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Chapter 7 – Plus BootsAlex woke up when her alarm went off. She checked, and everything seemed okay. It wasn’t until the nightmare in the middle of the night that it had occurred to her that using the chemicals in hair coloring might have unknown effects on her mutated DNA. Oh, man. She’d dreamed that she couldn’t control her shapeshifting, and she went all silvery right in front of Kelly and Libby, and shifted out of her clothes in front of the principal, and fell down a storm drain on her way home from school and couldn’t get back out.
Maybe she’d be a little more careful today. Or a lot more careful.
She fixed breakfast for herself and packed a lunch. Two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the new jar of grape jelly, an apple, and two bananas. Plus three energy bars. That ought to hold her until she got to the doughnut shop. Man, it was so much simpler getting enough to eat now that her folks knew about her powers.
There was a note for her from her mom. The school called and she and her mom had a meeting with the principal in his office at lunchtime. Jeez, if this was still about Jo, she was going to think about handling Jo herself instead of going through ‘proper channels’.
There was also a note from her dad to take some of his stuff to the dry cleaner, so she did that on the way to school. She really liked that the dry cleaner had a drive-thru window. Drive-thru windows just made life better. Even if Louis insisted that Las Vegas had drive-thru windows at the liquor stores, because that made no sense. That was like the complete opposite of “don’t drink and drive” if you asked her. But Louis said lots of crazy stuff, and maybe some of it even turned out to be true.
And school was completely back to normal. She walked with Robyn and Nicole to homeroom, noting that she really did have her own posse, so she needed to stop being rude to Kelly and Libby about theirs. English class was like always, even if Mrs. Finnegan was starting them on another book she didn’t think she would like. Mr. Porter reminded them again about the Wednesday quiz. Sometimes she wondered if there was actually someone in the room who didn’t know every Wednesday was quiz day in history class. Trig was okay, with Mrs. McGurty handing back the tests and only one person got a higher grade than she did.
Then she had to go to the meeting with the principal instead of eating lunch with Ray and Nicole and Robyn and Louis and … Holy cow, she was as bad as Libby or the football stars. She had her own table. She probably could win the Homecoming Queen thing if she really put in the effort. But she had bigger fish to fry, as her dad liked to say. And besides, it would force Kelly to be nice to her and a lot of other people if they were helping her be Homecoming Queen, and it would be fun to make Libby not be the center of attention, which would drive her crazy.
Her mom showed up about five minutes after Alex took a seat in the administration area. It was just a shame she couldn’t eat while she waited for her mom, but you couldn’t eat in the principal’s office or the office area in front of his office. Unless she got up and went out front and ate while she waited, she was stuck. But if her mom parked in the big parking lot on the side, then she wouldn’t see her mom walk in. So that wouldn’t work. Oh, heck, maybe the meeting wouldn’t take too long.
But as soon as she and her mom walked in and she saw who was in the room, she started to blush. It was Principal Wilson and Mr. Hooper and Mrs. McGurty. So she knew what they wanted to talk about.
The principal ushered her mom and her into nice seats in front of his desk, and then he sat down He said, “Mrs. Mack, I wanted you to come here so we could apologize to you and Alex for not doing our job.”
Her mom said, “If this is about that bully again, I don’t see how you’re supposed to stop a confirmed criminal who’s sneaking onto school property illegally. That seems like a job for the police.”
Alex said, “Yeah. And she’s probably crawling in through that little creek bed over by the tennis courts. I think she had dirt on her hands and knees yesterday.”
Principal Wilson made a couple notes on his big notepad. “We ought to be able to address that.”
Alex asked, “If you put big blocks at each end of the creek, won’t that dam up the water when it rains and make for floods?”
He smiled gently at her. “Oh, no, we’ll just put up some chain link fencing. The water will go through that without problem. Even if we’ll have to check for blockages at every rainstorm.”
Well, that sounded good. She could go silvery and go right through a chain link fence. Jo couldn’t get through any opening smaller than maybe a manhole cover.
Then he looked at her mom again. “No, Mrs. Mack. This is about a problem I wasn’t even aware of, but I should have been. Apparently, Alex hasn’t taken the AP science classes and wasn’t planning on taking calculus because she was worried about how she would be treated in class. By the teachers. The teachers who all had Annie as a student.”
