by Barry Lyga
“First of all, ergo isn’t a big word. It’s only four letters. I think what you meant to say was that it’s impressive for someone of my age to know and use Latinate words properly. I’ll concede that. But in no way is it a ‘big word.’ Second of all, I only kicked out of reflex because Mr. Rogers kept smacking me with his clipboard. And he was humiliating me in front of everyone.”
As soon as he said “humiliating,” Kyle knew he’d made a huge mistake. Stuff like that — “feelings” and “social pressures” — were like fresh, bleeding chum to the shark that was the Great Nemesis.
Sure enough, her eyes lit up and her mouth made an almost perfect O — as in, Oh, goody! Now I can talk about Kyle’s feelings!
“Oh, Kyle. Kyle. I understand. This is such a difficult age. And to be embarrassed in front of your friends like that, well, it must have been very trying.” She leaned on the desk with her elbows and smiled a horrifying smile. “Let’s talk about those feelings, okay?”
Kyle groaned and put his face in his hands.
“It was an accident!” he said for the seventh (and, he was sure, not the last) time.
As the week wore on, Kyle tried to assuage his feelings by reverting to the one thing that always made him feel good: pranks.
Mairi still wasn’t talking to him and a bunch of kids had taken to calling him “Mighty Weak” (which didn’t rhyme with “Mighty Mike,” so it was a bad and insipid pun). So on Tuesday, he decided that every toilet in the school would simultaneously overflow.
Every.
Single.
Toilet.
All at once.
This would accomplish a couple of things: It would make Kyle feel better (most important, of course), but it would also catch any number of kids off guard, furnishing them with their own embarrassing moments that would make his embarrassing moment in gym class fade from everyone’s memories. To this end, he developed a special chemical compound that would, when released into the school’s plumbing, spread itself out, diffusing through the pipes and then — at a pre-timed interval — change its own chemical configuration, immediately backing up the toilets and causing an overflow that would (in nine out of ten computer models designed by Erasmus) be quite explosive.
The thought of water simultaneously shooting out of the forty-two toilets and twenty-seven urinals at Bouring Middle School, into the surprised and unsuspecting faces and rear ends of any number of students and teachers, made Kyle laugh so hard that he thought he pulled a muscle.
But at lunchtime, as he slipped away from the cafeteria to an isolated bathroom in order to dump his vial of chemicals into the pipes, who should show up? Mighty Mike! Yes, the do-gooder brat just happened to have to use the bathroom at the same time. And even though Kyle was in a stall with the door closed, Mike managed to push the stall door open at the worst possible moment, jostling Kyle’s arm and making him spill the chemicals on the floor instead of into the toilet.
“Oh. Hoops. I’m sorry,” Mike said.
“It’s not ‘hoops.’ It’s ‘whoops.’ Or ‘oops,’” Kyle corrected him automatically, while watching his awesome (and rare) chemicals spread out across the tile floor. He’d had to steal several of the compounds, and he couldn’t risk doing it again.
“Are you sure?” Mike asked. “It’s not ‘hoops’?”
Kyle pushed past him and left the bathroom.
The next day, he decided to go simple: He whipped up a little audio device that he patched into the school PA system. Now, at utterly random moments, the school PA would make a farting sound. It didn’t matter if someone was talking on it or if the system was turned off. At random moments, the PA was going to fart, whether the school liked it or not.
It was juvenile, yes, but Kyle didn’t care at this point. He just wanted to exercise his prank muscles and do something that would get kids to stop gossiping about his weak performance on the chin-up bar.
Sure enough, toward the end of first period the PA crackled to life and made a halfhearted farting sound before it suddenly died. Instead of laughter or chatter, all the sound did was cause the kids to look at each other in confusion and then shrug.
The bell rang almost immediately, so Kyle dashed to the janitor’s closet on the first floor, where he’d patched into the PA system through an electrical switchbox. Mighty Mike was standing there already, a confused look on his face, holding Kyle’s audio device. The wire that connected it to the PA was snapped.
