Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (9 page)

Superheroes. Claire had the same thought. “You’re really going to tell everyone we’re heroes?”

There was definitely emotion behind the half-second pause before Mourning Dove answered. “If they’ll listen. You’re not the only ones with that problem.”

That seemed to be it for the lesson. Mourning Dove turned and walked into the airlock. She paused at the inner door, standing right over me. Bloodshot eyes looked down, studying me. Her croaking voice low, in an awkward attempt to be gentle, Mourning Dove offered, “It will turn against you one day. I can kill it for you now, while it’s still safe.”

I clutched my new bioweapon to my chest. “What? No! It can’t turn against me. It can’t think at all.”

She pointed at my symbiotic kitty. “Not that.” Her finger lifted, pointing at my head. At the back of my head. “That.”

My mouth hung open, but I couldn’t say anything. I shook my head instead.

Mourning Dove kept watching me long enough to take a deep, sad breath. Then she turned, stepped over my prostrate body, and walked out. The airlock door closed, blocking her from view.

Claire climbed delicately to her feet. “Well, she was creepy.”

Ray stood up with apparent enviable ease. He tried dusting off his sleeves, but there was too much plaster in the air. “
Professionally
creepy. Nobody does it better, not even She Who Wots. Psychic cat, huh?”

I perked up. “Yeah!” My creation meowed my sense of triumph as I climbed to my own feet. My muscles ached. I would be taking it easy on the way home.

I cuddled my psychic kitty to my chest, stroking its fur. Claire scratched the top of its head, which felt kinda weird. “Are you going to name it?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s my black cat familiar, so I was thinking Ariel. Or maybe Aloysius. Something like that.”

I was going to regret having to leave this beauty in my lab, since I couldn’t possibly take her home. That was fine. I’d gotten the weapon and the adventure I wanted, and if I was really lucky, in a few days I’d be able to come clean to my parents as a hero!

f course, I had to go back to school on Monday. With a superpowered adventure fresh in my memory, it wasn’t too bad.

It all still felt pointless. I sat in Science class, fiddling with glass tubes and learning how to titrate. Every drop splashed a little more blue in my beaker of pink liquid. When it turned green, I would have measured the fraction of a milliliter required to neutralize an acid.

Yes, it was great how primitive equipment could produce sophisticated results. Yes, was a useful skill for anyone who wanted to go into science. Except me. My superpower could measure ingredients down to a few molecules.

Down the table, Ray showed off by using our measurements to calculate how strong the acids and bases we used were. We didn’t know what M meant, but he could write out an equation as if M were just another number. I probably could have figured it out myself. Probably.

Still, wouldn’t it be better to use my superpower? This whole thing was so inexact. How was I expected to measure fractions of a drop? I needed a device to do that for me. As the base poured out, the tube changed, and that could affect a balance…

The end of class bell rang, bringing me to my senses. I found myself holding a glass pipe with metal forceps, keeping it steady as hot, gummy rubber cooled into place.

Everybody was staring at me. Ray had abandoned his calculations, leaning over the table with his chin propped on folded hands. Pointing at the framework of glass pipes I’d built, he asked, “Having fun making us all look like pathetic mortal simpletons?” This was Ray, of course, so his sarcasm dripped affection, not resentment.

“Don’t miss your next class, Penelope,” Mr. Zwelf told me. Told all of us. Everybody had stopped to watch my superpower do its stuff.

Oh, Tesla’s Ridiculous Moustache. Please tell me I didn’t giggle maniacally this time.

I had a great way to stop worrying about that. I grabbed my backpack and ran to History class.

Distracted by invading a badly managed bioweapons lab and then cooing over my own adorable psychic kitty weapon, I’d kinda forgotten to do my homework this weekend. I wasn’t in danger of zeros, but for once, I had to listen in History class.

Following up on last week’s discovery of the New World, today Mr. Ret laid out the cruel, tragic, and hilarious story of the Aztec Empire. It must have been hard to keep a straight face as he told us that the other Central American nations took Cortez’s side against the Aztecs. Cortez and the Spanish Empire were pretty bad, but they didn’t feed human hearts on a daily basis to a centuries-old insane god king.

Cortez brought a few hundred men. Against an entire empire, he wouldn’t stand a chance. He was a vicious, ruthless man on the run from the authorities in Cuba, and he relied upon a network of rebels to get him close enough for his rifles and precious, limited supplies of ammunition to take down Huichtilopochtli.

At that point, I raised my hand. I didn’t interrupt often, which probably explained Mr. Ret’s amused tone. “Miss Akk?”

“So what you’re saying is, the fall of the Aztec Empire was a continent-sized gang war between a supervillain and a criminal mastermind’s army of minions?” I tried really, really hard not to sound sarcastic.

I must have succeeded. Mr. Ret fought an obviously losing battle against a grin as he answered, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, Miss Akk.”

Everybody sniggered, and that got me through History class.

Ray and Claire fell in on either side of me the moment I stepped out in the hallway.

Still snickering, Ray waved his hands grandly and monologued, “Fools! Your arrows and blow darts cannot harm me! Only… nooooo! Not high velocity balls of lead!”

“How can you be so happy?” Claire snapped back at him. “We met Mourning Dove and forgot to ask for her autograph!”

Ray stared at her for five seconds, then slapped his forehead. He conceded that Claire’s topic was more important by leaning over and gushing, “When she grabbed Penny by the throat, I really thought we were going to die.”

“We could be overheard, guys!” My scolding tone had absolutely no effect.

Claire grinned right past me, a cat’s worth of sly voice and teasing grin. “Really? Because what I saw was you so mad someone touched Penny that you walked into cute ground zero and didn’t notice.”

Was Claire trying to make me blush so hard I’d shut up? Because it was working.

Even Ray changed the subject. “She would have taken me to the cleaners. She did take me to the cleaners. I hope Lucy got out okay.”

Claire flapped a dismissive hand. “I emailed her later. They didn’t even see each other.”

“We’d have died without us ever knowing she was there if she hadn’t liked us.” Ray sounded pleased and impressed rather than terrified. My minions were crazy.

Totally crazy. Maybe it’s just because Claire didn’t remember a reanimated corpse’s fingers locked around her neck that she could argue about it so happily. “Don’t be so sure. She doesn’t break out the nuke often. She has to eat immediately afterwards. You saw her suck that clone dry.”

At which point, we reached the English class. “Squee later. Academics now.”

‘Academics now’ was easier said than done. Mrs. Harpy was still on the subject of oral histories, and why Beowulf and the Iliad were as much genealogy lists as stories. The basic concept wasn’t hard to understand, but I tried to pay attention. I did.

It just got really hard to pay attention when nobody else was. Now the rest of the room was giving me the same covert, suspicious stares I gave them on Thursday. Wild-haired boy and the girl who threw off sparks certainly did, while more sparks rolled around her glasses. Marcia practically looked like she’d take my head off.

This wasn’t hard to figure out. I’d shown off my superpower in first period. All the other kids had to keep their powers secret. Whatever they felt about me going all Tesla in Science class, they must have felt a lot of it.

Which suggested that most or all of the kids giving me the eye had superpowers. That included Marcel, and Sidney, and Eshe, and one of the girls that always hangs out with Marcia, and the girl with the dark skin and bright red hair, and the big guy, and…

More than half the class gave me looks ranging from admiring to wistful to angry. I felt like a bug in a glass, and I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not.