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Chapter 98 – Marsha, Marsha, MarshaAlex had her GoPro up, because this looked like great footage. Mark Warner was chasing after the football. Tom Hansen was making a great block to keep an opponent off his kick returner, and had no idea the ball was loose. Alex ran up the line, capturing the action as Mark snatched the ball out of the air and simultaneously dodged a tackler. Then he was running for the sideline and trying to turn the corner, but the other team had too many unblocked tacklers there because he needed so long to get to the ball.
She realized she was in the path of the action so she needed to move back and to the right. And just then she felt the telekinetic shove pushing her forward and to her left, so four big football players were bearing down on her.
She had to make a split-second decision. Use her powers, or get creamed? She couldn’t give herself away! Especially if someone was trying to make her reveal her powers.
She went for Door Number Three. She stepped back, even if she could see a normal person wouldn’t be able to get out of the way. They were charging right at her. So she was going to use her powers and let herself get creamed.
She jumped backward and put up a TK shield right in front of her body as close to her skin as she could manage. Mark and his pile of tacklers plowed into her hard enough to hammer her shield, but that was okay … except for the sharp whack of pain inside her head from her shield getting pummeled. She let go of the shield and pulled herself backward just inches ahead of the football players.
They crashed to the ground, and she went flying backward like they had knocked her that hard. She landed on her back, using her TK to reduce the impact to something manageable. She very carefully didn’t use any of her martial arts training to absorb the impact, but the ground was reasonably soft grass instead of maybe concrete.
She flung out her arms and smashed against the ground, letting her good camera bounce out of her hand, even if she hung onto it with her TK so it didn’t get busted. She let her GoPro bounce off her hip, since it was on a strap and wouldn’t go far.
She hit the ground and didn’t move.
* * *
Alex waited until Mark scrambled over to check on her, and she gasped for air like she’d had the wind knocked out of her. Mark worried, “Alex! Don’t move. I wanna get a doctor over here to look at you. Okay? Don’t move.”
She made another gasping noise and just lay there.
The team doctor, Dr. Cresswell, was over in a few seconds, since he was just down the bench. So were Coach Wagner and a dozen football players and half the cheer team, even though she’d thought they were all mad at her. Even Donna was there looking worried.
Dr. Cresswell knelt beside her with a medical bag and told her, “Alex, don’t move. Can you hear me?”
She pretended to be hurt a lot, even if she’d been hurt a lot worse just a ton of times. She groaned, “Sure I can. I just got the wind knocked outta me.”
He had her wiggle her hands and feet, and then move her arms and legs. He checked her pupils with a little penlight. He checked her stomach area.
She just said, “I need my cameras. Are they okay?”
Coach Wagner herded all the football players back to the bench area, and Donna and Nanci picked up her good camera for her before hurrying off to where the referee wanted them to go. Maybe Donna wasn’t that mad at her.
Then, when Dr. Cresswell was really, really sure she wasn’t desperately injured, he let her get up. She slung her good camera around her neck, held her left hand on her lower ribs like they really hurt, and limped off the field. She felt like a totally faking creep when the whole stands applauded her being okay. And Dr. Cresswell walked with her and kept an eye on her the whole way.
Ray was right there when she stepped out of the fenced area around the field, and he said, “Hey, doc.” Oh, yeah. Dr. Cresswell was the team doctor for the basketball team and baseball team, too, because his son Phil Creswell had played football and basketball and baseball for the school until he graduated last year, and his other son Frank was on some freshman and JV sports teams this year.
Dr. Cresswell nodded. “Ray, good to see you.”
Ray told him, “I’ll get Alex over to a doctor and get her really checked out. She’s not as bad as Heyward, but she doesn’t like to admit it when she gets hurt.”
Alex knew what Ray was talking about, because Heyward was the kind of basketball player who would say he was fine and ready to go back in even if one of his legs had been ripped off. That was probably why he was also playing tight end on the football team this year. That, and he really was just hugely bigger than he was last fall.
Ray took Alex off to his car and got her buckled in. Then he waited until he was out of the parking lot before he asked, “Are you really okay?”
She frowned. “Mostly. Just a couple little bruises, because I did you-know-what. But I couldn’t get out of the way in time because someone gave me a TK shove back into the line of fire.”
Ray gasped, “Another supervillain? One that’s out to get you? Maybe it’s Donna or Kelly. I think they’re about the only ones that cranky with you over the Homecoming thing.”
Alex pointed out, “Donna was even concerned. And helpful.”
Ray said, “So either it’s not her, or she’s faking the sympathy deal while being the mastermind behind it.”
Alex suggested, “Or else it’s one of her posse and she doesn’t know.”
