Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (5 page)

“You two are finishing the school day. Sorry, kids!” Claire’s Mom told Claire and Ray as I walked away from them.

Being sent home from school early never felt so much like a victory parade.

Keeping my hands off of The Machine during the ride home was a labor of Hercules. Keeping from bouncing off the ceiling of the car was a labor of Hercules.

“Go over the process of building it for me, Pumpkin,” Dad urged from the front seat.

“Mom?”

“One Princess, one Pumpkin,” she acknowledged.

“The question stands,” my father insisted.

“There’s not much to go over. I’ve been getting more and more stressed out, and I felt like building that power-revealing device would fix it. This morning, it got so bad I cut class to try to build it. It was the only thing I could think about. Then I got some tools, and, when I figured out they weren’t enough, I got an idea of how to fix that. Then I ran out of words. That’s why I don’t know what it does. I knew what I was making, but I don’t know what that knowledge meant. I was really wrapped up in it. Totally obsessed, lost track of the world.” That was pretty much all I knew.

“That’s not my power,” Dad mused.

“It might be an early stage. She has the comprehension skill you do, but she doesn’t know enough science yet to communicate that comprehension with her language centers,” Mom countered. I ought to have felt incensed that I’d been brushed off with “doesn’t know enough science,” but compared to Dad? No, I didn’t know enough science.

We pulled into the driveway. Dad set a speed record getting out of the car.

“To my workroom, young lady. We’re going to find out what you built, and what you can do,” he ordered.

Maybe a “young lady” jar next to the other two?

I beat Dad to the lab. Workroom, laboratory, whatever you want to call it. Me, I’m getting a lab. Since Dad’s specialty is applying other people’s theories rather than research, it was actually a fancier version of the school’s shop class. Much, much fancier.

I had to wait, hands clasped and grinning like a mad scientist, while he unlocked the door. I felt like I’d float right up to the ceiling. The master was going to take a look at my handiwork and tell me what it did! Eagerness scampered up and down my spine. Come on, door!

Dad was in a hurry too, but not enough. It must have taken him thirty seconds to unlock the door, turn on the lights, and ask me, “Okay, Pumpkin. Can you take off your creation safely so I can have a look at it?”

Good question. “I don’t know. I think so? Let me try.”

So I tried. The bracelet was too tight to slide over the wider bones of my wrist. In fact, the segments squeezed together, getting tighter, when I tried. Not a great sign, that. Pulling it back the other way didn’t help. I twisted it, and the segments turned against each other with a grinding resistance.

Oh, right, that’s how I got it moving the first time! I grabbed the band and rolled my fist around. The Machine began to writhe on my wrist. The head unbuckled, the tiny legs came out, and it crawled sluggishly around my arm. Sluggishly? It picked up steam, spiraling up my arm like the crazy metal bug it vaguely resembled.

“Hey, stop that!” It stopped. “Sit on my hand, not my face!” I yelled. The Machine scuttled forward again, now twining down my arm with purpose and crawling up on my hand.

“Voice commands?” asked my mother from the doorway.

“She’s thirteen,” my father threw back skeptically.

“Sit up!” I ordered The Machine. HA! It reared up on my palm like a snake!

“Voice commands,” my mother repeated. She sounded amused, and her folded arms and lazy posture as she leaned against the doorjamb shouted her sarcastic amusement at my Dad’s cautious attitude.

“Unless you think she found a voice recognition unit in her middle-school shop class, she built one in less than half an hour. We’re well into superhuman territory here already,” she added.

HA! I resisted my urge to stamp my feet and laugh. HA!

“It is an advanced-placement middle school,” Dad tried. Neither Mom nor I dignified that with a response. He hadn’t been serious anyway.

“May I examine it?” Dad asked when we’d been silent at him long enough.

“Sit still, and don’t do anything,” I ordered The Machine. It didn’t respond, which was good, right? I picked it off my hand with two fingers—kind of heavy to carry that way—and put it in Dad’s hands. It stayed in its reared up posture like a statue.

Good enough!

He unlocked his computer, laid The Machine on his scanner, closed the lid, and started tapping buttons. “An interior layout will tell us the most. We’ll try scans all across the wavelengths, but we’ll begin with a simple x-ray.”

The giant virtual screen he built just to prove that it could be done lit up. There was The Machine, a white cylinder with little legs sticking off of it. Solid white. Dad magnified one of its segments. The straight edges weren’t straight, they were blobby in this representation. The interior was solid, unvarying white. Plain white.

“It’s made of metal, so I guess x-rays were never going to penetrate too well,” I said.

“At the intensity I bombarded it, I should get at least a blurry interior picture,” Dad countered. I watched him adjust the wavelengths. I watched nothing whatsoever change on the picture. Okay.

He switched to magnetic imaging. Same thing. “Well, it eats a very broad range of energy types. I might be able to overload that effect, but if I succeeded I’d only damage the device,” he observed.

“Please don’t.” This was my first invention as a superhero. Even if it did nothing we hadn’t seen already, or stopped working in ten minutes, I wanted to keep it to show my grandchildren one day!

“We’ll try passive mapping systems,” Dad assured me. He clicked a few menus. There, that was the passive magnetic scan.

Well, I guess it worked. “All I can tell is that it’s full of junk,” I said. It looked like a regular medical x-ray, all cloudy bits inside solid shell.

“You really packed in the gears, Pumpkin,” he told me. Complimented me, I guess. I held up a finger, and Mom nodded. I was cleaning up on the Pumpkin jar this week!

“What’s the bright rectangle?” I pointed at the one shape that stood out in the body.

