Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain

by Richard Roberts

  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!”

  onday I told Mr. Zwelf I’d be submitting The Machine for my science fair entry. He gave me the bad news immediately.

  “It’s an impressive invention, but it’s not going to get you a good grade, Penelope,” he told me as The Machine wiggled around in his hands.

  “Are you kidding? I built a robot that takes voice commands and has no identifiable power source. Forget a middle-school science fair, my Dad can’t reproduce it or even figure out how it works. It’s as Science as it gets!” I shouldn’t have sounded peeved, because Mr. Zwelf’s was a good guy and I knew this was coming, but what was wrong with the world if I didn’t get an A for something like this?

  He explained to me what’s wrong with the world. “Building something new, no matter how brilliant, isn’t the same as science. Did you have a hypothesis when you made it? What were you testing?”

  “I just made it. I was trying to find a way to recycle equipment better,” I answered, trying not to glare.

  “What process does it use?” he asked. I was fighting a losing battle, and it gnawed like acid in my stomach, but at least he really was impressed. He couldn’t take his eyes off The Machine and kept trying to spread its joints to see how they connected.

  If only he hadn’t asked that exact question. “I don’t know. I knew when I made it, but then I forgot,” was the best answer I could give him.

  Now he looked pained, and his voice got slow. Here came the bad news. “Penelope, I can’t guarantee the other judges will believe you made this yourself.”

  I didn’t say anything. My expression must have said volumes.

  “As amazing as this invention is, I recommend you turn in a traditional project. You deserve better, but you’ll be lucky to get a D if you present this,” he concluded.

  I took a deep breath. I’d known I might hear most of this. It still stung, but I’d made up my mind. “Thank you, Mr. Zwelf, but I’m going to go ahead. I know I’m getting an A in the rest of the class, and I can swallow an F on the science fair project if that happens. I’m proud of my Machine, and it’s more important to me to show what I can do than to get a good grade for it.”

  “I understand,” he acknowledged, dropping The Machine back into my hands.

  I knew how to soothe my considerable rancor. As soon as the school bell rang, I ran down the stairs and past the shop room to the second entrance to my new laboratory (there were four!). On Saturday, I’d picked up a book from a hardware store about electrical wiring. I had all these pieces of high-tech shop equipment The Machine had salvaged for me, if only I could plug them in!

  I’d opened up the book in terror, expecting to have to splice wires, grade them by voltage, hook them up in careful order to hard-to -identify terminals, and make decisions based on amperage. My jaw almost dropped at how simple it was. One of the devices The Machine had spat back up was a volt reader, so I didn’t even need to buy one. I dumped the contents of my Pumpkin jar on a few grounded outlets and rubber gloves for safety, and that might be all I needed.

  So, now, as I heard the door open and close, I was on my knees, using one of The Machine’s jaws as a screwdriver to twist a screw drown and lock the power wires into place.

  “Don’t touch any switches!” I yelled back.

  “Why are you working with just a flashlight?” Ray’s voice asked.

  “Circuit breakers,” I answered. I gave the outlet a tug. Felt secure. I twisted the screws that fastened it into the wall. “Okay, flip them back on!”

  Ray ran down to the circuit breaker box open and exposed at the far end of the lab. Whoever’d taken out Baron Overlord had ripped out his machinery and the power outlets they were attached to, but left the wiring in the walls intact. I was sitting pretty. I should be sitting pretty. We were about to find out.

  He flipped the switches, the ceiling lights turned on, and my outlet failed to burst into flame. I stuck the volt meter sensors into the holes. 121 volts. Success!

  I jumped to my feet, slapped The Machine back onto my wrist, and dragged over the metal press. I’d never used one while I was completely conscious, but the idea seemed simple enough. I plugged it into the socket
, grabbed a copper rod from the pile of raw materials, stuck it into the gap, and pulled the lever. Thunk. Clank! Half a copper rod hit the floor.

  I slapped my palm against Ray’s. “YES! It works just like it says in the book. It’s even easier than it looks!”

  He grabbed a traditional screwdriver, then walked back over to the circuit breaker box. “We need more light. I’ll turn off one breaker, and you can find which outlets that makes safe.”

