by J. S. Puller
“I guess.”
“She’s all anyone can talk about! Her and her stupid baked-potato outfit.”
“Don’t worry about it,” April said. “It’s almost the Valentine’s Day dance. You’ll be queen and all anyone can talk about. Just like last year.”
Tyler Jeffries was walking down the hall, going the other way. Every single girl in the line stopped to watch him go, much to the annoyance of all the boys who were bumped and jostled in the process. “Hey,” Tyler said, smiling.
“Hey, Ty,” one of the boys said. “I’m performing today. What’s your advice, Shakespeare?”
“Be a better actor,” Tyler replied cheerfully. “Pretend you’re me.”
A couple of the boys laughed.
“But alas,” Tyler said, touching the back of his hand to his forehead. “There can be but one with talent such as mine.”
Someone threw a crumpled-up piece of paper at him.
“I am a gift to the stage!”
All the boys groaned.
“Break a leg,” he called to his friend, laughing and waving as he continued down the hall.
I wasn’t sure who he was waving to. Dagmar seemed convinced it was her, though. “Tyler is so going to ask me to the dance,” she said, leaning back over her shoulder to April. “You can see it in his eyes.”
April laughed, nodding eagerly. “Totally.”
Dagmar shook her head and started walking again, which meant that all the other girls started walking again. “I hope Captain Freak doesn’t ruin it.”
“Nah, she doesn’t seem interested in Tyler.” Sacrilege, if I ever heard it. “And I don’t think she wants to be Valentine’s Day queen, Dagmar,” April continued. “Even if she wanted to be, what would anyone write on the ballot? ‘Captain Superlative’? That’s not a real name.”
“That’s what all the teachers are calling her.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Not the point, April.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dagmar. It won’t last. She’ll get bored. I mean, it can’t possibly be fun making study guides for social-studies tests or opening doors for random strangers.”
“Study guides?”
April reached into her messenger bag, slung over her right hip. She pulled out a packet of papers, bound with a bright red staple in the top left-hand corner. “She made them for everyone in Ms. Hinton’s sixth-period class. To study for that big test. And she told us to hang on to the staple because—you’ll love this—red is a lucky color.”
Dagmar took the papers from April, violently crumpling them up and throwing them on the ground. “She is such a freak!”
April shrugged.
“Dagmar.” Mr. Hoffman, our drama teacher, appeared at the door. He was a tall, lanky man with salt-and-pepper hair that was swept back off his forehead. “Looking forward to your monologue today,” he said, bending over at the waist, offering her that Dagmar-special smile.
She flashed him a grin. “I’ve been working superhard on it.”
“Excellent.”
Dagmar and April disappeared into the auditorium. I followed after them, scooping up the study guide from the floor. Across the top, I could see the words Ancient Greece. Not only was Captain Superlative not a new kid, she was in my grade. She had Ms. Hinton, who only taught seventh graders. I unfolded the packet, smoothing it out between my hands. The first section was about ostracism, about how the Greeks voted politically dangerous citizens into exile.
No question in my mind who Dagmar would ostracize now. There was something about Captain Superlative that was dangerous.
Deviant.
Disastrous.
Deadly.
The incident in the hallway—really, the whole day—left me feeling strangely uncomfortable in my own skin. I found myself constantly digging my fingernails into my arm or my knee, and chewing on the inside of my cheek and lower lip. It felt like my blood had been replaced by pop fizzing through my veins. I was buzzing. I was out of place, out of sync with the way things were supposed to go, and I wanted to strip off the feeling. I wanted to tear it away from me like a rumpled old sweater that I could toss into a corner and forget. But it was a part of me. And I couldn’t tear away a piece of me.
I didn’t like it.
It was irritating and distracting and made doing my homework impossible. Words blurred before me, and I found myself drawing Captain Superlative’s cape all over my notebooks instead of answering questions about the ancient Greeks. It was only when my dad and I began our nightly rituals that I started to come back to myself. I slipped back into comfortable familiarity, sitting in my usual spot on the floor of the living room after a usual dinner and usual ice cream.
The ice cream and episode of K-911 were followed up by our weekly coupon clipping. My dad and I crawled through the pages of the local newspapers, each with our own list of items to find. Laundry detergent. Mouthwash. Spaghetti sauce and string cheese. All the ingredients for my dad’s triple-fudge-chunk brownies. Whoever found the most coupons in thirty minutes, before the news ended, won.
Again, usually my dad—who read much faster than I could—won the game.
The so-very-serious anchorwoman on the TV was talking about a wanted criminal who’d just been caught in Chicago. My dad glanced up at the mug shot, the guy with a gold tooth and a tattoo over his right eye standing there with a card in front of his chest, snarling at the camera. “Ha,” he said. And again, louder. “Ha.”
It was a strange noise, one that startled Selina, who leaped off her perch above the window and landed on the arm of the recliner. Not his usual laugh. I looked up from a coupon for powdered sugar. “What?”
“I was just thinking about what you told me. About your day.”
“About Captain Superlative.”
What else?
“Maybe it’ll be her picture on the screen next,” he said. “I mean, opening doors for classmates? Showing new students around the school? Her reign of terror has to end. Call in Scotland Yard.”
