#153: The Blow Dryer

The orbiting killer satellite of the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning made for a pretty picture against the stars and black space and misty-white horizon of Earth. Shaped like a handheld hair pistol, but scaled a thousand times bigger, it amply earned the nickname agents of ICHHL called it—the Blow Dryer.

#148: Tête-à-Tête in Troy

“We’re gathered together around the Y+Table,” said Soren “Sabersnag” Sneed (with a slight speech impediment since he was a saber-toothed tiger), “at this, the headquarters of the Troy+Thems, to consider the charges leveled against Clarissa James, the sometime-megahero known as Ms. Megaton Man …”
        “Charges?” I cried.

#147: Deep Throat

“You’ve composed a fine paper,” said my thesis advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, smiling amiably behind her desk stacked with books and various research projects in progress. “You’ll certainly give those Hypothetics people something to chew on.” She handed back my paper, with several Post-It notes covered in red pen attached. “I’ve made a comment or two for you to consider, but they’re neither here nor there; they’re mostly cosmetic. I think you’re good to go.”

#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.

#81: Views from Olympus

“What up doe, Banky?” I said as I entered the Troy+Thems hall.
     Few people get my sense of humor to begin with, and my white colleagues weren’t sure they had permission to laugh at a black woman doing her impression of a racial stereotype. But Rubber Brother loved it.
     “Ha! Buckwheat from The Little Rascals,” he chortled. “Clarissa, that breaks me up every time you do it!”

#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.

#71: The Troy+Thems

It was the first of February, the day before my birthday, and I was walking home from my afternoon class at Old Main when I noticed a white van in the parking lot of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City. This wasn’t just the usual white van belonging to the residents, my friends the Y+Thems, which was always there, but a second van parked alongside it. On the side of this van were the words Inter-faith Church Healing for Hopeless Liabilities, and there was a dumpster unceremoniously plopped down next to it that ICHHL workers were quickly filling with debris.
     “Oh, no,” I said to myself. “What now?”