* * *
Louis was worried. Marsha burst into tears when Alex got tackled. Louis held her while she cried, but he didn’t get why she was so upset. Alex wasn’t hurt that bad, and probably wasn’t really hurt at all.
Oh, yeah. Marsha didn’t know about the secret superpowers thingie.
He hugged her and murmured, “It’ll be okay. Alex is pretty tough. Anybody who can stand up to Jo Baker can handle getting knocked down one time.”
But Marsha wanted to leave, and she wanted to go over to the emergency room to make sure Alex was okay. Louis was sure there was no way Alex would let anyone take her to the hospital, so he wasn’t sure how he was going to handle that, but he wasn’t going to take Marsha over to the ER no matter what.
They got into his car, and Marsha put a hand on his arm before he turned the ignition. “L-louis … please don’t hate me.”
“I could never hate you.”
She sobbed, “I think I made Alex get hurt! I think I’m a supervillain!”
Louis dropped his head forward and bonked his forehead on the steering wheel. Why did this stuff happen to him?
Marsha started crying harder, so he sat up and took her in his arms and hugged her. All right, so he also really liked holding her like this. “It’ll be okay. Just tell me why you think you’re a supervillain when I know you’d never do anything bad to anyone … other than Kelly, because that thing with her ballot was hilarious and she totally deserved it.”
And the whole story came rushing out: how stuff happened around her, ever since their first date when they fell in the mud in that creek, how every time she worried about something going wrong it did, how stuff had happened when he wasn’t even around like her dad’s birthday cake, and now how Alex could have been really badly hurt because of her.
Louis stroked her hair and told her, “I don’t think you can be a supervillain if you’re not doing this stuff on purpose. Look, you’re really upset, so why don’t I take you home, and I’ll check with the Macks and make sure Alex is fine, and we’ll go over and visit her tomorrow. How’s that sound?”
“NO! I need to go over to the emergency room and see how she’s doing!”
Louis tried, “What if she isn’t at the emergency room? Let me call Ray and find out where he took her.”
“Umm … okay. That sounds good.”
He crossed his fingers Marsha couldn’t hear whatever Ray said on the phone, and he called. “Hey, Ray, it’s Louis.” Ray answered, but Louis just kept talking over him like he’d gotten an answering machine. “Marsha’s really worried about Alex, and she’s afraid she’s gotten superpowers from that time we fell in the muddy creek, and she’s afraid she’s doing these things by accident, so I really need you to call me back ASAP and let me know how Alex is and if she’s at the emergency room. See ya.”
He turned to Marsha and gently told her, “Okay. I’ll drive you home, and we’ll get you a cup of tea or something, and you can get yourself under control, and Ray will call back with all the details. It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t see how it can ever be okay when I’m doing all this stuff …”
He hugged her again and said, “We’ll make it be okay, or my name isn’t Louis Otto Driscoll.”
She whimpered. “Well, just don’t change your name to Elmo Driscoll when this goes bad and Alex calls the cops on me.”
* * *
Ray looked up from his phone. He was sitting in Alex’s kitchen having ice cream with Alex and Shar. Because Alex was always hungry and Shar had a huge sweet tooth. Alex had changed out of her overalls and shirt because they had grass stains and mud stains all over the back, and then Alex had even let Shar comb some grass out of her hair.
He groaned. “This is either really good news or really bad news. Marsha thinks she did it accidentally, and she thinks she’s been doing stuff like this by accident ever since right after their first date.”
Alex gulped. “The mud in the creek! She got plastered with mud. She told me how she got covered in mud and even got a mouthful of it, too. How many times have we wondered if other people in town were getting powers, maybe by playing in a creek or getting splattered by contaminated mud? Maybe a lot of people around here have really low levels of the powers and don’t know it. This could be really bad!”
She suddenly remembered a host of events. Louis getting stung when some hornets got dislodged. Louis getting knocked into freshly-poured concrete. Louis getting coated with silver paint at the park. Louis getting orange juice spilled in his lap. Louis getting knocked into a fishpond. All of them could have been done with a tiny TK push in one place or another.
Shar asked excitedly, “Can I go play in the mud and get powers like yours?”
Alex winced some. “Honey, that would be a really, really bad idea. It might make your regular powers go crazy.”
Ray warned her, “It might make you go crazy, because that stuff messes with the chemistry in people’s brains. And I really hated what it did to me. I couldn’t stop being a silver blob, and I couldn’t grab anything, and I couldn’t even keep my clothes from falling off.”
“No clothes? Eww!” Shar complained. “Forget it!”
Alex asked him, “Okay, what do we do?”
