"Good Job on the Test, Son," a Boy Genius Adventure

By Travis Flatt

1. Murder Mart

Boy Genius catches shoplifters with his X-Ray specs. When suspicious characters shuffle into the Minit Mart and linger, he’ll flip the green neon lenses down on his spectacles, find a bottle of motor oil or a Milky Way in a jacket pocket, say, “Back on the shelf, if you please,” and most folks replace it. For such a small man, he has an authoritative voice. This he inherited from his dad, an Air Force captain.

And he’s got the freeze ray if he needs it, although he doubts he could use it.

It’s busted, but he keeps a death ray in the back. He only ever used it for rats’ and wasps’ nests. In middle school, he went through a raygun phase.

The freeze ray he uses for icing his coffee. It’s cheaper than Starbucks.

The Minit Mart doesn’t bring in much this time of year. Or any time of year. It makes most of its money from scratch-offs and Powerball tickets.

There was a time, Boy Genius worries, he could have gamed the odds, devised the numerical combinations via calculuses lost to him by the slowing of age, cobwebs in the works, gumming of workaday monotony, the erosion of disappointments. He suspects there are thousands—more like millions—who feel the same way or are convinced they’re still perfectly capable, that they’ve discovered the secret as we speak.

So, until he hits a ticket, he’s the same as anyone, with a chance of around one in 300 million. He’s stuck watching DVDs of The Twilight Zone behind the Minit Mart register while the hours tick by, the Earth gets a fraction of a degree hotter—if you believe that science, which he does most days—and his mind grows just that much dimmer, cooler.

Ever present in his mind is this investment, the Minit Mart. Would he be any happier if his dreams had come true? If one burst like a joyous firework tomorrow?

Boy Genius bought the Minit Mart for a song.

The previous owner’s son got shot in a robbery that wasn’t a robbery but a prank gone wrong, a coked-out frat boy “just kidding around.”

Everyone in town still calls it the “Murder Mart,” even those with no idea how it earned the nickname. Countless versions of the story exist, hydra-ing with each generation. Most young people don’t bother to ask, just like the sound of it.

The murder happened in ‘94 when Boy Genius was still a boy genius.

He bought it in ‘12, after blowing his inheritance building backyard rockets, reeling in a downward spiral after NASA—and everyone else—rejected his science, outright calling his life’s work “doo-dads” and “gizmos.”

Boy Genius needed income and a life away from microscopes and soldering irons.

Instead of cash, the murdered clerk’s dad wanted a time machine, was desperately earnest in this request, but some things are impossible, Boy Genius told him, and the heartbroken father settled on a device that broadcasts a holographic projection of the deceased.

Boy Genius had already developed the holographic projector to resurrect his own dad, with whom he’d had something like a loving, if chilly, relationship, as the man would make an occasional point to praise him for academic achievements, might look up from his morning newspaper and say, “Good job on the test, son.”

Whenever Boy Genius feels blue during the empty hours at the Murder Mart, he can pause The Twilight Zone and flip on the projector. His dad, golden-hued and intangible, phantom kitchen table half in, half out, of the candy shelves, will lower his Herald-Citizen, headline reading “NASA launches Mars Global Surveyor,” and toast him with a coffee mug.
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“Good job on the test, son.”

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2. Beep-O

At home, it’s only Boy Genius and Beep-O, whom he can’t rename.

Beep-O responds only to Beep-O. When he was ten, Boy Genius programmed the robot, an aluminum trash can filled with electronic wizardry, painted purple and white, his school colors. He would have to dismantle the robot to make adjustments and doubts he could repeat the job.

Building Beep-O won Boy Genius his first science fair. Beep-O, his oldest friend, can make tea—Boy Genius’s dad loved Earl Gray—and that’s about it. That, and he can ask how Boy Genius’s day went after a shift at the Murder Mart. Beep-O would listen if Boy Genius had anything to say.

Boy Genius still lives in his dad’s three-story Victorian, his grandfather’s and his grandfather’s before, but he rarely leaves the garage, staving off depression by futzing around with new inventions. Gets excited and loses interest. No idea’s any good. Who wants a shrink ray? What’s the point of a jet pack?

He doesn’t care for TV, and he’s read all the books in the library.

He’ll lose hours drafting blueprints of nonsense. Things with names like “Discombobulator” or “Electronomatic.” Nightmares of circuits and antennae, propellers, and treads with no purpose.

More and more, Beep-o interrupts him with tea. The cups line the work table, undrunk and cold.

If Boy Genius paid attention, he’d notice Beep-O lingering at the door, watching him. Or the improvements Beep-O’s made to the tea over the years. His experimentation with steeping length, water temperature, and so on.

Beep-O would ask Boy Genius to buy honey if he was capable. And milk.

Boy Genius keeps sparse cabinets and a desolate refrigerator like his dad did.

