Degrees of Separation: 2/?
by Nan Smith
Previously:
"Dad." CJ was behind him when he turned, looking uncharacteristically serious. "I have something for you. Linda gave it to me. It's important."
"Sure. What is it?"
He extended a hand, and to Clark's surprise, he was holding a piece of ordinary notebook paper. He took the paper, and read the line of Linda Lennox's neat handwriting at the top of the page.
"Marta's new friend, Allynda, is one of us."
**********
And now, Part 2:
Clark knocked lightly on the door of the attic playroom before stepping inside. The three girls were sitting in front of the computer, their heads nearly touching as they scrutinized something on the monitor screen. It was obvious that none of the three had heard his knock.
Deliberately, he knocked a little more loudly.
The girls straightened up and turned their heads, and Clark could now see the picture on the computer monitor was that of a green frog with sucker-tipped toes. A tree frog, naturally. The creature's bright red eyes were almost shocking in the tiny, green face.
"Hi Dad," Marta said. "I didn't hear you come in."
"Oh, that's all right. CJ said you were studying tree frogs."
"Yeah," Maria Hernandez said. "We have a research project that's due Friday."
"I see Dr. Jenkins isn't wasting any time," Clark said. He unobtrusively took stock of the third girl. "You must be Allynda."
She nodded and smiled in a friendly way. "I guess you're Mr. Kent."
"That's right." Clark extended a hand. "Glad to meet you, Allynda. I hear you stood up for Marta this afternoon. Thank you."
Marta nodded vigorously.
"I gave the school a copy of the court papers, so if Susie gives you any more trouble, you're to report her," Clark told his daughter, but he studied Allynda as he spoke.
Allynda Myers was taller than both Marta and Maria. She was an attractive girl with chocolate brown skin and a flock of darker freckles across her nose. Her black hair was braided fashionably back from her face and gathered into an elaborate braided bun at the back of her neck, and she wore tiny pearl earrings in her ears. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a blouse, and wore close-toed sandals on her feet. Superficially, there was nothing particularly remarkable about her at all, but, tuning his super-hearing, he could hear the telltale accelerated heartbeat of a Kryptonian. Still, something like that wasn't likely to be noticed even by another Kryptonian, unless he was listening specifically for it. Even Superman couldn't go around with his super-hearing wide open all the time. All the noises would have driven him insane in short order. Only something like Linda Lennox's extra abilities, whatever they were, was likely to detect Allynda's extra-terrestrial ancestry.
He smiled at her. "CJ said you're new in Metropolis,"
She shrugged. "Sort of, but not really. When I was little, we lived across town on the West Side. After my dad and mom got divorced, Mom moved to Florida for a while, and then we moved back here about three months ago."
"Oh; I see," Clark said. "Well, I'm glad to meet you. I guess I'd better leave you three alone so you can get your work done."
He retreated and descended the attic stairs to the second floor, thinking hard and listening with his special hearing to the conversation behind him.
"Your dad's nice," Allynda said. "Anyway, what do we want to use for the introduction --"
They were obviously concentrating on their research project. Clark paused in his descent and opened the door to the room that he and Lois shared. He could hear the shower going, and he glanced through the wall for a glimpse of his wife in the shower. That was always a pleasant exercise, he reflected. Lois would be the person to talk to after Allynda went home, when there was no longer much danger that she would overhear what they were talking about. The girl was undoubtedly beginning to notice that something was different about her from other teenagers, but whether she had realized the cause yet he didn't know. He was going to have to try to talk to her sooner or later, but that would have to be done in his other identity. Some of the changes that had taken place in his life when he had begun to gain his super powers had been frightening. One of the things that he had undertaken was to help to ease the transition for the half-Kryptonian children left behind. If he could make things less traumatic for them, it couldn't hurt anything.
At normal speed, he changed into casual clothing. As he was tying his shoes, he heard the shower go off and knocked lightly on the bathroom door. "May I come in, honey?"
"Sure," Lois's voice said.
She was wrapped in a skimpy towel when he opened the door and rubbing her hair vigorously with another towel. Clark wolf-whistled softly and saw her smile. "I don't know how you can still think I'm worth whistling at," she remarked. "I'm nearly forty-three years old and the mother of triplets."
"Believe me," Clark said sincerely, "you're worth whistling at. If I didn't have to start dinner, we'd be having dessert within about half a minute." He X-rayed the towel and smiled more widely. "Maybe we'll have one later tonight."
"I'll take that as a promise," she said, obviously fully aware of what he had just done.
"In the meantime, though, I thought I'd better pass along something CJ gave me from Linda," he added, on a more serious note, and handed her the paper.
Lois read the line of script and her eyebrows went up. "She's sure?"
