Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain (8 page)

“Thanks for bringing me home, Mom!” I piped as I shoved the car door closed behind me. “Could I get into the basement?”

“Why?” She’d just been sitting there in the car and hadn’t bothered to open the door, luxuriating in not having a schedule. Right up until I asked my question and got the pointed look.

The key was to tell most of the truth. A direct lie would not get past The Audit. Not while Mom was alert. “Me’n Claire’n Ray were thinking of starting a club. You know, kids of superheroes. It means a lot more now that my own powers are on the way, and maybe we could figure out if any other kids in the school had superhero parents. Anyway, Claire and Ray love superhero memorabilia, and it’s all in the basement.”

There. Lots of plausible, rambling truths that weren’t the actual reason at all. Come on, fall for it!

“Trying to uncover the secret identities of your classmates is a disastrously bad idea, Penny. They could take it personally,” she warned me. Gently, though. That was the voice that trusted me to do the right thing.

“You’re right. It didn’t occur to me, but that’s how bad they’d freak out. It doesn’t make a big difference. If there’s a club, some of them might join us on their own, and if they don’t we’ll still have fun. I still want to poke through your mementos.” I put on an extra-relieved smile and didn’t have to fake it. It hadn’t occurred to me, and her advice might have prevented a lot of trouble.

“If you want. You know what not to do,” Mom finally conceded. I waited, swinging my arms behind me while she got out of the car, then followed her inside. She unlocked the door to the basement stairs and wandered over to Dad’s office.

Ha! Rule one of living with super genius parents, play it light. If they suspect at all, it’s over. I felt smug as I tromped down the basement stairs and flipped on the light.

For the one millionth time, I wished my parents had kept some kind of superhero headquarters beyond my dad’s laboratory. This was a storage basement. It looked like a storage basement. Gray cement walls, green cement floor. Those boxes over there? Camping gear and thirteen years of my old clothing. Those file cabinets held every receipt and financial and legal form that had ever crossed my mother’s hands. She never even opened them. Pure packrat instinct.

The file cabinets on the other side were different. I scampered over to them.

Mom kept papers. All kinds of papers. I pulled a drawer open. Mostly newspaper clippings. “Who is The Audit?”“Brainy Akk Captures Spectral Burglar.” Maybe I should pull a couple of these. We could put them on the walls of my new lair. Claire and Ray would flip. Here were a bunch about The Minx. My Mom and Claire’s Mom must have known each other forever.

I tried the next drawer. “Akk and Audit Announce Espousal.”“Audit Reveals Identity To Marry Super Sweetheart.” Did these fill the whole drawer? How big a story was my parents’ marriage, anyway? No, they only filled half the drawer. The other half was announcements of my birth. The excitement over that disappeared fast.

Ah, this next drawer was it. I hadn’t poked through these in forever, but I knew she had a bunch of files on supervillains. This stuff was all ancient, pre-internet printouts. A KGB dossier on The Last Soviet? Freaky. The inner pages were all in Cyrillic. So much for the cool factor. A scrapbook of photos of some villain in ugly spandex in action. The cover read “Unknown Villain 1993” and over that had been glued a label “Coincidence (deceased).”

Okay, who was a local mad-scientist-type villain Mom and Dad had taken down? The Thief Of Parts had stolen a lot of Dad’s old crime fighting inventions when I was tiny. Dad had told me that a few times. He hadn’t committed a crime in years, so info about him must be low security and might be in here. After Coincidence was Lubricia, then a thick stack of foot and fingerprints all labeled “The Hope Chest.” Not alphabetical order, then. By date? No, The Last Soviet held on until nearly 2000.

This wasn’t in any order. Or, if it was, it was some system only my Mom understood. I slammed the drawer shut in irritation. I should have known. They wouldn’t keep any information anyone could use in our basement!

I looked at the boxes on the shelves by the filing cabinets. Most of that stuff was just as useless. The very few items that weren’t were dangerous enough that I wasn’t going to go opening random boxes.

