by Jon Scieszka
“But how do we get him on his back?” asked Julie.
“God-boy can push him,” said Mr. Peterson. “He’s strong.”
“Yeah, and Superjerk knows he’s strong,” Will answered, glaring. “Someone told him. He’s not going to let Aidan get within five feet of him before he starts blasting. Aidan, are you invulnerable or anything?”
“Not until I’m older.”
“See? So, no, Aidan can’t just rush him. Look, I have an idea, but if it doesn’t—”
Will never got a chance to explain his idea. From the hall door came a metallic squeak, and then the door was wrenched free of its hinges. The villain tossed it aside like garbage and the kids each ducked behind the closest workstation. Will peeked around the edge.
“Look, guys…” the villain said. He tried to step through the opening he’d made, couldn’t, then turned sideways and crab-walked into the room. “I don’t want to shoot a bunch of kids—even the supervillain community frowns on that kind of thing—but I will if you don’t cooperate. Just line up where I can see you, and when Cheetah Girl gets here I’ll kill her and leave.”
He punctuated this last statement with a few energy blasts to the science room equipment cabinet. Pressboard doors splintered and Pyrex petri dishes shattered, musically.
“Why do you want to kill her?” called Will. Anything to keep the man talking instead of shooting things. “Are you her arch nemesis or something?
“Oh, man, I wish. She probably hasn’t even heard of me yet, honestly—I’m kind of an up-and-comer. But word’s gotten around about her secret identity, and I’ve never defeated a superhero, so…It’s really the only reason I haven’t made it to the big time.”
“What’s your name?” shouted Aidan.
The villain fired off a couple rounds at the ceiling. “I AM CALLED…CYBERSTRUCTO!”
Will could suddenly think of another reason why this guy had never made the big time.
“Okay. Cyberstructo? I’m going to come out,” said Will, and he rose slowly from his hiding place, hands in the air. “It’s me, the boy who can read minds, except I can’t really, that was a lie, I can’t do anything, I was trying to make you reveal your weakness but you don’t have one, so…”
He’d watched a lot of action movies and nobody ever seemed to die right in the middle of a sentence, so he tried to make each thought sort of blend into the next.
“…so you can have me, ’cause you don’t need all of us and you can just let the other kids go, all right?”
He was getting closer, getting CLOSER to the evil robot man with the guns, and each step was harder and heavier. Shards of Pyrex crunched beneath his sneakers, and the villain was smiling.
“That’s right,” Cyberstructo said in a tone of voice he’d probably picked up from some kids’ show about feelings. “I only need one of you. Come closer.”
Will came closer.
Cyberstructo seized the scruff of his sweater in his metal claw and hoisted Will three feet in the air. The hot barrel of the villain’s arm cannon creased the back of Will’s skull.
“Oh, man.” Cyberstructo chuckled. “Too easy. I hope Cheetah Girl is this stupid. Okay, you kids. Everybody up, everybody to the front of the room or I blow his head off.”
Will had only seconds. The other kids (and Mr. Peterson) were already beginning to rise, to give themselves away. He fished around behind him, groping at the empty air for—yes, there it was. The camera cord. The thin plastic of it bumped against his palm and he closed his fingers, slid them down the length of it until he found the end.
“You know,” said Cyberstructo, “I should probably kill at least one of you or it’ll look bad. Like I’m too soft. Then maybe you’ll behave—”
Will pinwheeled around and plugged the camera cord into a USB port on Cyberstructo’s hip. The villain went stiff.
“What’s happened!? I can’t move. I can’t move, and now all I see are pictures of a tetherball game.”
“Aidan!” shouted Will. “Now!”
Aidan started, then rushed forward and sacked the quarterback. Cyberstructo rose an inch in the air and came down hard on his back. So did Will.
“Ow.”
“You okay?” said Aidan, ripping Will free of the villain’s claw and ruining a perfectly good sweater.
“I’m fine,” Will answered. He had a sore head and a sick taste in his mouth, but he didn’t want to be a whiner.
