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Chapter 97 – Home and AwayAlex’s first reaction was kind of in the ‘oh holy crud’ range.
Her second reaction was more like, “Umm, Mom, maybe that’s a good idea.” And maybe she said it out loud.
Her mom gaped at her. “What?” Her mom opened her mouth, and then froze. She even stopped and thought stuff over for a second. “I mean … Could you explain what you’re thinking? Because this sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.”
Alex thought for a couple seconds and tried to explain herself. “Okay … we can’t really teach her firebending here. There’s no way we can find a place in Paradise Valley where Shar can blast everything in sight. But Captain Miller’s down in a big, open desert area we could use. And if they fly us there and back in the Cessna, it’s only an hour and a half each way. I think the firebending stuff in ‘Avatar’ is supposed to be Kung Fu stuff but just with blasts of fire. So first we have to find someone to teach her the martial arts part. My guess is Riley or Jo or Graham is good enough to do it, but if not, I bet they know someone who can. So Shar can get a lot of training in self-control and she can learn a bunch of self-defense that’s normal martial arts stuff. It would be mega-cool if she had something she could do in between ‘sit there and take it’ and ‘burn the entire building down’. So then the firebending ought to come naturally once she’s good enough at the kung fu.”
Her mom carefully said, “Honey, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I think I want a second opinion.”
Okay, it did hurt Alex’s feelings, but she tried not to get too grumpy about it, since her mom was treating her like an adult and even listening to her. She asked, “Who you gonna call?”
“Ghostbusters!” shouted a high-pitched, very excited voice from around the corner.
Alex watched as her mom sighed quietly. “Shar? Honey? Where did I ask you to wait?”
Shar peeked in from the doorway. “You said I could watch TV or a movie in the living room, or play up in my room, or run around in the back yard. An’ I did. I waited and everything. I played up in my room and read until I thought Alex was home.”
Alex was pretty sure she hadn’t made any noise when she came in, but she’d noticed that sometimes Shar just sort of ‘knew’ stuff. If Shar’s mom and dad had some kind of telepathy between them along with their other powers, it wasn’t crazy that maybe Shar had some kind of telepathy along with her pyrokinesis. So she asked, “Who’s Aunt Barb going to call?”
Shar grinned. “Auntie Willow! I love talking to Auntie Willow, even if she told me to keep a big secret until she was all set to tell you herself.”
Uh-oh. Alex’s mom flinched a little bit on that one. Alex totally trusted Willow, but she really wished Willow hadn’t asked Shar to keep a secret, even if it was something harmless. Even if it was mega-harmless.
Her mom frowned. “Well, we’re definitely calling Willow now.” She pulled out her tPhone and pressed a speed dial button.
Willow’s AutoTuned voice sounded really chipper and cheerful. “Hi!”
Alex’s mom said, “Burn, we have a couple things. Shar saw this cartoon and now she wants to learn this thing called firebending …”
Willow sounded so excited. “Ooh! ‘Avatar: the Last Airbender’! They modeled all the bending on real Oriental martial arts. Firebending is modeled on Northern Shaolin Kung Fu! Very powerful, very dramatic. Do you want me to see if I can find a sensei for her?”
Alex’s mom hesitated. “We’d have to decide if it’s a good idea, and appropriate, and also age-appropriate, and we’d need a teacher who’s read into the SRI rules because of what Shar wants to do.”
Willow bubbled, “Oh, sure, but Jack has a ton of contacts, and Riley probably has a black belt in it anyway, or at least in something pretty similar, and let me check their records even if I’m not supposed to be able to go look in this part of their files … Ooh! Jo has a brown belt in it! You should so set things up with Jo, she’d love it, and they’ve got plenty of open space down there for when Shar learns the kung fu part and moves up to the firebending part, I bet it’ll be totally awesome!”
Alex’s mom sternly said, “I don’t want to have to be the bad guy here, but we haven’t agreed to this. We don’t have a time we can make this work, and we don’t really have an instructor, and we don’t know if Shar and Alex can spare that much time, and we’d have to find a way to keep all this extra stuff a secret, too.”
Alex figured, “About the only time we have would be Sunday afternoons. I mean, we’d need an hour and a half of flight time each way, plus at least an hour of lessons. I mean, I’d be up for two or three hours of lessons, but I think that might be way too much for Shar. Still, that’s at least four hours. Maybe five. That would eat up the whole afternoon. And how many Sunday afternoons would I have to cancel because of Terawatt business or photojournalism, or just plain family stuff?”
