Archvillain (6 page)

Every time Kyle was ready to go for the goal, though, there was Mighty Mike! It’s like the kid was Kyle’s personal defender. Kyle dribbled down the field; Mike showed up to steal the ball. Kyle lined up for a shot on goal; Mike intercepted. Kyle kicked the ball away from an opposing player; Mike appeared from thin air to take it right back.

At one point, Kyle was driving hard down the field. He had a clear shot on goal. This was it; he was going to
score! He drew back his leg to kick, imagining he was kicking Mike’s perfect face instead.

Suddenly, Kyle’s legs went out from under him and he went sprawling in the dirt and grass. The ball spun away and rolled out of bounds.

“Foul!” Mr. Rogers cried. “Foul on Camden!”

Kyle spat out grass and pushed himself up to his knees. What had happened?

“Whiz gee!” Mike said, standing over Kyle. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to trip you.” He held out a hand to help Kyle up.

Kyle ignored it, standing on his own. “It’s not ‘whiz gee.’ It’s — oh, never mind.” He brushed past Mike, shouldering him out of the way.

“Hey.” Mike grabbed Kyle’s wrist, and Kyle felt the incredible strength in those fingers. He forced himself not to spin around and show Mike his own strength.

“I really am sorry,” Mike whispered, pulling Kyle in close. “But you were about to kick the ball and hit the goalie in the head, and the way he was standing, he would have slammed his head on the goalpost.”

Kyle had never been this close to Mighty Mike. Up close, it was truly amazing how utterly
human
the space alien appeared. Whatever process he (or it?) had used to create this human body, it was a good one.

“That wouldn’t have happened,” Kyle told him. He had planned on hooking the ball so that it would sail
right past the goalie, but Mike couldn’t know that. “Just stay out of my way, got it?”

Mike released Kyle’s wrist but did not move. “I won’t let people get hurt.”

“Camden!” Mr. Rogers shouted. “Get your rear in gear! Take your foul shot!”

Kyle jogged to the sideline and lined up his shot. He could easily kick the ball to a teammate who was open to take a shot on goal.

But he kept looking slightly upfield. Mike stood ready. Kyle knew exactly what was about to happen — he would kick the ball to his teammate, and Mighty Mike would either intercept it or block the goal shot.

No way. Kyle wasn’t going to let Mike humiliate him again.

He ran to the ball as if he were going to kick it downfield, but — at the last possible second — he pretended to stumble. He lashed out with his right foot and kicked the ball as hard as he could without making it explode,
up
field. Right at Mighty Mike.

“Oops!” he called out as the ball smashed into Mike’s face and blew up.

“Whoa!” someone called, and an excited babble rose on the field. “Did you see that?”

“Whiz gee!” Kyle said. “I’m sorry. I must have slipped.”

Mr. Rogers quickly called the game a tie. Mike, of course, wasn’t the least bit hurt.

As the teams headed for the locker room, Kyle looked over his shoulder. Mike was lingering on the field, picking up the pieces of the ruptured soccer ball.
That’ll teach you to trip me and make me look like a fool,
Kyle thought.

Kyle’s revenge was sweet but short-lived. Every day, it was something or another from Mike. If he wasn’t disrupting class by leaving all the time to perform some kind of good deed, he was slowing things down by asking idiotic questions. In history class, he just couldn’t understand why the United States ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Japan.

“If everyone wanted the war to be over, why didn’t they just stop fighting?” he asked.

“It’s not that simple,” Miss Hall said.

“But if the Japanese wanted it over and the Americans wanted it over, why didn’t they just stop?”

In math class, he got “pi” confused with “pie” and couldn’t understand why they were talking about baking. In English, he thought “irony” meant a story could rust. In science, he was just hopeless.

Kyle was already bored enough in school. Having everything dumbed down for the moron from Planet Brainless was just making things worse.

As the week wore on, Kyle became increasingly annoyed by Mighty Mike. One morning, his parents turned on the TV and who should be there? Who should be sitting on the set of the
Today
show, acting as if he had been born to sit there?

Who else?

“Well, gosh, Mr. Lauer,” Mike said, gazing earnestly into the camera, “I just hope that when people need help it’s the kind of help I can give!”