  The elevator whirred, and a few seconds later the gates opened and Claire stepped in. “You look like you’re in a good mood,” she told me immediately.

  I gave a little shrug. “Mr. Zwelf told me to expect an F if I use The Machine as my science fair project. I can’t dress it up to look like an experiment. I’m gonna do it anyway.”

  Ray winced.

  “Ow,” Claire echoed.

  “Don’t worry. I’m fine, because I did this during Art. Watch!” I unzipped my backpack and pulled out my box of pencils, paperclips, and random stationary crud. I only used them once in a blue moon, but I hated not having a thumbtack when I needed one. You could do a lot with a thumbtack.

  Don’t think about it. I reached in, picked up two thumbtacks, and used the jaws of The Machine to crimp them together. Then I put them down on the floor, sticking off from each other at an angle, and spun them.

  They kept spinning, whirling around in a blur without falling down or sliding away.

  “What did you just do?” Claire asked, crouching down to squint at it.

  “I built a simple gyroscope. I think. I don’t know!” I threw up my hands and started to giggle.

  Ray knew why I was laughing. “But you meant to do it!” He looked around. “We have to get this place fixed up fast. You’re going to need tools before the week is over.”

  “I controlled my power for less than ten seconds, Ray. We’ve still got a few weeks,” I corrected him. A few weeks. Oh, man! Let it be that soon!

  Claire, smarter than either Ray or me sometimes, announced, “These wires over here have no power.”

  I knelt down between the two of them and walked them through the process of securing the hot, neutral, and ground wires, and wonder of wonders both outlets had screw holes to fasten into place. We all flinched as Ray flipped the breaker back on, but my laboratory again failed to erupt in flames. It must be a mad scientist record.

  Not that I was a mad scientist. I just felt very giggly as we plugged in my dad’s water knife table and flipped the switch. I could barely hear the hissing as the stream of water shot from overhead pump into the hole in the workbench.

  “What is that?” Claire asked, doubt creeping into her voice.

  “You’ve never seen a water knife?” I asked. I just had to keep the grin off my face as I picked up a shiny iron pipe from the pile of parts The Machine left me with, and waved it through the stream of water. I didn’t even feel the resistance as the knife sliced it in two, but Claire let out a squeak of shock when the other half fell onto the work table with a clonk, rolled off the end, and fell to the floor with a louder clonk.

  “That was amazing. You’ll be able to build anything with this kind of equipment,” Claire wheezed, leaning against the wall as she calmed down.

  I flipped off the water knife. As cool as it was, it also scared the dickens out of me.

  “We should make plans. Don’t you want to be the girl with her own sentient supercomputer in the middle of your base?” Ray suggested.

  They were both so excited! I hated to break it to them. I nudged a heating coil from what had been a microchip press with my foot. “I’m a long way from building a traditional supercomputer. The Machine is awesome, but it’s not good at anything but raw materials and repairing clean breaks. Most of the stuff we brought back it spat up in bits. I’ve got the tools for simple metal shaping and macro electronics work, but my superpower’s going to be working crippled until it builds me better machine tools. If I can get it to build me better machine tools. All the cool big machines will require custom shaped metal parts. I really need a miniature smelter with adjustable molds for casting. I’ve almost got the parts for one.” Like that heating coil I’d just kicked over. I’d still need—

  Stop thinking, Penny!

  Ray caught me before I hit the floor. That was so sweet. My own prince charming, my hero. Sure, he wasn’t strong enough to hold me, but, when he landed on his butt, neither of us took much of an impact. Lying in his lap with his arms around me was what counted.

  What was that thing in front of me? Had I fed The Machine? So many tubes and domes.

  That was my metal caster. I put metal into the bin at the top and worked those levers to adjust the prefabricated forms for the molds. With its help, I could make better molds. The whole thing was modular.

  “I have to try it out. I don’t want to forget how the controls work!” I gasped. I was still panting for breath, and sticky with sweat. Ugh. My legs wobbled. They wanted to rest a minute before I stood up again.

  “I don’t think we have time, Penny. Our folks are going to get worried if we don’t get home before it’s fully dark,” Claire corrected me. She still sounded nervous. Or maybe excited.

  Fully dark? “How long did I spend building that?” I asked.

  Ray flipped open my smart phone and pressed the button. A glance at the welcome screen later, he answered, “About four hours.”

