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There were rumors of the new kid flying all over the school. That he'd been transferred from a juvenile detention center. That he thought he was a supervillain. That he was an alien.
You wouldn't have believed that last one, if there hadn't already been rumors floating around for years that Metro City Prep—Metro City Tech's main rival highschool—also had an alien. And, well, that guy wasn't blue, but he could fly, a fact confirmed not only by your friends who actually attended football games—who would definitely have lied about something like that if they thought they could get you to believe it—but also your very disgruntled physics teacher.
"Does ours fly?" you asked your friend Holly, who seemed to have actual cartoon heart eyes dripping out of her eyes as she leaned over the lunch table.
"Even better," she said, soppy grin melting across her face as she twirled a lock of firefighter-engine red hair around one finger. "He builds freeze rays."
She let out a long sigh, propped her head up on one hand, and proceeded to stare into space dreamily.
You averted your eyes, looking first waaaay over to the other side of the cafeteria, and then at the faintly grimy tile floor. There was something that almost creeped you out watching Holly of all people go this gooey-brained. It wasn't like Holly to sigh over boys. It was like Holly to try and dismantle and rebuild a dishwasher in her basement and not even notice when multiple days had passed until her parents called you to bribe her out with promises of twix bars and the creepiest nature documentaries known to man.
Holly wasn't the first to get the disease.
"Have you seen the way he dresses?!?" Courtney hissed in P.E. "Leather jackets. Studded leather jackets. And band T-shirts."
She gesticulated wildly. A stray dodgeball thunked against the wall just over her head, and she ducked without missing a beat. "Do you know how hard it is to find a proper bad boy in this school?!?"
"Idunno," you said, picking up the ball and tossing it to somebody who was still in play. "Kinda sounds like he's trying too hard to be a real bad boy."
"He got transferred from Juvie."
"That makes him a bad decision."
"He got transferred because he escaped from Juvie. With a freeze gun. They wanted him for our robotics program."
At that, you actually paused to seriously look at her. "Wait a second," you say. "I keep hearing 'freeze gun.' What do you all actually mean, 'freeze gun?!?"
She threw back her head and cackled, the same mad-scientist, theater kid laugh that had had her cast as the evil queen in your middle school’s production of Snow White.
Somehow, you knew that wouldn't be the last of it. Indeed, over the next few days you needed only mention the name of the new boy in order to provoke a wave of blushing giggles—and what a name it was.
”Megamind?" You asked. "No last name? Really? Megamind?"
Jillian nodded gravely.
"I heard he does have a real name," Kassandra cut in. "—But he hacked into the school records to change it so none of the teachers know what it is."
"Maybe," you said, nodding your head. "You're sure it's not just… you know. A cultural thing? From being from space?"
"I'm asking him to the Sadie Hawkins dance," Jillian said abruptly.
You all looked at her.
"Sadie's isn't for two months," Kassandra said, then paused, like she was thinking about it.
"I'm serious!" Jillian said. "It's worth asking! And I've got to do it quick, anyway, before someone else snags him."
Kassandra's "thinking" expression lasted one second longer before it smoothed out, and she gave a short, decisive nod. "If he turns you down, I call second shot."
Their eyes both pivoted to you.
You threw up your hands. "I haven't even met him yet! He's not in any of my classes!"
"You," Jillian blew a loose strand of hair out of her face. "Are coming to robotics club today, missy."
***
Okay. You admitted it; he was cute.
Elvin features, shockingly green eyes, elegant, spidery fingers that skimmed over the lab's tools with a confidence that even Holly didn't have. Even the theoretically over-the-top outfit looked good on him in person. He definitely stood out like a sore thumb, but a good sore thumb.
You groaned.
Jillian reached out and flicked your ear.
"Ow!"
"Told you."
You scowled at her and reached up to rub your ear. "I'm still not joining your asking-him-out competition."
The new boy sat at a table in the furthest corner of the room, alongside Holly, the two of them practically buried in boxes of various parts, components, and supplies. One of the chairs on the opposite side of the table had been pushed out of the way to make space for a bulky, humanoid-looking mech with a fishbowl inexplicably perched atop its shoulders.
You left Jillian and Kassandra at the door and veered towards them, picking your way around some of the other tables which were equally cluttered with junk.
Jillian threw you an affronted look, which you pretended to not see.
Holly's eyes lit up when she saw you coming, and before you could even sit down, she was already shoving a plastic bin full of PVC pipes into your hands. As she spoke, a pink sticky note came unstuck from the side of the bin and fluttered towards the ground. "Do you want to work on cutting these? I'm working on the circuit board right now, but it'd be great to have the pieces for the frame already ready by the time I move on—"
Shifting the weight of the bin to hold it with one hand, you reached out and plucked the sticky note from the air before raising it to your face to read over. On it read a list of sizes and quantities in centimeters, written out in cramped but still very legible script.
You dropped the bin back onto the table and began rummaging through it for the pipe cutter.
"Hey," Holly said, turning to the new boy and holding up a circuit board. "Do you see a better way to rewire this? It feels inefficient to me but I can't figure out a good way to tweak it."
He immediately went still, eyes going wide as if he'd been caught in a spotlight. Holly, unnoticing, practically shoved the circuit board into his hands before turning back to what lay in front of her on the table. The boy stared after her, blinking uselessly a couple times, the circuit board clutched between his fingers. A rosy-violet blush crept up his face.
