Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (2 page)

Sitting in a quiet classroom full of kids with superpowers all pretending to be normal humans just felt weird. Ray, Claire, and I were all here, although Mrs. Harpy had been smart enough to split us up. So was Marcia, AKA Miss A, sidekick to the Original, who wasn’t original in any way I could tell. The kind of tanned blonde with a nasty, shallow personality that LA is supposedly full of, Miss A had gotten me into this supervillain mess. She still shot me, Claire, and especially Ray nasty looks every time our paths crossed. I was pretty sure she’d figured out our secret identities, but she couldn’t tell anybody. Even a vicious little… dog like her knew better than to get personal.

Anyway, we could squash her like a bug if she made trouble, and she knew it. Marcia didn’t have any powers. She just was pretty good at martial arts. Not good enough. She was too vain and angry to have real discipline. I’d met the martial arts big boys, and they liked fast thinkers and fast movers. Master Scorpion wouldn’t have given her a second glance.

Two chairs away from me sat Claudia, who had enough superpowers for the entire school. Now that I knew, she’d gone from the sad girl people like Marcia picked on to a mystery I couldn’t leave alone. With her dark skin and black hair, Claudia couldn’t look more Central American if she tried, but she actually had a faint Irish accent. She had super strength, and not like Ray’s, but serious ‘lift a building’ super strength, but she never stuck up for herself. She also had super speed, could fly, and probably more besides. So, why was she always miserable?

Claudia looked up from her book, and caught me staring. She stared back for about two seconds, cold and disapproving, and then went back to her book. That was all I’d gotten out of her since we got back to school. Did she hate me for being a supervillain? She took heroing real, real seriously.

And that boy with the messy red hair in the back row. I was almost positive he was the kid who’d tried to steal my helmet in Chinatown. That made him the son of some supervillain.

A flicker of light caught my eye. Had I just seen a spark of electricity when―what was her name, Cassie―picked up her pen?

I’d always known that Northeast West Hollywood Middle and Upper High were the schools most superheroes in Los Angeles sent their kids to. Now that I’d had to fight for a place as a real supervillain, suddenly that mattered. Any kid in this class could have superpowers, or all of them. How would I know?

I wouldn’t, that’s the problem. Marcia and Claudia wouldn’t get personal and rat me out. The urge to find out who my classmates really were gnawed at me, but we all kept our secret identities because we all turned a blind eye. So… suck it up, Penny.

I was still staring at Cassie, probably looking like an idiot with a crush. She hadn’t noticed me. Instead, she’d turned her head to watch someone else. So had everyone else. What had I missed while stewing in boredom?

A flicker of anxiety tugged at me, but too late. I looked.

Claire sat at her desk with her phone out, texting away. Or maybe she wasn’t texting. Nobody looked that intense just sending messages. She had her face scrunched up, and her thumbs tapped away at high speed. She must have been playing a game instead, because she twisted the phone from side to side, pouting, then grinning, then raising one eyebrow in confusion, then grinning again.

She reached a save point. The typing stopped. Mrs. Harpy was watching Claire with the same bemused grin as everyone else. Raising her voice, too entertained by Claire’s chutzpah to be mad, Mrs. Harpy called out, “Miss Lutra, Charlemagne is waiting.”

Claire gave her a not-actually-guilty grin, and tucked her phone away. “Sorry, Mrs. Harpy.”

Everyone went back to their books. I made myself look at the clock.

The whole class had just spent twenty-five minutes watching Claire type. This was what it felt like to have your mind clouded. Claire had hit us all with her power, and gotten away with it. I only noticed because I knew what to expect, and in a few minutes, I would forget like everyone else.

Note to Penny: At least try to remember to ask Claire what she’d pulled in English class while we all gaped and drooled like bludgeoned sheep.

With a sigh, I turned back to Song of Roland. I’d lost twenty-five minutes, and this book was already a crawl. Another Moorish commander’s name, another description of hide coats and bronze spears and funny ponies, and how many men he had. Then another commander, his equipment, and his troops. And again. And again.

They covered the page. I flipped to the next page. That one, too. And the next. And the next.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I raised my hand.

Mrs. Harpy put down her own book. “Penelope Akk?”

If I was jumping, I might as well swan dive. “Is half this book nothing but a list of Moorish troops?” I demanded, and I could hear the impatient sarcasm in my own voice

Oh, ho. Mrs. Harpy smiled. I hadn’t belly flopped. I’d scored big. Unconvincingly casual, she answered, “That’s correct.”

Surrounded by twenty frustrated faces wishing they’d been brave enough to do this themselves, I said what we were all thinking. “Why would anyone want to read this? Why would anyone want to
write
it?”

Mrs. Harpy put down her book, and stood up. “Let me tell you about oral tradition.”

She did. There wasn’t much time left in the class, but she kept us interested enough I never drifted off into wondering who my classmates were.

Lunch didn’t feel any more natural. The weight of my homemade lunchbox was a vivid reminder that school hadn’t changed, but I had. By homemade, I meant I had made it myself. Me. The lunchbox was one of my few inventions I could show off to my parents, all brass gears and copper plates. I set it down on our table opposite Ray, and it unfolded to reveal my meal.

There, at least, I might as well still be buying from the cafeteria. Mom might be encouraging the superpowered genius that built this box by making me lunches now, but the food she made was so exactly as bland as cafeteria food, she might have made measurements. Actually, knowing my mom, she probably had. The box kept the hamburger perfectly at its original lukewarm, rubbery temperature, and the julienne fries as limp as when they came off the stove. Only the broccoli steamed, perfectly crisp. Not subtle, Mom. Not subtle!