“Scotland what?”
“The British police.”
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t understand.”
“If parents had dimes for every time they were told that they didn’t understand, we’d all be millionaires and then I could pay someone to understand for me and I could take a vacation to Australia.”
“Bring me back a koala.” I went back to cutting the coupon. “She isn’t a…” I couldn’t find the right word. “She’s just different.”
“Everyone is different,” he said, riffling through a few pages of his newspaper. “If we were all the same, we’d all be named Bob and we’d all like country music.” He curled his upper lip. “‘My truck done left me and my woman broke down,’” he said with a horrible, fake Southern accent.
“I mean different different. Weird.”
He shrugged. “There’s nothing wrong with being a little weird. Weird people teach us what it is we value most. When you go ‘that’s weird,’ what you’re really saying is such-and-such is what I like best.”
Of course he’d say something like that. I sighed softly. “It’s okay to be a little weird, but this is too much.”
He made a soft popping noise with his mouth, setting down his scissors. Was he forfeiting? We still had five minutes to go on the news. Seemed so, as he reached over for the remote, turning off the TV. “Any idea what her secret identity could be?” he asked me.
“Secret identity?”
“All superheroes have them. What? Do you think they sleep in their superhero costumes? They wear pj’s just the same as the rest of us.”
He stood up, crossing the living room. Compared to our old house, it was cramped with just the couch and recliner, the glass coffee table, the TV mounted on the wall, and a couple of bookcases. They weren’t exactly bookcases, though. They were more like trophy cases, displaying our most valued possessions: Dad’s college diploma in a gold frame, the ink prints of my feet from the hospital when I was born, a picture
of my parents from their wedding, my winning nighttime landscape from the third-grade art fair, and some of my dad’s most prized comic books. I once asked him what made them more special than the others on the shelf in his bedroom. He said something about limited-edition collector’s items and that they would put my grandkids through college.
He picked up one of the comic books, handling it like a newborn kitten. He opened the cover, thumbing through the pages until he found what he was looking for and turned it for me to see. On one panel, an ordinary-looking man in a gray suit and tie with glasses. On the next panel, a ridiculous superhero in a ridiculous getup—a dark blue leotard with a pattern of white stars along one side and a flowing white cape—soaring through the sky with his fingers held the same ridiculous way that Captain Superlative held hers. Two people in one.
“Da-ad,” I said, my voice rising into a little bit of a whine. “We’re supposed to be playing coupons.”
“This game is much more fun!”
I slapped my scissors down on the table and flopped back against the recliner, folding my arms across my chest. Selina let out a yelp and jumped up from the chair, scampering out of the room.
“Scaredy-cat,” my dad called after her, before turning back to me. “What do you know about Captain Superlative?”
“Really?”
“Come on!”
“I know she’s in my grade,” I said with a sigh. “She has Ms. Hinton for social studies.”
“Her and one hundred and fifty other kids.”
“And she’s not a fort kid.”
“Well, that’s a good start. I’ll make a detective out of you yet. Noticed anyone missing from your classes lately?” he asked, taking a seat in the recliner. His fingers brushed against my hair. “Someone who might be running around with a big C on her back?”
“Not really.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Our seats all got reassigned after winter break. And anyway, the teachers are all in on it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even they’re calling her Captain Superlative.”
“Interesting…She really is a superhero, then,” my dad said, a slight chuckle in his voice. “A superhero’s secret identity is always someone entirely ordinary. Someone anonymous, who you wouldn’t notice. Someone you would never suspect of being superlative.”
Paige, Dagmar, April, Tyler. Half of Dagmar’s friends. Yeah. If any of them were suddenly replaced by someone in tights and a cape, kids would notice. But as I thought about all of my classes and my classmates, I saw a lot of blank faces. They blended into one another, vanishing. If one of them disappeared, I wouldn’t know it. “That’s half the class.”
“Half the class?”
I shrugged, settling back against the side of the recliner. “It’s better to be that way, I think. Unknown. Anonymous.”
“Why?”
“You don’t get burned by Dagmar Hagen, for one thing.” If Paige ever disappeared, everyone would be tripping over one another, fleeing from the possibility of becoming Dagmar’s new target.
I’d be right there with them.
My dad sighed. “Ah yes. The big D.”
He tapped his ear. The word came to me easily. “Dominating.”
“Demanding.”
“Diva.”
“Dreadful.”
I couldn’t argue with that. She was dreadful. “Yeah,” I said, conceding the point to him.
He set the comic book down on the coffee table, leaning forward in the seat and bowing his head so that he could look at me, partly upside down. “Is that how you like to be seen, Janey?” he asked.
“What?”
“Anonymous. Just a regular old face in the crowd?”
I blinked in surprise at the question. “Well, yeah.”
“Just Plain Jane?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m very glad that I don’t get Plain Jane at home.”
“Who do you get here?”
“Here, I get Janey. With an exclamation point. I get Janey!”
“Same thing.”
“Absolutely not. My Janey! is funny, interesting, witty. Nothing plain about her at all.”
