Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen

by Richard Roberts

  My eyes drifted up to Ray, off to the side from everyone else, riveted on the conversation, but unable to really take part.

  Oh, yeah.

  I tossed both gloves over to him, calling out, “Hey, Ray, see if these fit.”

  Despite my questionable aim, he fielded both gloves with ease. Lo and behold, not only could he put them on, the gloves made little clacking sounds as they adjusted to fit him perfectly. They hadn't done that with me, or with Cassie.

  Without a word, he walked over to my spring twisting device, and lifted the multiple hundred pounds of metal a foot off the floor.

  Cassie waved a hand at him frantically. “See? See? A good mad scientist can give people superhuman powers! This is exactly what I'm talking about. I bet Penny could make Ray boots, maybe a whole suit. By the time she's done, he'll be more powerful than any of us who were just inherited what we can do.”

  Sliding the gloves back off, Ray gave them a quick shake. They folded up into fat disks that he tucked into his pockets. I had no idea they could do that.

  As Cassie ranted behind him, Ray grinned at me like the Cheshire Cat.

  re we going to have to set official club days?” I asked, between stuffing onion rings into my mouth. I didn't like onion rings, but Claire's mom had some kind of magical onion ring fixing power. They had a strong oniony taste, but none of the squish.

  Ray eyed the lunchtime cafeteria crowd. “We might. Texting each other 'Do you want to go commit an act of moral and legal ambiguity?' seems to no longer be an option.”

  “The new kids seem nice,” pointed out Claire, waggling a glazed carrot stick.

  “But not Inscrutable Machine nice,” Ray argued back. Faster than a snake, his hand darted out and plucked the carrot from Claire's fingers, tossing it into his mouth.

  As he chewed, Claire hunched up her shoulders and gave a wicked giggle. “Cassie would sell her own legs to join the Inscrutable Machine.”

  Resisting the urge to joke, I said, “But then it wouldn't be Us.”

  They got it. Sober silence reigned.

  I added another bucket of conversational ice water. “Besides, I had to convert my lab to hero mode, which is now useless. We don't have a base.”

  “Food now, sulk later,” Ray said, pointing up at the clock on the cafeteria wall. He had a point.

  Ray must have been especially pleased that I'd given him a fake super science toy to let him use the super powers he already had. He caught up with me a whole hallway before we hit the front door of Northeast West Hollywood Middle. There was no hand holding, or anything. He just fell in step next to me, grinning this big, proud, happy grin. It made me happy, too.

  As we passed the big central stairwell, Marcia walked out and tried to trip him.

  I almost missed it. She looked completely unconcerned with us, saying something to her friend with the brunette page-boy haircut. Without missing a step, her foot slipped out farther than it should have, hooking around Ray's ankle.

  Ray didn't miss a step, either. Superhuman reflexes and strength let him push right through and keep walking.

  It happened fast, and it happened smooth, and since it didn't work, I almost didn't know what I saw. Only the sound of Marcia's papers hitting the floor made me look back at all.

  She stood there, a binder, a few loose pages, and a textbook still clutched to her chest. She sneered at us, the mask of friendliness gone.

  Most of the kids in the front hall stopped to see what was going on. It took a moment for Marcia to find something to say.

  In that silence, Ray said, “Watch your step.”

  It wasn't much of a quip, but Marcia's friend gave a reflexive, barely audible snort.

  Marcia screamed.

  Her voice rang through the hall, that horrible noise between a screech and a growl that jaguars make. She lifted the textbook, and threw it at my head.

  A couple of months of super powered battles came to my aid. I saw five pounds of hardcover book hurtling towards my face, and ducked and stumbled aside.

  With a series of loud clicks, Marcia unfolded a glittery telescoping baton. This wasn't a cheerleader's toy. This was the weapon she used as Miss A.

  She took a step after me, her eyes bulging with hate. Ray tried to step in the way, but the sparkled-up metal staff swung at him in sharp strokes. It didn't hit, but it did make him back away.

  Her next two steps kept following me.

  I had my rings. I could take her.

  Mom and Dad would freak.