Your stomach dropped, flipping like a capsized buoy. Suddenly aware of dry lips, you ran your tongue over them, coating them with saliva. Oh gosh.
You suddenly understood way too well why every girl in the school was dying at the mere mention of this boy.
"Excuse me," a voice said from behind you. "Can I help with that?"
You pivoted in your seat to look up at whoever had spoken.
—Only to find the giant gorilla-fish mech hovering just inches over your shoulder.
You choked on air.
”Sorry," you said, coughing on the word as you caught your breath. "—Sorry, I was not expecting that."
The giant robot fish-cyborg looked on in concern. With its giant, piranha-like fangs. Somehow, those hadn't been terrifying before, but now that you knew that it could move and wasn't just some weird sculpture Holly and/or the new boy had made, they were suddenly much more menacing.
"Are you alright?"
…The thing's voice wasn't nearly so terrifying as its body. Mild, slightly concerned, but overall very normal sounding.
Person, you corrected yourself, as the dizzying jolt of adrenaline began to die down. Not thing.
Nowhere in the gossip had there been any mention made of a second alien, especially not one that looked like a fish and conveyed themself around in a mechanized suit—which seemed a massive oversight, given what you were now seeing—but that was clearly what this was.
"Yeah," you said, waving away his concern. "Sure, you can help. I—um—didn't realize there were two of you. Are you a new student as well?"
He shook his… head. Body? "No. But I'm used to going wherever Sir goes, and robotics club is technically separate from school, so they don't have a good reason to say he can't have me here."
You perked up. "Sir? Is that his name?"
The fish's voice went stony. "His name is Megamind. Just Megamind."
"Oh. We were wondering. Some of us, anyway. I thought it was probably just cultural, but people kept saying it was some kind of pseudonym he made up." You snorted. "I thought that was kinda ridiculous, but then you called him something else, so…"
The fish paused, as if he were hesitating. "Actually, he did come up with it himself. Back on our home planet, it was traditional for children to pick their own adult names once they reached a certain age. It's a bit confusing to people here, but it is his real name, and his childhood name isn't. He just got it later than most."
For the past minute or two, Holly and Megamind both had been locked in conversation over that circuit board, but at that moment, they must have finally figured it out, because Holly's head finally popped up from their little huddle
"My most favorite minion!" She announced, holding her hand out across the table and wagglng her fingers at you. "Could you hand me the soldering iron? I think you've got it over there."
You reached for the device, which was indeed resting unplugged on our side of the table, only to have your knuckles knock against metal as the fish-cyborg's fingers closed around it at the exact same moment.
Holly waved her hand at him dismissively. "No, not you. My minion."
There was a pause as Megamind spent a moment looking back and forth between you and Holly before he broke down into laughter, bending over to clutch his stomach as his stick-thin frame shook.
When he finally straightened up again, his eyes were sparkling.
Your own smile softened into a matching grin, spreading wide across your face. Too wide, probably, considering you had no idea what was so funny, but he just had such an expressive face. It lit up the room.
Several tables away, Jillian abruptly stood up, pushed her chair back under the table with a sharp thunk, spun around, baby-blue skirts twirling, and marched across the room straight towards us.
“Hey adorable,” She leaned forward over the edge of the table, shooting Megamind a smile like she was in a toothpaste commercial and batting her eyelashes. “Megamind, right?”
A record tape could have scratched inside your head. It was all you could do to keep from cringing. Oh, Jillian, no. Please no.
She batted her eyelashes again. Beside you, the fish cyborg sounded like he was choking on something. Holly had dropped the soldering iron and was looking at Jillian with an expression somewhere between shocked, scandalized, and betrayed.
You almost couldn’t bear to look over at Megamind, but there was nothing you could have done to stop yourself, either. He had gone dead still again, even stiller than he had gone when Holly had turned to him to ask him for advice, and the air around him prickled with leashed hostility.. The smile on his face was gone as if it had never been there, replaced with the kind of bleak blankness you would expect to see on a man who had just lived through a zombie apocalypse.
“I don’t entertain practical jokes,” he said flatly, voice sucked dry of emotion. “Get out. And don’t you speak to me again unless you want your lab projects sabotaged for the rest of the semester.”
You gripped the table so hard it felt like your soul was about to elapse from your body.
Jillian’s wide blue eyes blinked rapidly, turning glossier with each movement, and she stayed rooted in place, seemingly stunned solid. Her body began to tremble.
Megamind reached casually into his jacket pocket, withdrawing something that looked a bit like a sci-fi glue gun crossed with a revolver from the Old West. He pointed it lazily at one of the scrap pieces of PVC still lying on the table and squeezed the trigger. A bright beam of light engulfed the chunk of plastic. There was a light clicking noise a half-second later as a tiny blue cube dropped a two millimeters lower from where it had been onto the tabletop.
“This thing also works on people, you know,” he said, angling it back and forth in his hand with a moue of interest, as if looking for a spot of dust to clean off. “Haven’t tested that in awhile.”
A tiny squeak escaped Jillian’s mouth, and her eyes focused in on the device, shoulders spasming in a shiver-like shudder before she turned and scampered away.
You sat frozen, limbs stiff as if they’d been carved from marble, as Megamind took a moment to polish the barrel by rubbing at it with the corner of his jacket before dropping it into his pocket.
…So that was the freeze gun.