InsaneJournal

The Fabulous Adventures of Emily Smart
So I promised some original fiction, and here it is. It's completely different from QaF for many reasons:

1) There's no sex.
2) It's about a 14 year-old girl.
3) There are superpowers.

I figure that if you liked reading Beverly Clearly and Roald Dahl as a kid (or books that had smart, funny, and slightly awkward girls kicking ass), you might like this.

Also, I'll be locking these posts to "friends only" after this first chapter, but no worries. If you want to continue reading, just friend me and I'll friend you back.



Title: The Fabulous Adventures of Emily Smart
Chapter One: Babysitting Jeffrey
Author: dirtylttlescret
A/N: Copyright 2008 dirtylttlescret, all rights reserved

To say that Emily’s first babysitting job was a disaster would be like calling the Hindenburg explosion a minor glitch in the flight plan. But what happened to Emily Smart the afternoon of August the 12th was extraordinary to say in the least.

“It’s not a real radio,” she said over her shoulder as she opened another cabinet in her aunt’s kitchen. Jeffrey was circling the island in the middle of the kitchen, ignoring her soliloquy as he opened and shut the cabinet doors for the sixth time as he passed by. Emily continued to chatter away nonsensically as rooted around in the unfamiliar kitchen looking for a measuring cup. She was trying to explain to her cousin that she could hear music in her head all of the time, like a broken digital tuner that hopped from FM to AM and then back again all of the time. She liked listening to music that no one else could hear. She had Jamie Cullum to keep her company when her bike got a flat and she had to walk home, or the Beatles when she was laying in bed trying to fall asleep after a particularly heinous day. It was a little silly she knew, but sometimes she wondered if the inside of Beethoven’s head was like that too.

“You have a radio in your brain?” asked Jeffrey, suddenly very quiet. Emily stopped rummaging through the cupboards to glance over at her three-year-charge, noticing that his face had gone a strange shade of pink. Like the calm before the storm, the silence that preceded the scream was almost so deafening that for a moment, Emily wondered if she had actually lost her hearing. And then Jeffery opened up his mouth and wailed.

“What the…” Emily muttered as she ran to his side. She tried to reach out and touch the screaming preschooler, but that only seemed to make things worse. “What the heck is going on?”

After a ten minute tantrum of hysteria, Emily managed to extract that her cousin apparently had an irrational fear of both doctors and robots. Through gulps and sobs, Jeffrey explained that he thought some doctor had cut into her brain and implanted an AM/FM receiver inside her cerebral cortex. Or really what he said was: “The doctor gave you an operation and put a radio up your nose into your brain and now you’re not my cousin anymore and you’re a robot and I want my mommy!” he sputtered. Emily then had to spent the better part of another ten minutes trying to calm him down and assure him that no surgeon had ever gone anywhere near her brain with a scalpel or a tuner.

Finally, when Jeffrey’s face had turned back from the scary shade of purple it had been just moments before, she returned to the kitchen cupboard to continue her search for the elusive measuring cup.

“You know,” Emily muttered under her breath, “it might have been helpful if Aunt Maggie had thought to warn me that Jeffrey has severe anxiety issues before she dashed out to her Tupperware party.”

By the time she found the plastic measuring cup set shoved far back in the junk drawer, Jeffrey had found another way to amuse himself that didn’t involve running around the kitchen in circles.

“Jeffy, NO!” she shouted, swatting away his pudgy hand before he could pull the carton of eggs tumbling off the counter with seven left still inside it. “Look, you sit here,” she sighed, hoisting him with a great groan up onto the kitchen stool next to the island countertop. “I’m gonna start mixing the ingredients for the cookies, okay?”

“I want to watch Spiderman,” he moaned as he kicked his chubby legs against the island in the middle of the kitchen.

“Well you have to stay in here with me,” said Emily. “Your mom said no TV and besides, I can’t see you when you’re in the living roo-”

Then a moment of sheer brilliance hit her.

“Jeffrey, you want to play a special game?” Apparently she had hit on the right words, because his eyes widened into little black saucers and he stopped whining long enough to see what she might have to say next. Emily opened one of the low cabinets filled with plastic reusable containers. “See this? This is a magic portal. It will take you to a giant castle filled knights and dragons.”

“I don’t like dragons,” he said.

“Fine then, baby bunnies,” and under her breath again, “I wonder if this kid is scared of sponges too.” But to Emily’s delight, Jeffrey slid off the stool he was perched on and cautiously approached the cupboard.

“Nothing’s gonna get me?” he asked, a hint of worry laced in his voice.

