"Look what I bought!"
All heads turned to see Todd "Toad" Tolensky carrying in a huge Sharper Image bag. He set it down and pulled out a thin rectangular box.
ULTRA SCALE 5000, the box proclaimed in bold electronic-font lettering.
"What's up with that?" Lance asked. "We got a bathroom scale!"
"Not like this one! This talks! It tells you your weight to the nearest half-ounce!" Toad enthused. "And it saves up to six people's weights at once, so you can see if you've lost weight."
"I don't need to lose any weight," Wanda said.
"It's for Fred."
"Hey!" Fred, a.k.a. Blob, protested. "I'm not fat!"
"No?" Toad said. "You could fit a whole soccer team in your shadow! You need this scale, Freddy!"
"No I don't!" Fred insisted. "I'm not that fat!"
"Yeah you are," Pietro said, and then ducked while Fred threw a plastic flowerpot at him. Things would have gotten very violent had Toad not intervened.
"Chill out, yo," he said. "Let's try the scale."
"Who's gonna go first?" asked Pietro.
"We'll go from the smallest to the biggest," Todd decided.
"Okay." Lance picked up Todd's baby brother Tad and put him on the scale.
"TWENTY-ONE POINT SEVEN POUNDS!" said the scale. "TO SAVE, PRESS THE RED BUTTON."
Lance pressed the button and the computer recorded Tad's weight. "Next!"
Toad stepped up onto the scale. "ONE HUNDRED SEVEN POINT ZERO FIVE POUNDS! TO SAVE, PRESS THE BLUE BUTTON."
Toad pressed the button and Wanda growled, "I'm not getting on that thing!"
"Aw, c'mon, sugar bumps!"
"And don't call me that!" Loose objects around the room were starting to vibrate.
"Id okaee, Ahdee Babah," Tad said. "Id no baht."
""OK, Tad, if you say so." Wanda stepped up, her eyes closed.
"ONE HUNDRED TWELVE POUNDS!" the scale announced. "TO SAVE, PRESS THE GREEN BUTTON."
"What did it say?" Wanda screamed. "I can't be that fat!"
"You're not fat," Pietro told her. "Just press the green button already, it's my turn."
"Not fat? You just heard it! One hundred twelve pounds!"
"That's not even close to fat!" Toad said. "Anyway, you were too skinny when you came out of the hospital. You look good now. See, I have pictures." He held them up. "Before, after. Skinny, sickly before—filled-out, sexy after."
"Oh, will you shut up?" Wanda stalked off to her room, Tad toddling along after her.
Pietro got on next. "ONE HUNDRED TEN POINT TWO POUNDS! TO SAVE, PRESS THE—"
"HEY!" Wanda stopped in her tracks and glared at her brother. "That's less than me!"
"What can I say? Fast metabolism. What color button did it say?"
"Orange," Lance said.
Pietro pressed it. "I think you're making too big a deal about this," he said to Wanda. "Chicks are too obsessed with weight. It doesn't matter if you're a hundred and twelve pounds or two hundred and twenty—we still love you."
Wanda gave him a look. "Nice try," she said. "Come on, Tad, let's go alphabetize your frogs."
Lance got on the scale next. "ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-FOUR POINT FIVE EIGHT POUNDS! TO SAVE, PRESS THE YELLOW BUTTON."
Flexing his muscles and singing "Macho Man" was rubbing it in, Pietro thought. "Okay, okay, you're buff! Go show Kitty your pecs or something!"
Fred was hoping they'd forgotten about him, but as soon as Lance left the room, Todd said, "Let's go, big guy."
"Huh?"
"Get it over with. It's not so bad. Hope you like brown, it's the only color left."
Fred sighed and stepped up onto the scale. There was an alarming creaking noise.
"THREE HUNDRED NINETY-ONE POUNDS!"
"WHAT?"
"THREE HUNDRED NINETY-ONE POUNDS!"
"I'M GONNA KILL YOU, YOU STUPID PIECE OF JUNK!" Fred picked up the scale and held it over his head. Just as he was about to hurl it into the far wall, Todd stopped him by grabbing his arm.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Freddy, calm down, yo! Don't take it out on the scale!"
"THAT SCALE IS LYING!" Fred bellowed. "I AM NOT NO THREE HUNDRED NINETY WHATEVER POUNDS!"
"It's just a number, Fred," Pietro said. "We don't love you any less, either." He attempted a group-hug, but couldn't get his arms all the way around the titanic teen.
"That thing's a piece of junk," Fred grumbled. "Take it back to the store."
"I can't," Toad said.
"You didn't steal it, did you? You promised you wouldn't do that any more."
