Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Read online

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  © 2017 Richard Roberts

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  Cover Art by Eugene Teplitsky

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  ISBN 978-1-62007-665-1 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-685-9 (paperback)

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  All Penny Akk books, including this one, are dedicated to Dana Simpson.

  This one also is for Rivky, my middle school beta reader.

  he field of battle lay before me, as yet innocent and green. Soon, it would belong to me, Penelope Akk, the world’s greatest fourteen-year-old supervillain. Or superhero.

  Yes, I was still working that part out. Look, I had a plan.

  The plan would come later. For now, that field across the street from Griffith Park and next to the play fountain needed conquering.

  I pulled my latest mad science invention from my backpack, and laid the disk on the ground. It looked like an oversized Frisbee, or maybe a shield, if either of those could be made of layers of concentric and interlocking gears.

  “So. Open space. We meet again!” My war cry given, I flipped open the control box strapped to my wrist and pushed a button. The innards of the disk rearranged, and rearranged again. It grew about a foot vertically, and lifted itself up on gears like knobby wheels.

  You know that moment in wildlife documentaries where the wildebeest looks up from the watering hole to see what’s approaching? The elementary school kids in the fountain did that. Just like that, first one, then another.

  Fiddling with the control joystick, I sent the disk skittering across the green, throwing up clods of dirt and grass behind it. Whoops! Note to Penny, works fine on carpet, not kind to fragile surfaces.

  “So. Penelope Akk. We meet again,” said a boy’s voice, copying me shamelessly. Or maybe it’s just something us people with super powers have to say.

  Swiveling around to meet this new threat, I brought my new and experimental toy zipping around between us. It left a chewed up arc in the turf. Hopefully, my parents wouldn’t have to pay for that.

  Said parents stood over by the trees, watching this confrontation with unhidden amusement, as if it was their goal in life to sap the drama from every moment of mine. Mom had her arms folded, and despite her smile, she watched me with sharp, calculating eyes. You know, the same way she does everything. Dad was more interested in our inventions.

  ‘Our’ inventions, because I knew my challenger. The dark-haired boy, who was taller than me, stood a few yards away. He had the rangy muscles you would expect in a super powered youngster, shown off by a thin T-shirt and shorts. Only his massive, thick-lensed glasses contradicted that look, hinting at his true nature. Like me, Rocky was a mad scientist, blessed by genetics with the power to build things mere human scientists could not.

  Vastly inferior, of course, but none of us could resist a chance to test our limits. Unhitching the backpack off one shoulder, he opened the zipper and dumped out onto the grass a… uh… thing.

  Rocky worked with water and glass and the things he built made no sense to me. How they moved at all, I didn’t get. This thing had the expected tubes, a lot of them in circles attached to warped―but basically round―bulbs.

  He poked it with a stick. It spun around, different parts revolving in separate directions as water sloshed at high speed through the tubes.

  Smirking, I pressed one of many buttons on my control pad. The cog wheels withdrew, the upper levels of the disk rearranged, and out came a cog with elegantly rounded teeth. They spun into a blur, cutting the air with a high pitch whine, and the disk rose into the air.

  Just to make the point of how badly Rocky was outmatched, I flipped another switch, and concentric gears slid out of the belly and rotated like a drill.

  And then the goofy glass blob spat water at my creation. Criminy.

  ‘Spat’ was almost the only word, but about as appropriate as using ‘throw’ to describe firing a bullet. Two tubes slid up, tracking my floating toy, and launched blobs of water so hard Rocky’s glass freak show slid backwards from the recoil. Dodging wasn’t even an option, and my creation went spinning end over end, only righting itself and getting its hover action back inches short of hitting the ground.

  Before I could come up with an attack strategy, Rocky leveled an accusing finger at my disk. “Why isn’t that thing broken? How can it be light enough to fly, but hard enough I didn’t cut it in half? All you’re good at is gears!”

  My grim and gritty combat face fractured into a grin and I fuffed up with delight. “Turns out, there’s a benefit to using my power with my dad watching. He offered me all kinds of things I never thought to ask for, like alloys of… I think it’s molybdenum? And maybe some other metals from the far end of the periodic table? Strong and light, and all I had to do was feed them to the Machine and have it spit back out the right sized gears.” I tapped my left wrist, where the Machine clung, wrapped in a spiral like a hibernating copper centipede. The control panel for my disk was on the right wrist. No way I was ever leaving my Machine behind even if it meant weighing down both arms.

  Rocky gaped at me, jealous to the point of protest. “Lucky!”

  Penny Akk was not at home to shame, nope. I counter-attacked. “And where do you get all that glassware you use?”

  Direct hit! Rocky reeled back, awkward. “Well, my aunt…”

  “Right.” I nodded, triumphant, but you know, not rubbing it in.

  As a further gesture of magnanimity, I stepped closer and held up the wrist-mounted control box for inspection. “My dad made this, too. I’m a long way from knowing enough electronics to rig up my own remote control system. He scavenged some from toy planes. Just the control interface, of course. The actual power source is one of Penelope Akk’s magnificent super-tension winding springs.” I had plenty of reason to be smug about those. My dad, ‘Brainy’ Akk himself, still hadn’t figured out how they stored so much power. He’d gotten as far as ‘recursive spirals’ and apparently that was the tip of the iceberg.