“Nope, nothing,” Emily said, rolling his eyes when he wasn’t looking. It baffled her how anyone could possibly be afraid of lunchboxes or plastic colanders, but apparently, Jeffrey was shaping up to be a prime candidate to develop obsessive compulsive tendencies. Or turn into her mother. Releasing a sigh of relief, Emily smiled as Jeffrey crawled inside the open cabinet and started to play. Now she could make the cookies and not have to worry about keeping her cousin entertained.

The thing was, besides trying to bribe her cousin into keeping calm, Emily had another motive for whipping up a batch of soft and gooey baked treats. She was the oldest of four brothers and sisters, with a mother who was a well meaning basket case that insisted she only be allowed as many freedoms as her six-year-old sister Karen. That meant she couldn’t watch anything more scandalous than reruns of the Brady Bunch, swim in the deep end of the pool, or even talk online with her friends. All she wanted was to make enough money to buy a skateboard and a cool helmet so that she could have one normal teenage thing in her life. One thing she could keep hidden from her chronically paranoid mother and ride when she snuck it out of the house. And if she could just show her aunt how good of a babysitter she was by having her come home to a clean house, a happy kid, and a plate full of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, she might get a shot to baby-sit again.

Emily Smart was thirteen-years-old, with hair as dark as chocolate and thick bangs cut sharply across her forehead. While some girls could pull this off as chic, Emily was not one of them. She wore brassy wire frame glasses that enlarged her muddy eyes and collected oil in the plastic nose cushions, which she found really gross but didn’t know what to do about it. Lately, whenever she looked in the mirror, Emily wondered why she seemed to be the only girl her age who didn’t know how to not dress dorky, say dumb things around cute boys, and do her hair so that it was silky like the hair commercial ads instead of the greasy stringy mess it was now. The worst thing was that even if she did have the money to go out and exchange her hand knitted mauve sweaters and shapeless borrowed turtlenecks for something trendy and cute, she wouldn’t have the first clue of what to buy that would make her look like she hadn’t just rolled out of a thrift store.

Emily was short for Emilia, though nobody but her awful Aunt Beatrice with the hairy chin and old-lady perfume called her that. Emily hated her birth name, because old-fashion girlie names turned into blacktop nicknames like Emilia-Bo-Bilia, which was exactly what the creepy boy Harold at school called her until fifth grade. There was no way any cute or cool guy would talk to her if they heard her being called a baby nickname like that. Not that Emily wanted to be cool, but she didn’t want to be un-cool either.

Emily cracked an egg into the bowl and tossed the shell into the trash can under the sink. A catchy tune from the ‘70’s started to play in her head, a young Freda Payne belting out “all that’s left is a band of gold” in a tale of a wedding day gone wrong. Getting into the groove, she began to hum to herself, gliding and sliding around the kitchen, using moves that would make the girls of Motown days proud. Emily was used to random songs popping up in her head all of the time. She called it her own secret iPod for when she couldn’t listen to the fifty cent handheld radio she had bought from a neighbor’s yard sale and smuggled into the garage. Her mother didn’t like her listening to anything but the little kid sing along songs Karen listened to. Yet another reason why she’d never fit in around normal people her age.

But as soon as she had bought that radio, it was like a magic switch flipped on in her head. One day, while she was riding her bike home from school (another un-cool thing to do, although it was fun to race against the boys to the bridge), she found herself listening to “Hey Jude” loud and clear in her head from start to finish, and even better, without the commercial interruptions that turned the five o‘clock set list into an audio garbage dump. Suddenly, Emily found herself listening to Bach and Stevie Wonder and The Killers, one right after the other. Her own personal digital music library, without the cost of downloads.

But the best kind of music that played in her head, better than the theme to Rocky when she finished the mile run for P.E. in seven and a half minutes, better Chaka Khan singing “I’m Every Woman” as she got a higher grade on her pre-Algebra test than any of the boys, were the music scores. Not scores from other movies like the theme to Indiana Jones or Jaws (not that her mother had allowed her to see either one of those movies, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her). No, Emily had the strange feeling that these scores were written just for her to be a soundtrack her life and nobody else‘. It made her feel like she was a movie star, even when she was doing something as ordinary as sitting in the back seat of the car watching the rain pour down outside as her mother drove to the grocery store.

Until now, no one else had known about her brain’s phonographic capabilities, and what a disaster that had been. She’d think twice before telling anyone else about that again. Emily just hoped that Jeffrey had already forgotten what she had told him during the fit of insanity he spent hurling his fists against the floor.

“Jeffy, stop that!” Emily said, yanked back into the moment by grabbing the box baking soda from his hands just before Jeffrey hurled it onto the floor. He had clearly grown bored of playing in the cupboard and climbed out to see what else there was to do. She wiped her brow in frustration and a streak of flour smeared across her forehead. Babysitting was hard work. Her Aunt Maggie had been gone a long time now. It must be nearly time for her to get back now, she thought.

