Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (18 page)

“It’ll be a good toy to show your parents. Very superhero,” Claire pointed out.

I smirked. “More like supervillain. The guys who make these things are all crazed on revenge.”

Understanding hit me again. I saw the same revelation in Claire’s expression of growing horror. Desperately, I told her, “Claire, we have to do something. Ray’s a superhero now. He’s so mad, he’ll destroy the science fair and think it’s a good deed.”

“Not until after dark. Too many staff hanging around until then. We’ll come back after dark. We can talk sense into him. If not… well, we have powers, too,” Claire answered.

got home. Mom noticed me staring out the window, of course. “Something happen at school?” she asked as we drove up. The school is so close I can walk if I’m patient, but the short drive took forever. Ray was out there planning something nuts.

Not actually lying had worked so far. I made sure to grumble, which didn’t require any faking. “I put The Machine up for the science fair, and now I’m reaping what I sowed.”

Mom is too good at reading people for her own good. Since I didn’t want to talk about it, she let it drop.

Now I had cover to trudge into the house and straight into my room and lock the door behind me. Those audible but unintelligible voices would be Mom telling Dad I had to work it out for myself. Right? That was what Mom would do?

Seconds crawled past. Dad failed to come knocking at my door as I turned on my computer. Mom came through. I had cover for tonight.

Ray wasn’t online. Hadn’t been online all day. I was going to need that cover.

Claire was online, but I didn’t feel like talking to her, and she didn’t seem any more eager.

Time crawled. Around sundown I went to stage two. I found a multi-hour video of the championship tournament of Teddy Bears And Machine Guns and put that on. That would be my alibi.

It got dark. I couldn’t wait anymore. I pried open my window, crawled out, snuck my bike out onto the street, and pedaled off toward school. This could go wrong in so many ways.

As I pulled up to the school, out of breath, one of those ways nagged me, tensing my stomach. What if Ray couldn’t be talked down? He had super powers now!

I unlocked the lab’s front doors and rode the elevator down. I could stash my bike safely here so it wouldn’t get stolen. Even in this neighborhood, someone might try that.

The gate slid open. Ray wasn’t here. My heart sank a little further. It would have been so much easier to talk this out here. At least I could use the back door to get into the locked school.

I looked around at the clutter. I’d hardly stuck any batteries to the wall yet. Pieces of circuitry formed a pile on a work table against the wall, and bars of plastic and metal sat in piles on the floor. My jumpsuit hung over one of the levers of the brooding anemone mass of my smelter. The air conditioner cannon lay right in the middle of the room, still gently pouring out chilly air.

Ray had super powers. So did I. I had a cannon. Okay, a souped-up air conditioner, but it might convince him not to just push me out of the way.

I wished I’d had more time, more inspirations, more weapons. Armor and a disguise in case I was seen. Not good for either, but I slipped into my jumpsuit. And the helmet. And the sticky gloves. And I grabbed the German grenade and stuffed it into a pouch at my waist. I was armed for Bar Mitzvah. It would have to do.

I walked down the long tunnel to the door behind the shop classroom. For the first time I noticed how bleak and shadowy it was. At the other end, I snuck into the (hopefully abandoned) school. The blank white hallway was empty. I crept upstairs. The institutional, dirty beige hallway was empty. The gym was on the very far end of the school, at the tip of the J, and I walked as softly as I could. Any minute a janitor, security guard, or late teacher could spot me, and then what would I do?

They didn’t. I reached the mud brown, oversized twin doors that opened into the ground floor of the gym. I pulled on a handle. The door came open, and I stepped in just in time to see Ray kick over a display table.

At least, it had to be Ray. Skinny, my height, wearing black. Not a black T-shirt and pants. A black suit. Dress shirt, jacket, crisply creased slacks, shiny black leather shoes, that same black hat, and a pitch black mask. Not one of those skimpy generic hero masks, but a masquerade ball mask with a sharp beak that hid the whole upper half of his face.

He kicked another table over. I didn’t recognize whose glassware broke, whose papers scattered all over the floor and turned purple with chemicals. I did recognize his next target. He walked over to Marcia’s exhibit, broke the lock as he yanked it open, and lifted out the alien machine.

I had to say something. What could I say?

Someone else knew. “Put the energizer down, and your hands up,” a girl’s voice ordered.

The gymnasium was three stories tall. I had never looked at the metal struts that crisscrossed the ceiling like rafters in an attic. Now a girl in pink plunged down from them, sliding down a cord and then letting go to land with expert delicacy on her feet.

She held a long pole in her other hand, an extended cheerleader’s baton. With the full body pink leotard, the little dress, the sparkles everywhere, she had to be a superheroine. A superheroine our age? A sidekick. It hardly mattered. This was now officially a disaster.

