“Do I?!”
“There’s a secret door in that corner! Help me find it!”
She clunked across the room, crushing a couple of Marcia’s old trophies. Robot hands patted the wall curiously. Thump thump. Thump thump.
Crunch.
Ampexia watched Gerty’s attempts to free herself destroy what used to be a secret door. With an exasperated sigh, the blonde high schooler leaned over to me and said, “I try not to bash on what other people are into, but your robot role model is majorly stupid.”
Gerty’s head swung around. Then her upper body swung around. Then her legs thumped around. Proudly, she announced, “I’m dumber than a sack full of hammers on a clothes line in Februtember! But you know what’s more important? That I love you.”
She spread her arms, and I leaped into her embrace. Ampexia took a step back, only to get yanked by a projectile grapple hand and yanked in to join the hug.
Sympathetic to the fact that my new teammate was not into goat hugs as much as me, and also needed to breathe, I said, “Gerty, you know the game’s not done, right? You have to find the door at the other end of the secret passage.”
Her arms swung wide, dropping us, and she gasped. “I’ll find it as soon as I wash this plaster off my hands. A clean cook is the only acceptable kind of cook, you know!”
Gerty tromped up the stairs. Ampexia followed, and I followed Ampexia. We passed through the broken wall my animatronic idol hadn’t even noticed on her search for a bathroom, and into a library.
This place was a wreck, and had been a wreck before Gerty got here. Stacks of valuable old books had clearly been lined up and used for punching. A painting of a handsome, muscular man, his smiling wife, and their golden-haired little girl had been defaced with a black magic marker, which put a mustache and devil horns on the father, scrawled black holes for the eyes of the wife, and colored the girl’s hair black.
Ampexia paid more attention to the living room on the other side of a wide doorway. “Cooool. That TV is huge. Look at all those game systems. And the stereo isn’t total garbage. Is that seriously marble on the dining room chairs? Who would do that? This place is going to rock as a hideout. I am going to get all my things, and live here until they send an army to chase me out.”
I jerked a thumb at the front of the house. “Don’t come in through the doors. I bet they’re trapped worse than the hallway downstairs. At least we know that’s clear. You really don’t mind the mess?”
She kicked a vacuum cleaner that had been broken in half, and had the imprint of Marcia’s toes in the casing. “Naah, that makes it feel more like home.”
I clapped my hands together. “So! With that settled, what’s the job you need my help with? Know a place I can steal some weapons, first? Gerty is great for brute force, but I have doubts about her tactical—what?”
Ampexia gave me such a convincing look of suffering and exasperation that I actually did feel guilty. With exaggerated pointing gestures, she explained, “I am going to go get my laptop out of the truck, hook up to these speakers, and edit some nightcore. Then I’m going to call a friend. Because I have a life. I don’t steal things every day. You need to take time off, too. This is not healthy.”
Loud thumping interrupted us as Gerty stomped up the hall. Good thing this mansion was roomy. Water dripped off of her, leaving a trail of puddles. Some of it flew around from her extended arms, wagging up and down opposite each other. “I’m a Cleany Claribelle! I also washed the dishes!”
Rubbing her hand down her face, Ampexia growled, “And if you can shut that thing down, please do it, because I can’t create music with her telling me I need to find a rhyme for ‘udder.’“
“Udders make butter! Let’s all have another!” Gerty singsonged happily.
I sighed, leaning forward since I couldn’t slump my shoulders. Walking up to Gerty, I gently slipped an arm around her aproned middle, feeling the rough metal struts underneath of a body packed with machinery. “It’s that time, Gerty. Mi mi mi miiiii…”
She recognized the slow, sad tone. Wagging from side to side, we sang in unison. “The man behind the curtain / Says it’s time to go for certain / But I wish I had the time to bake a piiiiie.”
Head tilted to one side, Ampexia watched us sing the song that ends a Gerty Goat show, her expression twisting into different forms of puzzlement.
“Come back soooooonnnnn…” At the last words, Gerty’s voice slurred, deepened, and her eyes closed. She slumped forward, arms hanging, until with a clang something locked internally, stopping her from falling over.
