Good. That would keep Mike busy even longer.
Kyle flew home.
from the top secret journal of Kyle Camden (deciphered):
First of all and most important: It wasn’t my fault.
I’m going to write that again, in all caps:
IT WASN’T MY FAULT!
Look, every great inventor has had setbacks. It’s just part of the process. You try something, it doesn’t work, you tweak it, you try again. That’s how progress is made.
If I’d had more than one day to work on it …
Or more than a couple of hours of sleep …
Or better equipment …
Or the help of more than a snarky artificial intelligence …
I could have made it work. Brilliantly.
In theory, the Pants Laser is a complete and utter success, and no one can tell me otherwise.
If that flying buzzkill hadn’t grabbed the Laser from me, I could have overridden the power regulator, shut down the enhancement mirror, adjusted the plasma intake, and recalibrated the light filter. Piece of cake.
But, nooooo! Everybody’s favorite alien punk had to showboat. He had to make me look bad in front of my town. My town!
(new entry, later that day)
I’ve had some time to think. My previous entry missed the point entirely. (Except for the part about it not being my fault. Because it still isn’t my fault.)
The point is that Mighty Mike has to be stopped. He’s pretending to be some kind of goody-goody who only helps people and doesn’t want anything in return. He’s pretending to be a goofy brain-damaged kid with amnesia. But in reality, he’s a space alien. He came from another planet and who knows why he’s here? If he wasn’t up to something, wouldn’t he just say, “I’m from another planet and I’m here to help?” Of course. So, since he hasn’t said that, that means he’s not here to help.
Since I’m the only one who knows the truth, it’s my job — it’s my duty — to expose him for what he is and drive him away from Bouring and from Earth.
Now that I’ve accepted that responsibility, things can only get better from here.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The next day, things got worse.
Kyle had spent the rest of Mighty Mike Day in a rage, arguing with Erasmus, going over the Pants Laser schematics again and again. Finally, at midnight, he’d fallen asleep. But it was a fitful sleep, jam-packed with nightmares of Mike attacking him, unmasking him, revealing his true identity to the world….
He woke up and dragged himself out of bed. His parents were at the kitchen table already, eating breakfast. Kyle slumped into his chair.
“How — how’s it going, slugger?” Dad asked brightly. (Ever since his exposure to the brain-wave manipulator, Dad had started stuttering on the word “how.” Kyle made a mental note to fix this. Someday.)
“Miserable,” Kyle told him.
“Great!” (That wasn’t a side effect of the brain-wave manipulator. Dad had always been clueless.)
“Links or patties?” Mom asked from the stove.
The idea of consuming the lumps of fat and gristle his mother had the temerity — the nerve! — to call “sausage” made Kyle want to engage in vigorous reverse peristalsis (in other words: puke his guts up).
“I’ll just have cereal — what the heck is that?”
If his parents noticed the way he blurred his sentences together, they didn’t comment on it. Instead, Dad just peeked over the top of his copy of the Bouring Record. “It’s the front page of the paper,” he said.
A front page with Kyle on it!
Moments later, Kyle had swiped the paper and told his parents he needed it for a school project. Safely in his room, he laid out the front page. He couldn’t believe it — there was a full-color photo of him in his guise as the Azure Avenger, pointing the Pants Laser at the dais while the entire town watched in horror.
Kyle had to admit that he looked pretty threatening. (Much to his chagrin, the cape also looked cool.)
“BLUE FREAK THREATENS MIGHTY MIKE PARADE!” blared the headline.
He whacked his forehead against his desk, then did it again. “It’s the Azure Avenger, you jerks! I have a name — use it!”
“You should say it louder next time,” Erasmus chimed in.
Kyle grumbled but made a mental note to add a public address system to his costume, just in case.
He scanned the article quickly. It wasn’t a good time.
Blue Freak Threatens
Mighty Mike Parade!
A day that was supposed to be devoted to celebrating a powerful force for good became, instead, a day of terror … and a demonstration of that same force for good.
Clad in all blue, including a face mask, a superpowered menace attacked the Bouring Square, wreaking chaos and havoc until chased off by Mighty Mike.
Most diabolical of all, the attacker waited until the entire town had gathered in the square before attacking, ensuring maximum casualties when he let loose with what has been described by onlookers as a “death ray.”
“Pants Laser!” Kyle screamed. “Pants Laser, you imbeciles!”
“How — how you doin’ in there, slugger?” Dad asked, poking his head in.
“Fine!” Kyle yelled. Dad nodded, smiled, and disappeared.
“He just came outta nowhere and started blasting,” said Cornelius Z. Smythe of Kimota Road. “It all happened so fast that no one even panicked at first.”
The attacker first blasted the statue of Micah Bouring, causing it to collapse on the dais, nearly crushing Sheriff Maxwell M. Monroe and Mayor Marilyn Montgomery. Fortunately, Mighty Mike was on hand to save the day, catching the statue and lowering it safely to the ground.
As the attacker continued to fire his death ray into the crowd, Mighty Mike took control of the situation….