Willow made a ‘hmm’ noise that sounded weird with the AutoTune. “Well, let me talk to Jack, and see what he can work out.”
Alex’s mom told her, “Fine. And Willow? What was the secret you asked Shar not to tell me?”
“Oopsies,” whispered Shar.
Willow sweetly said, “It’s okay, Shar. I just needed to plan some stuff out first, because I can’t just drop everything, and I wanted to take Shar to Disneyland over Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays.”
Alex’s mom looked surprised. “Oh. That’s not such a huge secret. And you could have talked to me about it first. But we like to do a family dinner on Thanksgiving. I was hoping my sister and my parents and Annie could all fly in and have Thanksgiving with us this year, and we were hoping you’d spend Thanksgiving with us this time, unless you already have plans.”
Willow uncomfortably said, “Umm, my mom’s kinda anti-Thanksgiving, what with the whole ‘taking advantage of native Americans’ thing. I think she’s speaking at a native American protest deal in Washington D.C. that day. And Dad will still be lecturing on his book-signing tour. I think he’ll be in Jerusalem that week.”
Alex looked over, and her mom looked so sad for Willow. Alex asked, “Well, why can’t you drive down Wednesday and spend Thanksgiving with us, and then maybe Friday evening you and Shar can drive down to Disneyland for the weekend?”
Shar wondered hopefully, “Can Alex go with us?”
Willow asked, “Yeah, can Alex go, too? That would be great!”
Alex smiled. “I’d love to!” Then she frowned. “But I have no idea whether ‘picture taking’ might come up.”
Willow just tried to sound really reassuring. “Hey, we handled it just fine the last time.”
Alex groaned, just a teensy bit. “Just as long as you don’t do what you did the last time.”
Shar excitedly asked, “What did Auntie Willow do?”
Alex frowned at Shar. “Auntie Willow was trying to be helpful, but it was still a very bad thing. She ran into a super-battle with about thirty people following her. She could’ve got herself hurt or killed. She could’ve got all those helpers hurt or killed, and they had no idea how dangerous the battle could be. It was bad.”
Willow pouted. “And Uncle Jack was really, really mad at me when he found out.”
Shar asked, “What did he do?” Alex could tell her mom really wanted to know, too.
Willow said, “He gave me a stern lecture. For like half an hour. And maybe he yelled. A little. And there was something I really wanted to do, and I didn’t get to do it.”
Alex looked sternly at Shar. “And I don’t want you running into super-battles either, even if you’re way better at ’em than Auntie Willow.”
Shar gave her a big pout. Even though the big Charlene pout worked great on Ray and Alex’s dad, it didn’t work on Alex. Well, not much.
Alex frowned at her. “No. When I think you’ll be safe, and when I think you can do something where people don’t get hurt really bad and buildings don’t get disintegrated, we’ll talk about it.”
Shar pouted. “Maybe I need to learn earthbending. I can already do the firebending, except for the karate part.”
Alex patiently told her, “Shar, I don’t think anyone can learn earthbending. Not for real.”
Alex could tell by the look in her mom’s eyes that her mom had no idea what earthbending was. She probably had no idea about firebending, either. Maybe Alex could talk her mom into watching a few episodes of the cartoon with Shar. On the other hand, most of the firebenders in the show were really bad people who did really bad stuff, so that might not work out real well.
After Willow hung up to go make more calls, they talked for a while. Alex sort of thought maybe they could find somebody local who could teach people that style of Kung Fu, and the whole firebending thing could get postponed until Shar was good enough at the martial arts part that they could go down to Roswell a few times a month to work on the superpowers part in private. She was working on talking her mom into getting the whole family to enroll, because they totally could use some martial arts skills after what had happened to them in the last couple years.
After maybe an hour, Alex’s tPhone buzzed. She yanked it out of her pocket with some quick TK, and answered, “Tera here.”
It was Jack. “Relax, Tera. I’ve got Lieutenant Lupo, Major Finn, and Captain Miller on a conference call. I understand The Littlest Witch wants to learn from Uncle Iroh.”