Shar piped up, “I could do firebending on her! Boom! Pow! Blammo!” She made little punching motions to go with the sound effects.
Alex gently said, “Shar, I don’t think that’s a good idea, especially if Marsha’s not a badguy. We need to talk to her and find out if she’s telling the truth and really didn’t mean to do any of this stuff, and we need to see if she’s even doing anything, because I definitely felt a TK shove tonight, but it could’ve been a lot more effective if the TK just grabbed my shoes so I couldn’t run out of the way, or if it tripped me instead.”
Ray pointed out, “Umm, not everyone’s got as much experience using TK as you do.”
“And nobody’s as great at it as you are!” Shar said, trying her best to be encouraging.
Ray asked, “Shar, if you were hiding behind Marsha, do you think you could sort of ‘know’ if she was telling us the truth?”
Shar shrugged. “I guess so. I knew when Mrs. Deetering was fibbing to Aunt Barb about the bake sale at the church.”
Alex said, “Great. Then we’ll have Louis bring Marsha over here, and we’ll talk with ’em in the living room, and you can peek in from the doorway where they won’t see you, and give me a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on whether she’s lying to me or being bad.”
Shar asked, “What’s a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down?”
Oops. Alex explained, “Thumbs-up is this.” She showed Shar how to point with her thumb up. “That means things are good. Thumbs-down means things are bad.” She showed Shar how to do a thumbs-down.
Shar asked, “Can I put on my superheroine suit, too?”
Alex tried not to laugh. “No, honey, I think we’d better not do that, even if we might let Marsha into Team Terawatt if she gets enough thumbs-ups.”
Ray smiled at the little squirt. “But you can show me your super-suit after Marsha leaves, if it’s okay with Alex.”
“Can I? Please?”
Alex grinned. “May you? Yes, you may.”
“Yippee!” Shar jumped around the room for almost a minute.
* * *
Meanwhile, Ray called Louis and lied, “Alex is already checked out and on her way home. Bring Marsha over, and we’ll talk in the living room.”
And Alex called her folks, who had gone over to Ray’s folks’ house for a little get-together when Alex came home early. She told them, “No need to rush back, because we need to talk to Louis’ girlfriend about ‘picture taking’ stuff.” That made her mom get really edgy, but her mom said they would hang out at Ray’s for a while longer.
* * *
When the front doorbell rang, Alex positioned Shar around the corner. Then she plopped down on the couch so Marsha and Louis would take the armchairs opposite her, and Shar could peek out from around the corner behind them, where they couldn’t see her. She let Ray go to the door and bring Louis and Marsha into the room.
As Ray sat down on the couch beside her, Alex pointed at the armchairs. “Go ahead. Have a seat.”
Marsha looked really uncomfortable, but she sat down. Louis asked, “Are you okay?”
Alex shrugged. “Oh, sure, just a few bruises. And my cameras are okay, which is what I was really worried about.”
Marsha looked like she was about to burst into tears. Okay, she looked like she was about to burst into tears again. Alex obviously just wanted to get up and go over and give her a hug. Marsha fretted, “Are you sure you’re okay? Because you should be really mad at me, because I think I did it.”
Alex peeked over at Shar, who was giving her a thumbs-up, and asked, “How could you possibly make that happen? I mean, it was four football players who smashed into me, and it’s not like they let you suit up for the opposing team.”
Marsha whimpered, “I … I don’t know! Stuff’s been happening around me lately. Ever since the night Louis took me out and we ended up in the creek. I get really worried about something happening, and … it happens. Like tonight, I was worrying about the ball bouncing toward you and you getting hit, and … then it happened.”
Alex asked, “Could you try something? Maybe …” She looked around the room. “Maybe you could try worrying that the DVD on the TV might fall off?”
Marsha glanced over at the TV and gave Alex a tiny nod. Then she squeezed her hands into fists, scrunched up her eyes, and started whispering to herself. “I’m worried the DVD might fall off … I’m worried the DVD might fall off … I’m worried the DVD might fall off …”
The DVD popped forward like someone had smacked it from behind, and it fell onto the floor.
Tears leaked down Marsha’s cheeks. “See? I’m a supervillain. I made you get hurt tonight.” Louis got out of his chair and held her while she cried.
Alex gave Shar a raised eyebrow, and Shar shrugged. Okay, so they couldn’t depend on Shar as a perfect lie detector and all-round psychic spy-girl. And it wasn’t exactly fair to treat her like one, either. Alex asked Marsha, “Do you want to be a supervillain?”
“No!”
Alex tried to be reassuring. “Then I don’t think you can be. I’m pretty sure being a supervillain includes wanting to do bad stuff.”
