Sometimes I wonder if stores have to go through some kind of gladiatorial contest to get a place on Melrose. Lost World was a great example. Technically, it was a comic book store, and sure there were the racks of popular comics in that corner, but they were dwarfed by the carefully sorted archives of obscure collector’s editions on the long wall, the racks of costumes, the shelves of actual books, and oddities like a globe of the heavens, nested crystal spheres outlining what Apotheosis claimed the universe was really like.
To be polite, I wandered over to the comic racks. Dramatizations of superhero battles had never drawn me, but there were the science fiction comics and the weirdly artsy graphic novels. My eye caught on Volume Twelve of Sentient Life. The series finale. I plucked it out of the rack and flipped through cautiously. I didn’t want to spoil the ending, and I’d always wanted to read this comic. That had to be Delph, the evolved dolphin boy. What had happened to his body in the volumes I hadn’t seen? In one frame, he pressed his hand against a screen as restraints fastened him down. In the next, the outline of a hand formed, an illusion of another, more delicate hand pressing against his from the screen’s other side. So Vera had survived to the end. Well, almost to the end. This page was near the beginning of a long graphic novel. That was why I’d never properly read Sentient Life. Twelve fat books, and I’d never been willing to spend the money to read all of them at once. Even with collections, it would be well over a hundred dollars. Who had that kind of money?
Me, that’s who. And all for thirty seconds of scribbling a formula on a wall in a code I couldn’t be sure Cy would even understand. The wages of sin were amazing.
Not, however, the wages I wanted. Ray stood a shelf down from me, poring through a book of maps of LA, of all things. Claire wasn’t much farther, failing to control her giggles at a corset modeled after her mother’s old costume. I stepped between them and offered quietly, “You guys know I’m buying, right? I have a thousand dollars of supervillain money I want to get rid of as soon as possible.”
Ray’s face bent in his most maniacal grin. Claire’s eyes merely twinkled. She’d lost control of her super power for a second. They had to have known this was coming, but they hadn’t wanted to assume.
Maybe they’d even discussed it. They swept right past me, beelining to the long display of statues that took up so much of the store. Statues? Statuettes? Figurines? Whatever. Claire scooped up two boxes, and set one in front of herself and the other in front of Ray. Then she delicately pried open hers and lifted out and set on the rack…
…a foot-tall statue of Lucyfar. Criminy.
“Come on, you two, this is a civilian day! I just want to be normal!” I hissed, rolling my eyes. Rolling my eyes didn’t feel like enough, so I rolled my head, too.
“This is what we talk about buying on normal days. We just can’t afford to!” Claire was right. I couldn’t deny it.
I examined the statue instead. I immediately had to giggle. “No one would wear that.” Lucy’s costume amounted to… well, not much. A black leather bikini, a few skull ornaments, some random straps, and very impractical looking boots.
“Lucyfar did.” New, shameless, super-powered Ray didn’t bother hiding the subtle growl of appreciation at the thought.
“Is it really so hard to believe, now that you’ve met her?” Claire asked, then gave me an impish grin. I had to return it, because the image of Lucyfar flopping onto her stuffed recliner in that getup started forcing hysterical giggles out of both of us. I tried to calm myself down by focusing on other details. This statue had Lucy’s black knives on the end of bony, black wings coming out of her back. Was that made up for the statue, part of the old costume, or an aspect of her powers she hadn’t shown us?
Wistfully, Claire noted, “I wouldn’t mind wearing something like that in a few years when I’ve filled out, except my power will completely cancel the effect.”
My cheeks warmed up. Thanks, Claire. “Don’t let that stop you,” Ray purred in delight. Thanks, Ray.
Then, to my considerable surprise, he changed the subject. “As much as I do like the costume, this is the Lucyfar statue I want.” With a little hop, he reached up to slip a big box off the top of the shelf behind the display counter. It dropped into his hands with perfect delicacy. Tesla’s Alternating Current Motor! Would it be too much to ask to repeat the Super Cheerleader Serum recipe, super power? I wanted some of that. My power ignored me.