  Okay, fine. I would run.

  Hoarse and shrill, Marcia yelled, “For once in your life you're going to lose, Penny Akk. Too bad there's no one here with super powers to save you!” The sneer she gave Ray, was deranged, mocking.

  Ray looked stunned. She had him. Even if he had his gloves, they wouldn't hide his powers if he saved me. His face hardened as Marcia stepped past him. He was going to intervene anyway.

  Or he would have, but a squeaky voice yelled, “I have super powers!” and a jagged crystal disk sailed out of the crowd at Marcia.

  It wasn't all that well aimed, and she knocked it away with her baton, but it got Marcia's attention as Teddy stepped into a rapidly clearing space, his raised fists covered in a shell of what had to be rock candy.

  Marcia leaped to meet him.

  The contest was totally one-sided. Marcia's staff lashed out again and again, and shells of sugar sprung up between it and Teddy, but the hits still sent him stumbling back. When he swung at her, not only did she lean out of the way, but she used it as a change to whack him in the back of his head. At least he put up a helmet, but the sugar split, and Teddy got knocked to the floor.

  Lifting both hands, the little eleven year old unleashed a wall of fire between himself and Marcia as he struggled to his feet.

  She gripped her staff at one end, and stabbed the rest through the flames, hitting him in the stomach.

  Teddy wheezed, and a wall of ice replaced the fire. Marcia grabbed the top of the wall and vaulted over it.

  Super powers or not, Teddy was just no good at this, and Marcia had lost it. Totally lost it. She was going to hurt him.

  I pulled the jumble of rings and chains out of my pocket, and threw it overhand, shouting, “Teddy! Catch!”

  Instinctively, Marcia swatted the mess with her staff. A couple of cuffs closed around it. Too angry to think clearly, she grabbed the chains and tried to pull the cuffs free.

  Maybe she would have done that anyway. The sad truth was, Marcia had all the training, but no more instinct for this than Teddy.

  One of the cuffs swung around, as if by accident, and closed around her wrist. When she yanked in both directions, the rings on her staff slid free, and instead one of them latched onto her upper arm, tethering it to her wrist. Reflex betrayed her again, and she grabbed the chain, getting her other wrist shackled.

  Thirty seconds later, Marcia was on the floor, tied in a knot of chains. Someone had taught her to get out of handcuffs, and twice she'd gotten her hands free, but that only set my nasty little invention off, making it grab something else.

  Marcia's growls and screams stopped, replaced by quiet sobs.

  I felt awful, but I couldn't have let her beat Teddy black and blue.

  That wouldn't help when I told my parents, and I had to tell my parents. It was the right thing to do.

  Criminy.

  Marcia wasn't in English class on Friday. At least I was.

  Actually, I had to hand it to my folks. They laid out the rules and the punishment, and they followed both exactly. I'd reported the fight I got into and why, and lost my week's allowance and been forbidden from all computer access Thursday night.

  And after that, arms folded, her face blank, my mother asked me, “Was it worth it?”

  “Yeah.” I'd do it again. I wasn't going to let a sixth grader get beaten up trying to defend me.

  She reached out and laid a hand on my head, then pulled me in close for a hug. “Then I'm proud of you. Sometimes as
an adult, you do the right thing even knowing you'll be punished for it. You do it because it's the right thing. That's true whether you're a superhero or a normal woman.”

  Trying – with limited success – to not sound resentful, I filled in, “But I'm still being punished.”

  “Of course. Otherwise, the lesson wouldn't mean anything.”

  It was an annoyingly dull evening, but not an unbearable one. I sat out in the kitchen doing every scrap of homework I could find, and then rereading my Sentient Life graphic novels. Mom tried to guess what my homework problems would be. She got two of them word-for-word right. Dad told me what he was hearing from NASA as they scrambled to find a safe way to contact the Jupiter colonies that had sent a radio message to Earth. I tried to dance through the conversation without giving any hints I'd been there, like using the phrase 'Jupiter colonies.'

