Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities

by Mike Jung

  “Don’t worry, Vincent, I’ll pick it up,” Max said, without doing anything to make you think he actually would pick it up. He picked a random stick off the ground instead and swung it around like a baseball bat, while George leaned his bike against the garage wall.

  “How long’s it been?” Max said.

  “Since the aliens took Captain Stupendous, you mean?” George said.

  “No, I mean since the aliens abducted your brain, George,” Max said.

  “Dude, why the rage?” George said. “Geez.”

  “Five days,” I said. “It’s been forever.”

  I stared out over the fence at the big hill covered in eucalyptus trees a few blocks over—Skyside Park, where Polly landed the day that Mom was kidnapped.

  “You really think there’s a new villain in town?” George said.

  “I hope not.” Max took a vicious uppercut swing with his stick, then tossed it over his shoulder. “A villain whose big weapon is teddy bears? How lame would that be?”

  “Geppetto the Destroyer wasn’t lame.” I kicked at a weed growing from a crack in the cement.

  “Geppetto used giant puppets with rocket launchers in their chests,” Max said, “not a bunch of stuffed bears.”

  “Yeah, but it started the same way, with that puppet show at the Luthor Hall of Science coming to life.”

  “We should ask Bobby what he thinks,” George said.

  “I think my mom was talking to him about it last night on the phone.”

  “Bobby’s a good guy,” Max said. “He’s a mensch, you know? That means he’s a good guy.”

  “Yeah, Max, we figured out what ‘mensch’ means after the first eight hundred times you said it.” I patted Max on the shoulder.

  “Bobby’s awesome, are you kidding?” George said. “He believed us, for one thing.”

  “He also gave us the greatest helicopter ride ever,” Max said.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I’m not used to liking my mom’s boyfriend, though.”

  “I don’t like any of my mom’s boyfriends.” George shrugged. “It sucks, dude, you should be psyched.”

  “Your mom could have a boyfriend like my dad, Vincent,” Max said. “Your house would smell like smoke and rotten ham sandwiches.”

  “I know, I know, I’m just not used to it.”

  “It’s a good thing to get used to,” George said. “Trust me.”

  A dog barked somewhere in the distance, and a few houses over I heard a car door slam, followed by angry-sounding voices. That made me think of Polly, of course.

  “Polly really is as tough as she seems, huh?”

  “That is so cool that she kicked Mayhem in the solar plexus!” George grinned.

  “I don’t get tough girls,” I said.

  Max ran his hands through his hair and leaned back with his elbows on the steps behind him.

  “What’s there to get?” he said. “They’re girls, they’re just, you know, different.”

  “You’re the big expert, huh?” I said.

  “I am,” Max said, intentionally making his voice as deep as possible.

  “It’s not just the tough girls!” George threw his hands up in the air. “I don’t understand any of them!”

  “Seriously, regular girls are weird enough, but what do you say to a girl who could beat you up?” I said.

  Max and George both cracked up a little, and Max slapped me on the shoulder.

  “I don’t know, Vincent,” he said. “How about ‘hi’? Or ‘my name’s Vincent’?”

  “Just ‘hi’ and nothing else?”

  “Do you like Polly? I mean, do you LIKE, like her?” George said.

  “No!” I crossed my arms.

  “Why not?” Max said.

  “We don’t care, you know,” George said. “It’s awesome!”

  “Polly’s okay, Vincent,” Max said. “What’s the big deal, anyway?”

  “You don’t think it’d be kind of a big deal if, you know …”

  “I’m just saying, it wouldn’t be a big deal to me. We’d still hang out.” Max socked me on the shoulder, but for once he didn’t do it very hard.

  “Do you think she’s coming back?” George said.

  “She’s coming back,” I said. “She HAS to, especially if there really is a new villain in town.”

  “She’s totally coming back, Vincent,” Max said. “I’m going inside, it’s getting hot out here.”

  “Me too,” George said.