Oh, puke. Kyle nearly gagged on his cereal.

Matt Lauer grinned and cut to video from last night — Mighty Mike stopping a gush of lava in Hawaii with his freezer vision.

Freezer vision! Who came up with these dim-witted names?

(Kyle had tried staring out the window at a fire hydrant for an hour, but apparently he did not have freezer vision. One point to Mighty Mike.)

“We’re so glad you were able to visit with us, Mighty Mike,” said Matt Lauer. “Tell me a little bit about this project of yours with the government.”

“Well, the project is me, I guess. I visit a special clinic a few times a week and they run some tests on me. Trying to figure out how my powers work, really.”

“That must be exhausting, doing that all the time.”

“I don’t mind. I’m happy to help.”

“Well, I know you have to be in school soon, and we wouldn’t want you to be late.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Mike said. “I can fly pretty fast.”

“That you can,” said Matt Lauer. “That you can.”

Kyle clenched his fist around his spoon, mashing it into a twisted wreck of stainless steel. Too bad, but it was the only way to keep from throwing that same spoon through the TV screen. He would throw it away and hope his parents wouldn’t notice.

Bad enough the world — including Bouring Middle School — had decided to bow down and worship a punk from outer space. Worse yet was that Mighty Mike got to enjoy his powers — he got to fly to school from the set of the
Today
show, while Kyle had to take the bus!

He stalked out of the house without saying good-bye to his parents and threw the balled-up spoon with a fraction of his new strength, aiming at the sewer grate across the street. The spoon clanked once against the grate and then dropped in.

As he waited for the bus, Kyle fumed. He had gotten very good at fuming lately. His own incredible intelligence was frustrating enough, but with Mighty Mike added into the equation, life in Bouring was quickly becoming torture.

He put in his earbuds while he waited. “Have you figured out how to get rid of Mighty Mike yet?”

“There’s a lot of information to go through,” Erasmus said, a bit impatiently. “What are
you
doing to help?”

“I’m busy with living a life. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I thought you were smart enough to live a life
and
plot the destruction of your nemesis.”

Kyle ignored it. “You know, before that brat arrived, I figured I was only a few years away from running this town. Once I got into high school, I would have been unstoppable.”

“But now there’s Mighty Mike.”

“Yeah. Who gets excused from class at least three times a day to go attend to some crime or accident or natural disaster. I can’t decide which is worse: being bored out of my skull by school or watching everyone bow down in Mike’s direction.”

“I have some news for you. I’ve been calculating some of your powers and their limits based on the nights you’ve been sneaking out to the mine. Unlike Mike, you are limited to just flight and enhanced speed, strength, and endurance.”

“No kidding, genius. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair? You can run for miles without getting tired; you
could
fly at Mach 1 if you could figure out how to avoid the sonic boom.”

“Mike has been clocked at faster than Mach 1,” Kyle said, sulking.

“I wonder how he manages to move so fast without shattering every window in Bouring?”

“Who cares? The point is,
he
gets to have fun and have crowds cheering for him while I have to stay hidden!”

“Kyle, look on the bright side: You are the most powerful kid ever born on Earth.”

“That’s not enough. I thought this Mighty Mike worship was just a passing fad, like when everyone wore capes. But this town has totally fallen head over heels in love with him.”

“It’s pathetic.”

“I know!”

On the bus, Kyle blocked out the noise and chaos of the other kids and seethed. He was beyond frustrated. The word to describe his aggravation hadn’t been invented yet.

(Kyle made a note to himself: Develop a new word to describe his aggravation.)

The bus came to Mairi’s stop. “My mom’s mad,” Mairi announced as soon as she sat down.

“Why?” Good. Mairi could help distract him a little bit. Take his mind off of Mighty Mike.

“You know the billboard that sits out on the highway? ”

There was a large billboard 3.2 miles from the Bouring town border. (Ever since his brain had gotten bigger, Kyle had been very specific about things like distance and time.)
It said,
YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER THE TOWN OF BOURING
…
IT’S NOT BORING!
As if that were the most clever slogan in the world. On a lark, Kyle had once suggested at a town meeting the slogan: “Bouring: The
U
makes it exciting!” To his delight, people had taken his suggestion seriously and thereafter ensued two weeks of debating, arguing, and pro-and-con editorials in the
Bouring Record.
It was one of his best pranks ever.