I faked a deep breath, and stepped away. Now I could talk to my new blonde teammate seriously. Rapping my knuckles on my wrist produced a hollow clonk. “I haven’t got a life anymore. A freaky brain parasite stole it with my real body.”
“So?”
I scowled in anger, and then in thoughtfulness. She was serious. That was obvious.
With my parents unavailable, I’d assumed everything else was also gone, but… was that really true? Perhaps it was time that Penelope Akk turned her currently solid-state genius brain towards the most difficult puzzle of all—being me.
ucking behind a pillar, I fired desperately with my new weapon. Direct hit!
“But what is this? No! My puny Earthling technology is useless!” I gasped, pulling the trigger over and over, emptying my ammunition into my opponent, only to watch it all be sucked into her body.
Opposite me, Barbara scooped up a ball of water out of the fountain, and flung it at Jacky like normal kids would a snowball. Jacky must have had eyes in the back of her head, because a cavity opened in her gelatinous blue body, closing around the ball.
Actually, since her eyes weren’t really eyes, I had no idea how Jacky saw, or in what directions.
What I did know was that she’d gotten awfully big, even in the puddle-shallow kids’ play fountains next to Griffith Park. Awfully, awfully big.
I realized what was coming too late. My teleport bracers would have looked ridiculous on bare arms, and I had no real cover. The skinny fountain poles were a joke.
SPLAT. Jacky’s body compressed, like a squeezed balloon. Barbara and I shrieked as waves of water crashed over us.
Then we did what any reasonable person would do, and doubled over laughing.
Shaking my head to clear water out of my braids, I stepped out onto the grass. My feet needed some shaking too. Water pooled inside them. Fortunately, wiggling my toes helped it drip out of the joints.
That gave me time to shake my puny robotic fist at the uncaring skies. “Curses! Foiled by my failure to anticipate that a slime-based hominid would absorb water!”
Giggling, we headed over to the picnic basket, while Jacky compressed down to a translucent blue girl shape, explaining with a hint of gurgle, “It’s not safe for me to swim, so this was nice. I can get melty in the shower, if I’m not careful.”
From out of the woven wicker basket, Barbara withdrew a neatly folded red-and-white checker tablecloth, which she spread out on the grass for us. Waiting under the cloth, I saw plates and tableware.
I gave her a smirk, leaning as heavily on ‘friendly’ over ‘teasing’ as possible. “A picnic traditionalist, I see.”
Her ghost-pale cheeks flushed. “Goth culture is more about aesthetic than depression. Wait until you see my parasol.”
The parasol was not a joke. It lay next to the basket, and even furled I had never seen so much white and pink lace in my life.
It would only be the icing on the cake. Instead of any ordinary modern swimsuit, she’d arrived vintage Victoriana, in a one-piece bathing costume of red-and-white stripes that covered from neck to wrists to ankles. Even her black hair, currently sporting one purple stripe, had been rolled up and tucked into a matching red-and-white cap. The outfit didn’t go well with her soft figure. Barbara was already more hourglass than most adults. A more traditional bikini or one-piece would be worst. Whether you liked the effect or hated it, there would definit
ely have been too much Barbara and not enough swimsuit.
She fit in perfectly with the group. I wore a plain blue swimsuit, which suited my skinny frame as well as anything would, and showed off all the mannequin joints on my arms and legs. The ball joints on my hips were a little freaky, to be honest. Jacky the blue slime girl didn’t need to wear anything. If she decided she did, I was pretty sure she knew how to shape and color change to fake it.
One of us alone might have gotten attention. Together, we became an LA thing and nobody paid any attention.
Hey, maybe they thought we were being filmed for a movie?
To dispel any hint of cynicism, I treated them both to a beaming smile. “Thank you both for coming. I wasn’t sure anyone would want to hang out with me.”
Barbara smiled back, more softly. Somehow, her black lipstick remained intact despite our splashing around. Magic? Mad science? Who would make mad science lipstick? “I like having more friends. After I started reading Abigail’s books, I had to hide from regular people, in case I hurt them. Now that everyone knows about my powers…”
Jacky snickered. “The supervillains can’t get enough of you.”
