Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (2 page)

And Claire was looking forward to inheriting those powers.

Thank goodness, Ray also wanted to move on. “There’s no way your mother is human. Regular humans can’t do that,” he insisted.

“Chess grandmasters are regular humans. She says it’s just focus and study, like Sherlock Holmes.” Contrary to what I’d just said, I agreed with him. We’d been passed on the road by a police chase once, and she’d gotten on the radio and told them where to set up a road block, and they caught the criminals. She’d been able to explain it, but when she got to calculating how fast the criminals had intended to drive rather than how fast they were driving, I gave up. I knew she wasn’t perfect, but, when villains heard The Audit was coming, they used to give up right there, and I couldn’t blame them.

Claire passed me a cup of real gravy, which I poured on the school’s bland Salisbury steak. Cutting a slice, I took a bite. The rich gravy made a world of difference. Claire’s lunchbox is a collectible antique with Krazy Kat on the cover. Her Mom feeds her like a princess. My Mom makes me buy a cafeteria lunch. I would never have asked, but Claire shares the wealth automatically. She has those looks, and she’s generous and kind. Is it any wonder her Mom got a full pardon when she retired? Of course, she’d saved the world a couple of times. What kind of crazy supervillain tries to destroy the world?

Half of them.

I stopped jonesing for super powers before I started and dug into my lunch. A little gravy made the mashed potatoes stop being pulped cardboard, too.

Claire gave Ray a chocolate cupcake, which must have made his sandwiches a thousand times more bearable. Ray eats like he’s on the edge of starvation. As skinny as he is, his metabolism must burn like a blow torch. He got done in mere minutes and asked, “How did the big German test go?”

“Nicht so gross. Got a B,” Claire admitted.

Ray looked at me.

I couldn’t think of any way to brush it off.

I let out a sigh. “I got a C.”

“Ow. Really?” asked the boy who never got less than an A on any test in his life.

Not that he was trying to be mean. He was trying to be sympathetic, which made it worse. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to get a C in the class,” I admitted. I winced, my whole body tightening up, but it hadn’t been… that bad to say. Just pretty bad.

Ray tried to comfort me. “Everybody has subjects they just don’t get. Languages are yours, I guess.”

Claire nodded.

“I’m not supposed to have bad subjects! My parents are the two smartest people in the world!” God, it dug at me. It dug right at my heart. How could I even explain this to them? “Can you imagine the look my Dad gave me when I brought home a B in Algebra II? He was trying to not let me know how disappointed he was. That’s the look he had!”

“You weren’t even supposed to
be
in Algebra II. You and Ray are the only kids going across to Upper High for Geometry, and you’re getting an A in that,” Claire pointed out. She was trying to cheer me up, not blow me off. She didn’t get that it just didn’t matter.

I couldn’t help but feel bitter. Or cheated, maybe. Some kind of ugly emotion, anyhow. “I just want my super powers to activate now. I won’t even have to worry about this stuff. I’m smart enough to get this frequency stimulator thing Dad designed working, at least,” I grumped.

The bell rang. I wasn’t done eating. Oh, well, I’d had the good stuff.

You want to know how good friends Claire and Ray are? When we got up, I noticed a plastic case in her bag. She’d gotten a new superhero collectable figure. She and Ray can geek out about them for hours. They’d kept their mouths shut about it not to rub it in. Then I’d spent the whole lunch period talking about super powers anyway.

We all had PE together. Half the class was spent changing into and out of our gym clothes, which I bet is why we only had the class on Wednesdays. Sometimes we could get together and talk, like when we were standing in line for the horse. Today was basketball, so no luck there.

The game went about like expected. Two random kids were picked as captains. The boy picked Ray second to last, and the girl picked me last. I wasn’t the last person picked, though. The boy still had one more person to pick. Claudia, of course. Ray and I ran around the edge of the crowd until someone threw the ball over everyone’s heads, and I jumped up and grabbed it.

Ha! I wasn’t the greatest dribbler in the world, but I was in the clear because I hadn’t been in the pack in the first place. I dribbled right past Claudia, who didn’t even try to stop me, and found myself face to face with Ray. He wasn’t a good runner, and he was already so winded I was able to duck right by him. Unfortunately for me, Claire had been lingering on the edges too. She snatched the ball in the middle of one of my clumsy dribbles and passed it to Li, who was a way better shot than either of us.

Still, face to face to face on the basketball court had been cool. I was considering chalking up this gym class as a rare success when the boy captaining his team started to yell. Not “yell,” exactly, but he had a nasty tone as he told Claudia, “What is wrong with you? You just stood there! You really are slow in the head, aren’t you? At least try to play the game!”

I wondered if I should get Miss Theotan’s attention, but it wouldn’t do any good. If she’d witnessed it personally, she’d come down on bullying like this like a ton of bricks, but she was on the other side of the court, and if a teacher doesn’t see it, it didn’t happen. Instead, Claudia turned away from the boy without a word. The crowd of kids taking the ball away from each other again and again turned and lurched in our direction with Claudia in the middle of it. She grabbed the ball as it went past, tossed it over everyone’s heads, ran through the crowd, and caught it herself, then launched it from the three point line and sank the basket.

You’d think that would get everyone gabbing and circling around Claudia and she’d finally be popular, right? No, that’s not how it works. All of a sudden a girl was complaining to Miss Theotan that it wasn’t fair that one team had one more player than the other team, and, as Ray and Claire and I stood around feeling helpless and guilty about it, Claudia ended up sitting on a bench for the rest of the game.