Alex just kind of stared at the phone. How did Jack know so many kid references? Did he just watch TV and read with Charlie all the time? Wait a minute, Charlie was probably too old for the show, so did Jack just watch kids’ cartoons on his own now? She still said, “Northern Shaolin Kung Fu would be a really good style for Shar to learn, and then once she was good enough, she could turn that into firebending pretty much on her own.”
Jack agreed, “That was what I was thinking. And I’d like her to have some means of self-defense other than ‘tactical nuke’. Lupo? Do you have time to fly up to Paradise Valley once or twice a week to give a lesson in someone’s back yard?”
Jo asked, “Is their back yard a suitable area?”
Jack said, “Surprisingly so. It’s more than big enough. It’s flat, with nothing in the middle. It’s got a sturdy, tall fence all the way around it, and no nosy neighbors as far as I know. All we’d need to do is put down a 20'×20' or 30'×30' area of weatherproof pads so you have a training area.”
Graham suggested, “I saw an advertisement for a weatherproof pad that’s three 3'×3' pads sewn together at the ends so it unfolds into a 3'×9' section for personal training. There’s a smaller one that unfolds into a 2'×6' rectangle. They’re an inch and a half thick, and really sturdy, but they’re going to be more expensive.”
Jack liked that idea. “Three by nine? We could get some and make a 27'×27' square.”
Jo calculated. “27 would do it. But they’d be pretty bulky when they need to be stowed away.”
Alex pointed out, “We have a storage shed that we can use. It’s big enough to hold two or three stacks of the things along with what’s in the shed already, and it’s got a better than normal-height ceiling so we can stack ’em pretty high.”
Jo spoke up. “That sounds workable. We just need to get all the pads there, and work out the schedule.”
Graham added, “Let’s find out what schedule Terawatt’s people want to go with, and we’ll work from that.”
Alex told them, “Sunday late afternoon. Four thirty to six, then Jo can eat dinner with us before she flies home. We’ll see how that goes before we add in a Wednesday evening session or change the Sunday time or whatever.”
Jack directed, “Lieutenant, you’ll have the Cessna for this, and we’ll make a motor pool vehicle available up there. I’ve got directions from Acid Burn, and they’re really easy to follow.”
“Yes, sir,” Jo said happily. “I’m looking forward to it.
* * *
On Monday, Alex got to school to find out that Kelly and Donna were both mad at her. Great.
Kelly and her posse headed Alex off just before Alex got to homeroom. Kelly glared at her. “You said you weren’t running for Homecoming Queen!”
Alex insisted, “I wasn’t. And I didn’t! You heard Louis and Mina that day. You made ’em mad being so mean about Terri and Elissa and them. Louis sent out a bunch of texts to people. That was it. I think. When I found out, I asked ’em not to do anything else.”
Kelly scowled. “Marsha told me you could write your name down more than once, so we all wrote my name down three times, and now I found out they won’t take ballots with a name down more than once!”
Alex groaned, “Ugh. I didn’t write my name down even once on my ballot. Look, go tell the principal someone fibbed to you about the ballot rules, and you want new ballots. But it won’t make any difference, really. Out of the whole school, you’re talking about … what? Three or four votes for you? If you need four more votes just to get on the Homecoming court, you have no chance of making Homecoming Queen, and if you only need four votes to be sure you’re Homecoming Queen, you’re probably already a lock for it.”
Kelly complained, “Fine! Just keep your political machine away from me from now on!”
Alex just barely made it into her homeroom on time, so she knew Kelly had to be a little late, because Kelly had to go to the other side of the building to get to her homeroom. She hoped Kelly didn’t get in trouble, because Alex knew she’d be mad if she was in Kelly’s shoes. It totally wasn’t fair that some jerk was running a really sophisticated campaign for Homecoming Queen and was also tricking people into turning in invalid ballots.
Alex wasn’t happy that the jerk with the campaign tricks was her.
At lunch, Alex complained to Louis and Marsha and Mina, “No more bad campaign manager tricks. Kelly’s really upset, and it’s totally not fair that you guys tricked her into ruining her own ballot.”
Louis shrugged. “Okay. Anyway, she’s mainly trying to sabotage Donna, which is pretty much a waste of her time, because there’s only one bloc that would vote for both of them, and Kelly’s not working on them.”
Mina added, “And it’s a good thing Libby’s not here, because I don’t think anyone would vote for her after the Terawatt thing.”
Ray grinned. “You mean it’s too bad Libby’s not here, so she could find out she only got three votes out of the entire school. That would show her.”
