Free Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon by Richard Roberts

about that. I grabbed my backpack and ran to History class.

    Distracted by invading a badly managed bioweapons lab and then cooing over my own adorable psychic kitty weapon, I’d kinda forgotten to do my homework this weekend. I wasn’t in danger of zeros, but for once, I had to listen in History class.
    Following up on last week’s discovery of the New World, today Mr. Ret laid out the cruel, tragic, and hilarious story of the Aztec Empire. It must have been hard to keep a straight face as he told us that the other Central American nations took Cortez’s side against the Aztecs. Cortez and the Spanish Empire were pretty bad, but they didn’t feed human hearts on a daily basis to a centuries-old insane god king.
    Cortez brought a few hundred men. Against an entire empire, he wouldn’t stand a chance. He was a vicious, ruthless man on the run from the authorities in Cuba, and he relied upon a network of rebels to get him close enough for his rifles and precious, limited supplies of ammunition to take down Huichtilopochtli.
    At that point, I raised my hand. I didn’t interrupt often, which probably explained Mr. Ret’s amused tone. “Miss Akk?”
    “So what you’re saying is, the fall of the Aztec Empire was a continent-sized gang war between a supervillain and a criminal mastermind’s army of minions?” I tried really, really hard not to sound sarcastic.
    I must have succeeded. Mr. Ret fought an obviously losing battle against a grin as he answered, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, Miss Akk.”
    Everybody sniggered, and that got me through History class.

    Ray and Claire fell in on either side of me the moment I stepped out in the hallway.
    Still snickering, Ray waved his hands grandly and monologued, “Fools! Your arrows and blow darts cannot harm me! Only… nooooo! Not high velocity balls of lead!”
    “How can you be so happy?” Claire snapped back at him. “We met Mourning Dove and forgot to ask for her autograph!”
    Ray stared at her for five seconds, then slapped his forehead. He conceded that Claire’s topic was more important by leaning over and gushing, “When she grabbed Penny by the throat, I really thought we were going to die.”
    “We could be overheard, guys!” My scolding tone had absolutely no effect.
    Claire grinned right past me, a cat’s worth of sly voice and teasing grin. “Really? Because what I saw was you so mad someone touched Penny that you walked into cute ground zero and didn’t notice.”
    Was Claire trying to make me blush so hard I’d shut up? Because it was working.
    Even Ray changed the subject. “She would have taken me to the cleaners. She did take me to the cleaners. I hope Lucy got out okay.”
    Claire flapped a dismissive hand. “I emailed her later. They didn’t even see each other.”
    “We’d have died without us ever knowing she was there if she hadn’t liked us.” Ray sounded pleased and impressed rather than terrified. My minions were crazy.
    Totally crazy. Maybe it’s just because Claire didn’t remember a reanimated corpse’s fingers locked around her neck that she could argue about it so happily. “Don’t be so sure. She doesn’t break out the nuke often. She has to eat immediately afterwards. You saw her suck that clone dry.”
    At which point, we reached the English class. “Squee later. Academics now.”

    ‘Academics now’ was easier said than done. Mrs. Harpy was still on the subject of oral histories, and why Beowulf and the Iliad were as much genealogy lists as stories. The basic concept wasn’t hard to understand, but I tried to pay attention. I did.
    It just got really hard to pay attention when nobody else was. Now the rest of the room was giving me the same covert, suspicious stares I gave them on Thursday. Wild-haired boy and the girl who threw off sparks certainly did, while more sparks rolled around her glasses. Marcia practically looked like she’d take my head off.
    This wasn’t hard to