  I looked back up at the metal caster. It was huge. It would be so useful. Something I felt told me that and itched to try it out.

  Looking up at Ray, I asked him, “End of the week?”

  “I’d say, yeah,” he chirped back smugly.

  Tuesday.

  “Were your parents suspicious?” Ray asked me as I sat down for lunch.

  “Nope. A little grumbling about how hard it is to put Dad’s junk back together, and they think it’s a phase I’ll get over. I’m going to blow their socks off when I get this under control. What do you think I should build first?” I gushed. It was a little much, but we’d had no chance to talk all morning!

  “It’th not my plathe to thay, Marther,” Ray played Igor back at me.

  “Ho ho ho, mad scientist humor.” I didn’t get to tell him I was serious. He suddenly looked too puzzled.

  “You don’t remember?” Ray asked. Claire slid into the seat next to me, all attentive curiosity and ostentatious lunchbox opening.

  “Not a thing. I go into a world without words when my power turns on. I can’t hold onto it afterward,” I explained to Ray. To both of them, really.

  “Oh, you had words,” Claire corrected me. She and Ray had the same pinched, failing to-control-a-smile expression.

  “They weren’t very good words, so she might be onto something.” Ray tried to juggle being almost serious with dancing around an explanation.

  “Spill it, minions. You’re creeping the mad scientist out,” I ordered.

  “That’s how you acted, like we were minions. Every few minutes you’d surface to shout at us to help you rearrange your tools,” Claire supplied, finally.

  Not that I liked the answer. “Wow. I’m sorry.”

  Ray raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t nasty, just impatient. Maybe desperate. You might be right about the words, because it was all ‘Move that here!’ and ‘Plug that in!’ This isn’t ringing any bells?”

  “Total blackout. It’s a little bit disturbing to find out I turn into someone else and can’t remember it when my power turns on.” Understatement. Maybe I needed help?

  Claire passed me a plastic dish with a slice of chicken on a bed of rice, then poured a thick, transparent sauce on it from another little container AND laid a slice of her Mom’s fudgy brownies on my tray. “Here. This will make you feel better.”

  I cut off a slice and took a bite. It was sweet, peanut-ty, and, after three seconds, I grabbed my milk carton and drank the whole thing. My tongue was burning! It was so good, but…

  I twisted The Machine desperately on my wrist, and, when it let go, I ordered,
“Water! Bring me cold water!”

  Then, of course, I had another bite. My tongue screamed at me. This stuff was great!

  I opened my mouth to thank Claire and realized there was no way I could talk like this. My glasses were fogging up, and my body wanted to bolt to the nearest water fountain. That duplicitous little minx!

  Ray leaned in to reassure me. “Don’t let it worry you, Penny. Your powers are supposed to get a bit crazy when they first emerge. In Evolution’s biography, I read he turned into a tree for a week when his powers came out.”

  “I heard about that. It was in that article in National Geographic about whether he was the cause of the super power boom, with all the pollen he released and all. They can find traces of his DNA in every human on Earth,” Claire chatted back to Ray.

  Ray waved a forkful of pasta at her. “Think if it’s true. Ten years later he fights Bull and Chimera, getting even more powers from villains whose powers he created in the first place.”

  This was what they talked about when I didn’t set the topic. Claire had outmaneuvered me, and there was nothing I could do about it. Oh, thank Tesla, The Machine was waddling back, distended like a gallon jug. I heaved it off the floor and drank. Ice cold water from the fountain!

  Claire still had me. Any time not spent finishing the chicken or slugging down water was time with my mouth on fire.

  I had the best friends.

  They conspired against me after school, too. They were both waiting in the lab, arms folded identically, and, as I opened the hatch, Ray announced, “No working yourself until you collapse this afternoon, Penny. We’ve taken a vote and decided you need a break.”

  “More specifically, we’ve decided we haven’t had a game of Teddy Bears And Machine Guns all weekend. I put too much work into my zombie rag doll army for you to sneak out of being on the receiving end of it,” Claire filled in.

  That sounded pretty good. I’d made a pile of money off the Pumpkin jar, and those zombie rag dolls were in for an ugly candy chainsaw surprise. Except for one thing.