"Oh, hi, Mystique," Todd said. "Uh . . . how's things?"
She crossed the room in three long strides and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. "I told you not to steal any more! I don't need to have to bail you out of prison on top of all my other problems!"
"Other problems?" Toad rasped out. God, that hurt when she did that! "Wanna share over a cup of tea?"
She shoved him away, rubbing her hand on her pants, and almost tripped over the scale. "What's this?"
"The thing I didn't steal," Toad said. "It's a scale."
"We have a scale."
"It's a really good one. Top of the line. Talks and everything."
"Lies, you mean," Fred interjected.
"Oh, quit complaining!"
"Easy for you to say! You're not three hundred whatever pounds!"
"Yeah, and I'm not the guy who can bench-press a Mack truck, either! Don't be so hard on yourself, Freddy. Just cause you're fat doesn't mean you're worthless."
"YOU CALLED ME FAT!" Fred started to lumber forward, but Mystique stepped in the way.
"Toad, go . . . go clean that plague pit you call a room. Fred, why don't you start on your homework. Dinner will be ready in about half an hour."
Toad slunk off, muttering, "My room ain't that bad, yo."
Fred looked down at the mechanical menace in the middle of the kitchen floor. "This is all your fault, you piece of junk. I'm gonna get you!"
"Fred!"
"I'm goin', I'm goin'!"
The scale's display glowed brightly for a second, then went out. It must have been the batteries. Just because it could talk, that didn't mean it could listen . . . could it?
Someone was creeping into Fred's room very softly, approaching his bed on tiptoe. The someone bent down, pulled the covers away from Fred's ear gently, and then shouted "WAKE UP, FREDDY BOY!"
"Whah?" Fred bolted upright and looked around for whoever had been stupid enough to wake him out of his favorite dream (it involved pizza—more detail than that would spoil the PG rating).
"Time for your daily exercise!"
"My what?" His eyes focused on Pietro, who was standing there in a blue track suit with the stupidest grin on his face.
"We're gonna get you in shape! First, we'll do eight hundred miles of jogging—"
WHAM! Fred's fist connected with the stupid grin, and sent Pietro flying. "Ow," he groaned. "Okay, seven hundred?"
"How about none?" Fred snapped.
"Wait, wait! You haven't heard the rest of the program! After the jogging, we'll lift some weights for about an hour or so, then finish up with Yoga for Really Really Dumb People and hit the juice bar. How's that?"
Two seconds later he found himself on the other side of a closed door.
"So that's a no, then?"
There was no way Fred was gonna let a stupid hunk of metal defeat him! He'd defeat it first! "Now, where did I put that hammer?"
Wanda came in just as he was about to smash the evil scale into oblivion. "What are you doing?"
"Getting even! Wanna help?"
"Don't break that thing! We might be able to sell it online!"
"I want it dead!"
"It's not alive!" Wanda couldn't understand Fred's thing with the scale. Sure, it was way, way wrong, but that didn't mean it was . . . evil, or something.
"I thought you'd be on my side! It hates you too!"
"What? No! It just needs adjusting!" She tried to look for a lever or a button or something on the underside, but there was nothing but the colored buttons up top. "How do you reset it?"
"How should I know? Where's the manual?" It wasn't still in the box, which meant Toad must have taken it to fill out the registration card. "Aw, man! Now we'll never fix it!"
"What needs fixing?" Todd had come up behind them while they were talking.
"This stupid thing!" Fred exclaimed. "It still says I'm three hundred ninety-something pounds! And I'm not!"
"Are you sure?"
Fred gave him a very dangerous look. The kind of look that he got just before he started smashing things. "Take it back!" he said, shoving the scale at Todd. "This thing lies like a cheap rug! Just ask Wanda! She's not what it said, either!"
"Actually—" Wanda began, but neither of them was listening.
"I can't take it back!"
"So you did steal it?"
"No way! I just lost the receipt, that's all. Can't return it without the receipt."
Fred stood up. "They'll take it back if I threaten to smash them over the head with it." He started to reach for the scale, but Todd pulled it away.
"No need to get violent, Freddy! I'll see what I can do with it." He went off towards his room, carrying the offending scale.
Wanda looked up at Fred. "You really hate that thing, don't you?"
"Well, yeah! Nobody calls me fat and gets away with it! I'll get that thing!"
"Have you tried weighing yourself on the other scale?" Wanda asked.
"Nah, I almost broke it last time—" He broke off and looked at her. "You're not sayin' this is my fault, are you?"
"No, I just think you might be . . ." She couldn't find the word. "I dunno. Let's go watch some TV.""Yeah!" Fred forgot, at least temporarily, about the scale, in the face of three hours of reality TV.