His mother died in labor, and his dad kept few pictures, disdaining sentimentality of any kind. He allowed her hydrangeas to remain along the fences, but only because they required little of him. Her rose bushes were gone before Boy Genius could walk.

His dad made a natural widower. A military man, he spent most of his time at work as an accountant for a tractor parts factory. At home, he ate his meals cold from a can, spent an hour most evenings, stone-faced, watching Roseanne or Cheers, and then went to bed without a word. He might have helped with homework if he were needed.
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On Sundays, he made his concession to frivolity. He’d sleep in until eight, drink tea on the porch, and listen to whatever seasonal sports played on the radio. He allowed Beep-O to make him tea, which secretly overjoyed Boy Genius, the closest thing to “I love you” he ever said once Boy Genius completed potty training and therefore became, in his dad’s eyes, a man.

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3. The Spaceman

Once a year, usually in December, Boy Genius receives a call on the blue button phone. The blue button phone is a black phone in his garage on a TV tray; the rotary dial has been replaced with a single blue button.

The phone isn’t plugged into anything. The blue button may or may not do anything. The Spaceman, who gave Boy Genius the phone thirty years ago, warned the boy genius Boy Genius never to touch the button, although he might need to one day.

Obviously, it’s the Spaceman who calls him.

They met, Boy Genius and the Spaceman, when Boy Genius was nine. Boy Genius was scouting the woods behind his dad’s house for an ideal treehouse tree.

Stuck in the limbs of an ancient oak was the Spaceman’s spacecraft, a flying saucer, like the ones on TV. Only gelatinous.

Similar to a downed fighter pilot dangling from parachute cords, the Spaceman, in a blue, bubble-helmed suit, hung from tubes and wires. The Spaceman was panicking, flailing arms and legs, and Boy Genius cut it loose with his dad’s pocketknife.

The Spaceman crawled from its suit, and Boy Genius saw a fishlike creature, like a merman, slimy and foul-smelling.

Boy Genius crouched behind his dad’s pocketknife, asking the Spaceman questions.

The Spaceman, it turns out, wasn’t the pilot. That creature died in our atmosphere and was made of something akin to what we call sound. The true pilot brought the Spaceman along as an experiment, like a chimpanzee or a dog.

At the time, Boy Genius was just some kid named Matt, not a genius. In return for helping the Spaceman and promising never to tell what he’d seen, the Spaceman explained all the known universe’s science.

After his first hit, Boy Genius was immediately hooked on knowledge. Before disappearing into the woods, the Spaceman told the pleading Boy Genius to build the blue button phone. This way, it could continue supplying. The Spaceman assured Boy Genius it would dole out more on their yearly phone calls.

Eventually, Boy Genius’s mind developed a sort of tolerance.

Over the years, the Spaceman gave Boy Genius advice on engineering or chemistry but refused small talk and grew cagey when asked where it was or what it was up to.

Boy Genius doesn’t consider the Spaceman his friend.

When Boy Genius answers the phone this year, the Spaceman sounds desperate. It pants in wet, slobbery heaves and asks if Boy Genius is ready?

“Ready for what?” Boy Genius says, and there’s a long silence on the line. Beep-O arrives at the door with tea. Boy Genius waves him off.

When the Spaceman finally responds, it sounds annoyed.

“To press the button, Matt. Press the button.”

This is the day Boy Genius has truly been waiting for. The lottery tickets are, to him, a distraction, just like the rest of us. As for the blue button’s purpose, Boy Genius long ago compiled a list of guesses, or wishes, for what it might be:

A warp backward in time would be nice.

Restoring his intellect, or some of it, would be better.

In his wildest dreams, the Spaceman comes and rescues him in a flying saucer—or sends one to retrieve him—like an Uber to the mothership.

“Now?” Boy Genius says. He’s not ready. He needs to pee. If this is his trip to the stars, he wants to enjoy it comfortably, like a fine steak dinner.

The Spaceman shrieks something that sounds like a bird call. The startled Boy Genius presses the blue button.

Nothing happens.

Another silence on the line. Desperate with disappointment, Boy Genius thinks the Spaceman has hung up—the blue button phone has no dial tones—but its voice returns, calmer now, and says, “Good job on the test, son.”

Boy Genius nearly drops the receiver. “Dad?”

“Of course not,” says the Spaceman, annoyed again. “‘Son’ is a conversational colloquialism for someone younger than oneself.”

“What did I just do?”

“Nuked a solar system. It was a test. It works. Look at Orion tonight around 2am. You should see a little flash beside—”

Boy Genius hangs the phone up. In shaking hands, he takes the cup of tea from Beep-O and collapses onto his workbench.

“You’re welcome, father,” Beep-O says, something the robot’s been building toward, electron by electron, for two decades, and will not be able to replicate for two more.
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Boy Genius fails to notice.

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​Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Prime Number, Fractured, Variant Lit, Puerto del Sol, HAD, Bull, and other places. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee and was longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs.