Pedestrians were already running in the opposite direction, away from Central Park, on the sidewalks and between the traffic that had ground to a halt on Madison Avenue. The cabbie pounded the steering wheel: “There’s no respect for the working man!” He cursed UFOs as well as all Megaheroes.

Stella impatiently watched as the meter continue to tick up. Suddenly, she paid the driver and hopped out, determined to covered the remaining blocks to Central Park on foot. It was tough going, considering the tide of humanity that was practically in full flight out of the city. “But I had a hunch that was where I was going find Megaton Man,” she told us.

Stella had been recounting her day’s adventures for us in a booth at Bimbo’s Roadhouse Pizza Shack. Being pregnant, and not having eaten anything since she’d left Ann Arbor that morning, Stella polished off half of our extra-large pizza by herself. So, we ordered a second one. As we waited for it, Stella continued her story:

“I made my way through the mob running the other way, past the softball diamonds, past the onlookers who were stupid enough to risk their necks to gawk—to where I knew the landing had happened.” Sure enough, it was her own auditing Martian she had hooked up with last fall, or at least his spaceship. Around the saucer was a perimeter of Megaheroes, ostensibly there to keep the Civilian crowds at a safe distance—although those crowds were small. The costumed characters were more focused on—and apprehensive of—the tiny blue saucer with its emerald dome sitting alone on the green.

Pammy and I looked incredulously at one another—had this all transpired while we were hunkered down like hermits on Ann Street? Had it been on the evening news? We’d have never known—we desperately needed a television set in that house.

Stella described the scene with Megaton Man, the Russian Megaton Man, Captain Megaton Man, and the Original Golden Age Megaton Man—Trent’s Uncle Farley—all assembled on the expansive lawn waiting for the saucer to open. Even the President of the United States was there—Stella said he was even more rotund in person—with a new “Presidential Megahero,” Megaton Man’s arch-nemesis: Bad Guy. Only now he was calling himself Good Guy, as befit his new official role.

Don’t ask me to explain any of this; at the time I had no picture in my head of what most of these guys looked like. Stella told us the crowd comprised dozens of other Megaheroes, all of whom she recognized and could identify, but whose names meant nothing to me. Stella thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of her ex-husband, Liquid Man, somewhere in the throng; if it was Rex Rigid, he looked like he’d aged considerably since the demise of his cherished Megahero team. But she lost sight of him and never saw him again.

“The weirdest thing was how warm it had become,” said Stella. “When I had gotten out of the cab, it was the dead of winter—but by the time I got to the park, it felt more like early spring. I had to take my jacket off as I got closer to the center, which was the saucer.”

Just then, the saucer opened. Out popped her impish Martian lover—pointy ears, Jheri curls, and all—with a brandy snifter of daiquiris, followed by a squid girl, a Labrador retriever in an astronaut’s suit, a talking tortoise, and assorted inebriated extraterrestrials.

“Partyers from Mars!” I exclaimed.

“That’s what they called themselves,” said Stella. “How did you know?”

The Partyers from Mars had invited all of humanity to join in a global love-in, and had chosen this time and place—Central Park—as the site for their landing. Unfortunately, their speech was slurred, their behavior was entirely inappropriate, and the extraterrestrial tortoise tossed his cookies. Instead of inspiring confidence they inadvertently set off a worldwide panic—or at least pandemonium among the Megaheroes gathered in Central Park.

First, Uncle Farley—the Original Golden Age Megaton Man—keeled over with a heart attack or stroke or something, due to the strain. Then Megaton Man—the regular Megaton Man—spotted Stella. “As soon as Megaton Man saw me,” said Stella, “he could clearly see that I was pregnant. I could tell by the look in his goggles he was shocked; I realized immediately I had made a mistake in coming back to New York.”

“What did he say?” I said with a full mouth. “What did you say?”

“There wasn’t much we could say,” said Stella, refusing to cry. “My ex-husband, my Martian lover, the Man of Molecules, everyone I knew or worked with or ever met in my Megahero, all there in one place –It was all so humiliating. Considering my taste in men, the father of my child was bound to be a nincompoop.”

Pammy never said a word during all this, but I could sense she was taking meticulous mental notes.