Kyle buried his face in his hands. The story went on, talking about how much money it would cost to repair the damage to the square, expressing relief that “thanks to the intervention of Mighty Mike” no one was seriously injured.
It was humiliating how wrong the reporter was. Weren’t these people supposed to report facts? He hadn’t attacked with a death ray or fired it indiscriminately into the crowd! He had been — justifiably — about to embarrass the holy heck out of Mighty Mike and things had gotten out of hand.
He was tempted to write a letter to the editor.
After a moment, though, he realized how idiotic that was. A letter to the editor! He had bigger problems than the newspapers. As preposterous as it seemed, the world somehow thought that he was the bad guy, that he was … evil. He would have to be a hundred times — a million times — more careful about keeping his powers a secret now. Before, it was just a matter of staying out of the hands of doctors and scientists. Now …
Oh, man! Now there was a chance he could go to jail!
Kyle moaned loudly.
Dad came back in. “I’ve decided it’s not a good idea for you to read about the Blue Freak. It’s upsetting you.” He took away the paper. “You can do your school project on something else.”
“The Blue Freak?”
“That’s what the paper calls him. Good thing we didn’t go to the parade, isn’t it? We could have gotten hurt.”
Kyle watched his father leave. Maybe his parents could have gotten hurt, but Kyle was now impervious to pain. Except for the pain in his ego, of course.
And the sudden shock of being hit in the face by that twerp from the stars.
“You need a better PR agent,” Erasmus commented.
“How do you know anything about the paper? You don’t have eyes!”
“True. But I’m Wi-Fi enabled, and the story is on BouringRecord.com. With more pictures.”
“Great.”
Just then, the phone rang. Mom called out that it was for Kyle.
“Hello?” he said into the extension on his desk.
“Kyle!” Mairi sounded relieved and — Kyle noted — no longer angry
at him. “I had to check up on you after what happened yesterday. I looked for you, but I couldn’t find you at the square, so I was worried. They took some people to the hospital, just in case.”
“Yeah, I, uh, saw that in the paper. Uh …” Now what? Which particular lie should he tell to Mairi?
He settled on the truth: “I wasn’t even there. My family didn’t go.”
The silence from the other end of the phone went on for a long time. “You didn’t?”
“Uh, no.”
“But everyone in Bouring went. It set some kind of town record. If you didn’t go …”
Oh, no. Kyle had known Mairi his whole life. Even over the phone, he could practically see her thinking.
“Kyle, were you involved in this Blue Freak thing? At all?”
“What?” He forced out a dry, tepid laugh. “Are you crazy? What would make you think that?”
“You’re the smartest kid in town. And you’re the only person who doesn’t like Mighty Mike.”
“I never said I didn’t like him!”
“What about the other day?”
“What did I say then?”
“You said, ‘You know what, Mairi? I don’t like that kid.’ ”
“Oh. Right.”
He thought furiously. He couldn’t have Mairi suspecting him of being the Blue Fre — the Azure Avenger. “We were out of town yesterday. We had to visit my aunt and uncle. They, uh, just had a baby.”
“Better make sure you brainwash your parents,” Erasmus whispered. “And maybe find a random baby for your aunt and uncle while you’re at it.”
Kyle switched off Erasmus.
“Anyway,” he went on, “we were out of town for that. I didn’t even know anything happened until I saw the paper this morning.”
Mairi seemed to buy it. She launched into a breathless account of yesterday’s events, using the phrase “Blue Freak” over and over again, usually in conjunction with “that horrible,” “that scary,” or “that evil.”
“Can’t you come up with something a little more original than ‘Blue Freak’?” Kyle finally asked. “Maybe something with alliteration?”
“Well, that’s what everyone is calling him,” Mairi sniffed. “What else should we call him?”
Kyle gave up.
from the top secret journal of Kyle Camden (deciphered):
First thing I did after getting off the phone with Mairi was zap Mom and Dad with the brain-wave manipulator again. I “reminded” them that we had spent Saturday at Aunt Michelle and Uncle Ron’s house, welcoming their new baby home from the hospital.
There is no new baby. Aunt Michelle and Uncle Ron are in their fifties. I don’t know what I’m going to do with Mom and Dad at the next family reunion, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes.
Special note: Since her reexposure to the brain-wave manipulator, Mom has developed a twitch. I sure hope that’s not permanent.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Days passed. Kyle became more aggravated.
He was famous.
But this wasn’t the good sort of famous, the kind that comes with endorsement deals, new cars, limo drivers, bodyguards, rap videos, a reality TV show, and your picture on boxes of breakfast cereal. Oh, no.
This was the bad sort of famous. Everywhere he looked on the Internet, people were uploading cell phone videos and photographs of the “Blue Freak.” The local TV newspeople had a fairly decent four-minute clip of the fight with Mighty Mike, and it ran over and over and over on YouTube. A week after Mighty Mike Day, the video had been viewed over fifty million times and it was still getting over a hundred thousand views a day.
On TV, every news channel talked about him. And it was strange, but even though no one knew anything at all about Kyle or his powers, every news channel had someone they called an “expert” on him.
“Neat trick,” Erasmus said. “Being an expert on something you don’t know anything about.”
