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If there was a prize for being the second best for everything, Stacy Hirano would’ve won it. That happened when your little sister was Ginger Hirano and your best friend was Candace Flynn.
“Candance you learned parkour? In two days?” Mrs. Hirano was equal parts befuddled and impressed, broccoli-laden fork halfway to her mouth. “That takes some serious dedication.”
“Well my brothers built these moving roller-dog-things and I had to figure out what they were up to so I could get my mom–”
Stacy had all but tuned out the conversation, basically since the three of them sat down to dinner. She enjoyed having Candace over, really she did, but not when her mother was home.
“Reguardless of the reason, that’s still very impressive. I remember when Ginger went for her park-based-athletics patch and it took her nearly a full week.”
Stacy remembered that. She’d had the house nearly to herself for a week. It had been awesome, until the other two Hiranos returned, Ginger proudly sporting a shiny new patch and enough leaping and running skills for her to place first in every field day since. Sure Stacy could’ve also learned parkour, theoretically, but there’d been a really good crime documentary series she’d wanted to finish, and besides, they’d almost run out of room on the trophy shelf anyway.
(Sometimes Stacy wanted to smash the trophy shelf in. She’d fantasized about it at least twice.)
Candace struggled. “Gotta do what you gotta do to bust.”
Neither Candace or Ginger did it on purpose of course. It wasn’t that they were out to spite her– Stacy was just constantly surrounded by amazing women doing amazing things, casually, as though it took almost no effort at all. Even though Stacy’s mother assured her that she was also an amazing woman who could do amazing things, she had a lot of trouble believing it. She sank a little further into her seat.
“Well thank you for coming over for dinner Candace, it’s been great hearing about your summer. Would you like a ride home?”
Candace shook her head. “No thank you. Dad let me borrow the car to come here so I’m all set! See you tomorrow Stacy!”
“See ya,” Stacy half-mumbled, trying to make it sound like the last two hours hadn’t felt like wearing sandpaper for socks.
As Candace shut the door Mrs. Hirano shook her head and hummed thoughtfully to herself. “That girl is going places, let me tell you.”
That, Stacy definitely agreed with. Candace was, without a doubt, going places. And hopefully Stacy too, by association. Unfortunately ‘by association’ was not the same as ‘going places’ in her mother’s eyes.
Without much more speaking she took the last of the dishes to the kitchen and rinsed them. Thankfully her mother didn’t have much more to say about it, choosing only to smile softy at her daughter and thank her for doing the dishes.
It was only once she was safe in her bedroom that Stacy could finally let out the groan she’d been holding in all dinner. In fact, that groan quickly turned into a muffled-pillow-scream, with a good leg kick thrown into boot. Nearly a minute later she felt better enough to lift her face from the bed, and that was when she noticed Perry, sitting quietly in the corner of the room and staring at her quizzically.
“HOLYfuckingshit– Jesus Perry, you scared me! Don’t do that!”
He shrugged casually, but the half smirk suggested he’d done it on purpose. “You okay?”
Stacy ignored the question. “What are you doing in my house? It’s not your usual sneak-out hours.”
Over the course of the last year and a half since Stacy had found out his secret, she and Perry had struck up a tentative friendship. She’d thought it would be weird at first, being friends with her best friend’s pet, but the Perry who showed up at her house was basically a completely different person, and he was genuinely fun to hang out with, enough so that she often forgot he was Candace’s pet to begin with.
(Sometimes she felt guilty for how much she enjoyed hanging out with Perry, especially when Candace annoyed her, but she tried to ignore that and remind herself she could be friends with both of them.)
“Needed a computer. Didn’t feel like sneaking past family.”
“Couldn’t you have used Heinz’s?” (In the past year Stacy had learned a lot about Perry, but also about the eccentric scientist he spent most of his time with. Perry didn’t talk a lot, but he did have a tendency to mention Heinz, more than he thought he did, and after nearly ten years of being friends with Candace, Stacy had gotten really good at filling in the blanks.)
“Quick thing. Realized after I left and didn’t feel like going all the way back.”