  Adjusting his massive glasses, which put even my solidly functional pair to shame, he studied the extensive array of switches, levers, and buttons with appropriate awe. “Coooool. So you come here to test what you’re building? How often?”

  “You should know. You hunted me down.” The connotations of that thought clicked into place, and I gave him a suspicious stare. “How did you know I would be here?”

  “I didn’t. I just saw you from the street.”

  Uh huh. I pointed at his backpack and his globular, water-spitting death bot. “And you just happened to be carrying a weapon to challenge me with?”

  His grin got goofy and apologetic, pulled up on one side. I’d never seen anybody so physically fit look so nerdy. “Well… yeah. I just like to carry it with me, you know?”

  I paused, my mouth open as my thoughts rearranged, until finally I admitted, “I guess I do. I never leave home without something I’ve built. Usually more than one. And it’s not like you can carry around that power armor you built.”

  He g
iggled faintly. “I never got that working again. It made sense when I built it the first time, but now… I just can’t figure out what I was doing.”

  I barked a laugh. “You don’t have to tell me.” My real super power, the one I didn’t want him or my parents finding out about, refused to ever do anything twice, and I didn’t understand how anything it made worked!

  Our conversation had not occurred in a vacuum. Two of the kids watching walked up to us. They were older than the grade schoolers playing in the fountain. Middle schoolers like Rocky and I… were a few weeks ago.

  Penelope Akk, sophisticated high school student. That’s me!

  The slightly shorter one had green eyes, wavy brown hair about my own ‘agouti’ color, and an absolutely manic grin. “Are we showing off our super powers? I want to be a superhero when I grow up. Call me Vanish.”

  “Soda Pop,” said the other girl, who had longer, straighter hair the same brown color, and darker eyes. She kept one hand in her pocket in a gesture that seemed awfully familiar.

  I pursed my lips. “I don’t know. Soda Pop is probably free, but I bet Vanish is taken.”

  Undeterred, the gleeful child―who was almost as big as I was, but radiated little-kidness―said, “Maybe they’ll retire. Vanishing is what I do!”

  “Invisibility?” asked Rocky, interested now.

  “Ghost powers. She passes through stuff,” supplied Soda Pop.

  “And you are a mad scientist,” I predicted.

  She nodded, brushing her hair back over her ear. Her fist came out of her pocket, opening to reveal a clear, star-shaped crystal with a powdery coating. It looked familiar. Soda Pop’s voice dropped almost to a mumble. “I have one of my pop rocks with me. It’s a lot stronger than it looks.”

  Vanish’s grin was nutso.

  Almost dreading the answer, I asked, “What are you two going to be when you grow up? Heroes or villains?”

  “A hero!” declared Vanish immediately, to my surprise and skepticism.

  Soda Pop answered more thoughtfully. “Hero, I’m sure. Supervillains seem like they have the most fun, but I know I couldn’t be a bad guy.”

  That spurred another thought, and I raised an eyebrow at Rocky. “Hey, what did you decide?”

  He looked down at the grass. “Uhh… neither, actually. After the big fight against the giant robots―”

  Vanish let out a squeal. “You two are from Northeast West Hollywood Middle? I knew it!”

  “I realized I just don’t have fighting in me,” said Rocky. “I guess I’ll end up a mad plumber or something. Strictly civilian.”

  I pointed at the glass monstrosity at his feet. “But you’re still building water-powered artillery.”

  He chuckled awkwardly. “It’s just like… I had to have one weapon, you know? Just to have it.”

  “Oh, I get that,” I assured him.

  “Yes,” agreed Soda Pop, more emphatically than anything she’d said so far.

  I clapped Rocky on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. My dad says mad science powers do great in regular life. The richest villains are mad scientists, because they were selling their inventions legally for years before their brain sprung a cog.”

  All four of us giggled at that.

  A moment of mad science bonding shared, Rocky looked around the park. “So, where are Claire and Ray?”

  I blinked. “What? I don’t know. Why?”

  He gave me as skeptical a stare as you can when your eyes are magnified to three times their original size by finger-thick lenses. “Come on. You don’t go anywhere without those two. It’s like you’re a hive mind.”

  My jaw hung open in outrage. “Hey, I can operate as an independent organism as well as the next girl! I can’t spend all my summer vacation hours with them. And aren’t we getting off track? You’re the one who should be answering how you knew I was here.”

  He grinned. Oh, sure, he held up his hands in a display of surrender, but had no actual submission in his amused voice. “I told you, I didn’t. If I knew where you would be ahead of time, don’t you think I’d have brought Cassie?”

  Tesla’s Inductive Heating Sole Inserts! Please don’t let me be blushing. “Oh, is she still… interested?” I hoped my voice wasn’t really as weak and cracked as it sounded to me.

  “Every third word out of her mouth is ‘Penny.”

