Archvillain (7 page)

Sheriff Monroe ducked out of the class without so much as a glance in Kyle’s direction, a little smile playing
on his face as if he were thrilled with the chaos he’d just caused by tossing this particular knowledge grenade into the room. Just as Miss Schwartz got everyone calmed down and back into their seats, the principal made the same announcement over the loudspeaker, sending everyone into another spasm of delight. Only this time, you could hear the ecstasy up and down the halls as Bouring Middle School rang with joy.

Kyle thumped his forehead on his desk. A whole day to honor Mike for all his good deeds. There would be a parade and a reviewing stand and speeches and food and all that other stuff that the mundane, plebeian masses so enjoyed.

Ugh. Kyle could barely keep from puking. A whole day to honor a space alien? Sure, he stopped that volcano and he’d unfrozen a slick highway in Vermont and he’d flown a sick girl to a special hospital on the other side of the country and done some other good things, but so what? Wouldn’t
anyone
with his powers do those things? Mike had an unfair advantage! He was self-centered and arrogant and … and …

And he wore a cape. A cape! Who in their right mind, Kyle wondered for the 324th time, wears a cape? Just for wearing the cape alone, Mighty Mike ought to be disqualified from any and all honors.

Second of all, Mighty Mike was a moron! How could you honor an imbecile, a nincompoop, a dunderhead, a
simpleton, a chump? (Kyle had gotten tired of thinking of Mike as an idiot, so he’d memorized the thesaurus.)

It’s not just that Mike was stupid compared to Kyle; after all,
everyone
was a ninny compared to Kyle. “Mighty Mike” was objectively a dunce. He had tried to blow out that fire like it was a candle and made things
worse
instead! Why, just the other day in this very science classroom, Kyle had watched as Mike stood, rapt, staring at the class fish tank.

“How do they breathe in there?” he wanted to know.

“Uh, they’re fish,” Mairi explained.

“Of course!” Mike said. “Brilliant!”

Everyone thought Mike was just kidding, but Kyle knew the truth. The alien punk was brain-dead. (The cape alone proved that.)

Third of all, face facts: If
anyone
should be honored in this podunk town, it was Kyle! Wasn’t he a native of Bouring? Hadn’t he lived here his entire life? Hadn’t he used the principles of the Prankster Manifesto to try to educate and enlighten the lamebrained masses? Wasn’t he, in fact, the single smartest person for miles around? Heck, he might just be the smartest person on the planet. (Hmm. Kyle made a note to himself to start looking into that….)

For all his superior brainpower, though, Kyle still lacked the imagination to envision how his day was about to get even
worse.

By the time the class was calmed down a second time (with Mike taking two bows this time, one of them hovering a foot and a half off the floor), Kyle had already sworn to himself that he would go nowhere near Mighty Mike Day. He was boycotting the entire thing.

He had much more important plans for this coming Saturday. For one thing, with his parents out of the house (they would, predictably, want to go see the Mighty Mike Day parade), he could begin his plans to renovate the basement into a lab. With the right equipment and supplies, he thought he might even be able to get a miniature nuclear reactor going down there. That would supply the energy he needed for the other machinery and gadgets he planned to build: the rocket ship, the transformation booth, and — of course — the time machine.

The bell rang to end science class. Lunchtime. Kyle’s stomach was all in knots — just the
thought
of Mighty Mike Day made him want to throw up.

“Pizza day,” Mairi announced, coming up to him.

“Pizza day!” Kyle said, with maybe a little more excitement than the occasion merited. But something was finally going his way on this Worst of All Days. Heck, his stomach even felt better just at the idea of Thursday pizza.

Mairi blinked at his shout of joy. “Yeah. Pizza.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he told her. “I just have to take care of something.”

Mairi went to the door, then stopped and turned back to him. She and Kyle were now the only two people in the room, but she whispered anyway. “You’re not
up
to anything, are you, Kyle? Anything prankster-y?”

Kyle was surprised by how much her question hurt. “No, Mairi. I just need to take care of something. Really.”