  But that was Thursday night. Friday, I stared at Marcia's empty seat until Mrs. Harpy walked up to stand next to me. She looked ill. Haunted. “Miss Bradley has been suspended, Penelope. A hallway full of witnesses agreed that she attacked you without provocation, and you only fought back at all when she turned on a younger student. Her father…”

  She cut herself off. Everyone was quiet, trying to pretend she hadn't just said much more than a teacher is supposed to.

  We returned to the scintillating topic of writers paid by the word.

  Still, the week would have ended forgettably if Cassie and Claire hadn't intercepted me on the way down the steps after school. While I stared at Claire's evil grin in slowly dawning horror, they picked me up by my arms and walked me around to the back of the school.

  If they said anything, I didn't hear a word. Claire's golden-curled baby face was giving me the full blast of her power. I was proud of myself for even spotting that, but by the time I did, it was much too late.

  They set me down in front of a crowd of kids, all standing outside the broken door to my formerly villainous lair. One, two, three, six, twelve… after that it was hard to count. Two dozen at least.

  An older high school boy stepped out of the group, his grin a mix of awkward and hopeful, maybe even a little hungry. “Hey, are you taking new members? Because…” His eyes lit up. Whatever color they'd been, it disappeared behind the prismatic, shifting, mostly pink glow. An aura much like it cast his body in highlights, and turned his hair into a rainbow. “…I am so sick and tired of hiding my powers.”

  Criminy. That was all I could think. Criminy. But my mouth said, “Sure. Come on in.”

  The elevator had to make multiple trips.

  Maybe my mind was still a little clouded, but I stood next to the wall in the center room and watched all these kids gleefully start to chatter with each other, and I just couldn't make sense of it. What was I going to do with them all?

  Another boy, dark and athletic except for round-framed glasses so big and thick they were almost laughable, stepped up to me. He had a shoebox cradled in his arms, and an expression a lot like the glowing kid's. “Penelope Akk? You're Brian Akk's daughter, right? Can I see The Machine? I've heard a lot about it.”

  My grin came back. “People talk about The Machine?” I unwrapped it from my left wrist, and gave it a few twists, until its little metal millipede legs started to wiggle.

  With those glasses, his eyes were always wide, but they got a little wider in awe. Maybe The Machine was impressive to look at. It was kind of small, but a mechanical pillbug was pretty cool. Especially when you peeked into the gaps between plates and looked at all the tiny moving parts.

  “Will it really recycle anything?”

  “Anything. Watch this.” I giggled. I couldn't help it. It was finally time to show off my favorite parlor trick. Fishing my house key out of my pocket, I stuck it into The Machine's mouth. Obligingly, and with a soft grinding noise, it chewed the key up. A shiny little metal plate slid out to fill one of the gaps in The Machine's armor.

  He stared, mouth open. It was like seeing a magician rip up a fifty-dollar bill. He knew I wouldn't really destroy a key, but I'd just done it in front of his eyes.

  “Spit it back out. Same shape, please,” I ordered. The process ran in reverse. The just-created metal plate sank back in, and after another brief grinding noise, my key stuck out of The Machine's mouth.

  He stopped staring at my invention to stare at me, and the words came out in a rush. “I'm Rocky. I invent stuff, too! I only have one so far. It's not as good, but I really like it.”

  Popping the lid off his shoebox, Rocky pulled out… one of those sippy birds. The ones that go up and down and dip their beak in a cup of water. It was bigger than most of them, big enough to fill the box, and there were a lot of tubes inside its glass belly, as well as a lot of sloshing water.

  Holding it up nervously, he set the bird to rocking. Its beak dipped down. Went back up. Dipped down. Instead of going back up, the glass and plastic bird head tilted, looking at me. The body continued to tilt back and forth, but the head and neck swiveled all around, looking between me and its creator. It even opened its beak and gurgled, like bubbling water.

  “This is Penelope Akk, Bloop,” Rocky told it.

  It looked at me. It looked down at The Machine in my hands. It gurgled at its owner again.

  “Yes, that Penelope Akk.”

  Bloop gave me an open-beaked gurgle that went on and on for fifteen seconds. It sounded impressed.