That put my mood right back in the dumps. I dodged Claire and Ray both when class ended, and with it the school day. I didn’t step out the school doors until it was exactly time to meet my Mom, driving up to take me home. She didn’t ask me about my obvious bad mood, so I didn’t have to tell her about the test.

Nothing eases the sting of social injustice like knowing you’ll soon have super powers to help you combat it. Nothing eases the sting of lousy test scores like knowing you’ll soon have the ability to absorb and then apply abstract data far beyond mere human limits. If they ever really integrate psychological theory, my Dad will be impossible to live with. Until then, us normal humans have a shot at outwitting him.

Not a good shot. He’s still a genius. Still, I had the advantage of experience. I wandered into his office. To my delight, I found him at his computer with an e-reader laid on either side of his keyboard, scrolling slowly down a web page with lots of text and a few teeny, tiny diagrams. The curiosity bug had caught him. He was researching. He’d have no attention left for anything else until it all came together in his head.

Or not. As I picked my way through the stacked up books and lifted the first pile of printed paper to peek at the title “Subliminal Paralyzation Cascades” he spun around in his seat and greeted me. “Hey, Pumpkin! How was school?”

I pointed at the “Pumpkin” jar. He put a dollar in it blithely. It hadn’t made him stop, but the penalty really supplemented my pathetic allowance. “Princess” is five bucks, but I’m saving that jar for emergencies.

I needed a plan.

“Where’s that paper on the antenna thing that resonates with the human nervous system?” I asked. My plan? Pretend it was something totally normal to ask for.

Dad took off his work glasses, which folded up as he scratched his head. “If you want me to build you one, the answer is ‘no.’ The shock is too dangerous to be used casually, and not dangerous enough to be a weapon. It didn’t even bring Marvelous’ powers back. Really a failed project.”

That was not good news. Not for my plans, and not for one of the nicer superheroines. “Is she okay?”

“Beebee took a look at the release records and worldwide superhuman crime reports. She says the odds of any criminal being near enough to LA and crazy enough to try a hit on a depowered hero are insignificant,” he answered. Beatrice Benevolent Akk, would be my Mom. Officially retired, as was my Dad, but still neck deep in the community.

“Not what I meant, Dad. Will she get her powers back?” I pressed.

“She says her powers will return when the curse is broken.”

Oh, the weight on those words. We had this argument again. “Dad, I can’t believe you still don’t believe in magic.”

He argued back as if this were the first time. “Pumpkin, I’ve done the analyses. She’s inherited a tone of voice and sensitivity to electrical currents that allow her to initiate some very complex energy chain reactions with precisely formulated sound wave patterns.”

I pointed at the jar. Money in the bank.

“So she can cast spells,” I translated back to him.

“They just happen to sound like incantations,” he insisted.

We glared at each other. Then I realized he’d taken off his glasses, so I took mine off to make it fair. We glared at each other a few seconds more, then both broke down laughing at the fuzzy-edged blob arguing against us.

“So, where is that paper on the nervous resonating antenna thing?” I asked.

He looked around the room, then his eyes drifted down the rows of piled up books, drives, notebooks, clipboards, and sheaves of paper. Got him! He’d started analyzing his own pattern of clutter. He knew it well enough to figure out the system when he needed to. “Under the Audubon Field Guide. I’m still not going to build you one.”

I scooped it out. No title, but the first paragraph talked about matching neural electromagnetic resonance. He loved printing out his work. Good for me!

“I need to do it myself anyway,” I evaded. “It’s for the science fair.”

“How is school? Report cards will be coming in soon. Were you ready for that German test you were worried about?”

EEK.

Okay, shake it off. Not literally. He didn’t notice me freeze up. I flipped through the pages laying out the engineering of the antenna. “I don’t think I have time to talk, Dad. I have to do a lot of math. Really a lot of math. Really, really a lot of math.” A different sort of horror crept over me at the thought. Urgh.

“Yeah, I bet. Good luck, Pumpkin,” he urged me. I pointed at the jar silently. I would have liked to gloat that I was cleaning up today, but I was trying to keep from fainting.

I could do this. I got the trig and calculus textbooks off of the kitchen shelf, praying I wouldn’t need to use them. I got my custom smart phone (like Dad would let me use a brand name when he could spend three weeks making one that works across all platforms) to use the calculator functions.

So many equations. Okay, I had to know the percentage by mass of each element in the antenna. I ran into Dad’s electronics workshop and copied down the label on his cheap spares. It didn’t matter what they were as long as I had the numbers, right? That gave me three variables he had down with Greek letters, and I plugged them into the next equation, which… took differentials of sines and cosines. He had to be kidding me. I dug out both books I’d been hoping not to use. I’d seen this stuff before. I just had to find the cheap rules and apply them… Okay, no. No, this was too complicated. I had to understand what I was doing. How did you get the first differential of a sine function?

I didn’t know. It just… it just didn’t make any sense. There was something there. I had to know because the waves from the antenna when they traveled through my skin had to become waves that would merge with waves in my axons, causing a chain of…

I could almost see it, but those words didn’t make sense. What was I doing? It was like trying to call The Mona Lisa a painting. Just work out the math the cheap way. I’d need my body mass index; that was in the next equation. Of course, I needed my real, exact body mass index, not just some rough approximation by comparing weight and height, or whatever the rule-of-thumb trick was.