“I knew it,” she lectured Ray smugly. “I knew there were supervillains’ kids mixed in at this school. All I had to do was make the bait too good to resist.” The baton twirled, and she leveled it at Ray. “Energizer down, hands up.”

Ray lifted the glowing alien machine up in one hand, and threw it. He didn’t throw it at the girl, but still threw it so hard it sailed all the way across the gym and bounced loudly off the wall. Then he cracked the knuckles of both black-gloved hands theatrically. Ray couldn’t possibly be this stupid.

They lunged for each other, so fast I had trouble keeping up. The girl pushed aside his fist with her baton and they slammed together, except she’d tangled her foot with his and Ray went down hard on the flat of his back. The baton didn’t wait for a moment. She prodded it right into his throat, pinning him with the threat of it as she laid a foot on his stomach. She was good. Who was she? A memory turned over. Miss A, the Original’s sidekick. I’d never met either. Like Mom, the Original had no powers, which meant he had to be one of the toughest, fastest, smartest men around. Ray was in trouble.

My heart squeezed into a knot in my chest. I flicked the power on the air conditioner all the way up, the focus to the tightest blast it could deliver, raised my arm, and fired at her back. The barrel fastened to my forearm jerked, and the gymnasium echoed to a violent crash as a hole punched through the wall behind Miss A, level with her head.

Thank goodness for terrible aim. If that had hit, it would have taken her head off. I thumbed the force down to a more moderate level as I stepped out onto the gym floor. I hoped my voice would be steady! “Killing you the first time we met would be bad form. The Original might think this was personal. Still, I thought you should know how badly you’re outgunned here. Hands up, or run away, or whatever it is sidekicks do when they lose. We’ll finish our business here and go.”

Sarcasm dripped like venom as Miss A drawled, “Oh, please! Who do you think you’re fooling?”

Marcia’s favorite vocal tick was unmistakable. Yes, that was Marcia’s voice, and her size and shape and blonde hair where the mask let it loose. Marcia was Miss A.

Ray’s peculiar English accent was also unmistakable. A word out of his mouth and she’d know. I pulled out the German grenade, turned its volume to max, and tossed it out into the room. It hit a table and rolled off, nowhere near Marcia.

“You have the worst-” was as far as her sarcastic reply got. The grenade screamed out over top of her, “SIE HABEN DAS NULL!”

Marcia flinched. In that flicker of focus, Ray rolled out from under the tip of her baton.

“That is-” Marcia started to say, and the grenade screamed, “DAS IST!”

Ray was back on his feet. Marcia swung her baton to face him, and he lifted his hands, fingers spread instead of bunched up into fists this time. I clenched a fist, walking over toward the German grenade, lifted my hand, and released my grip. Blue and purple lightning arced out to ground into Marcia. Even if she couldn’t feel it, the flash of light made Marcia spin around to face me. Her foot planted again, stuck, and she lost her balance before ripping it free of the floor. It would take a lot of charge to keep a determined human stuck to anything.

Thank goodness her squeal didn’t set off the grenade again. My throwing arm really was terrible. I bent down and picked it up off the floor. Dramatically, I clicked the volume down to zero again.

Marcia’s roll took her under a row of display tables. As she hopped up on the other side, Ray kicked a table out of his way and advanced on her, each step slow and cautious. Her mouth curled into a sneer. “Do you amateur clowns think you can toy with me?” She sounded confident and she looked poised, not tense, as she waited for Ray.

“Uh-huh. That’s exactly what we think,” another girl answered for us. She shuffled into the gymnasium. She had to shuffle. The full body brown teddy bear pajamas with the loose teddy bear hood had loose teddy bear feet. Her voice squeaked. She looked and sounded six. The hood shadowed everything but a broad, white-toothed grin.

Marcia laughed. “This gets more sad by the minute. You can barely walk in that outfit. How could you hurt anyone?”

Marcia wasn’t exaggerating about Claire’s costume. Claire. That had to be Claire. Claire’s floppy bear feet dragged as she waddled up to Marcia. I clenched both fists. Marcia smirked at her. Then Claire punched her in the gut.

Not the gut. The solar plexus. I’d heard it didn’t matter how fit you were, a punch right there below the ribs hurt. Now I saw it in action as Marcia stumbled backwards, bent over and wheezing loudly, fighting for breath.

Ray stepped forward, but I shook my head at him. Marcia forced herself upright, and I pointed both fists at her and unleashed the charge I’d been building while Claire’s power distracted her. Then I swung my air cannon around, twisted the focus to a wall of force big enough I couldn’t miss, and fired. I still had the force set too high. Tables tumbled, and Marcia didn’t just fall over, she flew off her feet and landed on the floor against the wall.