by J. S. Puller
It was the passing time between eighth and ninth period. The end of the day was in sight. I was at my locker, my real locker, when I heard April’s shrill voice shriek behind me.
“She’s coming this way.”
“What?” someone else asked.
“Look, she’s down the hall!”
Who was she?
I turned around. April was standing five feet away from me, talking to one of Dagmar’s other soccer-team flunkies. Meredith, I supposed. Both she and April would have been thrown off the team long ago, but I was pretty sure Dagmar was doing their homework. For a second, they blocked my view, but then they stepped back. Everyone stepped back. The hallway seemed to part down the center, everyone pressing up against the banks of red lockers on either side.
And that was when I caught my first glimpse of her.
She wasn’t very tall, probably not even five feet. But for some reason, she seemed bigger. She filled the space around her. Her hands were on her hips, her chin up, and her chest forward. It was the same sort of classic stance that I saw on the covers of my dad’s comic books. Wide and open. Completely exposed. Unafraid.
Probably a good thing—being unafraid—considering the way she was dressed.
She wore a bathing suit. It was the beginning of a wet and cold January and she looked ready for the beach. The shiny silver suit had thick straps, joined together by silver rings on top of her shoulders. Under it, she had a pair of bright, almost neon-blue tights. There was a hole in the left side, near her ankle, a bit of a rip going up the side of her leg that was only partly hidden by a red high-top sneaker. She also wore blue rubber gloves, the kind my dad used to wash dishes in the kitchen sink. Draped over her shoulders was a red cape, probably made out of a pillowcase, judging from the way it bunched up behind her neck.
Dead silence. I had never heard a school hallway that still. Everyone was staring at her. Everyone.
Time stopped.
I couldn’t tell what she was thinking or feeling. A red mask hid her face, the strings of it tied messily behind her head, with strands of the thick neon-blue synthetic hair of a wig caught up in the knot. I could see her mouth, though, her lips curling up into some kind of wicked smile.
“Who are you?” Someone from the crowd asked it. I didn’t realize, at first, that it was me.
She turned to me. Everyone did. I wanted to shrink against the locker, maybe even pass through it. The heat of so many eyes was a little more than I could take. The wind had been knocked out of my lungs. Fortunately, the moment she spoke, the attention turned back on her.
“Captain Superlative!” she said, in a voice full of confidence and certainty. “Champion of Deerwood Park Middle School, here to defend honor, justice, and the forces of good!” She made a broad, sweeping gesture with one arm. “Have no fear, citizens!” Both arms went up, fingertips stretched out and pressed together like blades to cut through the air. “Captain Superlative is here to make all troubles disappear!”
She whipped around and shot down the hall, faster than life. Like she was flying. Her cape fluttered in the air behind her, an enormous letter C made of blue felt glued on the back.
We stood there in a state of stunned silence, the sort that followed a natural disaster, a tidal wave. Even after she disappeared, we felt her there. It was only the sound of the bell marking the end of the passing period that broke the spell and sent us off in a thousand directions, like motes of dust, whispering about the outfit, the catchphrase, the name, the strangeness of it all.
Speculation spread: It was all for the school play. She’d been hit on the head. She’d been sent by Kohn Junior High. Someone had dared her to do it. It was the start of an alien invasion to replace us with pod people. Each idea was more outlandish than the last. None of it was right. I knew it in my heart of hearts. But I didn’t have a theory of my own, beyond what I thought was a reasonable assumption that she had to be a new kid.
What I did have was a sense of wonder.
When no one talks to you, you see everything. What else is there to do but watch the world?
But I didn’t understand.
I couldn’t understand.
Air understands nothing.
Deerwood Park was the town time forgot. Or at least the town that time didn’t visit too often. The biggest excitement we had was a bluebird perching in a raspberry bush. The most color we saw was the rainbows in oil slicks at the gas station. And the only conflict I could recall was the local council debate over a drive-through restaurant. The vote was six to three against—no one needed to get their food that fast.
That was Deerwood Park, and my dad and I lived on the very edge of it, spitting distance from Lake Michigan and the Wisconsin border. When I was younger, we had a big house with a porch swing and flower boxes, a few blocks away from the movie theater and the ice-skating rink. It was straight out of a storybook, or the past, maybe. But we moved into our apartment building when I was nine.
I cried on the day we left. A lot. I remember wrapping my arms around the fifty-year-old maple in the front yard. I begged my dad to let us stay. We had to stay. It was too big a change. Too much. Too fast. But my dad put his hand on my shoulder and told me that we had to leave. The house was haunted by a ghost, he said. A ghost that he wanted to leave behind. A ghost we needed to leave behind.
Then he’d made me promises. Our new home would be wonderful. We’d make a new start and have a thousand new memories. It would be our very special, secret place. We’d be happy.
He’d been right too (even if I still checked my closet for ghosts for the next year). Our apartment was the still and tranquil center of my little world. It was the one place in the universe where I was happiest.
The one place in the universe where I wasn’t air, where I didn’t have to be.