“AAAH! No!” said Cyberstructo. He regained control of his arms and legs and flailed them like a fussy baby.
“Better stay out of his way,” said Will. “He can probably shoot that gun again if he wants to.”
“What did you do to him?” asked Mr. Peterson.
“Well…that suit of his—it’s just a big computer, right? And I don’t know a computer that doesn’t drop everything when you plug a camera into it.”
“YOU STUPID KIDS!”
Cyberstructo wiggled and rattled, whirred and clicked, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He fired in frustration at the pressboard ceiling.
“HELP ME UP SO I CAN KILL YOU!”
“AUTO-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE ENGAGED,” said a new voice, a female voice from somewhere deep in Cyberstructo’s circuitry.
“What did that say?” said Cyberstructo.
“What did that say?” said Aidan.
“ANTIMATTER CORE WILL DETONATE IN FIFTEEN SECONDS.”
“A self-destruct,” Mr. Peterson whispered. “So if it falls on its back it won’t fall into enemy hands.”
“Did you know about this?!” Aidan demanded.
“There was…there was a line item on a budget request but I didn’t—”
“Shut up!” said Julie. “What do we do? Run?”
“TEN SECONDS.”
“No!” Cyberstructo pleaded. “Don’t leave me!”
“We could never run far enough.”
A shutter opened to reveal a cavity in Cyberstructo’s breastplate, and a bright, jittering yellow sphere of antimatter the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It crackled with power.
Aidan and Mr. Peterson looked to Will, waiting to be told what to do. Julie’s eyes were on the antimatter.
“FIVE SECONDS.”
Will hadn’t a thought in his head.
Julie pounced on the battlesuit, scooped out the antimatter (“Ooh, hot.”), and popped it in her mouth. She swallowed it like it was a dry aspirin and grimaced as it fizzled and died inside her.
There was a moment of utter quiet. Then she shot the other kids a guilty look.
“Okay, I’m an alien. Please don’t tell my mom I told.”
Cheetah Girl arrived a few minutes later. She was on the scene in a flash with her superspeed, buzzing around the room, trying to assess the situation. Only when the other kids convinced her it was all over did she finally stand still.
She was wearing her golden costume and mask, of course, but it was obviously Lily. Will couldn’t believe he’d never guessed it before.
Aidan explained everything that had happened and they all had a laugh, though when he called her Lily instead of Cheetah Girl she launched into a big “Lily? Who is this Lily you speak of” routine so the conversation ended kind of awkwardly. Then the news reporters started closing in, and Cheetah Girl looked anxious to leave. On the evening news they would get the whole story wrong and claim she had saved the day instead of Aidan, but that wasn’t her fault. By the time the reporters got near enough to hurl their questions, Cheetah Girl was gone.
Will and Aidan watched her disappear, just a yellow blur on the horizon.
“Sucks about you not getting powers,” said Aidan.
“I know.” Will sighed. “I’ll never be a hero.”
ARTEMIS BEGINS
BY EOIN COLFER
I have four brothers. That’s five boys altogether all living in a small house, which is a recipe for major property damage at the very least. As kids, each of us had our assigned roles in the family, pretty much like the members of boy bands do today. Paul, th
e eldest, was the wise and reliable one. I was the aspiring writer, bespectacled and be-notebooked. Eamonn was the tearaway, never without a nest of twigs in his hair and a bleeding cut on his knee. Niall was the cutie-pie blond baby. But the brother with the most interesting role, as far as an aspiring writer was concerned, was brother number three: Donal. Donal was the young criminal mastermind.
Donal has always been the fixer in our house. If someone was in trouble, Donal could get them out of it, especially if the someone in trouble was himself and the trouble was of the kind visited on a little boy by his angry mother when the boy had totally smashed something he had been expressly forbidden to touch on pain of death or at the very least no TV for a week. Donal was always touching those kinds of things and often smashing them into more pieces than there were of Humpty Dumpty post–wall tumble. (What was an egg doing perched on a wall anyway? And why would all the king’s horses be so upset about one egg? It all sounds suspiciously like forced rhyming to me.) Donal’s tried-and-true method for getting out of trouble was to use the fact that our mother liked him quite a bit; in fact, it could be said that she loved him lots then and still does today in spite of all the mayhem he caused in the 1980s.