That left two possibilities. My mother’s laptop, sitting on its shabby little desk right here next to the filing cabinets, or Dad’s computer upstairs. The location of every secret villain lair ever discovered in the world was probably on that laptop, along with the rest of Mom’s important files when Dad scanned them into electronic format. It wasn’t hooked up to the internet for good reason. Who knows what security systems Dad had put on it?

Time to find out. With the laptop pointing away from me, I lifted up the lid and pressed the power button. A grinding noise. Was that an alarm?! I tried to restrain the feeling that my skin was trying to jump off my body. It was just a computer noise. This was an old laptop. I knew Mom kept her Audit research on it, but…

Blue screen of death. There it was on the laptop screen: “Fatal Exception.” This old broken piece of garbage didn’t hold anything. My Mom had suckered me with a fake.

I grabbed my bracelet, then forced myself to let go. No, I was not going to let The Machine eat this piece of junk. I didn’t know what was actually going on. Maybe this was a trap for any supervillain who just couldn’t believe that Brainy Akk and The Audit had really retired. Maybe I was overthinking this, and it was an old, dead laptop, and Mom had moved her files elsewhere.

I could forget aboutgetting into Dad’s computer. I needed a new plan.

“Penny, Claire’s here!” Mom yelled down from upstairs.

“What, already?” I asked.

I didn’t wait for an answer. What did I have down here? I ran upstairs. Claire still stood on the stoop, so I ran out to meet her, leaving my Mom to shut the door behind us.

“I struck out. Nothing,” I leaned up against the car and puffed a little. Stairs, okay?

“I didn’t,” Claire returned.

“How did you find one this fast?” I asked in shock. I wanted to disbelieve, but she had her hands clasped behind her back, and her smile radiated smug pride.

“I asked my Mom! She thought a clubhouse in an old supervillain lair was a great idea. You’re going to love her recommendation, but I have to show it to you.” She was going to explode from smug. There had to be some kind of joke here, but it was a joke that got me a laboratory!

Although it wasn’t a laboratory without equipment.

Something about Claire’s pride was infectious. I had the craziest idea.

Opening the door again, I leaned way in and yelled, “Dad, can I have your junk bin?”

“For what?” he yelled back. He didn’t sound suspicious, he sounded baffled.

“To put in our clubhouse! I’ll need equipment when my powers arrive, right?” I yelled.

“You can’t hurry nature, Penny. You’ll get your powers when they’re ready!” he called back, his voice softer with parental understanding. Parental misunderstanding. He was so sure of his own timeline for my powers, he’d gotten entirely the wrong idea about what I wanted. I had him!

“Can I have it or not?” I demanded, just as impatient as if he were right and I refused to believe him.

A moment of silence. Mom making her opinion known, I was sure. Then, “I suppose. Do you need a ride to move it?”

“Nope, Claire’s Mom wanted to help with that. Thanks, Dad!” I pulled the door closed.

This was delicious. “You’re sure we’ve got a lair?” I asked Claire.

“We could have a dozen, but one of them is perfect,” she promised me.

“Then I have what we need to set it up. Watch this.” I skipped around the back of the house. Yes, it was twee. I was so eager to try this.

Dad’s junk bin is a huge thing. He’s not great at repairs, only building things the first time, and he racks up piles of equipment that can’t be regularly thrown away. Until he makes arrangements, he dumps them in a big concrete bin in the back yard. I pulled the bar out and hauled the double doors open. There was one of those saws, and his old special welding and soldering rod with the broken handle, and that was the old scanner before he built the new one. He hadn’t emptied the bin in awhile. None of it worked, but there were treasures in here, if only they could be recycled.

I grabbed The Machine and twisted until it let go of my wrist and flopped around in my grip on its own. Then I tossed it into the bin. “Eat that whole pile. I’ll want them back later, but with anything broken fixed back together.”

With a grinding noise, The Machine began to eat. With its little jaws, this might take an hour, but it would be an entertaining hour.