Emily looked at the clock. 4:26pm.

“Drat!” she moaned. Her aunt wasn’t due back until six which meant she had another ninety-four minutes left to keep Jeffrey occupied and out of trouble. Briefly she considered locking him in the cabinet out of desperation.

“Jeffy, why don’t you make music with these spoons?” Emily said handing him two metal serving spoons once he was settled on the stool again. Taking advantage in the lull of previously frantic activity, she took two silver sticks of butter out of the refrigerator and put them on the counter. They were as hard as a rock. “Great,” she sighed. She placed them on a plate and shoved them into the microwave. “Thirty seconds ought to do it,” thinking of the paper covered butter her own mother bought to bake cakes and cookies at home.

Barely ten seconds had passed when Emily realized something was horribly wrong. As she turned to scoop the sugar into a fresh bowl, a loud pop sounded from behind her.

“Fire!” screamed Jeffrey, his pudgy arms flailing wildly about as he stared at the microwave.

Later, Emily would learn from her science teacher that foil plus microwave oven equals flaming inferno, but unfortunately her mother had neglected to teach her that lesson before today. She whirled around to see the butter burning eagerly in the microwave.

Surprisingly, Emily’s first thought was, “Hmm. There goes my skateboard.”

Her second was, “Oh my gosh, FIRE!”

And her third was something else entirely. Reacting faster than she could think, Emily ran over to the microwave, flung the door open, and blew on the fire so hard that the butter turned into a block of ice.

“Whoa,” said Emily, her breath forming tiny ice crystals in the air. She raised her palm up to her mouth to feel subzero temperatures against the skin of her hand. Her eyes widened. “What was that?”

“Auntie Enamie,” said her cousin. “Why do you have snow in your mouth?”

Emily turned to look at Jeffrey’s curious face and was overwhelmed by a hysterical laughing fit that brought tears to her eyes. What had just happened was so surreal that it couldn’t have been stranger if she had fallen directly into the pages of a comic book, and yet here her cousin chatting with her calmly, as though what had happened was no more extraordinary than fanny packs or plastic snow globes. How on earth could one person be so afraid of cupboards and doctors and not even bat an eye at supernatural ice breath? Blame it on T.V., she thought, shaking her head.

Snapping back into the moment, Emily surveyed the giant mess in front of her. Frozen pools of butter and craggy icicles stuck to the microwave. A million kids would die to have blizzard breath, and all Emily could think of was what if her aunt came home and saw her microwave like this. Figuring out what had happened would have to wait until later. If she didn’t clean this up she would never get to baby-sit again. If she couldn’t baby-sit, that meant no skateboard and she’d have to ride her clunky old beater bike and hand-me-down helmet to high school next year, the ultimate shame. And who really cared if you had super powers if your bicycle helmet had Strawberry Shortcake on it anyway?

“What do I do?” Emily said cringing at thought of just how catastrophic the trouble she was in now. Who else in this world but her could have managed to almost burn down a house her first day of babysitting, then three seconds later completely ruin a kitchen appliance by flash freezing it?

“Enamie?” asked Jeffrey, still strangely calm despite the magnitude of the situation. “Are the firemen going to come now?”

“No, the fire’s out now,” she said quietly, though she was glad that Jeffrey was not pressing her about the ice-breath part of the whole fiasco. “Here, go in your play room and color with your crayons.”

She needed to do some damage control and fast, and she couldn’t figure out the icicle mess with her cousin in the room. Emily helped Jeffrey down from his chair and looked around at the mess. “What am I going to do?”

As if waiting for its cue, the radio tuner in her head clicked on and started playing the theme from Superman.

“Alright already, I get it,” she said, wishing there was an “off” button in her head as she picked up a sponge. Emily tried to scrape what was left of the butter into the trash can, but it wouldn’t budge, so she took a knife and began slowly chipping away at the huge mass of ice. Somehow she managed to get in one good blow and the whole thing came up in one piece. Emily tossed it into the garbage along with the knife which looked like it had seen better days, and took the trash to the outside bins so not to arouse any suspicion. Then she came back and cleaned up the rest of the mess with some dish towels she found under the sink.

Emily stepped back and took a good look at the kitchen. Not a trace of the disaster from before. But there was one little loose end to tie up.

“Jeffy?” she said in her sweetest voice.

“Yes Aunt Enamie?”

Emily sighed. “Jeffy, we’ve gone over this before. I’m your cousin, not your aunt, remember? Anyway, do you want to play a game?”