Donal callously played on this love to escape punishment. Even from a young age, his method was infallible: blink in a cute, babylike fashion and declare in a babylike voice how much he “wuves his mommy.” The key element in his whole scam was the aforementioned babylike-ishness, which cleverly transported my mother back to the day when Donal was a mere baby who could do no wrong, when the summers were longer and the music charts were full of actual songs that a person could sing along to.
And so no matter what Donal had been caught doing, he invariably got off with a mild tousling of the hair and perhaps, in extreme cases, a little finger waggling, which really ticked off the rest of us, who had to bear real punishments when we were caught doing anything wrong. But as much as we resented Donal’s untouchable status, we also admired him a little bit. After all, what mother’s son wouldn’t like to be able to gurn his way out of trouble whenever it suited him?
As Donal grew, so did his experience and the intricacies of his plans to avoid punishment. And it wasn’t long before we started turning to Donal in times of trouble to see if he could work some of his magic for us. Obviously we were prepared to pay. That went without saying. Donal was a payment-orientated kind of guy from a very early age who wouldn’t tie a toddler’s shoelace for less than a bag of gummi bears. So we went to him bearing gifts of potato chips or Wham bars or space poppers and begged him for a strategy to dig us out of the hole we were in. Once I scratched the door of Dad’s car with my bike handle. The car was only secondhand, which was the equivalent of brand-new for us, and I knew I was for the high jump. (This is a metaphor. We didn’t have an actual Olympic high jump in our garden. The official run-up track alone would have to be twenty meters long. Where do you think we lived, Buckingham Palace?) Donal took a look and gave me a bottle of Mom’s nail varnish to cover the scratch. It was a close enough match, and I was in university before dad noticed the camouflage. This little favor cost me more than candy. In payment, Donal forced me to call him by the title Sir Donal, Prince of Goodness, for an entire month.
This went on for a few years, and Donal got a bit of a reputation as the neighborhood fixer. Kids came from blocks away to hear his wisdom. They came with bonbons in their wagons and left with favors, tricks, con jobs, and sob stories. But Donal’s pièce de résistance, the one that the kids still talk about in the school yard, was pulled off in our own house with our own baby brother.
It happened like this. Every parent has to have an interest to stop their children turning them into blubbering head cases who sit in corners sucking their thumbs and flipping through photos of times when they were happy. In my mother’s case this interest was amateur dramatics.
She was the Wexford Drama Group’s leading actress. She played everything from a Southern belle to a society heiress. And one year, for her portrayal of an eighteenth-century island girl, my mother brought home the award for All-Ireland Best Actress. This was a proud moment for the Colfer family.
We were shown the crystal plate engraved with my mother’s name; we were even allowed to run our fingers along the carved facets and watch the light refracted along its edges. Then the plate was placed in our display case and we were warned never to touch it again. A warning like this pretty much ensures that the plate would be touched often and inevitably broken by one of the brood.
My baby brother, Niall, was the unfortunate who was destined to become the breaker. It could have been any one of us, as we regularly took down the plate when my mother was occupied. We used it to do crayon rubbings; we rolled its edges through uncooked pastry. It made a very effective puck in table hockey, and of course if a person felt like balancing something on his forehead, the award plate was the perfect size.
It was the table hockey that was to be Niall’s downfall. As the youngest in the family, he was a little short for the table and had never actually won a game, and so he decided to get in a little solo practice. It was only when he had struck the plate a square whack and it was skittering toward the other end of the table that it dawned on his pea brain that if there was no one at the receiving end, then the plate would fly off and, presuming gravity didn’t suddenly fail, crash to the ground.