“I think it’s a 9-volt battery. It’s mostly drained. I’m not seeing signs of electrical current,” Dad answered. Then he sighed, clicked off the scanning program, unsealed the scanner and heaved up the lid. “Eyeball examination will have to do.”

He picked up The Machine, and, on an impulse, I ordered, “Straighten out.” It did, extending into a straight line maybe a foot long. Less, really. So it was still active!

Watching Dad put it in a vise and pick up his screwdriver made my heart seize up, but I just had to be cool. He wouldn’t risk breaking it. Not something this valuable. His glasses rearranged to magnify as he peered into the many gaps in The Machine’s plates.

Right now, his own super power was working, trying to connect what he knew about science with the thing in front of him, analyze the pattern, and distill it into a practical result. “Your guess is as good as mine as to what it does. I’d swear it’s purely mechanical. I can’t find a power source at all,” came the answer.

Wow, I’d outfoxed Dad’s super power. Go, Penny!

“Superhumans with creative powers traditionally create artificial life or perpetual motion the first time their powers emerge. Looks like our Penny pulled off both at the same time,” Mom told Dad. She sounded proud, but…

“There’s no such thing as perpetual motion, even for us,” I argued. “Us.” HA! I get to say “us” from now on!

“Photosynthesis looks like perpetual motion if you don’t know anything about chemistry. How could shining sunlight on chemicals keep reactions going forever? There’s always a price, always entropy being made and fuel being consumed. We still call something like this a perpetual motion machine because it looks like it’s ignoring those rules. Like your Mom said, they’re the first thing most mad scientists make.” Dad leaned back in his chair and put his elbows on the desk as he explained all this to me. His glasses whizzed and clicked, rearranging to their normal configuration.

“Mad scientists are villains, Dad. I’m not a mad scientist,” I scolded him.

“I’m not sure you’re anything, yet,” he countered. Wait, what? I looked back at Mom. She wasn’t correcting him.

When I went back to staring at him, he explained, “It’s normal for superhuman powers to go off without—”

I cut him off, throwing up both hands. “I know, I know! You don’t have to give me the super- powered Birds And The Bees speech!” Criminy, he was probably right. I’d worked completely on instinct. Maybe my powers hadn’t emerged yet, after all.

“Can I have my Machine back?” I asked immediately. I knew I sounded like a begging baby, but when Dad pulled it out of his vice and set it in my hands, when I tried to bend it around my wrist and it got the hint and locked up like a bracelet again, I felt so much safer. This was my proof. I’d done something no regular human could possibly do.

“It’s fine, Penny—” my Mom started, her voice gentle.

I interrupted her. “I really don’t want the super-powered Birds and Bees speech, Mom!” Being patronized would make this worse.

“I was saying, it’s easy to check,” she corrected me. “Brian, you don’t mind if she uses your work room for this, right?”

“Go right ahead, Pumpkin. Make another. Make anything,” Dad urged me, sliding out of his chair and stepping over by Mom.

Eek. Okay, pressure time. Big, big pressure time, Penny. I looked around. Dad’s machines made even less sense than the ones in the shop. Well, no, that wasn’t true. Everything here was nicely labeled, and, even if I didn’t know how to work it, that machine over there stamped microchips, and there was his micro water knife, and… well, I sort of understood everything I saw.

Okay, build another Machine. I looked at it, wrapped snugly around my wrist. I’d felt so inspired. I’d needed to recycle circuit boards, right? What was it like to think that way?

It wasn’t coming. Maybe something simpler? I had all the parts here. I knew how Dad’s nervous system antenna worked. Funny now that building it would do its job for it.

I still didn’t know the math. I didn’t know what I was doing.

I must have signaled my defeat somehow. I became aware of Dad standing over me, and he reached down and wrapped his arms around my middle and picked me up. I didn’t think he was still strong enough to do that.

“Okay, I’m going to be serious, Princess. The bad news is, you’ll have a flash like this every few months, not as impressive, but you shouldn’t expect your power to emerge for at least a year, maybe three or four.” His voice was low and smooth as he laid it out. Not comforting, exactly. Professionally respectful, one superhuman to another.

Then he turned me in his trembling arms, as much as he wanted to pretend I was still eight and he could do this easily, and he leaned his head down until his glasses tapped mine. “The good news is, your powers are on their way and they’re amazing. Maybe you’re not a superhero now, but you will be one day. You proved that today. The only question is where we go out to eat to celebrate.”

“Pizza Place!” I answered instantly. The prospect of the best pizza in the world soothed my disappointment considerably. I wrapped my arms around Dad and hugged him, and our glasses clinked again. His were way more complicated and high tech, but you know what? Now it was only a matter of time.

“The Audit! Run for it! Everybody run for it!” the owner yelled. Cooks and deliverymen scrambled around like scared ants.

“This must be the twentieth time you’ve made that joke,” Mom told him as everybody smirked.

“Twenty? Really?” he asked her. Everyone settled down and got back to cooking.

“Contrary to rumor, I don’t count everything, Mr. Grigoryan,” Mom informed him. Her hands at her side flashed me seven fingers.

It was easy to enjoy the humor as I climbed into my seat. The tables and chairs in Pizza Place are really high. I’ve never asked why. It’s Los Feliz, so I’m not sure there has to be a reason. The smell of cooking cheese hung thick in the air, and I just couldn’t wait.

A meal at Pizza Place really eases the disappointment. Of all the tiny little restaurants that litter Los Feliz and serve amazing food, this is my favorite. It’s small—two tables inside and one outside small—but the pizza is so good. So good.