Still, in the end the idea had been defeated, and the billboard maintained its current slogan, along with an image of the Bouring Lighthouse and a burst that read,
VISIT THE HISTORIC BOURING LIGHTHOUSE! ONLY TEN MINUTES FROM HERE!

Mairi’s mother was the curator of the Bouring Lighthouse Museum, which consisted, really, of a gift shop on the first floor of the lighthouse. The lighthouse was, Kyle had to admit, something of an oddity because Bouring was totally landlocked. There wasn’t even a lake nearby. The biggest body of water within ten miles was the Bouring municipal pool. No one — not even Mairi’s mother — knew why there was a lighthouse in Bouring, but that hadn’t stopped Mrs. MacTaggert from turning it into a museum and getting the town to declare it a tourist attraction.

“What about the billboard?” Kyle asked.

Mairi was nearly fuming. Kyle couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her so angry. “The town council met
last night and they’re considering changing the billboard to say ‘The Home of Mighty Mike!’ instead of showing the lighthouse. Mom’s really mad.”

Mighty Mike! Again! Did this kid have to insinuate himself into every last possible corner of Kyle’s life and consciousness?

“You know what, Mairi? I don’t like that kid,” Kyle said.

Mairi was taken aback. “It’s not
his
fault, Kyle! It’s the stupid town council. Mike would
never
try to hurt my mom’s business.”

Kyle took a deep breath and did his best to calm Mairi down as the school bus bounced and jolted down the road. He didn’t know that things were about to get worse. He probably should have predicted it, but he just didn’t know.

Things got worse right in the middle of science, Kyle’s favorite subject. It was the only subject where he didn’t go out of his mind with boredom because he could at least look ahead in the book and speculate about different theories and research applications. He didn’t bother paying attention to Miss Schwartz, the science teacher, of course. He already knew more than she ever would know in her entire life.

The door opened without so much as a knock and there stood Sheriff Maxwell Monroe. Six feet two, with shoulders like a Cadillac grille and a face to match.

Kyle stiffened at Monroe’s presence. He couldn’t help it. He’d had his share of run-ins with the sheriff in the past. Too many of them, in fact. He couldn’t stand the sight of Monroe — the shaggy blond hair, the ridiculous handlebar mustache, the watery blue eyes. But the worst part about Monroe was that he was on to Kyle. “Can’t wait until you’re eighteen,” he’d told Kyle more than once. “Can’t wait until I get to throw you in jail for real. I count the days, kiddo.”

Kyle’s mind raced. Why would Monroe be here? Kyle hadn’t so much as laid a whoopee cushion on someone’s chair since “the flu.” He had been too busy stretching his new brain and experimenting with his new powers —

Was that it? His powers? Had someone seen Kyle flying out at the mine and reported him?

No. That couldn’t be. They wouldn’t just send the sheriff for that, would they?

Sheriff Monroe cleared his throat and then stood there, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, until the room fell silent. As if he’d been waiting for just the right moment, he hitched up his pants, jingling the handcuffs that dangled from his gun belt.

Show-off.

“There’s gonna be an announcement soon,” he drawled, without even looking over at Miss Schwartz, “but the principal said I could tell y’all first, seeing as how this class is sort of affected. It involves one of your classmates.”

He
was
here to arrest Kyle! Kyle’s heart pounded. For what? Kyle hadn’t done anything!

“I’m real proud to announce,” Monroe went on, “that the town council has just voted to make this coming Saturday ‘Mighty Mike Day.’ ”

As soon as he said it, the entire class erupted into cheers and elated screams. Monroe’s big, dumb face split into a huge grin, his mustache waggling at the ends.

Kyle slumped in his seat. He was the only kid not to jump up. Except for Mighty Mike, who pretended to be humble, shaking his head from his seat and making a “Who, me?” face.

Look at them! Look at those morons. Clapping and cheering for Mighty Mike. And look at Mighty Mike, still basking in his false humility.
Now he allowed the applause to pull him from his chair and he made a quick little bow to his adoring crowd.

Mighty Mike Day! Had the entire town council — the entire
town
— gone completely mad?