  “You guys go in, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I unlocked the door, and after Max and George went inside I walked back to the steps and stared at the eucalyptus trees some more. I really like that eucalyptus smell—it’s a little bit smoky and a little bit spicy. I was imagining that smell in my head when the wind kicked up. A few of the treetops jerked and swayed, a handful of leaves scattered into the air, and I realized it wasn’t the wind, because the rest of the trees didn’t move at all. It was a sunny October day, so the flash of blue light might have been my imagination, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew it. My heart started pumping really fast, and it wasn’t all lub-DUB, lub-DUB like they say in school. It was more like WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM!

  I ran to the garage and stuck my head inside.

  “Skyside Park!”

  Max did his flailing-arms thing and knocked a magazine right out of George’s hands. George got halfway to his feet.

  “What about Skyside Park?” Max said.

  “STUPENDOUS ALERT!” I screamed.

  George and Max burst out of their chairs, hollering like lunatics. We stampeded out of the garage, hopped onto our bikes, and hit the road in about thirty seconds flat. The five blocks between my house and Skyside Park felt like five feet, and we were on the park’s main trail and halfway up the hill before we realized how incredibly steep it actually is. Man, it is really steep—no wonder I could see it so easily from my house. We got off our bikes and started walking them when Max reached over and grabbed George’s arm.

  “Hey, George, let’s wait here,” he said. We hadn’t reached the crest of the hill yet, so all we could see were the tops of the trees up ahead.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Yeah, what ARE you talking about?” George said. “I wanna go up there too!”

  “Let’s give Vincent a little privacy,” Max said.

  George looked at Max, then at me. Then he grinned, a big, old, goofy George grin.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “We’ll be here, Vincent.”

  “You’re not coming?” I said, feeling confused.

  “Dude,” Max said. “How dense are you? We’ll wait here.”

  “Oh,” I said. “OH. Uh, yeah, okay.”

  I turned away from the guys, which felt a little weird, and pushed my bike up over the crest of the hill.

  The smell of the eucalyptus trees hit me as I lay my bike down on the path, and I sucked in a big lungful when Polly stepped out from behind a tree and made a tiny waving motion. I took a half step, stopped, then started again. We met just outside the line of trees. She wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans, a black messenger bag over her shoulder, and a smile that showed the gap between her front teeth. I got a little dizzy when she stuck her arms under mine, squeezed me around the chest, and pressed her face hard into my shoulder. At first I held my arms up like a scarecrow, but eventually I put an arm around her neck and the other arm on top of that arm.

  We snapped out of it after a few seconds. Polly stepped back and crossed her arms, with one shoulder pushed up higher than the other, and I put my hands down by my sides, then in my front pockets, then in my back pockets.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You look really tired,” I said.

  “Geez, Vincent, you sure know how dish up a compliment.”

  “No, I just meant—you know, things have been kind of messed up. That’s all.”

  “Messed up is right. I was on a Grakkian interdimensional cruiser getting trained to be
a superhero, you know.”

  “The cops put out one of those missing kid reports on you a couple of days ago.”

  “They did, huh?”

  “My mom’s boyfriend was the one who talked to your mom about it,” I said.

  “Detective Carpenter?” Polly said. “I talked to him too. He’s an okay guy.”

  “When did you talk to Bobby?”

  “I actually got home yesterday.”

  “What did you tell him? Not the truth, right?”

  “I said I got picked up by the same UFO that took Stupendous, the aliens ran all these bizarre tests on me, and they dropped me off on the edge of town.”

  “That’s genius! A thousand other people are claiming the same thing, there’s no way to disprove it!”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know if he believed me.”

  “That doesn’t matter, you’re good as long as you don’t change your story.”

  I was so happy to see her! Yeah, I know, that’s gross and weird, but there she was, gap toothed, short, and fresh off an alien spaceship. Max was right, I had a GIGANTIC crush on her. Rats. I swallowed hard.

  “Ummm, hey, I don’t know if I told you before, but I, uh, I like you.”