Donna sat down at her regular table, which was next to theirs, and half a dozen of the cheerleaders sat with her. Donna glared at Alex. “I don’t need any help getting my friends to vote for me! And I sure don’t like you sneaking your name in there, too.”
Alex sighed. “I’m sorry.”
Louis turned around to face Donna and explained, “It was my fault. Kelly was being a giant pain in the ass, and Mina and I decided to steamroller her, even though Alex said she didn’t want to run for Homecoming Queen.”
Alex sort-of-fibbed, “I’m waiting to hear back from Corcoran College on when they want me to fly out to meet prospective mentoring teachers, and most of the mentors are real reporters and photojournalists who are on their own schedules, so I may only get like a few hours notice that I have to rush to the airport and fly out there to meet with people way more important than me. So I don’t even know if I’m gonna BE here for Homecoming! If I get elected to the court, I’ll end up spending the entire time up to Homecoming sweating out whether I can even go to the game and show up at halftime, so it’s a huge headache for me. So I really wish they hadn’t done this stuff!”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Get real. You would’ve got elected to the Homecoming Court anyway. Everybody who got screwed out of last year’s yearbook by Pete and Paul and Jack loves you and Mina. And everybody who ever got bullied by Fatso Baker thinks you’re freaking awesome for standing up to someone who’s a supervillain now.”
Alex muttered, “She was just a bully back then.”
Donna pointed at her. “And see? You’re really good at the fake modesty thing. Libby totally sucks at that. That whole ‘little old me’ routine really gets the guys.”
“I don’t do a ‘little old me’ routine!”
Ray insisted, “She doesn’t fake it, she really is modest.”
Donna pointed at him. “See? Guys totally fall for shit like that.”
It made Alex pretty mad, but she just could not make Donna see that she wasn’t being all ‘fake modesty’. So by the end of lunch, Donna was still ticked off at her, but Alex was ticked off at Donna, too.
The whole ‘running for Homecoming Queen’ thing was just a giant pain in the … neck. She was gonna be so glad when the voting closed on Friday and it was all over.
* * *
That night, they had a delivery from a home furniture store. At least, that was what it said on the truck. But Sergeant Scott was driving, and Sergeant Walters was sitting shotgun. And Jack called an hour before they arrived to tell Alex’s dad that the martial arts pads were about to be delivered.
Alex introduced everybody. “Mom, Dad, this is Sergeant Scott and Sergeant Walters. They’re both really nice. And all of you know Shar.”
Sergeant Scott shook hands with her folks and said, “Call me Stew. And this is Cliff. The colonel wanted to maintain absolute security, so not even the DHS knows where we’re delivering this gear.”
“Well, call me George, and this is Barb.”
Shar asked, “Can I help? ’Cause I wanna start firebending like tomorrow.”
Alex scooped up Shar in her arms and told her, “Honey, we’re not gonna be doing firebending until you get good at Shaolin Kung Fu first, and then we get permission to go work out with Jo at their desert base where you can’t burn anything up and no one can see you.”
Shar pouted for like five minutes.
But the sergeants had a whole bunch of stuff. First, they had a lawn roller they filled with water so they could roll out that part of the yard. Then they had big sheets of really stiff plastic that they laid out to make a thin ‘floor’ for the 27 3'×9' pads. Then they had a 30'×30' plastic tarp rolled up on a collapsible plastic tube so you could unroll it over the padding in a few seconds if it looked like rain. Then they had a bunch of martial arts gear, too. The clothes went in the laundry room to get washed before wearing them. The wrist and ankle weights and the weighted vests and the fake knives and fake swords and the training dummies and the padded helmets and shoes and gloves and chest-pieces all went in the shed in a storage locker and a storage bin that the sergeants brought, too.
Alex got ‘Stew and Cliff’ to stay for coffee and cake before they took off again, even if they had a three-hour drive back to their jet so they could go home. Everyone thanked them for hauling all that stuff out.
Once the truck was gone, Alex’s mom started a laundry load with the white gis and the white belts. “Alex? Did you know your colonel was going to send outfits in my size and your father’s, too?”
Alex admitted, “I was kinda hoping he would, because you two need to get secret kung fu lessons, too, because someday you may need ’em.”
Her dad said, “Given that we’ve already needed them a couple of times, I think this is a good idea. Even if I’m too old and out of shape.”