Louis jumped in. “Or else being out of control, like the early Hulk comics, or being really crazy, like —”
“Louis!” Ray complained before Alex managed to do exactly the same thing.
Marsha cried some more, while Louis held her. He apologized, “Umm … sorry. I meant being super-powerful and also totally out of control, not just being able to knock a cake on your dad’s head, which I would pay serious money to watch.” Marsha giggled through the tears.
Alex carefully suggested, “Maybe you could practice this a lot more, so you’ve got it more under control and you can use it just for good stuff.”
So Ray added, “Like flipping Louis’ dessert in his face when he starts saying stuff at the lunch table that’s getting Alex in trouble.”
“Not my dessert!” Louis whined. “Maybe my vegetables. I can live without them.”
Alex said, “I was thinking more like when you see a bully pestering someone like Wade or one of his friends, you could maybe untie the bully’s shoelaces and scoot one lace under his other foot so as soon as he tried to walk he’d fall on his face.”
Marsha hesitated. “I thought you were gonna say ‘go stop bank robbers’.”
Alex shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no way. That’s not a good idea. That’s really dangerous.”
Louis pointed out, “And you ought to know, since you’re the crazy photographer who ran into a battle zone outside a bank robbery.”
Marsha worried, “Now that was really dangerous. Maybe I could handle making bullies trip.” She looked into Alex’s eyes. “Are you sure you don’t hate me? You could’ve gotten really hurt.”
Alex glanced at Shar, who was now giving her a big nod and a thumbs-up that Marsha was on the up-and-up. She took a deep breath and admitted, “No, I couldn’t have gotten really hurt.”
“And you … huh?” Marsha looked up at Alex in confusion.
Alex told her, “You’re not the only person in town who has superpowers.”
Marsha said, “Well, sure, there’s Terawatt, and Jo Baker used to live here, and there used to be those weird rumors about the Mystery Kid, and we’ve had those creepy supervillain bank robbers …”
Alex stood up. “Come on, I’ve got something to show you.” She led Marsha up to her room, with Shar twirling and giggling alongside them the whole way.
Louis stood up and asked Ray, “Do you really think Alex is gonna show her the suit and everything?”
Ray just looked up at the ceiling and waited.
“HOLY FUCKING SHITBALLS!!”
Ray grinned. “Yeah, I really think she’s gonna show Marsha the suit and everything.”
Marsha came scrambling down the stairs. “Louis! Louis! You’re never gonna believe this in a million, zillion years!”
Louis laughed. “Yeah. Pretty amazing, huh?”
Marsha gaped. “She’s … I mean … Alex! And … The whole …” She stopped and collected herself. “Wait a minute! You KNEW? You KNEW and you never told me? YOU DICKHEAD!”
Ray definitely heard Shar upstairs saying, “Potty mouth!” He managed not to snicker out loud.
Louis stuck to his guns and firmly insisted, “It’s not my secret to tell. I totally wrecked Alex’s life once by not keeping my mouth shut, and I promised I wouldn’t ever do that again.”
Ray told Marsha, “And you can’t tell anyone. Not your mom, not your sister, not your BFF, not your diary, nobody. Ever. Except you can talk to us about it when we’re someplace safe, like in Alex’s house.”
And then Terawatt’s voice came from upstairs. “Okay, everyone can come up now.”
Ray walked up ahead of Louis and Marsha, because Marsha was still glaring at Louis. But when he walked into Alex’s bedroom he had to stifle a laugh.
Terawatt was floating half a foot off the floor in one of her ‘superheroine’ poses, but she had a sidekick. Shar was standing on the floor in the same pose, in a cute little Terawatt outfit with black tights, and white leotard and knee-socks and dress shoes and gloves, plus a cute little Lone Ranger-style mask. She even had her hair brushed out so it looked roughly like Terawatt’s.
Marsha choked, “Shar gets to know, too? How come Shar got to know and I didn’t?”
Terawatt said in that voice, “That would be because Pyre here also has superpowers, although you will need to keep that under wraps as well.”
Ray explained, “The time when Alex missed my birthday? She had to go to the East Coast and rescue an eight-year-old with superpowers who was being experimented on by sickos.”
“Oh, God,” Marsha gasped, clapping her hands to her mouth.
“Eight and a HALF!” Shar insisted.
Terawatt spoke in her forceful tones. “And it’s crucial you never even hint about Shar’s powers, because we have reason to believe a few of those sickos are still out there, and might someday try to hunt Shar down to kill her or make her do really bad things with her powers.”
Shar threatened, “And if you ever tell on Terawatt, I’ll go firebender on your ass!”