It was nothing exciting. The carpets were beige and bland, the rooms were average size, but it was enough for us. My dad’s bedroom was right next to mine. We used the third bedroom for a study, although there were more board games than books in there. The kitchen was always warm and light, the sunset always filling it with gold around dinnertime. Pictures from the old house that I’d drawn in kindergarten were still on the wheezy yellow refrigerator, their corners curling up with age, like the shoes of a genie in a picture book. We had a table, but my dad and I usually ate dinner on stools, on the far end of the marble island with the stove top. The table just felt so empty with only two people.
It reminded us of the ghost.
“A superhero, huh?” my dad said that night, when I finished telling the tale of Captain Superlative’s bracing arrival in the hall.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “She just showed up. Wearing a cape.”
“A cape?”
“With an enormous letter C on it. For ‘Captain Superlative’”—I used air quotes—“I guess.”
My dad grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling up. I had brown eyes, but my dad’s were a deep, dark blue. The color I imagined the ocean to be. When he smiled like that, they became lost under heavy wrinkles and even heavier eyebrows, wires of brown and gray. “Clearly,” he said, touching his finger to his ear. It was a gesture that signaled the beginning of one of our many rituals.
“Certainly,” I replied, pleased with my word of choice.
“Completely.”
I struggled for a moment to come up with another word, but was saved when I remembered my science homework from a few days back. “Conclusively!”
My dad laughed, clapping his hands together once. “Oh! Good one!”
Breaking the pattern was considered a surrender. I grinned with pride at my victory. I didn’t win the game often, given my dad’s love for words.
After polishing off the last of his green beans, my dad tapped his fork absently against the side of his plate. “Maybe you should start wearing a big letter J, Janey,” he said.
“Dad!”
He tapped his ear again. “Joking.”
“Jesting,” I shot ba
ck.
“Joshing.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Old word.”
“Old man,” he replied, gesturing to himself.
I couldn’t argue with that or with the spirals of silver sparkling in his curly, otherwise brown hair.
He started to launch into a story from the afternoon. He worked as a veterinarian, and most of his stories—which usually ended with a dog peeing on him—had me howling with laughter.
Tonight was different. With a bit of a scowl, I propped my elbow up on the counter, dropping my chin into my palm. I was only half listening, really. His voice sounded like a video whose audio had been sped up so it came out like a squeaking chipmunk. It was one of those nights where even the familiar things couldn’t quite get my mind to relax. All throughout my afternoon, as I plodded through my homework and several reruns of this old sitcom my dad loved and had gotten me addicted to, I kept flashing back to the hallway, to Captain Superlative’s grand entrance. And I was there again now, watching her swim upstream against the tide in her mask and cape. In my memory, she was the only thing moving. The rest of us were frozen. She was on fast-forward. “I would never do something like that.” I don’t know why I said it. It wasn’t about me. But the words just sort of popped out of my mouth.
“Something like what, Janey?” Dad asked.
“Run around like some kind of superhero.”
My dad raised one of his eyebrows. “And why not?”
Well, that was easy enough. “I’d be labeled as a freak in two seconds.”
“Ah! The perils of labeling. I remember it well. Some things never change.” He stood up, taking my plate and heading for the sink. “And what social circle are you in these days, Jane Esther Silverman?”
I wrinkled my nose. I hated it when he used my full name. It sounded like a little old lady’s name. “I don’t know.”
“You know,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at me, “that’s why you’re my favorite daughter. You’re a work in progress.”
“And I’m your only daughter.”
“Well, that too.”
“Unless you count Selina.”
“I never count Selina.”
Right on cue, with a soft mew, our cat, Selina, padded her way into the kitchen, winding her sinewy, sleek black body around my dad’s ankles.
“What about my best friend April?” he asked. “What’s her social circle?”
That was an old joke. One that still made me groan. April and I hadn’t spoken in years, but back when she was my best friend, my dad always joked that she was really his best friend and that she only came over to our house to hear his awful jokes, just pretending that it was to visit me.
“Definitely the popular, pretty, athletic, not-freak circle,” I said, standing up and joining him at the sink. He washed the dishes in his thick kitchen gloves while I wiped down the counter with a rag that had once been a T-shirt. He got out the chocolate-chip cookie-dough ice cream while I got out the whipped-cream canister. Just like every night. I thought the subject of Captain Superlative was put to rest.
My dad thought otherwise.
“What do you think her origin story could be?” he asked me as he topped off my two scoops with a noisy squirt of whipped cream.
“What?”
“Your Captain Superlative.” He made a vague gesture toward me. As if I owned her. “All good superheroes need an origin story.”
“You think?”
“I don’t think, young lady.” He pointed the tip of the whipped-cream canister at me. “I know. Don’t you remember what my social circle was? You’re talking to the king of the comic books.” He threw his hands up triumphantly, getting so loud that he startled poor Selina, who went streaking out of the room, her claws skittering across the tiles. “The Evanston Public Library superhero quiz bowl champion, three years running. A feat never accomplished before or since! Hip-hip huzzah!”
I snatched the whipped cream out of his hand. “They had comic books when you were a kid?” I knew they did. I’d seen his collection. But for some reason, I wanted to change the subject.