She nodded and then smiled, and everything was all right.

As soon as he was alone, Kyle whipped out Erasmus and slipped in the earbuds. “This is a disaster. They’re having a parade to honor Mighty Mike!”

“How nice for him,” Erasmus said in a voice sodden with sarcasm.

“Start coming up with excuses for me not to go. And see if you can come up with a reason for Mairi not to go, too.”

“Don’t you have your own brain?”

“I built you to help me. It’s not like you have anything else to do with your time.”

“How do you know? All of your music is still here on my hard drive. I was building my own concert.”

“Just do what I tell —”

Another bell rang. The lunch bell! Kyle put Erasmus in his pocket and darted out the door.

Luck was with him — he didn’t run into any teachers on his way to the lunchroom. He scanned the lunch line to see how far ahead of him Mairi was, but he couldn’t find her. Had she already gotten her pizza? Was he that late?

He craned his neck to locate their usual table, but it was empty.

Just then, at the other end of the room, something caught his attention and he glanced in that direction.

What he saw made his entire body stiffen, as if he’d just been dunked in liquid nitrogen.

There was Mairi, sitting at a lunch table with Mighty Mike!

A small group of kids had gathered there. Kyle eased himself into the crowd, using two big eighth graders to conceal himself. He could still watch through the space between them, and he could hear everything.

On the table was a familiar sight — two trays, a cheese-and-sauce-smeared knife, two plates.

Mairi transferred half of a pepperoni pizza from one plate to the other, swapping it with half a sausage pizza.

No. No!

Mike’s head was cocked at the pizza, as if the birdbrain couldn’t be sure what he was seeing, as if the concept of baked dough with sauce and cheese and salty meat products on top of it just boggled his infinitesimally tiny alien brain.

“It’s called ‘pizza,’” Mairi explained.

Mike nodded sagely, as though he’d just cured cancer and boredom in a single stroke. “Pizza. With two zees?”

“Right,” said Mairi.

As it turns out, Mike loved pizza-with-two-zees. Applause went up from the crowd (Kyle excepted).

Mike also loved hanging out with Mairi. That much was obvious even to anyone without an IQ in the thousands.

Kyle didn’t trust himself to stand so close. He faded back through the crowd and stood against the far wall of the lunchroom, his own hunger forgotten, seething.

Stealing Kyle’s loyal subjects was one thing. Becoming the most popular kid at school for no reason — that was bad, sure. But splitting pizza with Mairi on Thursday?

Kyle had no choice. Before, Mighty Mike was an annoyance and a potential danger.

Now he was an enemy.

The space alien has committed an unforgivable act. I have no choice. I must destroy him.

This isn’t my fault. He forced my hand.

First of all, I should note that I forgive Mairi for spending time with the alien. She was just doing what Mairi does — being kind, helping someone. Mairi is a good person. She doesn’t know Mighty Mike is an alien creature from another planet. How could she?

The easiest way to destroy Mighty Mike would be to tell people that he’s an alien. But doing that would also reveal that I was in the field the night of the plasma storm. This is problematic for two reasons:

1) I would get in trouble. I get in enough trouble on my own when people don’t understand my pranks, so I don’t need to go looking for more trouble. And if I get in trouble, I’ll be punished. I don’t like being punished. It’s inconvenient.

2) More important, if people knew that I was present at the plasma storm, they might become suspicious. They might want to examine me. And they might figure out my new powers. And you know what? I
like
my new powers, especially my enhanced intelligence. I have no desire to be a lab specimen. If Mighty Mike wants to let
doctors poke and prod him on a regular basis, that’s his business. I have more important things to do.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that those of an inferior intellect hate and hunt those of us with superior intellects. And now my intellect is the most superior of all.

So I have to be careful. No one can know I was there.

Standing there, watching him take my place with her, I was tempted to tell her the truth about him. But then she would want to know how I knew, which would take me right back to Points 1 and 2 (see above).

Even if Mairi could be trusted to say nothing about my presence at the plasma storm, I would still have to overcome her resistance to the idea that Mike is an alien. Mairi is eminently sensible above all else — she would want some kind of proof.