“Whoops,” Mike said, then smiled up at Kyle. “Hey, you’re right! ‘Whoops’ does sound better!” He clenched his fist, crushing the audio player. “Whoops!” He laughed. “Yeah, definitely whoops! This thing made a weird noise. I could hear over it even from herstory class.”
Mike beamed with pride, so thrilled with himself for figuring this out that he didn’t even think to ask what Kyle was doing in the janitor’s closet.
“History” class, Kyle thought. And “overhear.” You idiot.
So. At school, he was a failure and a laughingstock. At home, he was doing no better. Despite spending hours poring over the Mad Mask’s schematics, Kyle still couldn’t grasp them. Ultitron was the most confusing, confounding thing Kyle had ever imagined in his life. And this was coming from the guy who had built the now-legendary Pants Laser.
“This just doesn’t make any sense!” he told Lefty one night. He was sprawled out on his bed, the slate before him, Lefty similarly sprawled out nearby, nose twitching. Kyle rubbed the rabbit’s ear between his thumb and forefinger — sometimes that calmed both of them.
“The data intake module can’t connect here,” he went on, pointing to the slate. “It conflicts with the ocular synthesis systems over here. That means its eyes,” he explained to Lefty, who cocked an eye at Kyle and twitched his nose wisely.
“This system was either designed by an idiot or a certified genius,” Erasmus chimed in, scrutinizing the copy of the schematics on his own hard drive. “There are power couplings that attach directly to networking nodes, servomechanisms that don’t have any sort of internal or external structural support…. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Kyle agreed. But every time he wanted to throw away the schematics in disgust, he thought of the Mad Mask’s force field. That thing definitely worked; there was no question about it. If that same genius was being applied to Ultitron, then Kyle couldn’t just dismiss the blueprints, no matter how big a headache they gave him.
On Thursday, he spied Mairi sitting alone at lunch. He bought two pizzas — one sausage, one pepperoni — so that they could share, like they always used to do on Thursdays. He approached her hesitantly. They hadn’t talked in almost a week. If he hadn’t had the distractions of trying to come up with a great prank and studying the Mad Mask’s impossible schematics, it would have driven him crazy. As it was, it still nagged at the back of his brain, like someone softly poking his shoulder over and over, not hard, but just enough that he could feel it.
He approached her quietly. She had her backpack on the table and she was reading a book, so she didn’t notice him standing there until he cleared his throat loudly.
She looked up at him and didn’t say anything for what felt like a long, long time, but Kyle knew was only three seconds. Then, without a word, she slid her backpack off the table.
And revealed a lunch tray with two pizzas on it: one pepperoni, one sausage.
Kyle couldn’t help it — he laughed. Mairi smiled a very wide smile. “I guess we both had the same idea,” she said.
Kyle sat down across from her, and even though they already each had a sausage and a pepperoni pizza, they still went through the age-old ritual of cutting each pizza in half and swapping plates. Kyle contentedly bit into the pepperoni first, then the sausage, going back and forth with each bite.
They ate in silence, and then Mairi said, “I’m not stupid.”
Kyle froze. “I … I never said you were.” But he felt guilty anyway. The fact of the matter was that — compared to Kyle — just about everyo
ne in the world was stupid. Except for the Mad Mask, of course. But everyone else. And, yeah, that included Mairi. It’s not that she was stupid — it’s just when you put her brainpower up against Kyle’s … it was no contest. That wasn’t her fault. For a normal kid, Mairi was really, really smart. Kyle didn’t want to think about it, really. He felt bad just having the conversation at all.
“I didn’t say you said I was stupid,” Mairi said, frowning. “Listen to what I’m saying, Kyle, not what you think I’m saying, all right? I’m saying: I’m not stupid. I see how you’ve been ever since Mike came to town. And I totally get it. You were the most popular kid in school. You were probably the most popular kid in the whole town. And then Mike came along and suddenly everyone’s been paying a lot of attention to him. No one chants your name when you walk down the hall —”
“That was always annoying,” Kyle said. But he had to admit, he missed it.
