A huge thank-you to my brilliant beta, HaydenXCharm. Any remaining errors are my own!
The chapters get a bit smaller from now on. I decided that I'd prefer to keep to one POV per chapter, so now I'm changing back and forth more often most chapters are half the size of the earlier ones.
Thursday
Thursday began as all Thursdays did: listening to the drug addict from the second floor vomiting into the upstairs toilet while the kid that was too bratty for foster care had an argument with the cartoons on the TV. Traffic started up in the city around them, and somewhere outside, somebody was shouting at somebody else.
They'd been discharged from the prison at age fourteen, and they had found their way to a group youth support home. They'd debated long and hard about going off the grid, but in the end, the power of identity papers kept them within the system. Warden called once in a fortnight to keep tabs on their whereabouts, which was nice. It never hurt to know that someone cared.
Anyway, Thursdays. Thursdays, Minion's alarm clock went off at 5:30. They got into the kitchen early and got to work on their food for the day. Minion got himself some fish flakes. Megamind made two pieces of toast and four sandwiches. He grabbed a banana, if there were any in the fruit bowl.
The current adult – they had names, but they tended to rotate in and out, depending on the status of the other homes – would greet everyone and make sure they all headed off where they needed to. Megamind would get on a yellow school bus that was just like the prison bus, really, and brace himself for the day.
He didn't need to be there; he couldn't learn anything from a curriculum designed for soft-headed monkeys trying to hump each other, but no university would accept an orphan with no money. He needed the academic transcript. What was an evil mad scientist or inventor without a basement lab in a university? He needed to graduate high school. He wanted to see Roxanne Ritchi, even if she hated him. He enjoyed the look on Metro Dude's face every time he topped the class. To tell the truth, his ego needed this escape of finally being able to beat Metro Dude at something. Take that, rich little daddy's boy! Hah!
Homeroom was boring at best, and hell at worst. If the mindless masses were too bored, or itching for a fight, Megamind's head was a big blue target. There's no smaller minority on planet Earth, than one. Luckily, it was quiet. Roxanne, however, was not herself. She kept shifting in her chair, like she was uncomfortable. Was this what their sexual education class had revealed to him in middle school? Had she begun menstruating?
It was disgusting, but from an academic perspective, fascinating. An internal and automatic factory. Megamind had toyed with the idea of self-building robots, a huge swarm of interconnected artificial intelligences. He could appreciate when nature had some insights to share on the subject.
Perhaps it wasn't a biological or hormonal change in her body. Or at least, not her period. Roxanne was none-too-subtly watching one of the slowest and least interesting specimens of humanity, a quiet library type who didn't just read comic books, he lived in them. He'd rejected the outside world and didn't care for anyone in it. Megamind had evaluated him as an ally against bullying, but bullies just didn't care about this kid.
In his defence, he was white, middle-class, and more or less invisible. Basically, he was the polar opposite of Megamind, in many ways. Not his ideological opposite, like Metro Dude, but still, he was different.
What did Roxanne see in him? Did he have some kind of secret?
Minion had his own opinions, in-between classes. "I think she's sweet on him," he said.
"As if." Megamind was hearing none of it. They continued stalking her as she stalked Bernard along the corridor to the science labs.
"But Sir, I thought you didn't like it when she spent time with Metro Dude. If she's with this guy, then..."
Minion was heckling him, a pastime that Megamind endorsed with vigour on most days. However, this was not most days, and Roxanne was not most topics. "Minion. One more word on the subject, and I will kill you."
"Understood, Sir." Minion was far too bright and chirpy for a fish that was nearly fried. Megamind briefly took his eyes off Roxanne and glared at Minion, who was still grinning as sunnily as he could with all those sharp teeth.
"You skate on thin ice, my friend."
"Well, I was just trying to break some of it," Minion shot back. "You haven't really been here, today."
"I'm thinking," Megamind lied as he watched Roxanne sit down one bench behind and to the left of the boy. Predictable. He nodded to Minion, and they slid into the desk immediately behind Roxanne.
There had been a time, long ago, when their teacher had unlocked the cupboards at the back of the room, and they had performed basic experiments with chemicals. That had been, of course, before the incident with Metro Dude's beaker.
What? Why, you ask? Bad guy, duh. Megamind had class. He had style. They had never been able to find any evidence that he'd been involved, but of course, they had reasonable suspicions, which was why nobody in his entire grade was allowed to mix chemicals anymore.
