#102: The Multimensional Pinpointer

It was going to take a while for it to sink in that my eighteen-month-old distant cousin had singlehandedly fended off a battalion of robotic invaders at the Youthful Permutations headquarters in Troy while I had been reading my Introduction to Hypothetics textbook for an upcoming seminar in my off-campus apartment in Detroit ten miles away.

#76: Who’ll Have You?

A week later, Secret Agent Preston Percy called to summon Avie and I to an urgent meeting of the Y+Thems at their Troy, Michigan headquarters. “Be here this afternoon,” he ordered.
     “Impossible,” I replied. “I’m scheduled at the Union Stripe Café, and I have a buttload of homework…”
     “Call off,” said Preston simply, and hung up.
     I got Nancy, who was back in the employ of the restaurant after quitting abruptly the summer before, to cover for me at the last minute. Avie and I drove up to Troy in her Pacer that evening, our megahero uniforms under our civvies.

#75: He, She, Him, Her

“Shouldn’t it be the Positive Woman?” asked Avie. “If the Negative Man stopped being a man, he might have stopped being made of anti-matter as well…”
     “No, he was still made of anti-matter,” I replied. “I mean she. He’s a she now. She just switched genders. Or sexes. Or whatever you want to call it. I mean, he switched…into a she.”
     We were all sitting around Wilton Ashe’s bookish apartment on Ferry Street at Cass Avenue—Avie, Wilton, Audrey, and I. It had a big bay window open to the south, and was crammed with all kinds of houseplants and bookshelves. It only had one bedroom but it had a nice-sized kitchen and living room. The walls were white and everything was open and bright. The sky was clear and blue and the steam heat cranking from the radiators almost gave the illusion of spring or summer, even though it was still winter.

#74: Double Negative

I agreed to go back up to Troy a few nights later, on a night when I wasn’t scheduled at the Union Stripe Café. But it had been so long since I’d used my megapowers I really had to psyche myself up. The last time I had tried pulling on Avie’s weight machines, I could barely do ten reps at forty pounds, flabby civilian weakling I had become. But when I put on my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, my courage came back and I managed to fly to Detroit’s northern suburbs without any problem. I had no choice, since I don’t drive and I didn’t want Avie hanging around dangerous scientific machinery any more than was necessary. In fact, I was hoping she’d get so busy with school and her theater group that she’d forget about joining the Troy+Thems altogether, so I never even let on to her that I was going.

#73: The Whistleroar of the Wondrous Warhound

Neither I nor Avie had bothered to do any cleaning in our apartment since we’d moved in before New Year’s, except for a quick tidying up before my birthday gathering. She had promised to dust and run the sweeper in the upstairs living room, and I agreed to handle the kitchen and bathroom, which was right next to it. We both managed to find ways to procrastinate—me with my homework and her with her working out in the basement. But by mid-February, the bathroom was starting to get funky, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. So there I was, scrubbing the tiles in our shower. I could hear Avie clacking away at the weight machine down in the basement, and was more than a bit perturbed at her. What if Clyde and Alice² were to drop by? Of course, this wasn’t likely—I hadn’t heard from them since they’d gone to New York.

#39: North Cass Ditty in the City

“So, you played ‘Deep Throat’ to Pammy Jointly’s Woodward and Bernstein, then you deep-throated Trent Phloog to alleviate your guilt,” said my half-sister.

#38: My Appointment with Pammy (or, Meeting Jointly)

I pushed thoughts of my parents’ pending divorce out of my mind and resisted the temptation to fly up to our old Boswick-Addison neighborhood and confront them about the matter. Daddy would still be at work at that hour—or perhaps he was parked at some motel in Dearborn instead—and I had enough issues on the table with Mama. She refused to reveal the identity of my biological father, and—as I had discovered during my trip to New York over the winter—had for reasons unknown lied to me and Avie all our lives about our grandmother’s death. Apparently, Grandma Seedy—Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James—hadn’t died on some government mission during World War II, as we’d been told, but was alive and well. In fact, she’d even manufactured my custom-made Ms. Megaton Man uniform especially for me in a place called the Doomsday Factory in New Jersey, although I still hadn’t met her.

#37: The First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City

About a week after my tumble with Nuke, I was coming home from my summer class at the Arbor State Extension and passing the church, hoping perhaps to get another glimpse of the man with the stretchy arm. A white van had just pulled into the church parking lot with a New York license plate. The brake lights went out, the engine shut off, and the side passenger door opened. An orange, fur-covered arm had pushed it open; then, a leg that looked more animal than human stepped out. Long, shiny saber teeth protruded from the mouth of the enormous tiger-man that appeared. He wore long shorts, a tank top, and tennis shoes.