  I wasn’t nervous, just so you know. My forehead was sweating, and my neck was itchy, and I couldn’t figure out what to do with my stupid hands, but nervous? Who, me?

  “I like you too, Vincent.”

  “I mean, um, well, I LIKE, like you.”

  “Oh.” Polly made an exaggerated O shape with her mouth, looked down, and smiled.

  “Maybe we should, I don’t know, go to the movies?” I said.

  “Sure,” Polly said. “Or we could save the world or something like that.”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  We looked at the ground for a while. Polly swept a few leaves to the side with the side of one foot, and I used one of my feet to poke around the shoelace on my other foot. I tilted my head up and looked at Polly out of the corner of my eye. She was looking at me from under her eyebrows, and we both looked down again.

  “… Um,” I said.

  I scratched my neck and finally just looked at Polly.

  “The guys are waiting down there,” I said. I stuck my thumb over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, I figured,” Polly said. “I’m kind of glad you came up here first.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Polly looked up and smiled, a big, big smile. She hauled my hand out of my pocket by the elbow, held it in her hand, then hooked her other hand under the strap of her messenger bag.

  “Let’s go. I have some stuff to tell you guys.”

  Of course I had to let go of her hand to pick up my bike, but it was pretty cool to hold hands with a girl for twenty feet or so. I had no idea how sweaty your hand gets when you hold someone else’s hand, though—when I picked up my bike I secretly wiped my hand on my shirt so Polly wouldn’t see.

  It turned out Max and George were slooooowly making their way up the hill anyway, so we ran into them about three seconds later. Polly hugged both of them too, although she also socked Max on the arm. George shouted, “AWESOME!” two or three times, which was a little nerve-racking because people were starting to show up in the park and a couple of them looked our way.

  “George, you nutcase, let’s keep a low profile,” I said. “We gotta protect Polly’s secret identity, remember?” And just because I was feeling like nothing in the galaxy could embarrass me at that moment, I reached over and held Polly’s hand again. She even let me.

  “Oh right!” George said, not looking like he cared much. “LOW PROFILE!”

  “We better get back to headquarters before George blows a gasket,” Max said. He looked at my hand holding Polly’s hand.

  “Mazel tov,” he said with a huge grin. He turned to George. “That means ‘congrats on the awesome stuff you’ve got going on,’ just so you know.”

  “I know what ‘mazel tov’ means, Dad,” George said. “You have actually been Jewish the whole time I’ve known you.”

  When we got to the bottom of the hill we saw a handful of other kids coming toward the park. It was Scott Fanelli and his tribe of morons, cackling loudly about something and swaggering along like usual.

  “Hey, it’s the Unofficial Captain Stupendous Loser Club!” Scott said. “What are—” He trailed off when I let go of my bike’s handlebar and held Polly’s hand, which she’d already held out in my direction. Scott looked back up at my face with his mouth open, and I looked him right in the eye without saying a word.

  It was fantastic.

  One of Scott’s caveman followers thumped him on the back of his shoulder. Scott coughed.

  “So, hey, Polly, how about you ditch these rejects and hang out with us?” Scott gave Polly his usual irritating grin, but his eyes darted down to our hands again.

  “No.”

  Polly’s “no” was so totally pure and simple, I couldn’t help breaking out in a cheesy grin of my own. For the first time ever, I saw Scott Fanelli lose his cool. His eyebrows knotted up, his face turned pink, and the corners of his mouth turned down. I guess he wasn’t used to not getting his way.

  “Okay, whatever. We’re just gonna check out some confidential info about Professor Mayhem’s origin story, but if you want to miss out on—”

  We burst out laughing—I mean, we totally lost it. Scott and his buddies shuffled their feet and crossed their arms as we laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “Dude, he’s right! We’re so gonna miss out!” George said.

  “Where did you get this so-called confidential info?” I said, gasping for breath.

  “Right, like I’m gonna give up our sources,” Scott said. His face wasn’t pink anymore, it was bright, stop-sign red. “You losers wouldn’t know anything about how to get info on a villain like Profess—”

  “Oh no, we don’t know squat about that,” Polly said, which cracked us up again.

