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Chapter 6 – And a CostumeHer mom frowned and said, “Okay, I guess. But let me show you the wig.”
Alex had to admit the wig was pretty nice. It was a couple inches longer than her real hair, and straight. It had sideswept bangs in front, and it was about one or two shades lighter than her real hair color. “Mom, it’s perfect!”
Her mom showed her how to hook it into her hair with the little clips in the front of the wig netting. It was pretty obvious she needed to pull on a wig cap first, but her mom had picked up a couple. And then her mom showed her how to roll it back up so it stayed looking nice and went back in the netting it came in. And her mom had a wig head to put the wig on so it held its shape when Alex wasn’t using it, and so Alex could brush it out and style it if it got messed up in a superhero fight.
She hugged her mom and said, “You’re the best mom anywhere.”
Her mom hugged her back and said, “But I messed up your leotard.”
Alex said, “Maybe not. Let’s try this out.” She put her black leggings inside the white leotard so the legs hung down, and she laid it out on the bed like a person. She hooked the padded bra with the jiggly inserts, and slid it inside the leotard where it ought to be on a real person. Then she put the white shoes she’d been using over the feet of the leggings. She put her black domino mask above the neck of the leotard, and laid the wig and wig cap out where her head would be if she was wearing the wig, too.
She really liked the domino mask. Her dad had made a mold of her face with some special ballistic gel from the plant, and then molded this mask out of a hard plastic so it fit the gel mold of her face just perfectly. The mask covered her face from an inch above her eyebrows all the way down to the tip of her nose. And it didn’t have huge openings around the eyes. It came in well under her brow bones and came up well above her cheeks, so there were only little openings right at her eyes and when she blinked she could feel the edges of the mask ever so lightly touching her eyelids. And it had a special tacky coating so it would glue itself to her face but she could peel it off when she was done, and there wouldn’t be glue all over her face. Okay, she usually felt like washing her face afterward, but that was about it.
She said, “And Terawatt is going to wear makeup that I don’t.”
She got out two things she never used, even if they were in her makeup drawer in her desk. A fat little black eye-crayon and a rich dark-red lipstick that was pretty close to the color Libby liked to wear. She had a lot of makeup that she didn’t wear. Like the black lipstick Lindsay gave her years ago. She still couldn’t remember why on earth she thought the blue sparkly eyeshadows were a good idea, but she had stuff like that in her makeup drawer, too. Her top drawer of her desk was school supplies, so some of the time it was a study desk. Her second drawer was makeup, so some of the time it was a makeup table. And her third drawer was mostly school notebooks, and a small laptop, and some laptop accessories, so some of the time her desk was an internet cafe. It wasn’t like she could have a study desk and a computer desk and a makeup table, when she really could only use half the room. Even when Annie was away at college, Annie’s bed and dresser and desk and work table took up Annie’s half of the room, and Alex didn’t want to get into the habit of using Annie’s desk and table, because Alex remembered how mad she got when Annie used Alex’s side of the room too for a special project.
She pulled the stand-up mirror out of her makeup drawer and used it to apply the black eye-crayon all over her upper and lower eyelids. Then she applied the lipstick like Libby did, carefully smoothing it on just past the edges of her lips at the top and bottom to make her lips look fuller and sexier. Okay, Alex thought it was maybe less ‘sexy’ and more ‘slutty’, but she knew guys really liked the way Libby applied her makeup.
She looked at her mom and said, “And now for the quick change on the costume!”
She went silvery. It had taken her weeks when she first got her powers until she could always go silvery and take her clothes with her, so she didn’t end up naked by accident. Which was the most embarrassing thing ever. Then it had taken a lot longer before she figured out how to go silvery with more stuff, and then how to be silvery and grab some stuff and pull it into the silver, and then how to grab something like an entire person and take the person silvery with her. But she could still go silvery and not do it with her clothes, if she wanted to.
She went silvery and left everything behind except her panties. She flowed up onto the bed and into the costume, got herself aligned right, and went solid again.
And she was in her costume, lying on her bed. She floated up off the bed and over to where the full-length mirror stood on the back of her door.
