Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (7 page)

I was smart enough to text my Mom before my last class that I’d be sticking around after school to hang out with Claire and Ray. She wouldn’t object. How the two biggest nerds in all of superherodom could worry that their daughter spent too much time playing computer games and not enough outside in the healthy fresh air baffled me.

It’s pretty safe around the school, which helps. The poor heroes all live south of here, and do a lot of patrolling in South Central, and the rich heroes live just north. Me and Claire were the only kids of openly admitted superheroes in school, but muggers and drug dealers and what all knew this was the most dangerous neighborhood in the city for them. Here, and Chinatown. I couldn’t tell you why Chinatown, I’d just heard my folks say it. Superhero gossip.

We’re on our own against bullies, unfortunately. I wish it was a surprise to step out the side door onto the recess grounds and see Marcia bee-lining toward Ray with three of her friends watching.

He was reading while he waited for me, so, of course, she grabbed the book right out of his hands and snarked, “Class is over. Do you ever spend five minutes without your nose in a book?”

“Please give my book back,” Ray said, quiet and serious. That’s Ray with other people.

Marcia smirked at him. She was blonder than he was, the perfect LA princess like everybody sees on TV, and taller than him, and cheerleaders are pretty strong. He looked so skinny and helpless, and she looked like what she was, just plain mean.

Then she glanced at the book itself, and it got worse. With that nasty drawn-out twang her voice has, she laughed. “Oh, please. Look at this, Rachel. It’s not even a book. It’s a catalog for superhero toys! Guess who wants to get his hands on a page full of superheroine figurines?”

Ray gets really expressionless at times like this, but that just tells you how mad he is. I didn’t want to look at it, but I also wanted to do something. “Stop acting like a harpy and give him his book back!” I snapped at her as I stomped up.

Like that did any good. “Oh, please, now he needs a girl to rescue him. And it’s the Akk girl, whose superpower is the biggest pair of glasses in the world.” I tried not to wince. My glasses look great! I could have had contacts if I wanted.

“Here. You can have your pictures of women in spandex back.” Marcia turned around and tossed the book over her shoulder. Ray had to grab twice to catch it.

He didn’t want to look at me. I had to get control of my breathing and stop trembling. Why would anybody enjoy being mean like that? At least I’d scared her away.

No, I hadn’t scared her away. That made no sense; I was just another target. Claire had rounded the corner and was walking toward us. Picking on Claire doesn’t make you look good. “I’d like to say a few things about her, but my mother says that swearing isn’t classy for villains or heroines,” she muttered as she joined us.

“Forget her. We’re supposed to be celebrating.” Ray still sounded sour, but he was right. We wouldn’t stop being sour by stewing.

Claire knew the right thing to say. “Is that the new Dynamic catalog?” she squealed, crowding up closer to peek into it. While Ray blushed and looked stunned, she crowed, “They came out with the classic Minx figurine. I’ve got to get one for Mom. And that’s Marvelous in her old costume! I’d forgotten how blatant it was. That’s less than Mom’s costume. Do you two want to go down to Rocket To Earth and see if the new stuff has come in yet?”

“Normally, sure, but I wanted to try and find out what The Machine does,” Ray demurred.

“We might as well go. I can wind it up and make it move around, but, other than that, I don’t even have a clue where to start,” I assured them.

Ray’s grin came back. “I have an idea or two. Come on,” he promised me.

He led us right back inside. I wondered where we were going, but it turned out we were going right here, back to the computer labs. We’d just caught Miss Petard closing the door behind her.

“Miss Petard?” Ray greeted her, with a hopeful tone and a big smile.

“It’s Friday, Ray. Shouldn’t you be going home?” she replied, with a smile almost as big.

“Actually, Claire and Penny and I were interested in forming an official club, maybe lure out any other children of super-powered parents. You know who Penny’s Dad is, and I thought she might have some insights on our broken supplies.” I was a little surprised he’d lie to her, but… was it a lie? A club for kids of superheroes. I’d have my powers soon, and so would Claire.

Letting us fool around in her repair lab was a ridiculous request, so she must have really liked Ray. “All right, I suppose. Lock the door when you leave, Ray?”

“Of course, Miss Petard,” he promised. He stood and watched her, smiling and grateful, as she started walking away. She didn’t look too certain about this, but she’d agreed. When she stopped looking back, we let ourselves into the repair lab.

“Why are we even in here?” I asked Ray when the door shut behind us.

“I don’t know how much you remember, but you got your inspiration when you were trying to build that antenna and didn’t have the parts. I figure The Machine has something to do with electronic parts. If you try to build the antenna again, maybe you’ll figure out what you needed The Machine for,” he suggested.

It wasn’t a bad idea. I grabbed an old hard drive and a sound and video card and dumped them on a table. Then I stared at them. What was supposed to be happening?

“Okay, I… was building the antenna,” I needed a wire. Anything would do, really. Claire handed me the toolbox. It had a wire stripper, so I cut a wire out of a spare internal power cord. It didn’t matter, right? And I’d have to send an electrical current through it.

This was going nowhere. Without that obsession, I knew I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t even have the tools or the supplies. I hadn’t when I built The Machine, either. I’d been so annoyed by it…

“…I built a machine to recycle parts,” I finished out loud.

Ray and Claire stared. They were trying not to jinx it. I grabbed The Machine and twisted until it began to roll around on my wrist by itself. It uncurled, but this time I didn’t let it crawl up my arm. Instead, I dropped it on the table and pointed at the video card.

“Eat that,” I ordered.

By all the stars and little fishes, The Machine did. It pounced on the card like a cat on a mouse, and a grin split my face so wide my cheeks hurt.

Behind me, Ray laughed. “He’s getting fat. That’s so funny!” He was right. Flakes of metal laid themselves over the gaps in The Machine’s armor, and through the holes that were left I could see green plastic circuit board lining the interior. The little robot centipede looked plump.