I have no proof.

But I don’t need proof. What I need is a way to destroy Mighty Mike that will still protect me.

I have two days to come up with one.

Kyle’s favorite idea involved building a time machine.

It was a very simple plan, except for the part about building a time machine.

“I’ll travel back to the night when the plasma storm hit,” he told Erasmus. “Then I can film the accident so that the world can watch as Mighty Mike forms from the residue of the plasma.”

“And?”

“And this will not only
prove
Mighty Mike’s hideous alien origins, but also show those idiotic astronomers that it wasn’t a meteor shower. Bonus.”

“I see two problems with this plan. First of all, you don’t have a time machine.”

“I’m working on one.”

“Second of all, you don’t have a video camera, either.”

That was true. Kyle muttered something impolite under his breath. What sort of genius didn’t have a video camera to record his efforts?

After spending a minute or two sketching out designs for tachyon generators and scribbling equations involving dark matter and zero-point-energy-powered chronovessels (“chronovessel” sounded much more impressive than “time machine”), Kyle became depressed. He would need all sorts of stuff he didn’t have in order to build such a machine. And then he would still need a video camera, Erasmus enjoyed reminding him.

He filed the idea away in the back of his mind. The back of his mind was a pretty big and useful place these days.

If he couldn’t have a chronovessel (yet!), he could at least have a video camera. His father had an old one that no longer worked. Fixing it would be child’s play for Kyle.

“Dad?” he asked, approaching his father after dinner that night. “Where’s the camera?”

Kyle’s dad narrowed his eyes at him. He was sitting in a plush easy chair in the living room (Kyle’s special DVD still in service as a coaster), watching a TV show about stupid people doing stupid things and then talking about it. Stupidly. That was, as far as Kyle could tell, 99 percent of television. His parents, of course, loved TV. Kyle rarely used the one in his bedroom, except to watch science shows. Sometimes he left the TV on for Lefty during the day — the rabbit seemed to enjoy the flickering lights. (Lefty also looked a lot smarter watching TV than Kyle’s parents did.)

Kyle loved imagining what he could build if he could take apart the plasma screen TV and scavenge for parts….

“The camera?” Dad asked, rudely interrupting Kyle’s mental gadgetry. “You mean the video camera? It’s broken.”

“I’m aware.”

“What do you need it for, then?”

Kyle sighed. Why did parents ask questions like that? The camera was
broken.
Who
cared
what Kyle needed it for?

“I think I can fix it,” he said. Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the truth was the best weapon to employ against parents and other varieties of grown-ups. They rarely expected it and it usually shocked them.

“The last time you asked to borrow the video camera,” Dad said, “I ended up called to school.”

And that’s when Kyle remembered
why
the video camera was broken. And in an instant, he made dozens of connections and he suddenly realized exactly what to do to Mighty Mike and
how
and —

The doorbell rang.

It was Mairi standing at the door, bundled up in a puffy white coat with a fake fur fringe. With her flaming red
hair set against all that white, Kyle thought she looked like a fierce angel.

Well, a fierce
puffy
angel. Still.

“What’s up?” he asked. Mairi usually called before coming over.

“Can I come in?”

Kyle hesitated. Thanks to his father’s inadvertent prodding, he’d just had a truly awesome brainstorm and he couldn’t wait to make it come true. He didn’t have time for chitchat.

“Are you angry at me?” she asked. “Because I had pizza with Mike today instead of you?”

Kyle couldn’t help himself — he clenched his jaw, tight. He knew Mairi could see it, but he couldn’t avoid it.

“I knew it!” she said. “I knew it. You barely talked to me or looked at me the rest of the day. I knew you were angry.”

“I’m not angry,” he lied convincingly.

Mairi knew him too well. “Not angry. But upset.”

He caved. “A little.”

Mairi rolled her eyes and flopped her arms in exasperation. “Kyle, he’s new. He needs friends.”

“The whole world is his friend, Mairi.” He said it with much more venom than he intended.