Her mom whispered, “Oh, Alex! You look great!”
She had to admit it. Terawatt looked pretty awesome. With that hair and that lipstick and that eye makeup, she looked pretty sexy, and way more mature than Alex Mack looked. Oh, yeah, the leotard made her look a lot more mature. She suddenly went from a B cup to a D cup, and the leotard really emphasized her breasts, and pulled in her waist, and cut up at the side of the hips, making her legs look longer, too. All she needed was some white superheroine boots, and she’d look like one of the sexy superheroines out of Louis’s comic books. Except for showing the slutty cleavage and too much skin. She was never going to do that part.
Except she had visible panty lines. The leotard was highcut enough that her panties were showing at the hips. She was going to have to stop wearing panties under the leotard and leggings, which was a little skankier than she wanted to be, or else she was going to have to start wearing really high-cut panties and wear them all the time. Crud. Yet another problem with superhero costumes. She wondered if the superheroines in Louis’s comic books were just naked under their superhero uniforms all the time, which was kind of yuck.
She lowered her voice a couple notes, so she sounded more like Libby and less like Alex. “Evildoers, put down your weapons, or prepare to face the powers of … TERAWATT!”
Her mom put her hands over her mouth and said, “This is a lot more of a disguise than I thought it would be …” Then she opened the door a crack and called out, “George? Come on up to Alex’s room for a minute!”
“What is it, Barbara? I’m on the computer!”
Her mom insisted, “I really think you’re gonna want to come up here and see this.”
A few seconds later, her dad came tromping up the stairs. “I hope it’s important, because I was in a chat room with some other biochemists who were talking about some rumors they’d heard …”
He stepped into the room, and Alex said in her Terawatt voice, “Good evening, sir. I am Terawatt, and I’m here to save you.”
Her dad stopped and stared. “Holy crow … Alex? Is that really you?”
She put her hands in fists and then put her fists on her hips. “Pardon me, citizen. You appear to be confused. I’m not anyone named ‘Alex’. I’m Terawatt.”
He said, “That … That’s amazing. The costume … and the makeup … and the wig … No one’s going to look at you like this and think of Alex. They’re more likely to look at you and think of Miss Waylee.”
Alex remembered Miss Waylee from third grade. As a third-grade girl, she hadn’t noticed, except to think that Miss Waylee was really pretty. But apparently, every third-grader’s dad had noticed. Miss Waylee was tall and blonde and curvy and way too hot to be teaching in elementary school. Which was why she was now Mrs. Haverston and had like four kids.
Alex grinned. “Thank you, citizen, but your compliments are completely inappropriate, since I am a superheroine. And now for my amazing costume change!”
She flew across the room, went silvery, and slid under the bed. She slipped off the parts of her puddle that were her costume and left them in her gym bag under her bed. Then she slid across the floor to where she left her clothes, pulled her clothes into her puddle, and went back to normal, with her clothes on right. “Ta-da!”
“Very impressive, honey,” said her dad.
“Umm, Alex, you forgot a couple things,” said her mom.
Alex looked in the full-length mirror and saw what her mom meant. She still had the wig cap on her head. And the black eye-crayon. And the lipstick. “Oops. I’ve gotta work on that. But I’ve got homework to do first.”
Her mom went over to the bathroom and brought her two facial cleansing cloths. She scrubbed off her lipstick and eye makeup in a few seconds. But then she saw her face was a mess, because she’d smeared her bronzer all over the place. So she had to go wash her face properly.
When she came out of the bathroom, her mom said, “We’ll work on the makeup switch. But you did great for your first try. Now go do your homework, and I’ll fold laundry.”
“Thanks, Mom!” she said happily as she went back into her room.
She set her watch where she could keep an eye on it now and then, and started on her English paper. She whispered what Mrs. Finnegan always said at test time. “All right class, you may begin now.”