"CJ says yes. I just talked to the girls and double-checked. She's right."
"Sounds like something Superman should talk to her about."
"I think so, too. She must be noticing things by now. I sure was by this time. Anyway, I thought it was a good idea to tell you."
Lois nodded. "Yeah."
"I'll get dinner started," Clark added, "and let Jonny and Jimmy get busy on their homework. Billy and Rach were climbing on the swing set the last I looked, and Lucy is apparently trying to dig to China. Hopefully they'll tire themselves out in a little while."
"Hopefully," Lois agreed. "Maybe we can get them to bed by seven tonight -- without too many requests for water and trips to the bathroom." She shook her head. "It's lucky we had them last," she said. "I could never have coped with three kids like them if they'd been first."
Clark grinned. "If they'd been first, they probably would also have been the last," he pointed out. "At least now we know what we're doing."
"True," she said. "If someone had told me thirteen years ago that I'd wind up the mother of seven, I'd have laughed in his face."
"So would I," Clark said. "I know we didn't plan these last ones, but I wouldn't give them up now for anything."
"Neither would I," Lois said. She exited the bathroom and opened her lingerie drawer, glanced sideways at him and deliberately dropped the towel before selecting a pair of ice-blue panties.
Clark blew out his breath. "If you don't want to take time for dessert now, I'd better get out of here," he said, a little raggedly. "Or you're going to be flat on your back in about ten seconds."
"Just keep that in mind for later," she said.
"Count on it." He left the room quickly and wiped his heated brow. Lois might be nearly forty-three, but, when it came to sheer sex appeal, she outclassed any other woman he'd ever seen. It was probably just good luck that they didn't have more than seven kids, considering the way she affected him. Whew!
**********
Lois Lane smiled as the door closed behind her husband. Perhaps it was a little unfair, but it made her feel good to know that she still had that effect on the most powerful being on the face of the Earth. If the women of the world knew that she alone was loved and desired by Superman, she would be the most envied woman on the planet, and even more so if they realized the kind of man he really was. Plenty of her acquaintances already envied her the relationship that she and Clark shared. How much more so if they knew the whole truth?
Of course, the inconveniences associated with that knowledge being openly disseminated wouldn't be worth it by a long shot but it was fun to picture the outrage of certain of their number should they learn the truth.
And, of course, someday her four sons would also be in a similar position to their father. With luck, they and their three sisters would be spoken for long before it became an issue. CJ and Marta were already taken. That left five to go.
But there were the other super-children who would face similar hurdles in the future, and one of them was upstairs in the playroom right now.
Lois fastened her jeans, tucked in her blouse and ran a comb through her hair. There. Now it was time to go upstairs and meet the mysterious Allynda.
First, though, she had better have a good excuse.
Well, what better excuse could there be than her wish to meet her daughter's new friend? She left the bedroom and went up the attic stairs.
All three girls were grouped in front of the computer screen, their heads nearly touching, but they turned when Lois knocked on the door.
"Hello, girls," Lois said with a smile. "Clark said you had a new friend with you today, Marta." She looked at Allynda. "I'm Marta's mother. I'm glad to meet you."
"Hi." The new girl smiled in a friendly way with no hint of shyness. "I'm Allynda Myers. It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Kent."
Lois nodded. "Where do you live, Allynda?"
"In an apartment on Michigan," Marta said. "Her mom has our phone number. She might call you later. Ally has to be home by six."
"In that case," Lois said, "I'd better let the three of you get on with your work." She smiled generally at the three girls and retreated.
**********
The sounds of clinking utensils and the definite scent of cooking food drew her toward the kitchen when she reached the first floor. A glance at the dining room table showed her Jonny and Jimmy, perched on dining room chairs, working on pieces of paper spread out before them. Jonny appeared to be working (somewhat reluctantly) on a page of fractions, and Jimmy was practicing his letters. Jimmy, at six, was reading well above his grade level -- a fact that his kindergarten teacher last year had mentioned to her with an air of surprise at their first student conference, although Lois had told her the same on the first day of school. Perhaps his progress had something to do with his Kryptonian ancestry, although Lois seemed to recall having taught herself to read at about the same age. It had frustrated her tremendously that, when she had demonstrated the ability for her father, Sam Lane had refused to believe it, and had insisted that she had been repeating the words by rote. She hadn't made that mistake with her own children.
Clark was busy, putting together what looked like a tuna, rice and vegetable casserole when she entered. The aroma of cinnamon and baking apples emerging from the oven led her to suspect that apple pie was on the menu for dessert tonight. A glance through the kitchen window showed her the triplets digging industriously in the sandbox.
"I'll be done here in a minute." Clark finished stirring his ingredients, scraped the casserole into a baking dish, added French-fried onions to the top and slipped the dish into the oven with the pie.
