Captain Superlative

by J. S. Puller

I don’t know where the momentum came from. The part of me that was my dad, maybe? I don’t know. Anyone else would have left well enough alone, I think. I just knew that I suddenly had a whirlwind of desire to follow her, to see where she went and what she did and who she was while doing it. I thought that maybe, once we left the school, she’d start to be herself. You know, a normal girl. But as I darted from tree to tree—dark bare branches cutting into a cloudy gray sky—Captain Superlative continued to zoom down the sidewalk with her arms out, the synthetic curls of her wig bouncing against her back. She was flying.

  Flaunting.

  Fearless.

  Free.

  The act went on.

  There wasn’t a lot of town, as far as Deerwood Park was concerned, of course. The school was set on a side street, surrounded by square little houses with white siding and gray rooftops. The end of the block turned into the downtown area. But downtown wasn’t much more than a few shops, a gas station, the post office, the ice rink, the movie theater, a burger place (without a drive-through), and the train station. The crown jewel of it all was the park: Sunset Ridge Park, a small, grassy area with a few benches, swings, monkey bars, and a slide. After that, nothing but a sea of houses and apartment buildings stretching out to the horizon.

  The weather was mild for the middle of January. For us, anyway. Usually, it was icy and cold in Deerwood Park, but this year, it was mostly just wet. The snow had melted, leaving slippery asphalt and dead, muddy grass. It was kind of disgusting. Like a half-finished painting.

  I could hear Captain Superlative’s footsteps slapping and splashing the ground, which helped me to follow her while keeping out of sight. And for someone running, she didn’t seem to be in a great hurry to get anywhere specific. She’d go for a few blocks, then stop to chat with someone, ending the conversation with “Have a good day, citizen!” and then run on. Other times, she would just stop and stare. At a tree. Or the paint peeling off of the side of a house. Or at the ground of the gas station, as if she were admiring the rainbows the sunlight cast in the oil slicks.

  We ran past Sunset Ridge, where Tyler Jeffries and some of his friends were tossing a football in the mucky grass, Kevin watching forlornly from the sidelines. “Hey, hey, hey!” Tyler said, running backward with his hands out and open. A boy tossed him the ball and he caught it, starting to dash to some invisible line.

  “Go, team!” Captain Superlative shouted at them as she came skidding to a stop. “Good luck, Tyler! I hope you win!”

  A couple of the boys laughed and elbowed each other in the ribs, but Tyler turned over his shoulder and smiled, his upper lip stretching out thin. “Thanks!” he said, raising his hand to wave at her.

  The other boys all slowly followed suit, waving shyly.

  To my surprise, he also waved to me. I did a double take. Well, no. That wasn’t possible. He didn’t know I existed. But before I could look again, he’d fallen down into the mud, tackled by his friend.

  “Hey! Foul!” he said, laughing as he rolled over onto his back.

  “Says who?” his friend asked.

  “Says me. It’s a touch game, remember?”

  His friend chuckled. “I’m sorry, was the football distracting you from your new superhero girlfriend?”

  “Nah, it’s not like that. I think she’s cool, that’s all.”

  “Of course you think she’s cool,” Kevin said. “She’s an even bigger ham than you are.”

  “Nothing wrong with being a ham,” Tyler replied.

  “I’m glad you’re so good at being a ham, Ty,” Kevin said.

  “Yeah,” the first one added, right on cue, “because you suck at football.”

  Tyler clasped both hands to his chest, letting out a strangled noise. “Zounds! I am murdered by thy cruel, cruel words!” Thrashing around, he rolled over on the ground, dying in the most epic of fashions.

  Kevin gave him a round of applause. “Bravo! Bravo!”

  That only seemed to encourage Tyler, who started to gurgle with his tongue sticking out.

  At least until his first friend shoved him down into the mud. It coated half of his face and left him coughing and spitting. “Now you can play the Phantom of the Opera.”

  Tyler pushed himself up on his hands. “Oh, I see how it is. You were doing me a favor.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly.”

  A couple of the boys started howling, as if they were singing opera music. They bent their arms, hiding their noses in their elbows, pretending that they were wearing capes. The game—touch or tackle or otherwise—turned into a complete free-for-all of Phantom versus Phantom.

  Tyler was so cute when he laughed.

  “That’s the spirit!” Captain Superlative said. With a wave, she started to run again, heading away from the game.

  Briefly, I considered lingering in the trees, just to watch Tyler. It was what any other girl would do, I was sure.

  But with a shake of my head I decided to keep following Captain Superlative.

  She continued to fly down the sidewalk. I thought that maybe she was heading home, but at the very edge of downtown, she veered to the left and headed toward the highway. It wasn’t a highway, really. But it was the only street in town with more than two lanes—it had a whole four. There were some office buildings peppered in among the apartment complexes. And in the distance, I could see the hospital and the boxy little grocery store.

  Was that where Captain Superlative was headed? Was she off to help pack vegetables or recycle cans or escort little old ladies to their cars, carrying their groceries for them? It seemed that way. At least, up until the very last minute.

  Captain Superlative went left when she should have gone right, zooming up the cracked walkway that led straight to the front entrance of the hospital. I stopped at the edge of the parking lot, watching as she cut between the parked cars and raced up the concrete ramp, disappearing through the automatic doors that parted for her. My foot hovered in the air, close to stepping down on the blacktop, but I couldn’t. I reeled back forcefully, almost losing my balance.

  The hospital.

  Horrible.

  Horrendous.

  Hopeless.

  No, I thought, clutching the charm on my necklace, I couldn’t go there.

  On the grassy knoll, across the street from the parking lot, there was a wrought-iron bench. A little gold plaque on the back of the seat announced that it was dedicated in loving memory of Betty Grossman. I didn’t know who she was, but I used to imagine that she was enormous, six feet tall and at least three hundred pounds. She had a laugh that rippled through her, shaking the very foundation of Deerwood Park. And she had kind eyes. Like my dad’s. I used to draw pictures of them in crayon and colored pencil while lying on my stomach across the bench. I’d spent a lot of time on that bench, I’d had a lot of time to doodle and dream and wonder.

  But I hadn’t been back in a while.

  More than three years.

  Not until today. I crossed the street, hurried by the shadow of the hospital on my back. It was the same as ever. I sat on the bench, feeling the coolness of the metal in the January air. Betty’s plaque was still there, although the letters had faded a little bit with time. I ran my finger along them, tracing out her name. Apparently, she’d been a loving daughter, sister, wife, and mother.

  Like my mother.

  She’s gone.

  I’d come out to sit on the bench for the last time when I was nine years old. My mother had just died. Cancer. The memories of that day were blurry, like the shards of shifting glass in a kaleidoscope. Formless. Changing. It made sense, though. At the age of nine, I was just starting to understand things like cancer and death. But not completely. I kept asking, over and over again, how something this unfair could happen. Why? Why her? Why now? And what was going to become of my family? I clung to my dad’s arm, terrified that I would lose him too. It made as much sense as anything else at that time. I begged him not to go into the hospital again to get h
er things. All I could really figure out was that my mother had gone into the hospital and now she wasn’t going to come out.

  Hospitals were monsters. They gobbled people up. And they were the form of my nightmares. When I was nine. And still sometimes after, although I no longer screamed for my dad to come make it better.

  I’d never set foot inside of one. Not since losing my mother. But I could still see the hospital walls, anytime I blinked. Clean and white and impersonal. And with that memory came another, more crystallized and solid.

  Third grade. A few days after my mother died. I came back to school to a barrage of drawings, notes, and letters from my classmates. Our teacher, