Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities

by Mike Jung

  “Thank you, Ms. Suarez, but I believe I’d like to reveal that tidbit myself,” he said in a slow, deep voice. His fingers kept drumming on the table, THWIDIDIDUMP. THWIDIDIDUMP.

  “I am Professor Mayhem.”

  Dad dropped the remote control on the carpet with a muffled THUNK.

  “Oh no,” he said. “This is NOT possible.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “It can’t be him.” Dad was clenching his fists. Actually, no, it was more like he was grinding his fingernails into the palms of his hands, and his mouth was open in a toothy snarl. Holy cow. Dad was pissed off!

  “WHAT IS IT, DAD?”

  Dad held up a finger, waved it around next to his ear like a gun, then pointed at the TV in a jerky motion.

  “I know him! I went to high school with that idiot!”

  For a second I was confused, because it was like Dad transmogrified into a different version of himself—more slouchy, a little bit of a whinier voice, maybe even shorter? It was bizarre, like he was channeling his inner teenager.

  “Professor Mayhem my eye, that’s plain old Dennis Mayhem!” Dad ran his hands through his hair, then laced them behind his neck.

  “You know him? Seriously?”

  “I haven’t seen that misanthropic pig face in twenty-five years, not since—”

  I kinda wanted to know since when, but Dad stopped talking when Professor Mayhem started.

  “Greetings, citizens of Copperplate City,” Professor Mayhem said. “So pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  The door opened again and a whole crowd of people came in, and not just security guys this time (although there were a few of them too). There was an old lady, a couple of guys in jeans and hoodies, a woman in a lab coat, and … Bobby? Yep, it was Bobby, with two of his cop buddies.

  The old lady came and stood next to Dad, and everybody else gathered around the TV as Professor Mayhem went on.

  “It appears I have your miserable little city to myself, worms. Unless Captain Stupendous chooses to show his face momentarily?”

  Mayhem stuck one hand behind his ear, being all exaggerated about it, and pretended to listen.

  “No, it appears not! Excellent. Let’s get down to the meat of it, shall we? By now even a gaggle of simpletons like you all realize I’ve stolen away your superintendent of schools, my old paramour Violet Keller.”

  Mom!

  “PARAMOUR?” Dad yelled at the TV in such a psychotic voice that I jumped and waved my arms around like Max. “SHE WAS NEVER YOUR PARAMOUR, YOU TROGLODYTE!”

  “A charming lass, with whom I’m delighted to renew my relationship.” Professor Mayhem looked like he was having a good time—he grinned, drummed his fingers on the table, and wiggled his dead-caterpillar eyebrows.

  “But of course she’s not the only one I’m here to see. Ray-Ray? Are you out there, my old foe? I imagine you’re cowering in some inadequately defended rodent run inside Corwin Towers, eh?”

  Huh. Good guess.

  “Ray-Ray?” the old lady said. “Oh my stars, Raymond, is that cretin talking to you?”

  Dad ground his teeth together.

  “It’s a long story, Janet,” he said.

  “What a tragic ending to your storybook romance, Ray-Ray!” Mayhem giggled, which was maybe the creepiest sound I’d ever heard. “I trust you won’t stand in the way if Violet and I pick up where we left off? But perhaps we should talk it over first, being the gentlemen we are.”

  He grinned again, with his lips pulled so far back from his teeth that you could see his top AND bottom gums. Gross.

  “In fact, Ray-Ray, I insist we talk it over. Here at my headquarters—I’ll even provide transportation! Meet me at Corwin Stadium tomorrow at noon. Perhaps that coward Captain Stupendous will even join us, eh? Oh, and in case you also succumb to cowardice, I’ll provide a bit of incentive.”

  Mayhem slammed both hands down on the table in front of him and glared out from the screen, not smiling at all anymore.

  “I’m fond of Violet, Ray-Ray—she’s still quite the scrumptious little bird—but if you fail to appear tomorrow, I won’t hesitate to kill her.”