He lifted the statue out as if it weren’t two eighteen-inch tall ceramic figures that must weigh half a ton. The broad base looked like pavement, with tiny fake dollar bills strewn over it. The statue needed the support, because the statue of Lucyfar stood on the ground with the statue of Gabriel held up only by two wings wrapped around her, the other four spread to keep him hovering. At least Lucyfar was better dressed in that black gown she’d materialized fighting us.
“Oh, wow,” Claire concluded succinctly.
“This was the first time anybody’d seen Gabriel in action. He hadn’t started his blog yet,” Ray whispered to me. To me, specifically. Claire would know this stuff.
Wait- “This really happened? They made a statue of an actual event?”
Ray looked surprised at the question. “Sure.”
Claire bolted away from us over to the comic racks, then scurried back and spread out a magazine. “Compendium: Lucyfar” it read. She flipped through it to a page with a photo of, well, exactly what the statue in front of us depicted—Gabriel hovering and wrapping her in his wings from behind.
‘Lucyfar and Gabriel, The Archangels’, the section was titled. The page was mostly photos because there wasn’t too much to say. Lucy claimed to be the actual fallen angel and that Gabriel was her divine brother. Gabriel said she was making it up, but for all that he freely talked online about what it was like to be a superhero, he never explained who he was, how he got his wings, or how he knew Lucyfar. They did seem to have a connection, and their frequent meetings were half super-powered battle, half bickering about morality. Gabriel had notably caused Lucyfar to go from working with Arson to fighting and defeating Arson, mid-crime. The conversation was unrecorded, but witnesses claimed the winning argument was that Arson’s bombs would level the library next door, and it still had children inside.
Wow. Lucy had a whole magazine packed with this stuff. I flipped a few pages and saw in one header the question that had nagged me earlier. “Where Did Her Wings Go?”
A different question struck me now. “Is there one of these books for The Apparition?”
Ray nodded. Apparently I’d asked a solemn question. Claire returned the Lucyfar magazine to the racks and brought back another one, much more sedately. Chilly nervousness tiptoed up my spine. The Apparition was dead, after all. This might be gruesome.
Unlike Lucyfar’s packed volume, “Compendium: The Apparition” was slim, only half a dozen pages. The only photo showed Lucyfar standing over a prostrate, terrified man in a suit. Next to it was a copy of the same photo, with an artist’s sketch of The Apparition crouching over the man, holding his face in her hands. There were other pictures, and the one on the cover looked exactly like her, but they weren’t photos.
No, sorry, I’d flipped past a page speculating about The Apparition’s powers to a page about her origin. That had a photo, but not of The Apparition.
“Believed to be the ghost of Polly Icarus, accidentally killed by Mourning Dove during the battle when she captured the leadership of the Scarlet drug cartel,” I read aloud. I didn’t want to read more. The stock photo of Mourning Dove said plenty. White hair, jaundiced yellow skin, and white leather from the collar down hiding what the metal plates in her temples hinted at – a dead body returned to life and given horrific powers by technology. Mourning Dove might be stridently on the side of law and justice, but the hero community wasn’t comfortable with that fact. A vengeful, unhappy ghost was the kind of wreckage she left behind. She was better than Judgment, but… not by much.
“Mourning Dove. Th
at’s a name I never want to hear as a supervillain,” I whispered to Ray and Claire. Dutifully, I added, “I’m hoping to switch to being a superhero before it comes to that.”
Ray deflected that with ease. “I think you’re stuck with the villain label for a while. Might as well enjoy it until we can find a chance to publicly switch sides.”
I glanced at Claire for her opinion, but she’d wandered over to the sales counter. As I watched the clerk carefully handed her another statue box, which she brought back over to us.
“We’re not supposed to be able to open up this one, but the power to cloud men’s minds with cuteness has its advantages,” Claire whispered. Then she peeled off the tape and unclasped the lid, being careful not to damage anything, and lifted out of the box a mirror-surfaced bell jar.
Despite the mirror reflecting everything else, inside floated the transparent white figure of The Apparition. The details on her bleak face and loose, simple dress were perfect.