Stacy nodded. “You know where it is. It should be logged in.” She still kinda wanted to scream about earlier, but it seemed like the moment had passed, so she settled instead for watching the platypus. He hopped up on her chair and stood on it, so that he was leaning over the desk. In a year of watching him make people-sized items work for a smaller figure, she still hadn’t quite gotten used to it.
Perry plugged both his phone and watch into the computer, with two different cords, and pressed a few buttons. A minute later Stacy watched him groan (or as close as a platypus could come to a groan, which was much closer to an annoyed chatter) as a popup appeared on the screen. This was followed by several inappropriate gestures.
“What’s wrong?”
“Need to transfer a file. Stupid antiquated technology won’t connect. Says it needs permissions.”
After a minute of fumbling with the spelling of the word ‘antiquated’ (Perry hadn’t had a sign for it and Stacy wasn’t the world’s most profound speller– it took a minute to translate in her head and to top it off, Perry tended to sign faster and sloppier when he was annoyed) Stacy got it. “Oh, is the watch locking? Not letting the computer in?”
Perry nodded, and tried something else, which judging by the increasingly frustrated noises he made, wasn’t working.
“Do you mind if I try?”
He gave an exasperated ‘go ahead’ hand motion and pushed away from the desk, still in the spinny chair.
Stacy hadn’t spent a lot of time with this particular brand of watch (the specific of which she was sure were classified), but one time Candace had wanted to break into an apple watch she’d found on the floor of a bus because she was convinced Jeramy’s mother had the same one, and if it belonged to her she wanted to be the one to return it. (No matter that Jeramy’s mother already liked her very much. Candace could be a tad… overzealous at times.) Of course, Candace hadn’t had any idea how to break into a watch, and five minutes into the process Phineas had floated by outside on some kind of long-legged walking construction crane, and so in the end Stacy had been the one to do it. It had taken her all night and at least five or six youtube videos, but by the end of it she could confidently say the watch belonged to a thirty-four year old man with no idea how to talk to women and really bad Tinder game.
So, in short, Stacy was oddly equipped to do this exact task. She felt almost confident about it, although it took a couple of minutes to remember which part of the code she needed to work with, and she had to tweak some things from the first time (Perry’s watch was actually easier to break into, which was concerning to say the least.)
Fifteen minutes later, Stacy was in. She shuffled though the available files to make sure, then turned back around. “Will this work?”
It took her a moment to recognize the scene before her.
Perry was staring at her in shock, or as close to shock as the platypus came. (He didn’t actually make that many facial expressions– shock was more of a slightly widened eye and half-furrowed brow.) (The exception to this rule was mid mario kart, during which he turned into a complete menace, and one time during a television show with a devastating breakup in which Stacy swore she saw him cry, even though he denied it tooth and nail. Suffice to say, she’d never seen him shocked before.) He wheeled back over to the computer and opened a few things, and then turned to Stacy. “When did you learn how to do this?”
“Oh it’s a long story– it was this thing with Candace and– actually it’s not important. Are you able to get what you need?”
Perry nodded, and turned back to the computer. A minute later he was done and back to staring at her quizzically.
“They should give you a watch that connects directly to your phone. It would be a lot easier that way.”
“You just broke into a level five security clearance.”
Stacy shrugged. “Wasn’t that hard to learn.”
Perry shook his head and made the sign for amazing.
(What?)
Amazing? Stacy was certain she’d translated correctly, but compliments from the platypus were rare, let alone that level of praise. (When was the last time someone called her amazing?) It was at that moment Stacy felt her eyes begin to water. She hadn’t intended for them to water of course, she never did, but sometimes they didn’t listen to her. She wiped them quickly but of course Perry noticed, and squinted at her.
Sometimes it was really unfortunate that he was a trained spy.
“I’m okay, I swear, nothing’s wrong.”
He squinted harder.
“You’re going to judge me– it’s really bad Perry. Really selfish.”
He rolled his eyes and hopped up on the bed. Patting next to him, he motioned for her to sit down.
Was she really going to spill everything to the platypus? Everything, everything? (He would definitely hate her when it was over.) She found herself sitting anyway.
“Sometimes I really hate Candace,” she blurted out, mostly without thinking. “No wait, shit sorry. I don’t hate her, I promise, I just hate my mom– well actually I don’t hate her either. I don’t hate anyone! Especially not Candace, but sometimes she just annoys me so much.”