  “I think I can make walking legs for Bloop. It's all about how water moves,” said Rocky.

  “I'm a mad scientist, too! Look at this!” crowed a girl with a black ponytail, who I thought was a seventh grader. She stepped right up next to Rocky, fishing a shiny metal string out of her pocket. She proceeded to play a quick game of cat's cradle with it. The string was much too short, but it split apart in pieces connected by strands of different-colored light as the pattern grew more and more complicated. Her smile was a lot more goofy and sheepish than Rocky's as she admitted, “I don't know how it works. I'm not really sure how I made it. I think it can do a lot more than just this.”

  Another high school girl joined the group around me. “I've made a bunch of things. I even got goggles from – a friend of the family. I didn't bring anything, but I bet I could make something right now. Do you have a table saw?”

  They all looked around. My glowing pride flickered into embarrassment. “I don't have a lot of tools, yet. I can make most things just with The Machine.”

  “We need a full lab,” mused the older girl.

  “I need a furnace and kiln,” said Rocky.

  “And a lot of chairs,” said still another boy, who now had spikes sticking out of his head and the back of his neck. Slitted eyes, too.

  “I see some piled up furniture in that room over there,” said the table saw girl, pointing.

  “Akk,” said me, myself, personally. At least I managed to say it really quietly, so none of the others seemed to notice. They'd all taken an experimental step towards different doorways, so I used that as cover to scurry off.

  If they went hunting furniture, they would stumble over my cursed statue for sure. Just this many kids wandering around the base on a regular basis would find it.

  Tesla's daisy chain lightbulb trick. What was I going to do?

  I hurried into the room where I'd stashed the statue, to find someone already there. Barbara was crouched down, with the cloth cover lifted, examining the statue without touching it.

  Oh, criminy. Too late.

  Looking back over her shoulder at me, voice calm but eyes glinting, she said, “No wonder a Major Undefinable was defending this artifact. You should be careful with this, Penny. It could hurt someone.”

  “Oh. You, uh… know.” That I was Bad Penny.

  She sighed, replacing the cover and standing up. “Too much, but not way too much.”

  I dropped my voice to an urgent hiss. “If anybody sees that, they'll know. Can you help me get it out of here?”

  “It's not safe for me to touch. You are the onl
y mistress it accepts. But I can help you hide it. Here.” Pulling around her satchel with the little girl holding a knife logo, she pulled out a magic marker and handed it to me. Then she withdrew another, and scribbled on the floor next to the statue, 'This object is not interesting.' A few inches away from that, she wrote, 'I don't feel comfortable standing here.'

  There was no point in asking if this would work. Obviously, she thought it would. I went over to the door, and wrote in the doorway 'There's no reason to enter this room' and around the doorframe 'I should look somewhere else' and 'It's too dark in here. It's not worth bothering with.'

  Two hurried minutes later, the room was a mess of graffiti, and Barbara capped her marker and put it back in her bag.

  “Now what?” I asked. There had to be more to this than just writing.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  I did. At this point, I had no choice but to trust her. I could hear voices moving around in the labyrinth of this old, mostly-abandoned base.

  Barbara took a pin out of her bag, and with a quick, sure jab stuck the tip of my index finger. I winced, but she moved so fast it was already over. One drop of blood welled up, and the goth girl took my wrist and touched the blood to the words I'd written around the door frame.

  The red stain spread, first across the letter, then the word, then the sentence, and then to the rest of the room. Everything we'd written turned the dark, ugly red of drying blood, with little drips and smears. Eeewww.

  “Thank-” I started to tell Barbara, but when I looked into her eyes they weren't there, replaced by black voids. Her lips moved, not making words but bulging, like something wriggled around in her mouth. Whispers hung in the air.

  Barbara shook her head, and rubbed the heels of her palms into her eyes. When she let go, those eyes were merely bloodshot, and her voice hoarse. “I'm fine. The artifact will keep the spell powered for awhile, but you should move it as soon as possible.”

  From out in the main room, Cassie yelled, “Hey, Penny Akk! I'm going to show everybody my giant monster. You want to come?”