  Ever feel like your senses have suddenly gone screwy and stopped working right? That’s how I felt when I heard Mayhem say he’d kill Mom—everything looked kinda foggy, all the objects in the room looked like they were a little bit farther away than before, and there was a funny whooshing sound in my ears. After a little bit I realized somebody was calling my name.

  “—incent! Vincent! VINCENT!”

  My head waggled back and forth as Dad shook me.

  “Vincent! Are you all right?”

  “Blergh,” I said. “I mean, yeah … no … I don’t know. Is Captain Stupendous out there looking for Mom?”

  “I don’t know.” Dad looked at Bobby, who shook his head.

  “No sign of him, I’m afraid, but we’re doing everything we can to get your mom back.”

  Crap! Where were Polly and the guys? Why weren’t they DOING something? Or did they try to stop Professor Mayhem and get taken out? Were they even alive?

  I had to get out of Corwin Towers and find out! Mom!

  “Dr. Wu.” Bobby turned to my dad, looking grim. “We have some decisions to make, but first we should gather any information you have about Professor Mayhem.”

  “Of course,” Dad said. “I’ll … I’ll do anything I can to help Violet.”

  Dad had his arm around my shoulders, so I could feel him shaking. Was he scared? Bobby didn’t look scared—he stood up so straight a flagpole would have looked crooked in comparison. I didn’t see even one wrinkle in his uniform. He looked ready to leap into action.

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know about you strapping young men, but these old bones need a place to sit down,” the old lady said. She gave Dad and me a genteel shove in the direction of the couch. It wasn’t a really hard shove, but Dad moved toward the couch anyway.

  “You know Professor Mayhem,” Bobby said. The way he said it was like half question, half regular sentence. He pulled some kind of digital recorder thingy out of his pocket, pushed a button, and put it on the table in front of Dad.

  “His real name is Dennis Mayhem,” Dad said, sounding more like his normal self. “We went to high school together at Xavier High, over in the Gaslamp District. I haven’t seen him in almost twenty-five years.”

  “It sounds like you knew him pretty well, if you both dated Violet.” Bobby didn’t sound calm, exactly, but he sounded in control. His voice was firm, and his hands weren’t shaking like Dad’s. And he didn’t look mad, exactly, but there was one long furrow on his face—it started right at the inside tip of his right eyebrow and went halfway up his forehead.

  Dad snorted. His glasses slid an inch or two down his nose.

  “Dennis never dated Violet,” he said, and snorted again. He pushed his glasses back up with his thumb. “He wished he could have dated her, but she never gave him a second look. Violet was with me.”

  “So he considered you a … romantic rival?”

  “I suppose, but it was academically that we were genuine rivals. We were both … we were both science geeks, you could probably say. We were both interested in what they called earth science back then.”

  Dad was a science geek in high school—not exactly a shock. The fact that he was enemies with a future supervillain? Huge, massive, mind-blowing shock. Throw in the fact that the future supervillain had a thing for Mom and, dude, it was like my parents used to be, you know, young.

  “Xavier High had a very good chem lab for advanced students back then, and Dennis and I both made full use of it. We competed in a lot of ways—I won the state science fair three years in a row, for example. And after junior year I was accepted by the Takahashi Global Consortium’s summer research program, which rejected him.”

  “Did he have a scientific specialty?”

  “Do we have time for this?” I couldn’t keep it i
n—as interesting as it was to hear about Dad’s high school dork war with Dennis Mayhem, I was practically chewing my arm off to help Stupendous find Mom. Of course I had to find Stupendous first. Crapola! I stood up and started walking in circles.

  “I know this is hard, Vincent,” Bobby said. He leaned out in front of me, which stopped me from pacing, and looked right into my eyes. “This is harder on you than anybody, but believe me, I’m worried about your mom too. I don’t think Professor Mayhem will hurt her until his deadline—villains almost never do that.”

  “Lizardlips did it.” I stopped and put my hands on top of my head.

  “Lizardlips was a completely alien life-form,” Bobby said. “With a strange diet. Professor Mayhem is human, which makes him … not predictable, maybe, but not completely unpredictable. Your mother will be safe tonight. Okay?”