Her mom just got big eyes and said, “Oh.” But Alex could tell her mom knew what was up. Then her mom said, “Alex has talked about this indirectly at home, but I didn’t realize she was missing out on these classes because she didn’t want to deal with that. I thought it was because she was planning on going into photojournalism and didn’t think she needed those kinds of courses.”
Alex said, “Mom, I am thinking about photojournalism.”
The principal said, “Alex, that is a very tough field to break into. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who become ‘ambush journalists’ and ‘paparazzi’ and ‘celebrity photographers’ because they can’t break into the business, or they don’t want to do the hard work required to move through the ranks in the news industry.”
She nodded. “Yes, sir, I have thought about that a little, and I’d really rather take photos of wildlife or natural disasters or even police stuff than do that kind of stuff. I mean, trying to get pictures of Paris Hilton’s butt? That’s sort of sick.”
Mr. Hooper said, “Alex did a great job as a photographer in junior high for the paper and the yearbook, and Greg says she’s been excellent at it for our paper.” She knew ‘Greg’ was Mr. Ericson, because he was the adviser for the school paper, which came out every week, and he let the two co-editors for the paper call him Greg when they did the once-a-week layouts on the school computers that had all the right publishing software.
So then it was all Alex could do not to glow with embarrassment as Mr. Hooper and Mrs. McGurty talked to her mom about how the teachers didn’t think about Alex’s feelings when they were busy talking about how good Annie was, and how this was stunting Alex’s high school career, which could hurt her college prospects.
Finally, her mom said, “As long as no one compares her to Annie in any way and everyone judges her fairly on her own abilities, I don’t see a problem.”
Mrs. McGurty firmly said, “And no one accidentally calls her Annie instead of Alex.”
Principal Wilson said, “I think that Alex should just be ready to talk to her teachers the first time it happens, and then come talk to me about any problems after that, and I’ll straighten things out.”
Mr. Hooper looked apologetic as he said, “And we’ll try hard not to make even one mistake.”
Alex said, “Well, Annie said you call everyone by their last name in class some of the time, so if you call me Ms. Mack it’s not like I’d know if you slipped up.”
Mr. Hooper said, “And you don’t look like your sister. When I had the Robeson boys, that was a problem. I had them a year apart, and they look enough alike to be twins, so I was calling Mark ‘Matt’ for about the first two months. I had to institute a ‘free candy if I call you by the wrong name’ policy. Mark must have gotten three pounds of candy off me before I managed to stop.”
Alex smiled slyly. “I wouldn’t mind some free candy now and then.”
So the meeting wrapped up okay, and she even had time to go find her friends in the caff and eat one sandwich and an apple and a banana. Plus, now she had an excuse to change to tougher math and science courses without some teacher wondering what was up. Boy, next year was going to be a ton of work, assuming she could fit everything in. AP English, calculus with its own AP exam, AP chemistry, and Spanish IV. With an AP exam, too. Boy, that made it sound like she was as smart as Annie, which she totally wasn’t. And seniors also had to take a half-credit ‘mentoring’ class which was mainly getting help from a teacher or an adviser on stuff like college applications and job hunting. Plus co-editor for the yearbook, which Willow had said was more about planning and organizing and good management skills than working your legs off all the time. She made a mental note to talk to her dad about being a good manager, and maybe this summer reading some books on being a good boss.
Maybe her dad had a book on time management, which Sam said was really important to learn, and Buffy said was mainly learning how to tell other people to kiss off but doing it so nicely they didn’t figure it out. Willow said Buffy did time management by assigning all the tasks she didn’t want to do to other people, and by making it look like she was too airheaded to keep things straight so people didn’t ask her to do lots of other stuff, but that wasn’t the way other people should do it. Hermione said it was all about scheduling what you could, and doing the planning way in advance. Sam said that for a big project like the yearbook, she should learn about Gantt charts and flowcharts, so she could figure out what had to be done first, and what was a bottleneck for other things, and what the absolute ‘drop dead dates’ were on things like getting the files to the printer and getting the artwork finished and getting the portraits done. Selina said ‘buy-in’ was really important in something like a yearbook, and she ought to start out at the beginning of next year getting that from everyone who mattered.
The more Alex thought about it, the more ideas she had. It was always a headache getting photos done, but if they warned everyone — especially the seniors — that their picture for their ID card was going to be their yearbook headshot, then the ID photos would be a lot better, and the headshots for the yearbook would be mostly done by registration, which was before school even started. Maybe they could even set up a station over by where the ID photos got taken, so people could check their hair and makeup and stuff, so they’d be happy with how they looked.