Now it was Barbara’s turn to smirk, and even roll her eyes. She did cynicism surprisingly well. “A pretty dress and healing powers are all you need to get a statue dedicated to you in Chinatown. I’ve heard the words ‘Confidentially, I was fighting this fungus monster…’ five times this week. My healing powers aren’t even that good.”
“You cure disease well. That makes you a marvel all by yourself,” said Jacky.
Barbara’s cheeks got pink again. “Says the girl who can’t physically get sick. But the point is, they’re not real friends like you two.”
“I feel like the kids who knew Jack didn’t know me, anyway,” mused Jacky.
That made me blink. I didn’t know what to say about it. I’d forgotten that before I met her, Jacky had to pretend to be a boy.
Barbara unpacked sandwiches which, true to form, had been wrapped neatly in wax paper. I opened up my plain brown paper bag, pulling out my own sandwich. The fake robot bread might be as hard as a cracker, but the taste of cheese and wheat when I took a bite made my head spin. The first bite evaporated, but on the second my reflexes kicked in, and I swallowed. The illusion of really eating completed a moment of perfect peace like I hadn’t felt since I got roboticized. The sandwich came with a box of fake apple juice, complete with a fake apple juice box I had to punch a straw into. Hopefully the logo would keep regular people from drinking it. The box displayed a picture of a clunky gray robot drinking from a box with a picture of a clunky gray robot drinking from… well, and so on. This being the product of mad science, I assumed the recursion was infinite, and somewhere in there a quark had a picture of a robot drinking from a box carved into it.
As I lifted the straw towards my mouth, I heard a distinctive, rapid chunk chunk chunk in the distance. Barbara and Jacky both stopped and stared up the street behind me.
“What is that?” Barbara asked.
“I think it’s a Gerty Goat robot,” answered Jacky, amused and fascinated.
I turned around, not actually dreading what I would see. Sure enough, Gerty jogged up the road, bouncing in her spasmodic animatronic run. She made good time, anyway. Cars wisely gave her lots of room, but she wasn’t slowing down traffic much.
Questions flooded me. How did she locate me? When did she wake up? How long had she been following me? I’d been all over town today getting things ready for this picnic!
However she detected me, I was definitely the target. As soon as she got to the no parking curb, she swerved off the road and galloped towards me, shouting, “Who’s a Gerty Girl?”
There was only one thing to do.
Leaping to my feet, I ran over and grabbed her wrist. Pointing at people walking their dogs, I told her with wide-eyed concern, “Gerty! You’re just in time! One of those dogs must be Sheepy the Sheep Dog. Can you watch them and tell me which one it is?”
She gasped. Her upper body swung forward and down like a drinky bird. Wobbling in the world’s worst dog impression, she bounced off to inspect the real canines.
Had I just unleashed villainous chaos and destruction? Well, I did hear screaming, but it was two kids shouting, “Gerty!” and Gerty shouting back, “Who’s a Gerty Boy?”
I looked back at Jacky and Barbara. The latter chewed delicately on a sandwich. The former had turned almost opaque, so we wouldn’t have to watch her slime girl digestive processes.
Dabbing her lips with a handkerchief—which still didn’t disturb her lipstick—Barbara said, “I’m sure some of the other kids from the club would love to hang out with you. I know Marcia would, but I’m not sure how to get ahold of her.”
For a moment she stopped, her mouth tightened, and she continued with an apologetic tone, “I did pass the invitation on to Cassie. She said she would try to sneak out, but I guess she didn’t make it. Her sister is only letting her spend time with the flesh and blood Penny.”
“Sue still hates you. No loss there,” commented Jacky, now definitely more sarcastic than I’d ever heard before.
So. Cassie was hanging out with the parasite. It was weirdly flattering. Cassie liked me so much, she would get all of me she could get, in any body. Not cool of the parasite to take advantage of that, but definitely not Cassie’s fault.