“I want it,” I heard myself husk. Oh, man, I did. “How much is it?”
Claire flipped up the box to show me the label on the bottom. 375 dollars. Ouch.
“I can’t,” I argued with myself. “I can’t spend that much money on a statue.”
Claire took up the other side. “You can. You want to spend the money anyway.”
“I can’t spend half of it in one place. What if you two see something else you like?!” I whined.
Ray picked up the bell jar, placed it gently back in its box, and pushed the box into my arms. Blue eyes looked right into mine. “We’ll take a pass on our statues this time, and use the money to give this to you as a gift. If you still feel bad you can buy us something amazing later. Come on, Penny, let yourself go wild for once.”
My knees shook as I toddled back over to the sales counter. I laid the box by the register, then stepped over to the comic rack next to it and pulled out the entire collection of Sentient Life. I didn’t even look at the total when he rang it up. I counted out six hundred dollars in cash, took my change, and walked out of the store hugging my bag full of treasure to my chest while Claire and Ray grinned on either side of me. I swear, they looked like they were the ones making the big haul. I had the best friends.
Blinking in the bright sunlight, I asked, “Where to next?” because I sure couldn’t decide in this condition.
“Over there,” Ray supplied immediately, rushing ahead of us to the corner and then leaping across the street. Metaphorically.
As Claire and I hurried up behind him, I gawked in disbelief. “A shoe store?” But there he was, hands and face glued to the window in longing.
“Yes, a shoe store. Look at those boots.” I looked at the boots. The thick, black, leather ones that went way up the calf, with all the ornamental buckles. Thanks to their heavy and solid build, they didn’t look remotely feminine.
“Okay, I see your point. I’ll buy them for you.”
He sighed, half frustration and half longing. “You can’t. They won’t carry them in my size. Nobody makes the really cool shoes in middle school sizes.”
Well, that sucked. “Maybe you can order them online? I guess I don’t have a way to turn all this cash into a credit card number,” I speculated, realizing it was no good.
“No moping. Come on, I want to go in here,” Claire ordered us, grabbing our hands and dragging us next door.
I looked in the window at the frilly, colorful items on display. “A costume shop? I guess that makes sense.”
“If I’m going to be wearing something silly and cutesy when I work, I might as well have some variety. The trick will be finding something high enough quality to be worth wearing,” Claire insisted as she shoved the double doors wide and stepped in.
I followed in behind her, but fumbled in my pocket for my phone. Hmm. “We might want to watch the time. Tomorrow is Monday.” Clothing shopping could take forever. I already felt a magnetic pull toward a hat rack laden with costume goggles.
“We’re out for the whole month, remember?” Claire pointed out, flashing me a wicked smile. Oh, yeah. That was our fault. Ray’s fault, actually.
Ray who didn’t know when it was wise to keep his mouth shut. “That also means we’re guaranteed As. No chance of messing up our finals, and no Fs on our science fair projects to drag us down.”
“You don’t get to be smug about that,” I scolded him in a sharp whisper, throwing in a glare for good measure. “I’ve only forgiven you because I’d have been able to talk you out of it if Marcia hadn’t been an even bigger jerk. If she hadn’t set you up from the start, I’d be a superhero now and you’d be the supervillain I reformed.”
Somewhere between our reactions, Claire sighed. “I can’t believe we have all of December off.”
“It’s just our middle school. The rest of the school system is stuck finishing the term,” Ray added.
That detached, philosophical tone didn’t fool me at all. I turned and poked him in the chest with a finger. “You’re hinting we should go on another supervillain rampage.”
I’d caught him, and he didn’t bother to deny it. Or even look bothered. “It would help our cover. If we made a scene at a different middle school, no one would be sure we were students at Northeast West Hollywood Middle anymore.”
“I don’t know about attacking a middle school. If we just rampage, someone will get hurt.” Claire sounded wistful. Criminy. My friends!
On the other hand… “I might have an idea about how to do it, but we’d just be getting ourselves in deeper trouble.” Just because it might be fun to think about didn’t mean I was willing to do it.