Then all the seniors also got a ‘casual’ photo in the yearbook that was always a big headache for the photography staff. The jocks and cheerleaders always wanted action shots, and some of the sports weren’t until spring. The school bimbos always wanted pictures that were so slutty the yearbook adviser always threw a hissy, so there was that. The school nerds usually wanted something really nerdy. And plenty of other kids wanted something really inappropriate, like what some of the Goth kids tried to sneak into the yearbook this year, mainly because they didn’t like this year’s yearbook editors. Well, Pete and Paul weren’t interested in you if you weren’t in one of the ‘cool kids’ groups, so she knew why they were mad at Pete and Paul. She just didn’t like that it was her people — the photography group — who got caught in the middle.
But she ought to set up something so everyone could vote on what they liked the most and the least about the last couple yearbooks. And what should be shorter and what should be longer. Maybe then people would be happier about how the one next year would come out. She should talk to Mina, who was going to be her yearbook co-editor and hash some of this stuff out. And they both had friends on the robotics team and the computer club, so they ought to be able to get a little survey set up so everyone in school could go on a school computer and vote about their likes and dislikes for the yearbook. She figured she needed to make it a short, simple thing so people would actually do it. Maybe just those four questions, done with check boxes to make it easy, and one optional fill-in-the-blank section on what isn’t in the yearbook that you wished they had.
And maybe they needed to work up a little talk to the seniors at the start of school on what was okay for an action shot, and what wasn’t. Maybe they could get some of the submitted pictures from this year, and do it as a slideshow. “This is okay.” And a picture of Maribeth Wilkerson in that lowcut evening dress, which was really classy and dramatic. “This is not okay.” And a picture of Sera Miles in that lace top you could actually see through, and no bra. Ick.
Spanish and science classes went fine, even if she had more studying to do for Spanish. Then she worked her shift at the doughnut shop. There still weren’t any crimes for her to go stop, which she thought was a really good thing. She did get a text from Robyn that there was a guy with lightning bolts robbing an armored car at Disneyland, but that was way too far away for her to do anything about it. It would take hours and hours to fly all the way down there, and she didn’t even know how far she could fly before she or her powers pooped out.
Robbing Disneyland was just wrong. She was really getting to dislike Danielle Atron even more than before. What a creep.
Still, the best part of the day was while she was fixing dinner, which was NOT going to be curry no matter what, and her mom came home with a box too big to be a regular shoebox. It said ‘Leather Goddesses of Phobos’ in fancy script across the top, with a picture of a really skanky vixen in skyscraper-heeled boots that came up to her thighs, and a really teeny corset, and a teeny leather thong, and no bra at all, and a leather choker collar, snapping a whip. Ick. On the side of the box, it said ‘style: Egg Buster / material: white PVC / heel: 5" stacked reinforced / size: 7B’.
She opened the box up and found the perfect boots for Terawatt, exactly in her size. She hoped. Shiny white PVC knee-boots with invisible zippers on the inside of the legs and one-inch platform soles covered in the PVC, too, and PVC-covered five-inch stacked heels that felt really sturdy. And there was a pair of matching white PVC gloves that looked like they would go most of the way up her forearms.
She gushed, “Mom! These look awesome. Thanks so much!”
“You’re welcome … Terawatt.” Her mom gave her a quirky smile.
She wondered, “What was the shop like?”
And her mom turned a bright red. Wow. She didn’t think her mom was this red when she gave Alex ‘The Talk’. Or even when she gave Alex ‘The Other Talk’ about contraception, which Alex totally didn’t need yet because she wasn’t even letting Ray get to second base yet. Much. Well, hardly ever.
Her mom admitted, “There was stuff in there I hadn’t even heard of. I mean … Stuff I didn’t even think people did. And the clerk … And the mannequins … Oh, boy, I’m hoping you won’t need another pair of superhero boots.”
She was going to practice wearing the boots so she could get used to the heels, but she couldn’t put them on with the pants she was wearing, so she postponed it until after dinner.
She had the pasta and the pasta sauce and the frozen green beans and the salad all ready on time. And her dad even had the security guys at the plant looking into anti-eavesdropping stuff already. Unfortunately, her dad had some not-so-great news. This biochemist in the Midwest that some of the ‘Raising the Whistle’ chat room guys were talking about the other night? That chemist Dr. Dunn? JBH Chemical? He was dead. He’d been dead for a few years. Her dad wasn’t sure how to go about investigating whether the death was work-related or work-caused or even the ‘killed by your boss and made to look like an accident’ thing that happened to Hunter’s dad.