Surprisingly, Perry didn’t look upset. He gestured for her to go on.
“She’s just so amazing. She does all of these incredibly cool and crazy things, and has so much to show for it. And I love it for her, and she’s so talented, but sometimes I wish she wasn’t. And it’s so bad and so selfish, but sometimes I wish she was a little bit mediocre or at least bad at something so people wouldn’t think she was so cool. Because I can’t do half the things she can, and sometimes she’s so amazing that I forget that it’s not normal– to be that good at stuff, and it makes me feel bad for not being as talented as her. And it’s the same thing with my sister, except that’s even worse because she’s my baby sister and I’m supposed to cheer her on. But sometimes I’m at her stupid Fireside Girl competitions hoping she loses. Isn’t that awful?”
Perry was looking at her, but almost through her, Stacy realized, as though someone could see what was going on inside her head.
“Candace feels the same way,” he finally said, after a tense and silent moment. Stacy seriously doubted it.
“She does? How?”
“About Phineas and Ferb. Because of how amazing they are.”
“Oh.” Stacy wiped her eyes again. She hadn’t thought about what it would be like, being related to Phineas and Ferb. They were literally world famous. “I guess that makes sense. They are kind of amazing.”
Perry nodded. “She has a thousand talents but forgets them all as soon as Phineas steps foot on the moon.”
Stacy snorted. “No, she just catapults herself to the moon or builds a rocket or something because she knows how to build computers from scratch or something. She doesn’t let it stop her.”
Perry shook his head. “She builds the rocket, but doesn’t think it’s impressive at all. In the end it does stop her, because she doesn’t realize that what she’s doing is also incredible.”
And Stacy thought about it, and realized that maybe Perry was right. Candace did tend to forget about every amazing thing she’d ever done in the face of someone else cool.
And then Perry pointed to Stacy, and she got it.
“You’re saying that I forget cool things about me, because I’m constantly surrounded by people doing cooler things?”
“Equally cool. Maybe even less.”
Stacy shook her head. “Hardly. All I can do is break into a watch and make some spot-on animal noises.”
“You learn fast.”
“What?”
“You learn fast. You learned the basics of sign language in like a week. You can pick up most new skills right away. Lots of people struggle with that. You win at most games because you pick up on the rules and strategy before everyone else does.”
“Oh.” Stacy’s eyes were watering again, but she was determinedly ignoring them. “I- I guess that’s true.”
“You’re also good with people. Very likeable. Candace struggles with that. Could probably become a president if you tried.”
“Really? Me? A president?”
Perry shrugged. “If you wanted to.”
Stacy thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d want to be the US president. Too much campaigning. Maybe somewhere else.”
Perry nodded. “Up to you.”
She wiped her eyes again. “Thanks Perry, this was actually really helpful.”
He nodded again and shuffled awkwardly on the bed. Stacy wondered if he had any experience giving teenage girls advice. He didn’t seem bad at it, but not entirely comfortable either, as though he wasn’t sure if she was going to spontaneously combust next to him.
She made the call and hugged him. He was incredibly stiff at first, but softened a little by the end of it. They sat in the hug for a minute and then just quietly on her bed.
“So, you’re still coming over for Mario Kart next Thursday right?”
Perry gave her a thumbs up and stood up to put on his jetpack. It was late. He needed to go home. Stacy watched him line up with the window and launch out of it in one fluid motion, falling then flying. She jumped off the bed and ran to the window after him.
“PERRY!”
He stopped just before the acceleration, hovering in midair just long enough for Stacy to get her breath.
“Thanks for being my friend!” she called, head half sticking out of the window, hair falling into her face. The platypus shook oddly on the jetpack, and she was sure he was laughing at her, but it was hard to tell in the dark and so far away. When he finally stilled, he gave her a single thumbs up, and flew away.
Once he was out of sight she closed the window and collapsed into the chair by the computer. The page with the code was still open, and she looked at it thoughtfully. She’d been considering learning the C++ coding language for a while, and she figured it was as good a time as any to start.
After all, she was Stacy Hirano, and she could do anything she put her mind to.