Ray had a cafeteria tray, but doubled up on everything. Supervillainy paid well, and his physical powers kept his metabolism in overdrive. That was just fine by me. I liked him thin and wiry.

Oh, criminy. Was I as obvious looking him over as he was eying me? Behind his fake glasses (his powers had fixed his vision, too), his light eyes were all too focused. Leaning way forward, hands clasped below his chin, he gave me a grin that would put a jackal to shame. “Aren’t you sitting on the wrong side of the table?”

Uh. My face hurt. Uh. What was I supposed to say to that?

Claire always knew. She breezed up to the table, set her vintage lunchbox down, and sat beside me, hip to hip. She gave Ray just as serenely sly a smile, and answered for me. “No, Penny’s sitting next to me, same as always.”

“Cuuuurseeeees…” Ray held up a hand curled theatrically into a claw.

I snorted. So did Ray. Claire giggled, so much sweeter and more demure than any actual girl should be. Tension broken!

Well, the tension of being hit on was broken. I poked at a squishy fry and sighed. Sympathetically, Claire passed me a packet of crisp, spicy potato wedges. Even their red-brown color radiated deliciousness. When Misty ‘the Minx’ Lutra had found time to become a cooking goddess, I still had no idea.

Claire looked less pleased. “Sorry about the selection. Mom’s keeping all the good stuff locked up. She’ll only let me have it if I can sneak in and steal it. How am I supposed to stealth past the world’s greatest cat burglar?” She didn’t bother to keep her voice down. Like my parents, Claire’s mom ditched her secret identity as soon as she retired and had a child.

Miss Lutra had also managed to go from super criminal to lauded hero in the process. Sweet Tesla, would I give anything to know how she pulled that off! Yeah, she stole an actual nuke back from the Cossack, but the Eye of Heaven job had to be at least as good, and instead everyone blamed me for stealing it.

No cake, no pasta, no French pastry or Thai or Mexican food or bowls of soupy stuff I could never identify. Yeah, by Lutra family standards, this was pretty sad. Claire was reduced to eating like the rest of us, just much better quality and lots more of it.

She still handed Ray a bowl of beans that teased me with a sharp smelling barbecue sauce as they passed. He tried to pay her back with a suggestion. “How about an unexpected angle? Go out your window, over the roof, and sneak in from the other side of the house.”

Claire pouted, poking one of her remaining fries at the pile of crisp vegetables between her fat hamburger patty and the sesame seed bun. “If she’ll accept that. She wants me to learn the basics. She thinks I rely on my power too much. Since she’s immune, I have to sneak past her the hard way.”

Ray finished inhaling the beans. His hamburgers were already gone. Claire’s super metabolism didn’t match his, but she managed to wolf down a good half of her giant hamburger as Ray argued, “Sneaking over the roof
is
the basics for a cat burglar. It’s not like your mom waltzed past people like a ghost. She stayed where there was nobody to see her anyway, right?”

Claire turned to me suddenly, her fists on her hips. “When are we pulling our next job? I need to show my mother I don’t just stand around like a lump and let you two do the work.”

She’d had the decency to whisper it, but I still flinched. I lowered my face, and kept my own voice to a hiss. “I don’t know. School makes it kind of hard to schedule anything.” My shoulders slumped. It was time to admit it. “I’m going nuts here, pretending everything’s normal.”

Claire slumped back into place, poking at the remains of her burger. “Yeah.”

Ray swallowed his last fry, and stared at his empty tray hungrily. “Tell me about it.”

After lunch, Ray and I crossed the street to Upper High for Geometry. That kept me busy, at least. Mrs. Stakes liked making us do problems in class more than homework, which admittedly was fine by me. Even here, surrounded by older kids, I found myself staring at Mrs. Stakes. Sure, she was old, but lean and fit, and she had an unflappable stare. Nothing ever got her excited. Mad, maybe, in a really controlled way. She always, always looked like she knew what she was doing, like there was nothing she couldn’t handle.

Was she a retired superhero?

Calculating volumes of cones gave me no time to think about that.

At least I had already satisfied my PE and Health requirements. My last class of the day was Computer Science. Mr. Geisser was starting us off with a version of C++ that must have been made in the Stone Age, so we could get used to defining variables. Now I had to sit typing away, occasionally closing helpful popup windows. On the very first day, I’d had a mad science episode, and typed up a program that proceeded to program every assignment for the rest of the year. I hadn’t known whether to be smug or embarrassed. Mr. Geisser was making me do all the assignments the hard way anyway.

So, that was my school day. That was pretty much how my school days had been going since Winter Break ended. I felt itchy and discontent, so when Mom pulled up in front of the school exactly as I stepped out the door, I made no effort to hang around and talk to Ray and Claire, and got in.

We rode home in silence, and when I walked in the kitchen door, Dad called out from his office, “How was your day, Pumpkin?”

I couldn’t tell him that I missed delivering maniacal speeches as my army of zombie ragdolls swarmed all over those fools who dared to oppose me. I especially couldn’t tell him that while he sat in front of his floating blue holographic screens updating what looked like schematics for one of Mech’s beam weapons. I pointed at the Pumpkin Jar, and as he dropped a dollar into it, I kept walking and hedged, “It was okay.”

Dad was going to say something, but from right behind me, Mom told him, “She has something personal to think through, hon. If we can help at all, let us know, Penny.”