When she mentioned that, her mom said, “Ooh, that reminds me. I got an email today from Ellen Reeves. She said Hunter is doing very well at his school. And she’s working for a lobbyist for ethical experimentation, and she’s probably going to get to go before another Senate subcommittee and tell them about Danielle Atron.”
Her dad said, “Maybe she could mention the ‘Raising the Whistle’ website. If there had been something around back then, maybe Jack Reeves would have had someone to tell, and have been able to find someone in authority to talk to, and maybe he’d still be alive.”
Alex nodded. “And there wouldn’t be any GC-161 super-crooks running around loose. And Danielle would be in a teensy-tiny cell in a really nasty prison getting beat up by older versions of Jo.”
Her dad smiled a little. “You really don’t like her one bit, do you?”
She frowned. “I really think what that hellgod showed me is just what Danielle’s going to do, sooner or later. Because she’s the most selfish monster I’ve ever met, and that’s saying a lot after last week.”
Her dad said, “Oh! That reminds me. I had an idea on how to do the ‘makeup’ for Terawatt. Ultra-thin opaque plastic films. They would feel a little heavier than regular makeup, but not much more. And they would stand up to things ordinary makeup wouldn’t, like a rainstorm or a punch. You’d just stick ’em down and then peel ’em off when you were done.”
“Wow, Dad, that sounds awesome,” she grinned. “Because having to stop to put on makeup every time? Not a great idea.” She couldn’t imagine how awful she’d feel if robbers got away, or somebody died, because she stopped long enough to put on lipstick and eye crayon. How could she ever justify that?
He said, “I need to try out several possible formulations tonight, and then test them on the ballistic gel model tomorrow, but I’m hoping I’ll have something for you by tomorrow night or the next night.”
She thanked him some more while she helped Mom put away leftovers and clean up. Having your own inventors and costume designer and stuff really made being a superheroine way better. She was so glad she’d finally told her parents. She still felt guilty about lying to them for years about her powers, and it was ages since she had finally told them. Boy, had they been mad when they found out. And really disappointed, which was worse. And really super-disappointed in Annie, because Annie was supposed to be the mature older sister, and she was the one who talked Alex into not telling their parents. And her dad had been really, really hurt that they thought he’d turn his younger daughter over to someone like Danielle Atron. And her mom had just about cried when she thought she had to be the most oblivious mom ever.
Sometimes she really felt like she was a really bad daughter.
With her mom working on homework in their home office and her dad working on chemistry in the garage, she went up to her room to study. She had history and Spanish and trig to study, and a stupid English book to read. She figured she could do all of them while walking around learning to walk in those boots. Because she was really not used to high heels, and she wasn’t going to wear those boots outside the house until she wasn’t worried about tripping and falling on her face in front of the whole town.
She went ahead and practiced the whole thing. She put her whole Terawatt uniform and the wig and the wig cap and the makeup in the gym bag and just didn’t zip it all the way closed. Then she went silvery. She puddled over to the gym bag, slid inside it, grabbed everything, left her regular clothes behind, got things aligned, and slid back out. Then she slid over to the mirror on the back of her door and went normal.
It was pretty cool. Because there was Terawatt, looking totally awesome in her boots and costume, and the gloves really did look extremely cool, even if she was going to have to cut off the tips of the fingers or something so she could do her lightning blasts. She had her wig on right, and the domino mask, and the padded bra, and everything.
She just couldn’t get her makeup on while she was silvery. She was really hoping her dad’s idea worked.
Terawatt looked way taller and more impressive than Alex Mack. Which was the whole idea in the first place, but still … And those heels really made her legs look a lot longer and a lot sexier. And they made her butt look really tight.
She went ahead and applied the lipstick the way she wanted, and then she walked down the stairs to make sure her dad was going to get the lipstick and eye makeup the way she wanted. Otherwise, it was going to be a huge waste of his time. It turned out that walking in five-inch heels was a lot harder than she thought. And going up and down stairs was even harder. Maybe this was a stupid idea. Or maybe she just needed to practice a lot. Some of the girls at school wore three-inch heels all the time, even when they walked to school!
She floated into the garage. Then in her Terawatt voice, she said, “Pardon me, sir.”
“Yaa!” Her dad squawked and threw the beaker of chemicals into the air.