  I scratched the top of my head with both hands. Hard.

  “OKAY?”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.” I flopped down on the couch next to Dad, who put an arm around my bony shoulders.

  “We’ll get her back, Vincent,” Dad said. “I don’t know how, but we’ll get her back.”

  I muttered under my breath—no words, just muttering.

  “Dr. Wu, I know these questions may seem pointless, but I’m just hunting for any possible weaknesses,” Bobby said. “Did Dennis Mayhem have a particular scientific specialty?”

  Dad sat with his head bowed, thinking. “He was—is, I suppose—a genuine polymath, Detective. He was interested in many, many things. But I always wondered if he’d pursue metallurgy of some kind, particularly after we found …”

  “We?” I said. “Like, you and him?”

  “What did you find, Dr. Wu?”

  Dad took a deep breath and closed his eyes, but just for a second. “Detective, I don’t know how old you are, but you look to be in shouting distance of my age—you’re from Gigawatt City, correct?”

  “No, sir, I lived there for a number of years but I’m from Copperplate City, born and bred. I went to Ororo Munroe High.”

  Dad cracked a brief smile. “Go Storms, eh?”

  “Yes, sir, thunder and lightning. I played linebacker.”

  “Well, that fits, then, doesn’t it? You must remember that remarkable meteor shower we had twenty-six years ago.”

  Bobby nodded. “Yes. The papers were full of stories about UFOs.”

  I was getting more and more freaked out about Mom, but I also wanted to hear more. Dad talked about it like it was some old-school childhood memory, but that summer’s meteor shower is legendary among Captain Stupendous fans. Bobby must have guessed what I was thinking, because he gave me a quick, tiny smile.

  “Vincent, if that look on your face is any indication, you know something about that meteor shower,” he said.

  “Yeah. A lot of people think Captain Stupendous first got his powers that summer—maybe even from a UFO. The Copperplate Chronicle ran a bunch of articles on it, the library has them all on file.”

  Dad nodded and looked at me with one eyebrow raised.

  “What?” A little grenade of anger went off in my stomach. “You didn’t think I’d know about that, Dad?”

  Dad opened his mouth for a second, closed it, then opened it again. “Well, I just … it was … it happened a long time ago. I didn’t think you were interested in history.”

  “Knowing about Captain Stupendous IS knowing about history!”

  “Point taken.” Dad started talking, but this time he looked at me instead of Bobby.

  “I was hanging around at Skyside Park one day—Dennis was there too, although he was off by himself. There were only one or two other people there, though. Most kids went to Lake Higgleman to socialize.”

  “Aw, gross,” I said.

  “The lake was nicer back then, Vincent,” Bobby said. “In those days there weren’t any geese living there—the lake was the hip place to be.”

  “Right,” Dad said. “The hip place. So, not many people were there to see the meteorites fall to earth.”

  “You saw them?” Bobby said, and for just a second he didn’t look worried or businesslike or any of that stuff. His eyes got round, and he shifted his weight up to the front of his chair.

  “More than that,” Dad said. “I found one, and so did Dennis. Three meteorites landed in all—Miguel Zazueta was actually hit by the third one.”

  I totally jumped up out of my chair.

  “MR. ZAZUETA? IS THAT HOW—” I clamped both hands over my mouth, which probably didn’t make me look any less suspicious. Lucky for me, Dad misunderstood.

  “I don’t know if it caused him long-term health problems, but it’s not why he died,” Dad said. “He had a heart attack. But he did go to the hospital after the meteorite hit him. Some kids started a rumor that he’d been abducted by a UFO, but nobody took it seriously.”

  “There were a lot of alien abduction claims that summer,” Bobby said. “They’re on record in the police archives.”

  My head was spinning. That’s how it must have happened! Aliens! Aliens made Captain Stupendous!

  Of course, me knowing that didn’t help Mom at all, and that thought made my head spin in the opposite direction. It must have, because I felt like I might start throwing up and never stop. I wondered if everyone who had their mom kidnapped by a supervillain felt the same way.