My silence must have stretched, because Barbara said, “When school starts up, Ruth and Rachel won’t be able to keep Cassie away from you.”
Uh, woah. I sat back, feeling the illusion of my muscles all tightening up at that alien thought. “School? I intended to have my body back before then.”
She shrugged, making me jealous. “If you don’t, I know Upper High will accept you. Polly Vinyl Chloride, my stepmother, is a robot. She went to Upper High.”
Jacky leaned forward, lifting a squishy blue finger. “If you do switch bodies and she becomes the robot, they’ll let her in. Either way, you’ll have to maintain a truce on school grounds.” Then she smiled, looking over at our currently candy-striped goth picnic partner. “I’m looking forward to going to the same school as Barbara.”
“For one year. I’m going to be a senior. After that…” Barbara’s head lolled back, looking up at the sky. Her eyes were green—no, as I watched, they turned the same blue as the post-Gloom summer sky. “I don’t know what I want to do about college. I have a career for life with my healing powers, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want a degree. A lot will depend on how Abigail is doing, I guess.”
Nodding, Jacky leaned back on one hand, her arm compressing a bit before pushing her back up. The pool, an inch deep though it was, had left her more ‘slime’ than ‘girl.’ “I like history. It’s a shame that’s not one of the special programs at Upper High.”
I sat up sharply. “History is my favorite subject!”
Jacky giggled, her eyes widening in eagerness. “Did you cover World War One this year, too?”
My grin had to be blinding. “It’s one of my favorite topics, ever. Who knew that such a tragedy could also be so silly? Oh, hey, did your class go over Roanoke? All those mysterious statues?” I sank back onto a hand in imitation of Jacky’s pose, my enthusiasm fading to speculation. “I wonder if Barbara and her sister might be the only two people who know what happened there.”
Across the blanket, Barbara inhaled sharply. Jacky sat up, and warned me, “Asking questions like that is a bad idea.”
Barbara, however, held up one of her hands, palm out, and gave us a weak smile. Her eyes had turned back to green, but a blank, plastic green, not any human color. “It’s okay. What I like about having super-powered friends is that you understand. It’s not just that you don’t freak out I hear voices. You’ll get it when I say that they’re hard to fight because I know they’re telling the truth.”
Rubbing her hands over her face, she mumbled into them, “I’m so lucky my stepmother is immune.”
I frowned. “Immune t
o voices?”
She shook her head, and took another slow breath before continuing. Her casual tone rapidly returned as she explained, “Immune to our powers. She says it’s because our magic doesn’t make sense, and she always makes sense. I know it helps bring Abigail back to reality.”
Jacky reached over and squeezed Barbara’s hand. “I know you were worried if She Who Wots didn’t stop being a villain, Mourning Dove would go after her.”
My upper torso twitched and wriggled. “There’s a fight I wouldn’t want to bet on.”
Barbara grimaced, although it had no real emotion behind it. “Mourning Dove would win. Being all-knowing is useless when you can’t think clearly about that knowledge.”
The slime girl’s brow suddenly furrowed, or at least pressed down in a thoughtful way. She gave her friend a sharp, curious look. “You’re officially in the community, now. What is up with Marcia and Mourning Dove? I’ve seen them together.”
I chuckled, wondering that myself. Then that thought split off another, a strange thought I had to say aloud. “Are we… gossiping?”
“Yeah, and it’s great,” answered Jacky, with a grin that literally stretched off her face. Freaky, but also charming.
I tried to think about that. In the distance, what sounded like a couple of kindergarteners sang a song about identifying sheep with Gerty. I’d never heard this song before. I was pretty sure she’d started making up new ones.
The corners of my mouth pulled up in a smile that felt like it happened before I even knew I was happy. “I didn’t think I’d get to have this until I got my regular life back. Especially since nobody believes me.”
“I do,” said Barbara, and after the slightest pause turned defensive. “Not because of the voices. Just being your friend while this all went on, seeing it with my own eyes, the body switching story makes sense to me. I wish… I was sure enough to take sides. Attacking the wrong Penny would be horrible.”
You Believe Her Page 13