Alex carefully pointed out, “Umm, Jo might want you to start getting in shape. And she’s really strong and really tough, so treat her like she’s one of those six-foot-tall Marine drill instructors that you just know if you punched ’em in the face they’d just yell at you and say you hit like a girl.”
Shar said, “That’s stupid. You’re a girl. Hanna’s a girl. The blue lady who takes her clothes off too much is a girl. You’re all super strong.”
Alex’s mom carefully asked, “Shar, where did we hear about the blue lady who takes her clothes off too much?”
Shar said, “Petey Johnson’s friend Mike. He says Azure Crush is from here and she’s his cousin.”
Alex admitted, “Jo Baker is from here, and she used to go to my high school, and she just might be his cousin, since her family’s from around here.”
Shar insisted, “I tol’ him Azure Crush is a big stupidhead, and Terawatt is way prettier anyhow.”
Alex reminded her, “Remember the thing about secret identities?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Alex gently warned her, “I know it’s easy to lose your temper when someone’s saying bad things about your other identity, or the secret identity of someone you care about, but we have to pretend we don’t care so much about Terawatt.”
Shar insisted, “But Petey and Mike are dumba–…” She stopped in mid-word and looked over at Alex’s parents. Alex was pretty sure she knew the word Shar had been thinking. “Dumbheads. They’re great big extra-dumb dumbheads who are dumber than the dumbest thing anywhere.”
Alex smiled. “And we know stuff they don’t, so we can just smile and ignore ’em when they say dumb stuff.”
Her dad added, “Well, we can try. But sometimes it’s very hard not to jump in there and defend someone you love.”
Alex reminded Shar, “But just keep telling yourself the secret identity deal is way more important than getting to tell some dumb jerkhead how dumb he really is, because he’s gonna ignore what you say anyway, because he’s dumb and a jerkhead.”
Shar scowled. “Terawatt should fly over and punch Petey in the nose.”
Alex smiled a little at that. “Petey may deserve a big punch in the nose, but we can’t have grownups with superpowers going around punching people just because they’re jerks.”
Alex’s mom said, “And not just because Terawatt would have to spend all her time flying to Omaha twenty or thirty times a week to punch that Glenn Howard jerk in the mouth.”
Alex’s dad laughed so hard he almost choked.
* * *
On Thursday evening, Alex got a phone call from Willow. Well, it was from Acid Burn on the tPhone, so it was official stuff. “Tera here. What’s the crisis?”
Acid Burn said, “Oh, no big crisis deals, just Colonel You-know wanted me to give you a couple FYIs.”
“Pinkie Pie,” Alex insisted. “Action Girl and I decided his codename should be Pinkie Pie.”
When Acid Burn stopped giggling, she snorted, “Ooh, he’ll fuss about that.”
Alex wondered, “Will he even know who Pinkie Pie is?”
“Oh, yeah. He knows way too much about cartoons. A couple weeks ago, he wanted to assign op names out of the Herculoids! I mean, I kind of liked it when he said he’d be Zandor and I’d be Tara because they’re man and wife you know, but then he was gonna name you Zok and Hanna would be Igoo and Riley would be Tundro! And I’m pretty sure Sergeant Scott and Sergeant Walters were gonna end up being Gloop and Gleep, and Klar was gonna end up being Dorno. It was bad enough when he named you guys after the A-Team and when he named Grover ‘Space Ghost’. He even kept doing that announcer thing and calling him ‘SPACE GHOOOOOOOOOOOST’ all the time.”
Alex mentioned, “In New Jersey, he made Grover’s call-sign be ‘Amy’.”
“Oh, that. Cindy thought it was really funny, even if Grover was totally not with the ha-ha. I’m pretty sure Grover’s mom thought it was funny, too, even if she was trying to be all mom-like.”
Alex asked, “So what’s up?”
“Well, a few things. General Hammond’s been backing Jack’s push to get you official deputization, and they think this is gonna fly, and I worked out some options on DHS-type payments and income taxes, so they’ll be able to handle paying Terawatt through the GAO and setting up special protected accounts from companies like Mattel for royalties to an official deputized superheroine with an untraceable way Terawatt’s other identity could access the money, and I did some work lobbying some California Congressmen and Senators to fit you into the U.S. Tax Code, but it turns out there’s a couple of jerks in Congress who might try and tank that or get weird stuff stuck in the next IRS tax-law bill about you.”