It was at just that moment, according to Stella, that Yarn Man reappeared on the Time Turntable—along with Kozmik Kat, a little critter Liquid Man had sent after Yarn Man to bring him back. Both had been gone for months—gone for so long that the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters, which had been their starting point, had been destroyed in the meantime.

“Someone started throwing punches,” said Stella. She wasn’t sure who—there had been enough old grudges between Megaheroes in that crowd that just about anything could have set them off—and besides, by this time, Stella had grabbed her jacket and was leaving.

“I heard somebody shout, ‘Hey look! There’s the Cosmic Cue-Ball,’” said Stella. “But I was nearly to Fifth Avenue, hailing a cab.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “The Cosmic Cue-Ball? What in the heck is that?”

Stella explained that it was an incredibly powerful object no bigger than an ordinary billiard ball that radiated curious, colorful little symbols and geometric shapes. Her ex-husband, Professor Rex Rigid, had somehow captured it and kept it locked up in the old MQHQ, in some kind of magnetic field. “I used to think it was kind of cute,” said Stella. “I could watch the colorful, tiny geometric shapes that emanated from it for hours.” Sounded like the MQHQ offered no end of amusements. How it got loose, she had no idea—it was after her time, but apparently a number of Megavillains—and Megaheroes—coveted this all-powerful orb; they had come to Central Park not for the saucer landing at all but to get their hands on the Cosmic Cue-Ball.

“So, a fight broke out—the Cosmic Cue-Ball showed up—then what?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Stella. “I was in the backseat of a taxi crying my eyes out—all the way back to LaGuardia.”

Her eyes, still red, showed she had done a lot more crying on the flight back to Detroit. But she was darned near cried out by the time we—mostly she—polished off that second pizza.

The remainder of spring break week was uneventful; Pammy and Stella both helped me make quick work of Napoleon at Waterloo; we were done with the puzzle by late Monday night, after a marathon session. The only drawback was that after the image was filled in, and Stella stepped back, she started crying again. All of that French cavalry arrayed on a battlefield reminded her of the Megahero mêlée she had turned her back on in New York.

We swept if off the dining room table and back into its box, and said no more about it.

That night, my sister Avril drove out to pick me up and take me back home to Detroit for a few days. Cray, my daddy, had wisely sent Avie to Ann Arbor in our family’s old AMC Pacer as reconnaissance so she could report back independently to Mama that I wasn’t being held hostage in a crack house and forced to perform in pornographic Super-8 movies. Although if I had been, my kidnappers would have kidnapped my sister as well, since she was a lot curvier than me, and in all the right places. Then my daddy would have had to bust us both out with guns blazing like some kind of seventies ultra-violent blaxploitation movie, which would have been an even bigger mess. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what my daddy is thinking.

Luckily, I wasn’t being held hostage at all, and Stella and Pammy fell in love with my sister, who was politically earnest and socially committed, and holier-than-thou about Art with a capital A enough to make anybody sick. They asked if she planned to come to Arbor State after high school, but Avie said she hadn’t made up her mind; Pammy said if she did, she’d fit right in in Ann Arbor. Good Lord, I thought, if any of the three of them said “Right on, Sister!” with a straight face, I was going to puke.

The next morning Avie drove me back to Detroit to spend the rest of my spring break back home. Mama baked me a cake since we had skipped getting together on my birthday; now I could tell her how the Battle of Waterloo had turned out. I made Avril take me back the following Sunday after church, although Daddy had been looking forward to it. I knew he just wanted to get a look at Pammy’s legs again, so I made up a story that she was attending some academic conference in Hawaii. That made him lose interest; he went back to reading his Sunday Detroit Day and let Avril take me in his pickup, which had a better stereo than the Pacer—but only when we promised not to play it too loud on the freeway.

So that was my boring spring break.

Classes started back the following Monday; I was on central campus all day, and didn’t get back to the Ann Street house until late in the afternoon. When I got there, a strange, unnaturally green Volkswagen Beetle was sitting in the driveway. In Pammy’s study nook in the living room, Pammy and Stella were talking with a tall, blond-haired man in jeans, tennis shoes, and a silver-silk baseball jacket that said Kitchen Sinkers Softball on the back. He wore glasses with an athletic strap behind his ears; frankly, he could have been Stella’s brother—maybe because they were both blond and wore glasses, or maybe because it’s just that most white people look about the same to me.

