Quite Contrary (48 page)

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.

I didn’t even know the rule-of-thumb trick. I’d need a machine just to get my body mass index.

Whining in frustration, I threw Dad’s papers across the room, then threw my notebook with my fumbling math after it. I’d probably gotten the math wrong anyway. And I was good at math!

I lay down in bed and put the cover over my head. It wasn’t nearly bedtime. I would spend the rest of the day sulking and trying to avoid the issue and maybe tomorrow I could come up with a new idea. I had to hurry. I could hide a C on a test from my Dad, but not my report card.

And what was I going to do about the science fair anyway?

The alarm on my phone woke me up the next morning. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I stared at the ceiling for a while, but I’d already outsmarted myself. The phone was out of reach of the bed, and I had to get up to turn off the alarm, and after that I might as well go take a shower.

The sky was black outside, and I was all alone in the house. Technically, I wasn’t alone. Mom and Dad were there, they were just fast asleep. I tied my pigtails into braids myself. Dad made me a machine for when I don’t feel like putting forth the effort, but he’d tinkered with it yesterday. The little hands had extra fingers, and the access plate looked new. No matter how lazy I felt, I wasn’t going to risk it. I could tell just by looking that he’d messed something up. Dad’s inventions always do what they’re supposed to do, but sometimes don’t do what you think they’re supposed to do. Something about the extra grabbers looked wrong to me, and, if I couldn’t put a finger on it, I wouldn’t let them put a finger on my hair.

The scrambled egg maker, on the other hand, was a godsend, since it’s a miracle if Mom ever makes breakfast. She’s right; I’d hate it if she pulled her Audit routine at home, and she needed a break. Not that she could stop herself completely. Halfway through my cereal bowl I heard her door alarm squeak, and, as I reached for my backpack, she stuck her keys in the side door and opened it for me.

As she pulled the car out of the driveway, Mom asked me, “Still brooding, Penny?”

I’d just sat through breakfast grumbling about my parents’ super powers. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know what to do for the science fair.”

Just saying that gripped me. That’s all I needed, an F for not presenting anything at all. I had no ideas for what to do to replace the antenna. None. I still wanted to make the antenna.

“Want any advice?” she asked.

“No.” If I talked over the science fair thing with my parents, sooner or later my grades in German would come up. Most likely sooner. I was hemmed in on all sides.

At least my Mom has a light touch. She let it go, although she gave me a concerned glance. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she’d timed it precisely to give the maximum amount of sympathy without making the recipient feel pressured.

The brooding didn’t stop when I got to school. What was I going to do for the science fair? I wanted to invent something, really bad. I wanted to make that antenna. It wasn’t even about zapping myself with it for super powers now. It clawed at me that I’d stared at a few pages full of math and they’d beaten me utterly. I’d had reference books, but they didn’t help, because none of it had made sense. The device and the calculations were two different worlds that I couldn’t connect.