Alex winced, but she figured she could live on her income as a photojournalist whether that stuff went through or not.
“And if you do get deputized, General Hammond is probably gonna need you in Washington D.C. to get really officially deputized, and that would be by the President, maybe in front of a bunch of the Senators and Congressmen on the national security oversight panels. We’re trying to pick a time that’ll work for you without making it obvious that’s what we’re doing.”
Alex pleaded, “Just don’t make it Homecoming, because it looks like I’m going to be in the Homecoming Court.”
“Oh! They’re already counting the votes that are turned in!”
Alex asked, “And how do you know that?” Even though she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know.
Okay, she was pretty sure she already did know.
“Well, you know they have totally inadequate security on the school network, you really ought to talk to them about beefing that up before someone gets at the grade info and does something bad, I went ahead and changed a couple settings on their firewall that they totally needed to have someone fix but it still needs more work and a way better password than ‘PASSWORD’, which is just retarded, and they have all the votes in a big spreadsheet, and they haven’t officially done anything but data entry, but running totals is really pretty trivial, even if they entered the data totally wrong to do it the easy way, so I went ahead and did it on a private copy of the file, and you’re leading! By a bunch!”
“Oh, crud,” Alex muttered. “Is there any way you can jiggle the entries so I don’t win?”
“Not really, because they wasted a ton of time color-coding the entries, and you’ve got a pretty big lead over someone named Donna, and it’d be really obvious if huge numbers of ‘Alex Mack’ votes got changed to something else, because the huge blocks of red would disappear and it would be pretty obvious to anybody unless they’re totally colorblind, which they can’t be if they bothered to color-code the entries. Why don’t you want to be Homecoming Queen? Back when I was in high school I would’ve given anything to be all popular and get picked Homecoming Queen over Cordelia and have everyone applauding for me.”
Alex frowned. “Well, that part’s great, but what happens when there’s a huge Terawatt Code Red and I have to rush off and I miss Homecoming and the whole school hates me for dissing them?”
“Umm, I’ll tell Pinkie Pie you’re off limits for one evening no matter what. And that sorta leads up to what he thinks is going on. It seems the Russians have another little teensy problem.”
Alex winced. “Oh, no.”
“They have these really old Alfa-class nuclear subs that they decommissioned years ago and were supposed to all be scrapped. They had these really clever liquid-metal cooled nuclear reactors except they had to be kept hot by big external systems when they were in port, so it wasn’t like you could run one without tons of expensive support and your own submarine base, and they needed a crew of about thirty expert submariners, and they only had torpedoes so you couldn’t go launch missiles at other countries. So there was one that wasn’t scrapped yet and they were using it as a museum that you took a gangplank out to because it was actually in the water beside a dock, and they’d taken out the reactor and replaced it with a real, live VM-4 pressurized water reactor with some transparent parts so you could look into it.”
“Someone stole it,” Alex guessed.
“Umm, maybe, but the Russians are apparently investigating it like an inside job, so Jack thinks maybe someone sold it. And having a nuclear reactor running around loose all over the oceans can’t be good. Plus, it’s fast. Really fast. Super-noisy by today’s submarine standards, but fast. Like maybe forty-five miles an hour underwater. And it would cost a mint to keep it running for any amount of time, so no one knows what’s going on with that.”
Alex muttered, “Sounds just like some whackos we know and don’t love.”
“Yeah, Jack thinks it’s them. No one else has the technology to operate one except a team of American submariners, or else a team of former Soviet sub officers, and keeping a VM-4 water reactor going when there’s transparent parts stuck in now? Could be really tricky. But the DHS is checking pretty hard on personnel to see if there are any retired American submarine guys suddenly missing.”
Alex asked, “And that’s it?”
“Umm … no. General Hammond just passed down some CIA reports to Jack. It looks like the North Koreans are suddenly trying to buy biochemicals by the truckload. And radium, which is pretty darn hard to get hold of these days. They’ve got another ginormous famine problem right now that they’re trying hard to pretend isn’t happening, and it’s gonna be a bad winter there pretty soon, and after the thing in Arizona, George is worried they’re gonna try the giant food animal thing, and they might end up unleashing giant monsters all over Asia.”
Alex winced and tried again. “And that’s all the bad news?”