He steepled his fingers and watched the back of Metro Dude's head like a hawk. Roxanne wasn't doing anything remotely interesting, just taking notes and staring at that dweeby guy with all that hair. Science class was Megamind's home turf, and he couldn't afford to slack off, even if the peroxide was locked up.
Lunch was lunch, as usual. The cafeteria wasn't bad, but it cost money, and safety in numbers hadn't ever really worked for him. They did what they usually did. They ate their lunches quickly in a deserted classroom, randomised for increased security, then headed straight for the library. There weren't any computer terminals in the group house, and one of those glorious beauties had an ethernet connection. Sometimes, Roxanne or one of the other newspaper study-group types kicked them off, but four days out of five, Minion and Megamind would get a good half hour of blissful connectivity.
There were others out there in that wide world, people who didn't like puppies and rainbows, people who liked music that wasn't pop, and even people who didn't like Metro Dude.
Sadly, half an hour wasn't enough time to download a whole mp3, but Megamind had a floppy disk full of midi files, recreated from bands that he was sure he'd like if he heard them live. Sadly they were also the most commonly shoplifted, which meant that they were kept under close surveillance.
Megamind thought about their secret lair, an abandoned factory in the industrial district. He thought about their stolen boom box and their single copy of For Those About to Rock, We Salute You.
Perhaps, a disguise was in order, or maybe abject hopelessness. "Minion, why is it that the more things come within our reach, the worse I feel?"
Minion thought about it. "Perhaps it's the inherent inequality in the system, Sir? Or the unfulfilling nature of a material society."
"Why did I even ask?"
"Er, we could break something and then fix it again, sir? Get out of Gym free pass?"
Megamind sighed. "No, Minion. Exams are coming up. That would be an act of kindness to the lazy lolling masses. It might even earn some an extension on their homework. No. I shall just have to suffer through it… the pain and humiliation of this life."
"Sir, you appear to be angsting again," Minion said, as if he were ready to rattle off a list of common human 'teenage' symptoms.
Megamind sighed again. "You're right. Let's go outside and, I don't know, kick some puppies."
They didn't find any puppies, so they settled for writing dirty words on the back of the sports equipment shed with sharpies. It was anonymous, it was a victimless crime, and it usually led to Metro Dude offering selflessly to scrub it all off again. It was funny to watch him doing it, so what could it hurt?
The football team was practicing on the other side. It almost stirred a poet's soul inside him, their uniforms, their imprisonment within a system, his old orange uniform, the way that one system fed into another and back in, like a snake eating its own tail. None of the boys on the football team ever ended up in juvenile detention. None of the boys in juvie ever got picked for a sports team. Where did it end and begin? At what point in your life were you written off?
Megamind could pinpoint his own moment. He knew who to blame, and he knew just how sweet revenge tasted. He knew his place in the world, the limits and the boundaries of it. He felt some pity, even for the jocks. They were so oblivious to the invisible walls that trapped them, their small minds, their smaller life stories, their anguish when they tried and failed, to change their fates.
"Sir, that's genius!"
Megamind looked at the hilarious joke he'd just written. Too... many syllables. He sighed, and waved a hand. "Wipe it off. We can't leave anything too incriminating here. Write it down. I'll save it. My day will come."
Behind the equipment shed, nobody looked at you funny if you practiced your evil laugh.
In the end, they skipped the last two classes for the day. Megamind knew exactly how many truancy marks he could afford. He knew which teachers would mark him present, as thanks for his continued absence from their classrooms. It was a truce, of sorts. When he headed back to his locker with Minion, it was hardly his fault when he happened to spy Roxanne Ritchi saying her goodbyes to Metro Man.
"Like hell I do!"
She stormed off. Oh, wow. That was interesting. Fascinating. He'd have to get to the bottom of this situation. Trouble in paradise? Oh, say it isn't so! His toes nearly curled in anticipation.
"Let's follow her," Megamind said.
"Right you are, Sir," Minion replied, with only a little bit of a long-suffering sigh.
Which was how they ended up, somehow, in the library helping Roxanne Ritchi study Calculus. And by study Calculus, he meant, 'pretend not to be staring at that boy'. There was something hard, tight, and red hot in Megamind's chest. It made him feel sick. Or maybe that was just the sandwiches. Bread, bread, and bread wasn't the healthiest of diets.
They ended the day with a walk home along the sidewalk. They talked about shoplifting and which models of which cars were the easiest to break into. They argued about whether or not an entire bag of frozen peas, microwaved, counted as a balanced breakfast. They did not talk at all, about their new arrangement, or the fact that for the next week, every night, they were going to be tutoring Roxanne Ritchi in the library.