"Isn't that the wrong temperature for the casserole?" she asked, out of the fullness of experience. The last time she had tried that, Clark had had to come home in a rush to put out the flames issuing from their oven.
"Only a little," he said, setting the time for the casserole on the microwave. "The pie bakes at a slightly higher temperature than the casserole, so I'll take the casserole out a little sooner than I would have if it were the only thing in the oven. They'll come out about ten minutes apart."
"How do you know how much time to take off?" she inquired. "I tried that last week and you ended up getting us all takeout from Hong K...." She caught herself and glanced guiltily ceilingward. "Sorry," she mouthed silently.
"It takes experience," Clark said, in a casual tone, but also with a glance upward. "And I keep an eye on it. As I recall, you got involved in some kind of research on your latest investigation."
"Well, it was important!"
"I'm sure it was," Clark said. "But if you don't want to burn the dinner, you have to check on it now and then."
Lois looked skeptically at the oven and shrugged. Every time she thought she'd figured something out, she found that there were exceptions. It was a good thing that she had more or less accepted the fact that, when it came to cooking, it was better for her to keep her hands off. It just didn't look good when Superman had to show up a couple of times a week to put out her kitchen fires. Besides, it tended to upset the other residents of the townhouse when they saw smoke billowing from her kitchen window.
"Did you meet Allynda?" Clark asked, diplomatically changing the subject.
She nodded. "She seems pretty nice."
"That's what I thought. Maybe we should invite her mother over to dinner sometime next week."
"Maybe," Lois said. "You know, Allynda reminds me of somebody, but I can't think who it is."
"I know. I thought so, too."
"It'll probably come to me, if I don't try to think of it," Lois said.
"Probably. Dinner will be ready in about an hour. I guess we'd better get the Terrible Trio in and give them baths unless we want them to be eating sand."
**********
The three girls came down the steps a few minutes before six. Allynda slung her backpack over one shoulder. "We can probably finish tomorrow evening," she was saying. "Mom wants to get me a computer, but she's looking for a good used one, so it might be a while. Besides, we get things done faster when we work together."
"I noticed that," Marta agreed. "I'll see you guys tomorrow."
Clark stepped into the living room. "Ready to go home?"
"Yeah. Mom wants me home before it starts to get dark," Allynda said.
"I usually take Maria and Wyatt home," Clark said. "Would you like a lift?"
Allynda looked doubtful. "I'm not sure Mom would like it," she said.
"I'll be with you," Maria said. "So will Wyatt. Mr. Kent's okay."
Clark grinned. "If Allynda's mother doesn't want her accepting rides with strange men, I understand," he said.
Allynda looked a little embarrassed. "It's just -- after what happened when Mom and Dad got divorced -- she doesn't want it to happen again."
"In that case, why don't you call your mother and ask," Clark said. "Be sure to tell her that I'm dropping off Maria and Wyatt, too." He glanced toward the study, in time to see Wyatt Dillon emerge, his backpack in one hand.
"All right." Allynda appeared relieved and went to the living room phone.
Clark waited, while she spoke to her mother. She turned. "Mom wants to talk to you."
"All right." Clark took the receiver. "This is Clark Kent."
"Hello," the woman's voice said. "I understand you offered to drive Allynda home?"
"I usually drive my children's friends home, as a safety measure," Clark said. "I understand if you don't want me to drive Allynda home, though. You don't know me at all. I'll be bringing two others at the same time, if that helps. My son's friend, Wyatt Dillon, and my daughter's friend, Maria Hernandez live fairly close by. My son, CJ, told me they met you this afternoon."
"Yes, they did," Allynda's mother said. "All right; let me speak to my daughter, please."
Clark passed the phone to Allynda again and glanced at Wyatt. "Don't forget your trumpet."
"Oops," Wyatt said. "Be right back." He returned to the study for an instant and reappeared, carrying the instrument case.
Allynda listened to her mother for a moment and put down the phone. She smiled at Clark.
"Mom says it's all right, as long as the others are there. But she'd like to meet you."
"Sure," Clark said. "I'll drop you off first, take the others home, and then come back, if that's all right."
"That would be great," Allynda said. Her gaze rested on his face. "I've seen your picture, and Ms. Lane's on those advertising things in the Daily Planet, so I'm not worried."
"Good," Clark said. "All right," he added to all three of his passengers. "Last one to the car is a rotten egg."
"Dad!" Marta exclaimed. "That's for kids!"
"I know. Keep an eye on the casserole while I'm gone; would you, Marta? Unless you want it Cajun-style tonight. It should come out in about fifteen minutes."
"I will," Marta said. "Bye, guys. See you tomorrow."
**********
tbc