Willow confessed, “They still don’t have any idea where Danielle Atron or Maggie Walsh went, and Jack’s trying to find out if either one of them could have snuck into North Korea.”
Alex cringed and asked, “Is there any good news?”
“Well, your Samantha Carter is going to be leading a team that’s flying the shuttle Atlantis to a passing comet to get samples and stuff, and it ought to be pretty awesome, and I think I can also get all the feeds NASA’s not planning on televising!”
Alex grinned. “Okay, that is good news.”
“And that really annoying talk radio guy in Omaha? Glenn Howard? He’s talking about ditching his radio station and Fox News and running for state senator so he’d at least be off the air most of the time and just the state of Nebraska would have to put up with him.”
Alex frowned. “I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news. What if he gets elected and then he’s really popular and then he runs for way bigger offices?”
“And some anonymous donor who we have to pretend we don’t know who it is just sent Jack two bat-grapples with the bat emblems not embossed on ’em, and Jack’s letting Hanna work out with them, but it looks like they’re going to have to find some tall buildings and things for her to work with, because the tallest building at Jack’s base is only three stories.”
Alex had a mental image of Hanna swinging through the skies from building to building, and she sort of winced a little at that, too. “I hope that goes okay, but it sounds pretty dangerous.”
“And Riley’s teaching Hanna the basics of chain-fighting so she can use those grapples as weapons.”
Alex just said, “Okay.” She figured that was a really good idea. And she figured in another year or so, Hanna would be like Jet Li with those things.
“Oh! And you and me and Shar will do Disneyland over Christmas break instead, because I managed to get some special stuff she’ll love. And I promise I’ll come for Thanksgiving dinner, even if it sounds like it might be really crowded, and I can always stay in a hotel or something.”
Alex insisted, “No! You can’t! You have to stay with us! Grandma and grandpa will be in the guest bedroom, and maybe Aunt Ashley will be on the couch in the home office, so Annie will be in with me and Shar, and I’ll probably let Annie have my bed and I’ll get out a sleeping bag, so you can do that, too, and it’ll be like a sleepover! Shar will love it, too.”
“Well … okay … I mean, I guess.”
Alex didn’t want to ask why Jack and Charlie weren’t inviting Willow for Thanksgiving, because she really thought Willow would be going there instead, but it didn’t seem like it. But if Willow wasn’t invited out there for Thanksgiving, it was probably something that would upset her. Unless really she wanted to talk about it … “What’s Jack doing for Thanksgiving?”
Willow groaned. “Oh, poor Jack. He’s stuck going to Oklahoma. Sarah’s family is having this huge thing they do for Thanksgiving for the entire extended family, and they only do it once every ten years, and there’s no way Jack’s gonna let Charlie go by himself, and Sarah’s mom kinda roped Charlie into going even though he’s pretty iffy about it considering, and I really wish there was something I could do to help, but there’s no way I can go, because that would make everything a jillion times worse …” And Willow told her all about the get-togethers Jack had been to before, and how much he wished they didn’t have to go to this one, and how Sarah’s dad never really liked him anyway, and a bunch of stuff Alex wasn’t sure Jack would have wanted Willow to tell anyone. But Willow was really worried about how Jack and Charlie would fare, and it wasn’t like Jack could just beat up anyone who was mean to Charlie, or call up Terawatt to come down and give mean people zaps in the butt.
After hearing about the horrible Thanksgiving Jack was going to have, Alex decided she was going to go out of her way to make the holiday extra special for everybody at her house, including Shar and Willow.
And she had to go look up the Herculoids on Wikipedia to figure out what the names meant. Ooh, Zok flew and had laser beams, so that really was sort of like her, even if she didn’t like being compared to a screaming dragon-thing. And Igoo was super-strong and super-tough, so that was sort of like Hanna, except for the part about being an ape made out of black rocks. And Tundro was really big and tough, and could shoot exploding stuff from a long way away, so that really did sound a lot like Riley. But Gloop and Gleep? Really? Sometimes Jack was so weird.
And Grover would totally not like being tagged with the codename that went with the little kid.
* * *
The school day on Friday was chock full of tension. Kelly and Donna were making last-minute pushes to get votes for Homecoming Queen, but so were a dozen other girls. It was like everyone in school thought they had a chance now that Libby was gone. Okay, Alex thought it was great that so many girls believed they could be Homecoming Queen and really wanted it. But the whole school was tense from the pressure. It wasn’t like she could start all over and ask people not to vote for her.