Plain Jane wasn’t so bad, I thought. I’d been called worse, anyway. For a week, when I was nine, I’d been “the girl whose mother died.” That had been miserable. “You don’t know what it’s like, Dad.”
“Don’t I?”
“No.”
For some reason, that made him laugh. “Blissful ignorance! Achieved at last! My life is complete.”
“Dad!” I laughed too, in spite of myself. “Stop being weird.”
“I happen to enjoy being weird.”
“How are we related?”
“Only by blood, Janey.” He slid off the end of the recliner, folding up his long legs so that he could sit on the floor, squeezed between the recliner and the table, next to me. It was a tight fit. A funny fit. But his closeness always meant something to me. It made me think of the days, back in the house, when I’d wake up in the middle of the night, dreaming of giant monsters that gobbled up people. He’d come into my room, sit on the side of my bed, and stroke my hair until I fell back asleep. That always did the trick. Like magic.
Like a superpower.
“Plain Jane doesn’t make a lot of friends,” he said.
This was an old argument. Most parents longed for quiet, low-maintenance kids who never strayed from the path or broke the speed limit. My dad probably would have jumped for joy if I ever threw a party and trashed the apartment. “I’m fine, Dad,” I told him for the millionth time. “I like being a loner. It gives me…”
“Mystique?”
“Yeah.” Whatever that meant.
“Are you really so scared of someone like Dagmar Hagen disliking you that you’d rather be nothing more than a face in the crowd?” he asked.
“It’s better than getting picked on.”
“Is it?”
I closed my eyes, replaying scenes where she showed her temper. The time she’d kicked Paige’s towel into the pool during summer camp. The time she’d made fun of Paige’s jeans until she cried. The time she’d thrown Paige’s training bra into the boys’ locker room. “She’s brutal, Dad.”
“Then why isn’t she in detention where she belongs?”
“You try telling the teachers that the service-award-winning star of the soccer team is secretly a monster.”
“The way you talk, the other kids should be lining up to tell the teachers that.”
“And risk the team falling apart? Nuh-uh. Not going to happen. They’re going to go all the way this year. Crushing Kohn.”
“Uh-huh…”
“Besides, who else would show them the latest Joshua Goldman music video?” Or whatever.
“Yes. Where would we be without music videos?”
The scenes continued to play themselves out. The time Dagmar berated two girls for sitting with Paige at lunch. The time she’d compared Paige’s hair to a mop head. What was it about Paige? Was it that she looked like an easy target, with her delicate, birdlike limbs and secondhand clothes? Or was there more to it? I’d never really thought about it before.
“Believe me, Dad,” I said. “I’ve seen it. I just don’t want to get burned.”
“I see.”
But I didn’t think he saw. People always said “I see” when they didn’t really see at all. There was no way he could understand.
He wrapped an arm around me, his thumb brushing against the side of my shoulder. “Is Captain Superlative getting picked on?”
“You should hear the things everyone is saying about her.”
The scene outside of the auditorium played out again:
“She is such a freak!”
Dagmar said it with such poison in her voice, such fury, that for a second, she didn’t look like a rising pop sensation so much as a demon. Freak wasn’t just a word. It was a curse. Not like a cuss that would get you sent to the p
rincipal’s office (not that any teacher would believe Dagmar Hagen capable of swearing), but a spell that would derail the course of your destiny. There was nothing worse you could be called, nothing that made it clearer that you didn’t belong. Every school had the popular girls and the losers and the jocks and the smart kids and the theatre kids. But freaks? They weren’t a part of the social construct. They just didn’t belong.
“I’ll tell you one thing.”
My dad’s voice broke through the flashback. I opened my eyes, looking at him. “What?”
“If I were in your place,” he said, staring at the comic book on the coffee table, “I’d really like to know more about this Captain Superlative.”
He’d made that clear enough with all of his questions. But I just didn’t understand. “It’s just so—”
“Weird?”
“Weird. With a capital W.”
He touched his ear. “Wild.”
“Wacky.”
“Willful.”
“Wrong.”
“Wonderful.”
I faltered. “Wonderful?”
Repeating a word meant you lost. My dad gave me a triumphant little smile before standing up. His knees cracked. Once again he brushed his fingers against my hair. And then he started gathering up the coupons and newspapers. He wasn’t even counting to see who’d won. He just piled them all up and folded them into his pocket before grabbing the excess cuttings and carrying them out of the room and down the hall to be recycled.
I reached across the table, grabbing the pad of paper with the shopping list. I turned it to a new page and started to draw. Captain Superlative appeared, shooting through the sky. I added stars and comets and spinning planets with dozens of twirling moons. A blazing sun with dark spots and flares. The ballet of the universe. It was quite the picture. She was traveling faster than the speed of light, zooming from one galaxy to the next. She was—
It was so ridiculous!
I slapped the pad and pencil down on the table, shoving them away from me. Captain Superlative wasn’t about to go flying through the universe. She was just a girl. Just a normal girl. Somehow. Under all of that costuming.
I stared accusingly at the comic book. It was strange to feel angry at a few sheets of paper, but it kept giving my dad all these ideas. More upsettingly, my dad was giving me ideas.