She wrote down the notes she had in her head about the paper, and then wrote out the outline she’d already been thinking about. Then she started writing. “The theme of the importance of communication runs throughout Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. It dominates the feud between the Capulets and the …”
Exactly one hour later, she stopped. She sighed and added two more sentences to the concluding paragraph, because she was that close to finishing anyway. Then she looked it over. She needed to write it in nicer handwriting, but just glancing over it she could see a couple totally embarrassing spelling errors, and some clunky wording, and there were probably a bunch of grammar errors, too. And punctuation errors, because she was always putting commas in the wrong places. And she needed some more quotes, and she had a couple of places where she couldn’t remember who said what. But she was done with her notes and outline and rough draft, and it only took her an hour.
Now she had to do what Willow said, and put the paper away for like a week, so she could find the boo-boos when she edited it. So she’d wait and work some more on it Sunday. First, checking on quotes and names, then correcting errors and fixing wording. Then she’d write it over in her best handwriting. So maybe an hour or two on Sunday, and she’d be totally done with her English paper. Score! Willow totally rocked. And Willow said the more she practiced writing papers like this, the faster she’d get. Maybe AP English next year wouldn’t be so awful after all.
She really hoped her world’s Willow would be nice and helpful when she tried to meet with her. Selina had told her about Barbara Gordon, and how Barbara was the best hacker in the world even if she was stuck in a wheelchair. Maybe this world’s Willow could be her Oracle! She could really use the computer help, because Ray’s idea of computer research was cruising through Facebook and YouTube.
And she was really pretty sure that when her dad said ‘I got that website set up’, he really meant he got Mabel or Roger in IT to set it up for him. Because her dad was really smart, but he wasn’t exactly Mister Computer Savvy. And Annie was great on computers, but she was really, really swamped with stuff at M.I.T. And Annie said the M.I.T. computer network guys were really, really good at catching people who misused their computer network. Alex really didn’t want to get Annie in trouble, especially if it was doing something for her.
Alex went downstairs and told her mom, “I finished the rough draft of my paper, so I’m gonna go out for a little bit.”
“You’re really already done?” her mom asked, surprised. “And where are you going? Is it … Terawatt business?”
She said, “I’m really already done. With the rough draft, anyway. Willow told me how to outline a paper so it was easier to write, and how to do a fast rough draft then put it aside for a few days before you do the editing and final draft. And she said it was important to practice writing an essay like this really fast, so you could do it when you needed to on tests.”
Her mom said, “It just seems so … weird that you went off to save the universe, and you got advice on writing papers.”
Alex said, “And other stuff. How to study better and do homework better, and how to use my classes to learn about useful stuff. Which reminds me, would you go to the university library and check out a book for me on the battles of Oliver Cromwell?”
“Oliver Cromwell? As in England hundreds of years ago?”
She agreed, “Yep. Sam said he was a really smart strategist, and I should look him up when we got to the Commonwealth in European history. Well, we’re past that, but Mr. Porter’s gonna make us write a paper on something from this whole chunk of history, and I thought I’d do it on Cromwell’s battle strategies. I’m gonna tell him I just found a book you checked out for Dad from the university library, and I decided to write my paper since I had a book for references.”
Her mom said, “Well, you should get in the habit of using at least three sources for your work, if not a lot more. If you only use one book and copy a lot of material out of it, that’s plagiarism.”
She nodded. “Hermione made a big deal about that. Seems magical book writers in her world can put a curse on their book so if you plagiarize from them, it does something to your paper, like turn the ink a weird color so everyone knows what you stole from their book.” She took a breath. “So anyways, I wanted to fly over to school and study the terrain to figure out ways to sneak in and out of school in case Terawatt has to rush off to the rescue.”
Her mom shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m letting my daughter take off in the middle of the night to go sneak around her high school and figure out ways to sneak out during classes. That just sounds so wrong.”
Alex added, “And let’s call it ‘playing rummy’ instead of ‘being Terawatt’. Selina says it’s super important not even to use the words, even if you think no one’s around. Because even if there’s not electronic bugs around or a lipreader with binoculars, there might be eavesdroppers with a parabolic dish microphone, or even someone with super-hearing. Or maybe even someone with psychic powers.”
Her mom smiled a little. “You really did learn an awful lot for only being gone five days. I guess it really was like summer camp for teenaged superheroines. Hmm … How about we call it ‘taking photos’ instead? It might even be taking photos for real, if you can get photos of Terawatt fighting crime.”