Terawatt gasped in Alex’s tones, “Shar! Watch your language, or I’ll tell Aunt Barb!”
Shar winced behind her little mask, and she glared. “Well, I’ll do firebending stuff to you, and you won’t like it!”
Marsha looked to Louis. “Can she really … I mean … firebending? That’s from a cartoon.”
Terawatt stated, “Her codename is Pyre. And she makes most of those Fire Nation guys look like wusses.”
Shar insisted, “Yeah, I can do lots of stuff! I don’t like hurting people, but I can do it … if I have to.”
Marsha glared at Louis. “I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me. You tell me everything! Even the stuff you’re not supposed to, like the thing about your dad’s whoopee cushion and your mom’s mother.”
Terawatt switched to Alex’s voice. “Marsha? Louis found out about me and couldn’t stop talking about it, even if it was just to Ray over the phone. And because of that, Danielle Atron kidnapped me and my mom and dad and tried to kill all of us, and tried to kill Ray when he came to the rescue, and we were all nearly blown into a zillion pieces when she blew up part of the plant. The only person he convinced was Robyn, and she was really mad at me for not telling her for four years.”
Marsha gawked. “Four years? But the plant thing was … How old were you when you got powers?”
Terawatt went silvery, flew into her gym bag, and came back out as normal Alex Mack. “First day of seventh grade.”
Marsha froze, except her mouth came open. She moved her lips slightly, but nothing came out.
Shar pointed. “Guppy mouth!” Several people glared at her, and she said, “Alex says it!”
Marsha finally made sounds. “Oh, shit, you were the Mystery Kid!”
Alex nodded unhappily. “Yeah, Atron had her plant security hunting me down for years. It was not exactly the best part of junior high. Or high school.”
Ray complained, “Yeah, getting handcuffed to a desk so I couldn’t get away from a time bomb, and left to die where I could see it ticking down to zero? Kinda puts taking that last shot in a b-ball game into perspective.”
Marsha winced. “You guys sound like you had it really bad.”
Alex pointed out, “Trained mercenaries kidnapped Louis and ‘interrogated’ him until he talked.”
“Eww!”
Louis stared down at the floor with a miserable expression on his face. “Yeah, I totally wussed out.”
Alex gently said, “You do know that if you hadn’t folded, they would’ve hurt you for real. A lot. The police said they had a high-voltage cattle prod, and scalpels, and a dentist’s drill, and some mega-icky stuff.”
Louis frowned. “I still got you and your folks kidnapped and nearly killed. Ray and Hunter did all the hero stuff.”
Alex told him, “But you’re the one who’s been going around making people think he’s a dork just to provide me with a cover and point the finger at other people.”
Louis grimaced. “Yeah, and look at how well that one worked out. I nearly got Libby killed, too.”
Marsha hugged him. “No one made Libby do insane stuff except Libby. That wasn’t your fault.”
Ray insisted, “Yeah, and everybody thought that was a great idea. Even Alex. Even Alex’s mom.”
Marsha frowned. “Alex’s mom knows, too?”
Alex said, “Ray and my sister Annie found out on day one, because I was having all kinds of weird symptoms, and I needed a ton of help. I told Hunter after four years, and Louis found out a few weeks after that. My folks and Robyn found out the day we got kidnapped and rescued. I told Nicole a couple days later. My boss Gloria at the doughnut shop figured it out almost a year after that. Shar knows because I rescued her. There’s one policeman who knows. You’re the only other person in the whole city who knows, and we can’t let anyone else find out, because there are real supervillains out there who would kill my family and my friends and maybe the whole darn town just to get even with me.”
“Like Danielle Atron?” Marsha asked.
Alex sighed. “Yeah. And there are even more dangerous people out there, if you can believe that. So I’m trusting you with my life. I’m trusting you with my parents’ lives, and Louis’s life, and everyone’s life. Please, don’t ever talk to anyone except one of us about this, and don’t do it anywhere it can be overheard or bugged.”
Louis put an arm around Marsha. “I’ll give her the whole Team Terawatt security speech.”
Alex gasped. “Oh! I almost forgot. We have a super-secret computer hacker as part of the team, and she goes by Acid Burn. We’ll have to arrange to let her hack your phone so you can be part of the secret Team Terawatt phone ring, too.”
Marsha asked, “So she downloads stuff onto my phone?”
Louis led her down the stairs and off to the car. “Oh, no, it’s way cooler than that. It’s like James Bond level coolness …”
Ray waited until Louis and Marsha drove away. “Well, that’s one super-problem we don’t have to sweat about.”
Alex just looked at him. “But how many super-problems are running around loose in this town right now and we don’t even know about ’em?”