“I bet you miss it, though,” Mairi said, eerily reading his mind. “I know I would miss it, if it had been me.
“But here’s the thing, Kyle.” She pointed her fork at him to drive her point home. “You can’t blame Mike for any of this. None of it’s his fault. He didn’t ask for this to happen to him. He has near-total amnesia. No one’s been able to figure out where he’s from or who his parents are. His family is out there looking for him somewhere and he’s all alone and even he can’t remember who he is or where he came from.”
He’s from another planet, Kyle wanted to say, but couldn’t.
“So he only has his foster parents,” Mairi went on, “and the Matthewses are really nice, but he needs friends his own age, you know? That’s where I come in. Because everyone else just wants him to fly them around or pick up their car or show how he can shoot those funky black beams out of his eyes. But he needs downtime, too. He needs to be able to be a kid. Because he is a kid.”
He’s an alien kid, is what he is. Kyle bit into the sausage pizza to cover up his uncontrollable look of disgust.
“So I guess what I’m saying is, maybe you should try to put yourself in his shoes. I know him being here has changed things for you, but at the end of the day, you get to go home and get into your own bed and you get to be with your own parents and play with Lefty and all that. It would be great if you could be friends with Mike. And if you can’t do that, well …” She shrugged. “I understand if you can’t do that, and I won’t be angry at you. But if you can’t be his friend, then at least maybe you can, I don’t know, not be angry at me just because I am his friend.”
She gazed at him across the table, her big green eyes wide and hopeful. Kyle couldn’t bear to disappoint her, but there was also no way in this world or any other that he could promise to be Mighty Mike’s — shudder — friend. So instead, he said:
“It’ll all be all right, Mairi. Don’t worry.”
Which wasn’t really saying anything at all, but it seemed to make her happy.
Kyle didn’t know if he’d told the truth or told a lie. He figured he would find out eventually.
And so, that night, Mairi came over to the Camden house to work on the science project. Kyle took a deep breath and forced himself not to think about how simplistic the project was, especially when compared to his own “special science project” — the schematics for Ultitron. Instead, he decided to pretend for one night that he’d never been exposed to the radiation from the plasma curtain, that his IQ had never jumped into quadruple digits. For Mairi, he pretended to be the same old Kyle Camden he’d always been.
And it was fun! They avoided talking about Mighty Mike at all. Mom made some snacks for them, and they sat on the living room floor with their project spread out all around them — long chains of taped-together sheets of paper with shaky lines of varying crayon colors stretching as far as the eye could see. Mairi giggled at Kyle’s insistence on trying to make the lines perfectly straight, while Kyle joked that her lines weaved all over the paper like their sleepy-eyed bus driver.
He went upstairs for Lefty, plopping the big rabbit down on the floor so that he could hop around. “Rabbits need exercise,” Kyle said seriously, and Mairi nodded just as seriously. They both watched as Lefty — who apparently didn’t know that rabbits needed exercise — yawned an enormous, pink-tongued yawn, his sharp front teeth huge in his mouth, and then flopped on his side on the carpet and proceeded to go to sleep.
Mairi and Kyle exchanged a look and burst into a fit of crazy giggles. Soon, they were poking Lefty lightly on his little cotton tail, trying to prod him awake so that he would do something. Anything.
“You’re going to get fat, Lefty!” Mairi said.
“Your legs are going to fall asleep!” Kyle told him.
“All the girl bunnies won’t be able to see your awesome six-pack abs under all the bunny-blubber!”
“You’ll get so fat you’ll need one of those scooters the old people use on TV!”
“Your stomach will drag on the ground when you hop around!”
“You won’t —” Kyle was interrupted by the doorbell. He checked the time. It was almost nine o’clock at night. Who would be coming over this late?
“Kyle!” Mom called from the TV room. “Get the door, please!”
“Can’t you?” Kyle called back. “We’re working!” Even though they hadn’t done any work for the past ten minutes.