And things weren’t helped any by Louis. At lunchtime, he sat down at their table and pulled out his smartphone. “Okay, we did exit polling, and ran the results through some programs you can get for free on Nate Silver’s website.”
Donna turned around in her seat and fumed, “Now you’ve got them doing exit polls? You suck!”
Alex sighed, “Donna, don’t be like that! You know I’m not making ’em do any of this stuff!”
Louis totally didn’t help by adding, “We’re predicting Donna’s in second place, in case you’re interested.”
“We?” Alex wondered.
“Me and Marsha and Mina.” He went on, “Okay, Kelly’s slid all the way down to sixth, but she’ll still make Homecoming Court. She made too big a push for votes, and she did the whole ‘smiling and shaking hands’ thing, which really gets the vote out, especially when you’re good-looking. But you’re still number one by a pretty big margin.”
“Ugh.” Alex dropped her face into her hands.
Louis had a big breakdown on stats, which she so did not want to hear, but most of the table wanted him to spill, so she had to listen to all of it. And it just made Donna really grouchy. But the ‘nerds who never vote’ bloc and the ‘outsiders who never vote’ blocs had both come out in big numbers to vote for her, so she would have ended up on the Homecoming Court no matter what. And a lot of the jock vote went her way because of Ray, and because of Alex being on the track team for a little while, and because of her photography, and stuff like that. And the ‘playa’ vote was mostly split between the six hottest girls in school, and she was in that six even if she didn’t think she should be, so she was getting some of that vote, too. Ugh.
* * *
When the football game started that evening, Alex was in her usual photography outfit. A comfy shirt, overalls, a cap that was on backward so it wouldn’t be in the way of her camera, sneaks with good traction, her best camera body thanks to that mysterious Gotham donor, with her 70-200mm lens attached, and a fanny-pack turned around into a frontpack so she could get into it for lens caps and a few dozen other little things. Like two energy bars just in case she got too hungry to wait for halftime. She had her GoPro on a Joby strap so it rested on her hip and she could yank it up instantly to catch any exciting action. Since the football season had started, she’d already managed to sell three clips to the TV station to go with their regular camera footage, which tended to be from up in the booth so it wasn’t as crisp and close as she might be able to capture from the sideline.
She slipped up into the first row of the stands to catch some more shots of the cheer squad and the guys running out onto the field, because she wanted to have some really great images for the senior cheerleaders to look at for their pictures in the yearbook. Then she moved back to the field once the kickoff went soaring overhead.
* * *
Marsha was hanging onto Louis’ hand and hoping nothing went wrong. It seemed like nothing went right anymore, except for Louis. And stuff still happened to him — or to her, or to both of them — way too much.
And she was afraid it was her fault. Ever since that night when they ended up in the mud in that creek, she’d been having this problem. If there was something she was afraid might happen, and she worried about it enough, it was probably going to happen, no matter how crazy it might be. And it happened even when Louis wasn’t around, even if she hadn’t told him about some of those disasters. Like when her mom was making a really nice cake for her dad’s birthday, and Marsha started worrying about it getting knocked over, so sure enough, someone knocked it over. Okay, her dad slipped on a spot where the dog had slobbered all over the linoleum, and he fell over, and he knocked a chair over, and the chair tipped into her side and made her stagger, and she bumped her mom, and her mom fell over against the folding table, and a table leg folded up when they were supposed to be locked, and the table collapsed on one side, and the cake on the other side of the table went flying into the air and landed on the back of her dad’s head. Which should have been impossible except in a Laurel and Hardy comedy. Okay, she told Louis about that one the next day, and he laughed like a maniac.
Or how Louis ended up getting an uncooked kidney bean up his nose so she had to take him to the emergency room to get it out.
Or how her brother ended up covered in paint when he was repainting his room. Okay, that was really funny.
But it meant that Marsha was petrified to go do stuff like go to the school football games, in case something happened. But Louis wanted her to go with him, so she said yes. And now she was clinging to his hand and hoping nothing bad happened. Like having the kick returner crash into the people on the sideline.
But the football took a funny bounce when the return man tried to catch it, and it went bouncing across the field toward the sideline, and he sprinted after it, and he grabbed it out of the air, and three guys tackled him right out of bounds.
Out of bounds … and right into Alex.