Jeffrey’s chocolate eyes shot wide open with delight. “What kind of game?”

“It’s a secret game. And whoever keeps their secret the longest wins,” said Emily, surprised by her own ingenuity.

“I want a cookie,” he said.

“I don’t have any cookies,” said Emily.

“Well I want one.”

Emily sighed again. She had thought that babysitting was going to be the easiest and funnest job in the world. You’d get paid to color and bake cookies. She never thought that she’d be bribing a three-year-old to keep quiet about how she had almost set the house on fire AND put it out with freaky superpowers.

“There aren’t any.”

“I wanna cookie!” Jeffrey cried, the sounds of his screams piercing her ears like a fire truck siren at the Fourth of July parade. His slammed his fat hands into the ground, while his face flushed an unnatural shade of beet. Gosh, was he always this bratty, or only with his babysitters?

“Okay! Okay. Quiet down already,” said Emily, trying to shush her little cousin, who had somehow managed to turn into a supernova of tantrum-ic energy. “If I make you a cookie, will you promise not to tell your mommy about what happened in the kitchen today?”

The screaming ceased and a wicked smile curled up the sides of her cousin’s cheeks. “What happen in the kitchen today?”

What a rat! thought Emily. Three years old and already he was making deals like a used car salesman.

“But if you tell anybody, your tongue will fall off and the worms will eat it,” said Emily. She felt a little guilty for lying to a kid who couldn’t even tie his own shoes yet, but after the two-faced meltdown she had just witnessed, she didn’t think that God would hold it against her.

Emily turned around and headed back to the kitchen. If she was Superman, then that microwave was her kryptonite.

Come on Em, you can do this! she coaxed herself, standing at the door to the fridge, the shiny sticks of butter taunting her from within the little plastic compartment in the door. Why did people have to buy the flashy butter anyway when good old paper butter worked just as well? she wondered.

Then the radio in her head flicked over to a song Emily knew all too well and she groaned in disgust. “You think I’d crumble, you think I’d lay down and die, oh no not I…”

“Oh no, please no Gloria Gaynor. Not now,” she moaned aloud.

“Aunt Enamie, who are you talking to?” asked Jeffrey from the other room.

“No one, just keep coloring!” Emily shouted back. She put her hands over her ears and shook her head.

“…I will survive!” the song continued. “As long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive…”

Fine. Just fine, thought Emily. My brain is trying to tell me to make cookies with disco. With determination, she grabbed two new sticks of butter, not because she knew she would prevail, but because she had to make the singing stop.

Two sticks of butter, softened, and she only had 73 minutes left to get the cookies mixed, scooped, baked and out of the oven before her aunt came home. She could do something silly like put the butter in the toaster, or…

If she could make ice come out of her mouth, who was to say that she couldn’t do other things too? She had seen all of those superhero movies at her friend Sarah’s house. Batman had a whole bag of tricks up his sleeve, and so did Superman. What if she did too and just didn’t know it?

Emily stared at the butter with intense concentration. She was sure that if she could just focus her mental capacities for long enough, she could make lasers shoot out of her eyes. But staring at the shiny foil was making her go cross-eyed and get a headache.

Drat again! thought Emily.

Then she had a brilliant, non-superhero idea.

“Duh, I’ll just unwrap the butter and put them in a bowl.” Sometimes even Emily was impressed at the boundless nature of her own genius. With great trepidation, she stuck the unwrapped sticks of butter into the microwave and pressed thirty seconds. When the microwave rang its reassuring “ding” that the butter was done and no flames had appeared, she let out a sigh of relief.

Which accidentally froze the microwave door shut.

“Oh crud.”

However, it wasn’t long before the door was pried open again, the butter was creamed with the sugar and eggs, the oven was preheating and Emily was back in her groove again. Before Jeffrey could waddle his was back into the kitchen to tell her that he had drawn a bunny on the wall of his playroom with his favorite black crayon, she had the cookies out of the oven and cooling on the counter. She popped one into her mouth and sighed happily as the melty chocolate filled her mouth like a dream.

And by the time she had scrubbed the black bunny off the walls with some all-purpose house cleaner and propped Jeffrey up in front of his favorite Kermit the Frog video, Emily thought that baby-sitting might not be so bad after all, meltdowns included.

“Here you go, fifteen dollars,” said her Aunt Sara when she got home. She counted three crisp five dollar bills into Emily’s eager hand. “Any time that I get to come home to freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and not have to clean up the mess afterward is worth the extra money! You can baby-sit for me whenever you want.”

Emily walked home, collapsed on her bed and slept until morning.

Chapter Two: Anna Banana