Except the moment I said that, Claire and Ray closed in, their shoulders pressed against mine on both sides. Each way I looked, I got a devilishly eager smile from one of my best friends. Worse, they knew my weaknesses, and I could see how this argument would go. The next round would be them making me admit that if I blew up City Hall now, it wouldn’t affect my chances of clearing my name later.
I surrendered. “I’ll need a lot of metal I don’t have. Like a wrecked car, or something.”
double-counted. Three hundred fifty dollars. Sliding the bills into an envelope, I tucked it into the mailbox. Ray looked amused, but there was no way I was stealing this stranger’s car, even a junked one. “350 – DOESN’T WORK” had been painted on the back window, so that was how much the owner would find waiting when they got home from work.
I hoped the owner was at work. The next part might be loud and alarming. I uncoiled The Machine, tossed it into the back seat, and ordered, “Eat the car. I need transportation.” Hopefully it would get the message.
“Eat the car” went through loud and clear. The Machine chowed down on upholstery until tearing and crunching became squeaking and grinding when it reached the steel underneath. The Machine grew, a bulbous maggot in a vinyl skin, until it ate enough metal and the skin split, releasing a crab that was all mouth and legs. The whining of masticated metal grew louder. On this residential side street I didn’t see any pedestrians, and the three cars that passed didn’t slow noticeably. I added “Claire’s power keeps anyone from panicking” to the list of things I was hoping would work.
The Machine sucked down the last remaining tire and convulsed. Plates slid over each other, metal crackled, and more legs emerged. Finally, he settled down as a compact, eight-legged shape about the size of the car he’d eaten. Grabbing two legs, I climbed his joints and sat down on the rubber mat up near the head. Well, The Machine didn’t have a head in this shape, but one end was pointy and the other rounded and the pointy end looked like a tail to me. So, head.
Claire grabbed the highest joints of two legs, and, like a gymnast, swung herself slowly up and around to crouch behind me. In a bear suit. I didn’t know whether to be jealous or die laughing. Ray seemed in no hurry to join us, but, if I could outrun a car, I’d act the same way.
“So how do you drive this thing?” Claire asked, peeking over my shoulder at the complete lack of controls.
I pointed down the street. “Forward!”
We took off. I grabbed my seat in both hands as The Machine lurched forward. Those eight legs could move, and we barreled down the street. As the intersection loomed, I pointed left and yelled, “That way, and try to stay between the cars!”
The Machine obeyed. The car behind me gave us plenty of space as we scuttled up Los Feliz. Claire stood behind me like a princess overlooking her domain. Me, I had to cling to my rubber seat tightly as the wind rolled over us.
And then the car ahead of us slowed down at the same time we reached the bridge, and, without my instruction, The Machine swerved off the road. The world tipped underneath me, and I wrapped my arms around The Machine’s body and lay on the side of my rubber seat as we crawled sideways along the bridge struts without slowing down. Another lurch, a moment of vertigo, and I picked myself up and took back my seat. We were upright on the other side of the bridge, and I heard laughter.
I looked. Four kids in an SUV next to us had the windows rolled down, laughing gleefully. On the other side, two teenagers on the bike path cheered and whistled. HA! Why fight it? “AH HA HA HA! Machine! Jump the next car!”
STUPID! The Machine shuddered, and I let out a desperate squeal as we catapulted into the air! I had to clutch my seat tightly again to keep from being thrown off the back. A metallic crash and the honking of the car we’d just jumped beat at my eardrums when we hit the ground. I uncurled slowly, but The Machine resumed scurrying up the street as if nothing happened.
Behind me, Claire yelled, “Do it again!” over the wind. I twisted my head around to see her rising from a crouch.
“Forget it! Some of us don’t have a superhuman sense of balance!” I yelled back. Claire’s grin didn’t waver for a second.
The buildings got bigger. There was the skyline of Glendale’s downtown in front of us, but we weren’t going there. I pointed down an upcoming side street and ordered The Machine, “That way!”
Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain Page 18