Well, that was half the job. The Machine took voice commands, and I knew what I’d really wanted from it the first time. “Give me a blank circuit board.”

It did. The Machine twisted, lurched, and ejected the original video card, blank and green and smooth with none of the attachments or holes punched in it.

“That was so cool!” I gushed, scratching its little metal head. It sat there, reared up off the workbench, perfectly still. Aww.

“Mom thought it might be alive, but I think it’s just a really fancy machine,” I added, looking back over my shoulder at Claire and Ray.

Ray nodded. “A very useful machine for an inventor.”

It certainly was. What couldn’t I do with this? “Transistor,” I ordered The Machine. Off the top of my head I didn’t know what a transistor was exactly, but it spat a little chunk of metal attached to wires onto the tabletop.

Now, if only my power would come in! Then I’d know what to do with this. Maybe it would even let me do something about my German grade. I had a page of vocabulary to learn for Monday, and it all looked Greek to me, pun only partly intended. It’d be nice if my power made me smarter, but maybe I could at least build something to help me study.

“Eat that. I need wires, a six-inch diameter shell, and three circular magnets,” I ordered The Machine, pointing to the hard drive.

Trying to program a computer to speak a language I didn’t know wouldn’t work. I had to go past that, to something universal. I… stop the words, Penny. You know what you’re doing!

The Machine was wonderful. It ate and it spat out parts for me, over and over, until I screwed the upper dome of the shell into place and sighed. “That’s it!”

“Das ist alles!” the little metal ball immediately echoed, in a raspy metallic voice.

“It translates English—” was as far as Claire got before the ball copied, “Es English übersetzt—”

That little lever… that was the volume control. Yes! I remembered. I switched it down to zero, then I asked, “Wait, did I just invent something again?”

“You should have seen your hands move. And, apparently, The Machine makes a good wrench and screwdriver,” Claire answered in a hush. She and Ray realized how close they were standing and took a sudden step apart.

I had to ignore that. “Another episode already, and that one was almost under control. I can still feel it! I need… to make something. Flying boots would be cool! I’ve always wanted flying boots! Now, how would those work?”

I had no idea. Well, I had some ideas. Flying boots were all over the place, although they mostly relied on exotic power systems or other components nobody but the creator could reproduce. Some of them manipulated gravity to repel the Earth as the largest body around, and you could do weird things with magnetism, and there was simple propulsive force… and the feeling I’d had when I was inventing was totally gone.

I thumped my head against the desk in despair. OW! Not doing that again.

“Not working?” Ray asked. I appreciated the wry, sympathetic tone. Perspective. That’s what I needed.

“It’s gone. I think we can be sure it’s not gone for long.” I scooped up the round metal… I guess it was a German grenade, huh? I held it in one hand and laid my wrist over top of The Machine, which curled around it obediently.

The glee hit me again. “And I know what The Machine does!”

“Part of what it does,” Ray corrected me. Interesting idea, that.

“Now we can go shopping in triumph!” I told them both.

I stood back, examining a fan-made chart of Mech’s tools and weapon systems. The secondary boost systems in the wrists were accompanied by a photo of him lifting a cruise ship out of the water. It was too ludicrous a weight for him to actually lift, and now I recognized those glowing, spinning wrist cuffs. That was Dad’s ferrous gravitic rejection device, wasn’t it? It had to be. My dad’s craziest toy was installed in Mech’s armor, and he was using it to move weights he shouldn’t be able to budge. I’d seen the theoretical papers behind the device. Nobody else could understand them, or how Dad had turned a painfully abstract mathematical model into a functioning, if weird, invention. I sure couldn’t. So how could I do the same thing? Saying it made iron’s easily magnetized properties exactly cancel out gravity sounded great, but how did it work? Without lots and lots of math? Could I just… line up the…

“Hey, Penny?” Ray interrupted. Not that there was anything to interrupt. It didn’t make sense, it just felt like it should. Ray, on the other hand, was really leading up to something.

Might as well be direct. “What is this leading up to?”

From me, a sarcastic tone was no discouragement. “When I told Miss Petard we were making a club, I thought it might be a good idea. You want to surprise your folks when you’ve got control of your powers, and, I will not lie, Claire and I want a pile of mad science devices to play with.”

Claire hunched her shoulders, avoiding looking back at us for a moment. That only lasted a few seconds. Embarrassment is foreign to the Lutra genetics. Chattering enthusiasm resumed. “I should get my powers soon. A club for super-powered kids could be useful. If we’re official, Upper High will transfer the club with us next year. We’ll have regular time to practice our powers without our parents asking questions, because we’re being all healthy and extracurricular.”

“I will manfully endure being the token regular human in the club,” Ray announced airily. I snickered.

I took off my glasses and scrunched up my nose, considering. Claire and Ray did exactly the same thing, just to be goofballs. “I like the idea, but it won’t be much use unless I can get a laboratory set up. The school might let us use a room for club meetings, but a dozen other clubs will be using the room. We won’t be able to build or install anything.”

“Your Dad could set you up,” Claire pointed out immediately. She slid glasses back up her nose with one finger. Elegantly, of course. Maybe her Mom taught her how.

“I’d lose out on surprising my folks, and now I really want to. They don’t want to believe it’s happening, so I’m going to wait until I can blow their socks off and they can’t deny it.” For now, though… “I don’t know. Maybe having a clubhouse with a real laboratory would be worth spoiling the surprise.”

Ray’s smile turned sly. I’d almost missed it, since he was now one of two blonde blobs in front of me. I put my glasses back on with just enough time to catch that wicked grin before he suggested, “If you want a working laboratory, you don’t need a clubhouse. You need a lair.”