Gravity did not fail, and my mom’s All-Ireland Best Actress crystal plate fell to the tiled floor and smashed into a thousand rainbow pieces. Three pieces and he might have been able to jigsaw them back together and it could have been days before Mom noticed. But a thousand? His goose was cooked.
There was only one person to turn to. Niall rushed into the garden where Donal was burying our neighbor’s G.I. Joe so he could blackmail him for his pocket money later. I, in my role as budding writer, was observing and taking notes.
We knew Niall was in trouble when we saw him coming. He had not done his hair, and Niall always did his hair before venturing outside. He was very vain about his blond mop, still is. And there were twin streams of mucus streaming from his nose, which either meant that he had eaten pepper again or that he had been crying.
“Donal! Eoin!” he cried. “Help! Help!”
I waved my hand across my face, Obi-Wan style. “I am not here,” I said.
Niall was six, so this did not compute. “Huh?”
“I am not here,” I repeated, jiggling my head for effect.
Niall’s mucus glands went into panicked overdrive. “Eoin is dead!” he wailed at Donal. “And his ghost is sitting on the grass right there.”
“Eoin is being a writer,” said Donal, and Niall instantly calmed, as everybody knows that writers do stupid things all the time.
Niall’s calm evaporated when he remembered his own crisis. “I broke Mum’s award. She’ll be back in a minute.”
Mum was in the front garden chatting to our neighbor. Niall had mere moments before she stepped inside to find her beloved plate shattered.
“You broke the award,” said Donal, who did not seem too upset; in fact, he seemed delighted that someone else was in trouble for a change.
“Yes. I broke the award.”
As I was taking notes I decided that I would edit this conversation, as it was getting a bit repetitive.
“Who broke the award?” asked Donal, dragging it out.
Niall pointed to his own head. “It was me. I broke the award.”
Donal mashed a clod of clay onto G.I. Joe’s head. “Well, if you’re the one who broke Mum’s award, you might as well leave home now, because she’s going to go straight to DEFCON four.”
Donal loved using military terms to confuse his little brother.
“DEFCON four?”
“Oh, yep. I remember a milkman made the wrong delivery once. Gave Mom a bit of cheek, and she went from zero to DEFCON four in six point three seconds. Broke every bottle of milk in the lorry. Stamped on all the yogurt cartons. It was a massacre.”
This was good stuff. I wrote as quickly as I could. Donal was a gold mine.
Niall’s face fell. “A massacre?”
He was a clever boy. Only six years old and already he knew what the word “massacre” meant. He tugged on Donal’s mucky sleeve. “You can help me, Donnie. You know stuff. Everyone in the estates knows you have powers.”
Donal was torn. On the one hand there is nothing a big brother likes better than seeing his little brother up to his neck in trouble, especially when that little brother is such a cutie that trouble usually slides off him. But on the other hand his professional curiosity was aroused. Could he get Niall off the hook for such an extreme crime? If he managed it, the name Donal would become legendary around the estates.
I could be bigger than Santa Claus, I imagined him imagining.
Eventually Donal thought of a plan that could both dig Niall out of the hole he was in and inflict a little brotherly pain at the same time. Perfect.
“I will help you,” he said magnanimously.
“Thanks, brother,” said Niall, collapsing in a grateful heap. “He’s great, isn’t he, Eoin?”
“I am not here, remember?” I said. Some people are a bit slow to catch on.
Donal brought Niall to the top of the stairs, where they waited for my mother’s return. I followed a couple of spaces behind. I had an idea what was coming but it would have been wrong of me to intervene, just as it would be wrong of a nature reporter to come between two monkeys in the wild.
“When Mom sees the smashed award she will be furious,” Donal explained.
Niall nodded. “DEFCON four.”
“Exactly, grasshopper. So, my job is to somehow turn that fury into sympathy. I have to do something so extreme that Mom won’t even remember why she was angry in the first place.”
Niall was nodding like a little bobblehead toy. He would have done anything. Anything.