  Max closed his eyes and howled, his big shoulders shaking and his tongue hanging out. George bent over and clutched himself around the middle as he laughed. Polly threw her head back and shrieked laughter at the sky, her hair falling behind her like a short, shimmery wave. The muscles in my face and stomach started to hurt.

  “Let’s go,” I said. Still laughing, we walked right through Scott and his goon squad. Scott had to scramble to get out of my and Polly’s way, and Max went shoulder to shoulder with one of the nameless goons. The goon staggered back from the impact, and George stared him down as we went by and continued down the hill.

  “I brought food,” Polly said when we were safely back at HQ. She slung the messenger bag on the table and opened it, revealing a stash of quality junk food.

  “So the aliens have junk food on their interdimensional cruiser, huh?” Max said.

  “NO, they don’t have junk food, although they could probably make it,” Polly said. “I went to the store before I came here.”

  “Was your mom going totally bananas?” I said.

  “She’s still going bananas,” Polly said. “For a while after I got back I thought she was just gonna chain me to the kitchen table 24/7, and she’s making me go to a shrink because of the alien abduction story.” She sighed. “I hate going to therapy.”

  “There must have been a million reporters at your house,” George said.

  “Nope,” Polly said. “Mom said the news was nothing but Captain Stupendous while I was gone. She was pissed off about that, actually.”

  “What about your dad?” Max said.

  Polly shrugged. “He’s in India for some work thing—Mom said we should wait until he gets back before we tell him about it.”

  “That’s about fourteen varieties of lame,” George said. Max and I nodded.

  Polly shrugged again, then spread her hands apart with her fingers wide open in a showtime kind of gesture. “That’s my dad.”

  “Maybe nobody’s made the connection,” Max said. “Between Polly and Captain Stupendous, I mea
n.”

  “Maybe not,” Polly said.

  “Probably not,” I said. “And the reporters can’t interview everyone who says they were kidnapped by the UFO.”

  We got comfortable in our chairs and chowed on doughnuts, beef jerky, and honey-mustard pretzel nuggets. George and Max put their feet up on the table.

  “So what’s it like hanging out with aliens?” Max said, sliding way down low in his chair.

  “You were on a spaceship!” George said. “It must have been the most amazing thing ever, huh?”

  “‘Amazing’ is not even the word,” Polly said.

  “So what’s the deal?” I couldn’t wait any longer. “How did Mr. Zazueta become Captain Stupendous? Was it the meteorite?”

  Polly nodded. “Yup. See, the Grakkians are an interdimensional peacekeeping force. They recruit people on all these different worlds and dimensions, and make superpowered bodies for them to fight with.”

  “So they’re like cops for the entire universe,” I said.

  “Pretty much,” Polly said. “But they’d never recruited someone on this planet before—they only tried it with Mr. Zazueta because one of their ships was damaged during an interdimensional jump, and he was hit by a piece of the transmogrification matrix.”

  “So my dad and Professor Mayhem both found pieces of a Grakkian ship. Wow. So when your Stupendous body got all lit up and glowy during the battle at my mom’s office, was that them?”

  “Yeah,” Polly said. “They did a remote scan to see what was going on.”

  “You’re a soldier?” George said.

  “No way,” Max said. “You hate it when people tell you what to do, and soldiers are always told what to do.”

  “It’s not really like being a soldier,” Polly said.

  “Don’t they know Earth has fifty-seven known superheroes operating right now?” Max said.

  “Fifty-two,” George said.

  “Whatever,” Max said.

  “There weren’t so many superheroes twenty-five years ago,” I pointed out.

  “And none of the other superheroes are as good as Captain Stupendous, right?” Polly said.

  “Right!” George said.

  “Technically I’m supposed to patrol the whole planet, but with all those other superheroes I don’t need to, not unless something comes up that no other superhero can handle,” Polly said.