She nodded. “Once we get my costume all worked out, I’m going to try to scoop all the other photojournalists everywhere with the first real photos of Terawatt in action. I figure I can hold my camera with my telekinesis like fifty feet away, and snap some action photos. And if they look kind of shaky, I’ll say it’s because I was hiding while a superhero fight went on really close to me, and I was nervous.”
Her mom said, “Good idea. If you’re taking photos of Terawatt, you obviously can’t be Terawatt. I like this idea better and better. Are you going to put on the costume for tonight’s project?”
Alex shook her head no. “I think black jeans, a black turtleneck, black shoes, and a black knit hat with my hair up underneath, so I can fly over the school and not be seen.”
“Well, just stay high enough that the streetlights won’t illuminate you.”
She smiled. “Gotcha. I won’t be long.”
She changed clothes and slipped out the back door before going straight up about three hundred feet. She’d thought about a black cape for this stuff. Selina said the cape broke up your silhouette so you were harder to spot, and you could use the cape for stuff if it was designed that way by experts, but an ordinary bedsheet kind of cape wouldn’t do that. And it would flap as you flew, which would make noise and attract attention. So good and bad both. She decided ‘no cape’.
She flew over the school and surveyed the terrain, as Sam would say. There really weren’t any easy ways in or out. The area around the school was nice and open, but that meant you could see someone coming from a long way away. So how did Jo sneak over?
She flew a little lower and looked all around the school. There was a dry creek bed that ran right through the east side of the schoolgrounds and within thirty feet of the school tennis courts. It was only a few feet deep, but was probably the best way in or out without going through the sewer pipes. When it rained in the winter, the creek was pretty full of water. But while it was dry, Jo could probably sneak up near the school by crawling through it. She figured Jo had been sneaking out of school by crawling through it for a couple years before she got expelled.
She floated down to a spot a good hundred feet outside the school grounds, where a few trees provided a nice screen from anyone’s view. She turned silvery and went to check out the creek bed.
Yep, she could move really fast as a puddle up and down the creek bed. And she figured from the footprints and the empty beer cans that this was how Jo was scouting out the school. And if Jo could get in and out, anybody could. And there were way more dangerous people out there than Jo. So maybe Alex needed to tell the principal about the creek more than she needed to have an escape route. And if the school really did have to block the creek up in places, maybe she could find something else. Like the big grates in the parking lots that led into the runoff system and probably had outlets in useful places. Maybe someone she knew could get maps of the whole system with all the places where there were storm drains and outlet pipes and stuff.
She flew back to her back yard and slipped into the house, making sure her mom knew she was already home. Then she started on her next project. Her mom had that package of Miss Clairol on the counter in the bathroom, so it was time to color her hair. She washed out the spray-in color, which really didn’t look that great. Then she took her time with the new stuff. Because you really wanted to get the highlighting and lowlighting just right, so your hair looked really good. Back in October, Betsy had done her hair a deep chestnut brown with streaks, and totally messed it up, with these hugely wide stripes so her head looked like she’d borrowed it from a zebra. Someone who would not be named but whose first initial stood for Kelly had called Betsy ‘skunk girl’ for like the rest of the week until Betsy had time to go have it professionally fixed at a salon.
It didn’t take all that long to follow the directions on the box. Not even as long as it took to fly over to the school and look around and fly back. She was just going to have to make sure she only used shampoo for treated hair from now on. That was a little bit of a nuisance, but it beat a lot of the alternatives. Like not having a secret identity and having Terawatt’s enemies attack Alex’s family.
After she dried her hair and put it up in a ponytail for the night, she went to bed. She lay there and thought. She really needed the black eye-crayon and red lipstick when she was in her costume. But could she apply the makeup while she was silvery? Could she get it where she wanted it to go? And could she take it off while she was silvery? It would be pretty cool if she could clean her face just by going liquid and doing the right things. Or if she could put on her makeup just by holding it and going silvery. That would make regular mornings and evenings a lot faster, too.
Well, as Sam said, there was nothing like properly-done experimentation to evaluate a hypothesis.