  “The meteorite I picked up was just a rubbery lump, but it turned out to be an incredibly complex polycarbon. It took me two decades to decode its molecular structure and replicate it.”

  “Carbon nanotube monofilaments,” Bobby said, and smiled. “I’ve read a little about your work.”

  “Yes. That meteorite has been the foundation of my entire career.”

  The digital recorder on the table beeped.

  “Excuse me,” Bobby said. He picked up the recorder, pressed a couple of buttons, and put it back on the table. Doing that seemed to put Bobby back in 100 percent businesslike cop mode.

  “What did Dennis Mayhem find?” Just the way he asked the question made me want to tell him the right answer, but Dad shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “By that point he’d developed an infatuation with Violet. It became disturbing quickly: He started following her around in the halls, attending all of the women’s volleyball games, and so on. He couldn’t stand it that I was with her. We weren’t capable of being civil with each other, so we kept our distance. I saw him pick something out of a meteorite crater, but I didn’t see what it was. He’s clearly mastered robotics, however, so I’d guess it was an unknown ore mineral.

  “That was the last time I’d seen him. Until today.”

  There was a knock on the door, and this time a cop stuck his head inside.

  “Uh, Detective? Someone’s here.”

  “For me?” Bobby started to get up, but the other cop shook his head and pointed with his thumb.

  “No, for him.” He was pointing at me!

  The cop’s head disappeared, the door opened all the way, and in walked Captain Stupendous.

  At first I had my usual, automatic Yippee-Captain-Stupendous-to-the-rescue! reaction to seeing him. I felt a serious rush, you know? Then I remembered what the real deal was, and it was like somebody yanked my power cord out of the wall.

  The way Stupendous acted didn’t help. He stopped a couple of steps inside the door when he saw all the people in the room. He stood there with his shoulders slightly hunched and his arms stuck straight out, angled away from his body, and both hands in fists. I felt my whole body clench a little bit more just from looking at him. He looked at me and tilted his head a tiny bit while opening his eyes really wide. I hate it when people do the body-language thing; I can never tell what they’re trying to say.

  Bobby broke the silence by offering a hand to Stupendous.

  “Captain Stupendous, it’s an honor to meet you,” he said. “I’m Detective Bobby Carpenter.”

  Stupendous stared at Bobby’s hand, then wrapped his a
rms around himself and scratched the top of one foot with the toes on his other foot.

  Bobby never changed expression, but I saw Dad’s eyebrows go up, and one of the security guys turned and looked at one of the other security guys, who gave a tiny shrug.

  Finally Stupendous shook Bobby’s hand. Bobby pumped hands twice and let go, and Stupendous lifted that hand and ran it through his hair.

  “This is Dr. Ray Wu, and it sounds like you, ah, already know Vincent?”

  “Hey.” Stupendous nodded in Dad’s direction. “Right. I mean, yeah, I know Vincent.”

  “You know my son?” Dad’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head.

  “I assume you’re informed about the Violet Keller abduction?” Bobby looked and sounded totally confident that Stupendous would say yes.

  “Who?”

  Bobby’s expression still didn’t change, but he stared at Stupendous for a few seconds. Dad, on the other hand, looked like he was about to cough up a lung.

  “I was, you know, on my way here,” Stupendous said. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “To talk to Vincent.”

  Everybody turned to look at me. The security guys made me feel especially creeped out, especially the one who was wearing his stupid mirrored shades inside.

  “Um … err, yeah, we’re gonna go … in there.” And I pointed to one of the bedroom doors.

  I turned and walked into the bedroom without waiting. Stupendous came in and shut the door behind me, and I spun around.

  “YOU DON’T KNOW—” I started, but Stupendous shushed me with a finger in front of his mouth.

  “Not so loud!” he said in a loud whisper.

  “You don’t know about Professor Mayhem and my mom?” I said in a lower voice.

  “Like, hello? Thanks for coming to rescue me?” Stupendous crossed his arms and stood with one hip stuck out to the side.

  “Who cares about hello? Professor Mayhem is gonna kill my mom!”