My dad rolled his eyes. “Naturally. But they were painted onto cave walls.” He ruffled my hair before snatching the canister back and putting it in the fridge. “And every last one of them had a fantastic origin story which shaped the identities of the world’s greatest heroes.”
Frankly, I was much more interested in the ice cream. “Oh yeah?” I said.
“A tragic one too. Say, the lone survivor of an alien race who falls to earth in the midst of a meteor shower and decides to become a hero.” He held up a spoon, slashing it through the air like it was a sword.
“Some kids thought she was an alien,” I said, drifting out of the kitchen and into the living room.
He followed after me. In the small stretch of hallway between the kitchen and the living room hung a picture of my mother. We both waved to her out of habit. It was a ritual, I guess. I mean, it was a picture. It wasn’t like either of us expected her to wave back. But we still did it. Without questioning or considering, or even talking about it, we paid our respects.
It helped not to miss her so much.
Now that I was older, I understood that when my dad said our old house was haunted, he meant by the memory of her. Every room had her fingerprints on it, in one way or another.
Sometimes, though, I felt pretty sure that her ghost had followed us here to the apartment. At least she was a friendly one, even if she sometimes made us sad.
“We would have probably heard about any meteors crashing down in the middle of Deerwood Park, wouldn’t we?” Dad continued.
“Probably.” News traveled around a small town, after all. Especially in the middle school. I dropped down into my usual spot on the living room floor, between the coffee table and the leather recliner, pulling my legs in and setting the bowl on my lap. We always ate ice cream in front of the TV. K-911 was our favorite show and it was on tonight. It followed the adventures of real-life police dogs. We knew all of their names and could identify each of them before the scrawl at the bottom of the screen gave it away. Right before each commercial break, the enthusiastic narrator would ask the viewers a multiple-choice question, canine trivia. My dad and I would play along, although he usually beat me.
Okay, he always beat me, unless the episode was a rerun. But it didn’t matter what happened within our own walls. No gossip would ever reach the world outside.
I reached for the remote, but my dad got it first.
“Maybe she’s a mutant.”
“A mutant?”
“An ordinary girl who suddenly developed superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive…”—he trailed off, tapping the remote against his chin—“something. Do you know what she can do? What are her superpowers?”
It seemed like her greatest superpower was her ability to distract my dad from our night. “I don’t know,” I said. “She can’t sew. I think the big C was glued to her cape. Are you going to turn on the—”
“Hmm…this is a tricky one. Clearly, she wasn’t bitten by a radioactive sewing machine.”
“Dad!”
He sat down on the arm of the sofa. “Come on, come on, come on. I love a good challenge. Tell me what she can do, Janey.”
There was no way I was going to get my K-911 tonight. “I don’t know, Dad,” I said, stabbing my spoon into the whipped cream. “She’s really good at shouting?”
“Shouting?”
I rolled my eyes. “‘Captain Superlative is here to make all troubles disappear!’” I used the air quotes again.
“Catchy. I like it.” He slid down onto the couch. “Bitten by a radioactive megaphone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hmm…Captain Superlative…”
We sat in silence, my dad hogging the remote. He kept repeating her name over and over and over again. I shoveled the ice cream into my mouth, watching him from beneath my eyelashes. And I only stopped because I was going to give myself an ice
-cream headache. “I don’t even know what her name means,” I said after a moment.
“A captain is the highest-ranking person on the starship Enterprise.”
“Dad!”
He chuckled. “What? That wasn’t what you were looking for?”
“Superlative.”
“I see you’re paying attention in language-arts class,” he said sarcastically. Tyler Jeffries was in that class. Of course I wasn’t paying attention. I was supposed to be paying attention to him! Drawing his lips in the corner of my book. And I was doing fine anyway. I was pretty sure I had a B-minus.
“A superlative is something excellent, magnificent, above all others, the best of the best.” He gave me an assessing look. “Does that sound like Captain Superlative?”
“She’s fearless. I’ll give her that.”
“Aren’t all superheroes fearless? I’ll have to check my comics, but I think that’s part of the job description.”
I made a face. “You’d have to be fearless to show up wearing ridiculous clothing like that.”
“Ridiculous clothing?”
“A bathing suit and tights.”
“Oh my.”
“She wasn’t even wearing jeans! Or Blue Shoes!”
Blue Shoes were the latest craze. They had been ever since Dagmar came back from summer break wearing the pair that her mother bought for her. Everyone owned a pair. They were bright, plastic blue shoes, the color of a twilight sky, with silver glitter melted into the molding. To tell the truth, they were pretty uncomfortable. They had a thick band that cut across the top of the foot that dug into your ankle. And that wasn’t even the worst part. No, the worst came with every step. Accompanying the pain from the band was a squeak, like a dog’s worn-out chew toy. The squeak was even worse when the shoes were wet.
I never left home without my pair.
“Good for her,” my dad said.
He would.
And then, finally, he turned on the TV. I thought that meant the end of it. But as the opening theme song of K-911 started to play and Selina softly crept into the room, he said, “We’ll have to collect more information.”
“It was probably just some kind of joke.”