  Oh, criminy, his smile. He knew Cassie had kissed me. Emergency! Activate ‘finding a change of subject’ protocols!

  One presented itself. Barely a second of awkward ignominy passed before a man behind us shouted, “No! Scruffles, come back!”

  A dog-shaped blur shot past us. Gray. A greyhound, in fact, if I knew my dogs, which I didn’t. It was skinny as a rail, and it could move. Its leash flailed around as the escaped canine sped down the sidewalk. No way this poor guy was catching that.

  Reflex kicked in as I identified the crisis. My left hand darted to the controls of my disk, which swooped up into the air, arcing around to buzz over the animal presumably named Scruffles. Extending the wheels, I set them spinning. Normally that would be useless in flight, but…

  Ha! One wheel caught the flapping leash. Leash and remote-controlled mad science plaything tangled together. Scruffles let out a yelp, pulled up unexpectedly short. Not that the yank completely stopped him, but my creation tumbling into the grass made the dog stumble. That bought enough time for a man with orange hair and a jogger’s shorts and shirt to catch up and reclaim the leash.

  Huffing, he called over to me, “Thanks for the rescue, kid. Crazy drone. Where’d you buy it?”

  “She built it herself!” Rocky shouted back.

  “Wow. Super powers?” the jogger asked. Scruffles reared up, tail wagging, licking the arm holding its leash. That done, the dog spun around and darted forward, but this time its owner had a firm grip and the greyhound could only strain at the end of the line, paws windmilling in an eagerness to run.

  Rocky grabbed his invention, and held it up over his head in both hands. “Both of us!”

  “And us!” yelled Vanish, waving her arm wildly over her head.

  “Pumpkin…?”

  Oops. That was my dad’s voice.

  A quick fiddle with the controls, and my disk hovered back over to me, before folding up. Slinging it over its control box like a shield, I marched over to my parents so they could Talk.

  While Talks usually heralded trouble, and a display of sober sincerity was in order, I still held up a finger to my mother to register that dad owed me a dollar for using the ‘P’ word. Unable to touch my super powered riches, and with the opportunities of summer vacation before me, I needed that money!

  Certainly my parents, while stiff enough to have something on their minds, didn’t look mad. Not that my mother’s expressions could ever be relied on. The Audit’s face said exactly what she wanted it to say at every moment.

  Her mouth said, “We noticed your new glider has combat functions.”

  Criminy. Busted!

  Dad took hold of the disk, twisting it free of the locking mechanism, and held it up to peer into the mechanisms. Unlike Mom, his cheer could not he hidden, but it didn’t mean for sure I wasn’t in trouble. “You could have been less obvious about wearing it as a shield, Pumpkin.”

  Even amid the extra rush of embarrassment, I flashed two fingers at Mom. The Audit did not bend rules, and Beatrice Benevolence Akk would keep track of how many Pumpkins and Princesses I was owed as she lead me to the guillotine.

  This was so going to put back my plans to convince my parents to lift their restriction on super powered dueling.

  “We’d like to talk to you about the rule of not getting into fights.”

  See?!

  Mom went on. “While that restriction was necessary during the school year, circumstances have changed. You are not being stalked by potential rivals in the halls anymore, and the other parents have decided that if our children can’t be kept quiet, you should be treated as your own junior ring of heroic and
villainous sparring.”

  Gleeful hope flashed in my chest, but I tried to keep my face bland. “So…?”

  Dad took over, bending forward and putting his hands on his knees. “You’re very responsible, intelligent, and good at looking after yourself for your age, Penny. You proved that during the school year. Most of all, you’ve proven that you’re moral enough to use your powers to help people. What you did a moment ago made up our minds. If you promise to try to avoid fights, and stay strictly away from interfering with adult heroes and villains, we won’t hold it against you when some of your peers get too rambunctious.”

  “HA!” I yelled, thrusting a fist in the air and jumping up and down! It took considerable effort to restrict myself to just that. My parents did not need to hear the, umm, rather dramatic laugh I’d picked up since I started supervillainy.

  Ignoring my celebratory dance, Mom sighed. “And unfortunately, that you’ll be put in that position at least once this summer is statistically inevitable. As was you trying to talk us into changing the rules. When were you planning to do that?”

  Trying to restrain my glee and look appropriately abashed, I cleared my throat. “Uhh… tonight, after this invention showed how well I can control my new powers.”

  Mom brushed her fingers back over my hair, and leaned down to kiss the line where my bangs started. “I suspected, but the numbers weren’t clear. You used to have a body language tell for when you were trying to work your way up to talk about something, but now you do it all the time.”

  Yeeeeah. That would be because they still didn’t know I was Bad Penny, and I couldn’t work up the nerve to confess.

  That would change this summer. I’d found my weakness over the last semester of middle school, and my strengths as well. All I had to do was use my villainous talent for scheming to maneuver myself into a situation where I had no choice but to confess, with my parents in a good enough mood to not totally disown me. This would be my summer vacation mission, and now that my parents weren’t watching me for signs of adventure, I was free to get started!