Or it might take a lot less. Plates formed over the empty patches. Then they pressed out, and more plates made out of the metal it was eating slid up to fill in the gaps. New legs emerged near the front, shoveling mechanisms into larger jaws that hinged like a bear trap. Every bite made it bigger, and, as it got bigger, it ate faster.

I watched the bloated, turtle-like metal monster filling the bin suck up the last bits of wire, loose screws, and a tiny screwdriver lying on the bottom.

“Come here, boy!” I ordered, my voice hoarse from excitement.

The Machine stepped out of the bin on four bladed, multi-jointed legs. It was the size of a car.

I giggled. I wanted to laugh out loud, but if my parents hadn’t seen what was going on yet, I wanted to keep them in the dark. This was the last real hurdle that might get them suspicious.

I tucked my foot into a wedge sticking out of a metal leg, grabbed the edge of an armor plate, and hauled myself up. Then I extended an arm down to Claire, who just possibly might have been radiating as much glee as I was.

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“Head down toward Santa Monica Boulevard.”

I slapped The Machine. “You heard the girl. Get moving!” It lurched, rocking underneath us as it stepped over our fence, walked up the driveway, then turned and followed the sidewalk down the street. Walked? It moved way faster than I could run.

Wait. “We’re heading toward Santa Monica? It’s not. It can’t be—” I gaped at Claire.

She giggled back. It must be.

It was. The ride was surprisingly smooth. The Machine was obviously a superhero’s kid’s toy, so a few people pointed and laughed with delight, but nobody minded clearing the sidewalk as we trundled down toward West Hollywood. Right until Claire pointed and told me, “Over there.”

She was pointing across the recess yard of Northeast West Hollywood Middle School. The old villain’s lair was on school property.

“Go on!” I told The Machine. It picked its way across the concrete yard, and I was glad it was late Friday afternoon and every kid I knew was as far away from here as they could get.

“Those doors on the corner,” Claire said as we got closer. The school is huge and capital-J-shaped. It had lots of plain locked doors on the outside I’d never worried about. On the opposite corner, there had been stairs going down to the shop class. I knew there weren’t any stairs going down on this side.

A supervillain’s lair was taking up that space. It had to be.

When we reached the doors, I slid off The Machine and tugged at the doorknobs. Locked, of course. I could have The Machine eat the lock.

I didn’t have to. Claire’s feet hit the concrete next to me, and she pulled a key out of her pocket. “Mom broke into this place right before Baron Overlord got himself banished to another dimension.”

“Baron Overlord? Quite a title for a villain I’ve never heard of,” I said as she unlocked the doors.

“Nobody’s heard of him. He lasted about five minutes. Major overconfidence problem. So now his lair is ours!” Claire crowed, pulling the doors open.

Inside was a metal platform. An elevator. An elevator with lights. It still worked.

“In!” I instructed The Machine. It stepped around Claire and drew in its legs to fit in through the doors and onto the elevator. I’d programmed it to be gentle, apparently.

We squeezed in around the Machine, and I pushed a button that lit up bright green. My stomach fluttered as the floor dropped quickly, then smoothed to a halt. Wire gates opened in front of us. The lights on the elevator’s posts were just enough for us to see that we faced a big, dark room.

I peeked around the corner and slapped the button on the wall. Sure enough, lights came on in rings on the ceiling of a huge, domed room. Open electrical panels gaped along the walls. I saw five more doors, two open into dark tunnels, but not much else. This place had been stripped.

I pointed at the middle of the floor. “Start upchucking, Machine. Remember, I want everything back like it was, but fix any broken parts.” Would that work?

The Machine shambled past me, metal spikes clanking on the floor, and, with a loud clatter, spat my Dad’s welding rod onto the floor. The rod fit perfectly into the handle.

“Penny? Claire? Are you down there?” Ray’s voice called from above.

The Machine started horking up a much larger machine. “Hit the elevator button!” I yelled up. “You have got to come see this. We have a secret lair!”