“Clarissa, I’d like you to meet an old friend from back east—Trent Phloog,” said Pammy. “Stella and I were just discussing the possibility of renting out the fourth room upstairs.”

The stranger turned to me and smiled. “Hi, Clarissa,” he said, giving me one of those fleeting expressions—that crossed his eyes in a split-second—that people sometimes get on their faces that said, “Oh! Your friend is a black girl!” Not quite racist or anything, because frankly black people sometimes give off this vibe when they’re used to being around a lot of white people and unexpectedly run into another black person; it’s just that momentary look of apprehension as they process information different from what they had taken for granted.

“Trent Phloog?” I said. “Where have I heard that name before?”

“We were just talking about you last week, Trent,” explained Pammy, “about the old days, back at the newspaper.” Pammy gave me a raise-of-the-eyebrow look and a quick tilt of the head. “Trent was the reporter at The Manhattan Project I told you about, Clarissa; we used to work together, side by side, in the same newsroom.”

“Yeah, those were the good old days,” said our visitor, with absolutely no conviction.

Then it dawned on me.

“Oh my God!” I said. “You mean this skinny white guy is—Megaton Man?!”

I must have said this abruptly—and loudly—with my eyes bugging out and everything, because everybody flinched.

“Um, that was just a rumor,” said Trent, clearing his throat. “Megaton Man and I are just…good friends. Besides, I happen to know…he’s retired now.”

“Oh,” I said, looking in turn at both Pammy and Stella. “Did you know Stella, too, when the two of you were back in New York?”

Trent looked uncertainly at Stella and her pregnant tummy.

“Woo!” he said. “Um, not really…I mean, not really well, to tell you the truth. Actually, I’m more from Megatropolis.”

“But aren’t New York and Megatropolis the same thing?” I asked.

“More or less, I suppose,” said Trent. “There are those that would certainly agree with you.” He didn’t care to elaborate.

The poor guy—he actually started to sweat, and found it impossible to look me in the eye. He pretended to be distracted by some of the old newspaper clippings that sat next to Pammy’s typewriter on her desk. Picking up one of these—I believe it may have even been one of his own—he grimaced at the headline: “Mutually Assured Destruction and the Hyper-Masculinity of Megaheroes!” He promptly dropped it, as if it were a snake.

This was America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero?

“We were thinking of letting Trent crash here until he can find his own place, get back on his feet…nothing more,” said Stella firmly, to no one specifically. “If that’s agreeable to you, Clarissa,” she added.

“Sure,” I said. “Any friend of Megaton Man’s is a friend of mine.” I beamed at Trent, who smiled only wanly.

This was getting too good.

Naturally, I was dying to find out exactly what had transpired from the moment Stella left New York—just as the Cosmic Cue-Ball, the Partyers from Mars, Megaton Man, Bad Guy, Yarn Man, and all that crazy jazz were about to collide in Central Park—to this moment. Here I was, a world away—standing in a house on Ann Street with my two female housemates and an uptight, skinny white guy—four Civilians, and two of them used to be Megaheroes. Was this dude really the alter-ego of Megaton Man? If so, what had happened to all his famous muscles? Was he on a vegetarian diet now, and had he stopped working out? And what did Trent mean by retired? Did he have to say some magic word or something to change back and forth between Civilian and Megahero personas– and had he forgotten it? Come to think of it, was Stella Starlight really the See-Thru Girl? I had never seen her turn herself naked with but a thought—although I did see her step out of the shower and run to the hall closet for a towel once. By accident.

After the introductions in Pammy’s study nook, I went upstairs to my room and threw my bookbag on the bed and changed out of my jeans and sweatshirt, into my usual Arbor State athletic shorts and tight tank top—as was my habit. Momentarily, I heard Trent clambering up the stairs—he had a heavier stomp than either Stella or Pammy. How rude, I thought, that neither of them had bothered to show him up to his new lodgings.