Kyle grumbled. On TV right now, one of the “experts” was saying, “Maybe it was naïve of us, as a society, as a culture. We were so thrilled to have Mighty Mike among us, doing good deeds, that we never considered that there could be someone else like him, but without his benevolence.”
Click. Kyle changed the channel.
“Superpowered punks trash the town of Bouring!” an announcer screamed into the camera. His face was so red that Kyle thought it might pop right off and splat against the camera. “Who do these kids think they —”
Click.
“— if someone can’t control them, then what are we — we poor, ordinary human beings — supposed to do to stop —”
Click.
“What we’re seeing here is proof that the universe always seeks balance. If there is a great and powerful force for good, then an equivalent force for evil rises up to challenge it —”
Gah! Kyle turned off the TV. “Evil? I’m not evil! Why do they let imbeciles on TV?”
“Because if they didn’t, there would be no TV at all,” Erasmus told him. “In the words of my namesake: Fools are without number.”
“Grr …”
Kyle paced the length and breadth of his room. Lefty watched, his head cocked so that he could follow Kyle with one ruby eye.
Kyle dropped to his knees in front of the cage. “This is all crazy. I need a publicist. Or … No. I don’t need a publicist. What am I thinking? I just need to kick Mike’s alien butt off the planet. Then everyone will start thinking straight again. Right? Right?”
He poked a finger into the cage and let Lefty chin him. That’s how he knew Lefty loved him — when a rabbit rubbed the underside of its chin against something, it was like saying, “This is mine. I want it.” Lefty never judged Kyle. Lefty just loved him.
“What do you think, Lefty?”
“Why are you talking to a rabbit?” Erasmus asked haughtily. “He can’t answer you. He can’t do four-dimensional differential calculus. He can’t quantify string theory. He can’t calculate pi to ten duotrigintillion digits. He can’t —”
Kyle switched off Erasmus. Sometimes you wanted to talk to someone who couldn’t answer.
At school the next day, Kyle watched what had by now become a daily ritual: the Seating of Mighty Mike.
Everyone wanted to be at Mike’s table for lunch. Riots threatened to break out every day at noon when Mike marched into the lunchroom. So the teachers came up with a schedule. Each day, Mike would sit at a different table with a different group of kids.
It was, Kyle thought, a colossal waste of time and the very limited brainpower of the teachers at Bouring Middle School. They could have just ordered Mike to eat somewhere else, preferably the moon. Problem solved.
Today was the day he would sit at Mairi’s table. Kyle normally ate with Mairi.
Kyle went through the lunch line. The cheeseburger appeared to be the selection least likely to contain any sort of dangerous bacteria or germs, so he chose that. The French fries were probably okay, too, having been doused in boiling fat. He skipped the salad because it was wilted and looked like it had been sneezed on repeatedly.
Mairi’s jaw dropped in shock when Kyle sat down next to her.
“What — what are you doing here?” she asked.
“Eating lunch,” he said.
“Yeah, but …”
“What?”
Mairi glanced at the three other kids at the table. Kyle knew them all and smiled and nodded his head pleasantly. They ignored him, watching the opening from the lunch line as if the answers to life would emerge.
She leaned over to him. “Today’s the day Mike eats at this table. I thought you would …”
“Would what?”
“I know you don’t like him —”
“Don’t like him? Where did you get that idea?”
Mairi stared at him.
“Oh, I admit I’m not some Mike worshipper like everyone else in this town, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like him. I like him fine. He’s ??
?”
A cheer went up, drowning out whatever Kyle would have said next. Mike had deigned to manifest himself from the lunch line. When he wasn’t wearing his costume, he looked like any other kid, but they applauded and hollered like he was the president.
He sat down across from Kyle, the only remaining place at the table.
Just as Kyle had planned.
“Hi, Mike,” Kyle said, forcing himself to smile.
Mike’s eyes widened and he smiled back. “Hi! You’re Kyle, right? We haven’t talked since that day we played football.” He leaned across the table to shake Kyle’s hand.
Kyle kept smiling and shook that powerful hand, resisting the urge to show Mike his own strength. “Not football. Soccer.”
“Really? Are you sure? I think we used our feet. And I know there was a ball.”
“Trust me. It’s soccer.”
“I don’t remember there being any socks.”
“Seriously. Just trust me.”
Mighty Mike sat back, a thoughtful look on his face. “I believe you,” he said at last.
“Well, I’m right, so that’s good.” Before Mairi could chide him for being sarcastic, he said, “I hope you’re liking things here in Bouring.”
“I am! It’s a very friendless town.”
“I think you mean ‘friendly,’ ” Mairi chimed in.
Mike tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling, then nodded triumphantly. “Yes. Friendly. Thank you.”
The other three kids at the table didn’t bother talking — they just stared at Mike in rapt adoration.
“Have the authorities had any luck finding your parents?” Mairi asked, her voice so full of concern that Kyle wanted to tell her to cough it up before she choked on it.
“Not yet. They’ve been very busy. My printerfinger is not in the system, apparently.”
“Fingerprints,” Kyle said helpfully.