific process, not beneath it,” Ray insisted.

“Never found a good way to present The Machine?” Claire asked, giving me a pained grimace like Ray’s.

“Nothing good. I’ll have to try to describe what it does as a test and pray for a C.” I shrugged, hoping to convey that I was okay with that. And I was, honestly.

Anyway, that raised a thought. “What about you, Ray? What are you turning in?”

He stared at me. Then he let out a sudden, sharp laugh. “Hah! Absolutely nothing! We’ve been so busy with super-powered stuff, I completely forgot.”

Yikes. “I’m sorry, Ray.”

He shrugged, and unlike me, he pulled it off. “Why? It’s a tiny part of the grade. I’ll still get an A. I dragged my heels so badly last year I never turned anything in. This time it’s for a good cause.”

Claire set a stack of cold pizza slices in front of me. I dug in, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask.

End of the day and I still wasn’t sure what I meant to ask, but I meant to pin Ray until I worked it out. I headed for the side door he uses to leave school as soon as the closing bell rang.

Instead of the ambusher, I became the ambushee. As I came down the stairs and caught a glimpse of him standing by the door, he turned and charged up to me, grabbing my hands. He grinned at me. He had so many teeth. Okay, a stupid thought, but seeing all that shiny white, that’s how it hit me.

“Come here. Watch this!” he whispered to me. He pulled me down the stairs, and then left me to stand at the door while he wandered outside. Pulling out a pocket watch, he glanced at it, then took a book out of his backpack, and leaned against the wall to read.

Marcia and two of her friends walked past. He’d set up a mirror image of the confrontation two weeks ago. He couldn’t think she’d try the same thing.

He’d pegged her better than I had. She didn’t seem to notice him. She was looking at one of her friends instead, and I caught the words “Wait until you see it!” Her hand still darted out to grab the book.

The book moved, dropping a couple of inches just as she struck. She missed. Her head turned, and her face set in anger as she grabbed again. She moved so fast, she should have gotten it. The book only dipped, but she missed.

Ray had a moment’s advantage as she glared at him, stunned. He closed the book, folded his arms, and told Marcia, “I don’t get it. You’re obsessed with being better than everyone else, all the time. Why? You’ve got enough going for you. You’d be really cute if you weren’t so mean.”

That got her laughing, sharp and sarcastic. “Oh, please! Are you hitting on me?”

The contempt in her voice made me wince. It rolled right off Ray. “Not likely. Dating a shrew like you would be a nightmare. I just kept thinking there had to be a better person underneath. I guess not!”

That wiped the sarcasm from Marcia’s face and replaced it with a stiff mask of hate. I didn’t see her move, but her friends each grabbed her by the arm. Her feet dragged, but she let them walk her away. Ray didn’t rub it in, except by watching with the same solemn concern.

“What did I just see?” Claire whispered from behind me. I’d been too distracted to notice her approach. All I could do now was shake my head and push the door the rest of the way open and walk out to meet Ray.

“Ray, what was that?” I asked him, hearing my voice peak in surprise.

That didn’t faze him either. On the contrary, he tucked his book away and stepped up to Claire and me, turned, and scooped an arm around each of our waists. “Exactly what it looked like. I meant every word. I decided I couldn’t be the better person if I didn’t try, just once, to find the other side of her.”

I had trouble listening. He’d slipped his arm around my back so casually. His hand stayed high on my hip, not intruding, but his arm was around my waist. I would never have expected him to do this to Claire, much less me. He had his arm around Claire, too, but that was it. Even if he didn’t make a single move further, he’d just made it clear that he knew exactly whether I was a girl or a boy.

I could feel my heart thumping in my chest as he pulled away from both of us, leaving us at the front door to the lab. “I’m sorry, ladies, but I’m going to play truant again this afternoon. I still have a lot to think about. Life seems different since my two best friends became superheroes.”

He walked off. I tried to slow down my heart. Not that I had any idea how to do that, but slow breaths helped. Realizing I’d just turned into a frightened rabbit and made a giant fool of myself did not.

“I guess if he wants to be alone, we have to let him. Do you want to get any building done today?” Claire asked me, her voice completely noncommittal.

I shook my head. “My Mom will be picking me up out front in a minute. I don’t have time to build today. I have to go home and try to put some kind of science fair project together for tomorrow.”

The day came. Wednesday, the first day of the science fair. I woke up in the morning expecting to be terrified, but I felt okay. I had other things on my mind.

I didn’t get to pursue those things immediately. There was no time to talk in homeroom, and I didn’t catch Ray on the way to Math, and Science was all lecture—most of it about the science fair and how we would set up, which left me drumming my fingers and staring at Claire and Ray, impatient for lunch.

It took its own sweet time, but lunch did arrive. I made myself get a tray of food, but, when I slapped it down on the cafeteria table, I had no interest in it. My eyes were on Ray’s hat. The hat had taunted me since homeroom. It sat low and wide-brimmed and velvety black on his head, matching the black clothes he was still wearing. Another question for the pile, but they all tied together.

I didn’t have to wait for Claire to bring this out. “Fashionably late” today meant thirty seconds. She slid down next to me, folded her hands over the top of her lunchbox, and stared at Ray’s hat, too. Her expression was more affectionately amused than my interrogating stare. Ray’s face remained blankly indifferent, as if we weren’t even there while he chewed away at baby carrots from a little plastic bag.

Might as well go for the kill. “You got super powers from drinking the Serum, didn’t you?” I demanded.

Ray let out a sigh—a relieved sigh. He sagged in his seat like he’d started to deflate through his blissfully wide smile. “Thank goodness. I was praying you’d figure it out. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

I picked a nominal tater tot off of my tray and flung it at his forehead. He caught it before it hit, plucking it out of the air like I’d gently lobbed a softball. “You twit. You lied to me and drank the Serum on purpose, then you tried to hide it from us!”

“He didn’t try very hard,” Claire pointed out. She still had her blandly amused version of a poker face on.

Ray finally looked guilty. Not much, more exasperated than guilty, but he put his hand to his forehead and lowered his face and told us, “I was an idiot for hiding it. At first I wasn’t sure it worked.Then I thought I’d surprise you like we’re going to surprise your parents, then I couldn’t figure out how. I didn’t really want to keep it a secret from you, I was just stupid, stupid, stupid, and I’m sorry.”

I spotted the hole he was talking around. “But you’re not sorry for stealing the Serum.”

He looked up at me, right in the eyes. “Not in the slightest. It worked. I have super powers. My two best friends have super powers, and now I do, too. Would you regret it?”

I clenched my teeth. I scowled. The answer was as obvious as The Machine clamped around my wrist. No, I wouldn’t have regretted it.

“So you really have super powers? How super are we talking?” Claire asked. Now that I’d had to swallow Ray’s apology her detachment had disappeared, and she leaned over the table eagerly to hear.

“I drank twenty times as much Serum as you did, and I got maybe five times the effect. You can’t put numbers on it, but look,” he whispered. Grinning like I would grin, probably did grin, he pressed his thumb against the metal tabletop. Pressed hard. Cafeteria tabletops aren’t the sturdiest metal in the world, but should it have dimpled that much?

He pulled his hand away. He’d left a dent. A deep, obvious dent.

“That is superhuman,” Claire whispered back. She was smiling, too. Oh, criminy. So was I. Ray had me. This was awesome.

Ray glowed with pride. “I’m not sure about superhuman. Maybe extreme end of human. I can’t lift a car, but I can lift the front end.”