Trent had a duffle bag and a rolled-up sleeping bag he’d retrieved from his VW; he looked into the open door of my room and saw me. “It’s the door over there,” I said, pointing to the spare bedroom across the hall. He thanked me. I watched him open the door and disappear into the lonely, vacant room. I heard the lonely, hollow sound his stuff made as he dropped it on the floor. Then he opened the curtains to let some light in. I felt kind of sorry for him—coming all this way to be with the mother of his child, only to sleep on a hardwood floor instead of Stella’s comfy Queen-sized bed next door. But it was none of my business.

He came out again and noticed me standing against the door jamb of my room, arms crossed, watching him. You can tell when a guy is checking you out, even if it’s only for a split-second; he knew he was busted. He’d failed to maintain eye contact—only for that split-second. He gulped. It crossed my mind that I should maybe start wearing oversized football jerseys and baggie sweatpants around the house as a regular thing.

He thanked me again turned to go down the stairs. He had a nice ass.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let me give you the tour.” I put on my slippers and one of my daddy’s old flannel shirts and showed Trent the house, from the attic to the basement. I even took him outside; it was still nippy out, but not too cold—it had warmed up from the deep freeze of February considerably. I showed him our back yard, and our useless pile of firewood, and the inside of the garage.

“See?” I said. “We have our very own Q-Wagon.”

“I…see that.”

“You must know those Megatropolis Quartet guys fairly well, right?” I asked. “Living in Megatropolis and all, and being a reporter.”

“Uh…I’ve heard of them,” Trent replied. “Sure.”

“Have you ever lived with a Megahero before?”

“No,” replied Trent. “I mean—Why do you ask?”

“Stella,” I said. “She used to be a Megahero, you know.”

“Oh, yeah, right. I knew that. —No, I suppose I haven’t.”

“How do you think her baby will turn out?”

“Wh-what do you mean?” asked Trent.

“It could be a Megapowered alien or something,” I said. “Stella isn’t sure who the father is, you know.”

“She…isn’t?”

“She thinks it’s probably Megaton Man,” I said. “But it could be…” I suddenly stared at Trent. “You’re not the father, are you, Trent Phloog?!”

“Woo!” said Trent “No, of course not…I hardly know her.”

This was kind of cruel, even for me, so I changed the subject. “Have you ever lived with three women before?” I demanded.

“Um…. No, I can’t say that I have.”

“My daddy has,” I said. “With me, my mama, and my sister Avril. The key is remembering to put the toilet seat down.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” said Trent.

“You’ll meet them sometime,” I said. “My family, I mean.”

“I’d like to,” said Trent. “If I’m around long enough.”

“Oh, you’ll be around awhile,” I said. “Stella will warm up to you, eventually. She just needs to get used to you.”

“Really? You think so?” said Trent. “I mean—What do you mean?”

“She doesn’t know you yet, that’s all.”

“Oh, right.”

“Pammy must adore you, though,” I said. “She has to.”

Trent got a funny look. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re both critics of Megaton Man,” I said. “Pammy showed me some of the articles you’d written.”

“Oh, right.”

“Pammy hates Megaton Man something fierce,” I said.

Trent sighed. “Don’t I know it?”

“She can’t stand him,” I continued. “I don’t think Stella’s too keen on him either, right now. I think if you play up the fact that you hate Megaton Man too, just as much as they do, you’ll fit right in.”

I wanted to ask him who he liked better: Stella or Pammy. But that was too much like grade school.

“Are you going to write for a newspaper in the Detroit area?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Trent replied. “I-I wasn’t a very good reporter, or a columnist.”

I told him that was nonsense, and from what I had seen of his writing he shouldn’t give it up. I asked him what he did plan on doing while he was in Ann Arbor.

“Well, I wouldn’t mind sitting in on some classes, maybe some lectures,” he said. “I’d like to catch up on my reading.”

“My daddy reads a lot,” I said. “He never went to college, but he’s a whaddyacall, an autodidact.” I snapped my fingers. “That’s where you should work!” I said. “I have just the job for you.”

“What’s that?”

I told him about Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore, how great a place it was and all the kinds of books and stuff they carried. “You could stock the shelves and sell books to people,” I suggested. Did I mention I’m a great suggester?

“That’s not a bad idea,” he said.