“No commercial!” Dad yelled, almost in a panic, as if he might miss five seconds of whatever he was watching.
Kyle rolled his eyes. He had given up on his parents ever remembering to use the DVR. So he got up to go to the door. Mairi gathered the lethargic Lefty into her lap and stroked his fur, telling him that he needed to take better care of himself.
Annoyed, Kyle stomped through the house to the front door and flung it open, expecting to see some clueless friend of his parents.
Instead, standing there on the front step, in his full costume, was the Mad Mask!
Kyle stood at the front door, gaping, his mind spinning like a centrifuge. The Mad Mask! Right here! At his home! There weren’t enough exclamation points in the entire universe to express Kyle’s shock.
“What are you —”
“The Mad Mask told you we would meet again!” the Mad Mask boomed.
“Shh! Keep it down!” Kyle cast a panicked eye over his shoulder. Had his parents heard? Had Mairi?
“The Mad Mask told you we would meet again,” the Mad Mask whispered.
“How did you — never mind. Get in here.” He ushered the Mad Mask into the house and quickly shut the door. Fortunately, it had been dark outside for hours and most people in Kyle’s neighborhood — heck, most people in Bouring — didn’t wander the streets at all hours. He figured no one had spotted the Mad Mask standing …
On his front doorstep! Kyle resisted the urge to pull at his hair — he was so freaked out that he would end up as bald as a bowling ball.
“Who is it?” Mom shouted from the TV room. For the first and only time in his life, Kyle was grateful that his parents stayed put once they settled into their TV-watching positions. Except for bathroom breaks.
“Girl Scout cookies!” Kyle yelled back.
“Did you tell them the usual?”
Kyle slapped his forehead. That’s right. His parents had a standing order for Girl Scout cookies. Why hadn’t he come up with a better lie? Now he would have to make sure he scored Girl Scout cookies somehow. “Yes!” he called to her. “You have to get out of here!” he whispered to the Mad Mask. “I have company!”
As if on cue, Mairi said, “Thin Mints! Thin Mints!” from the living room.
The Mad Mask clasped his hands behind his back and tilted his head this way and that, taking in the vestibule of the Camden house. “Typical post-recessionary American suburban construction,” he said. Noticing the family portrait Mom had hung on the wall, he snickered. “Bourgeois ‘art,’ attempting to compensate for lack of taste and skill with highly suspect and generic emotional content.”
“You really hav
e to go,” Kyle told him. “Do your teleport thingy and …” Kyle made a magician’s poofing gesture with both hands.
“The Mad Mask meant no insult by his art assessment,” the Mad Mask said. “Indeed, the Mad Mask’s mother indulges in similar interior decoratorial tragedies. Now” — he straightened — “let us begin our work.”
“Haven’t you been listening to me? I —”
“Kyle!” Mairi said from the other room. “If you’re in the kitchen, get me a soda, too.”
“Right!” he shouted, panicking. He grabbed the Mad Mask by the shoulders. “See?”
“I think Lefty just pooped!” Mairi called out.
Kyle groaned.
“Walls should be used to display art of worth and merit,” the Mad Mask went on. “Or left blank, in which case they are useful to inscribe with equations and formulae. Maudlin tripe such as this, however,” he went on, gesturing to the portrait, “shames and dishonors the character and potential of a good wall.”
“Please leave,” Kyle mumbled, certain at this point that there was nothing he could do to get the Mad Mask to go.
“Oh, yuck!” Mairi said, and Kyle’s heart triple-timed as he realized her voice sounded louder — she was getting closer to him. She was coming here!
He opened the coat closet and — before the Mad Mask could say or do anything — shoved the Mad Mask inside and closed the door just as Mairi walked into the foyer.
“He did poop!” she said.
“Really?” Kyle hoped his panic didn’t show. Fortunately, Mairi seemed preoccupied with Lefty’s bowels and the products thereof. “You know, rabbit poop is small and dry and not a big deal. It looks the same coming out as it does going in.”
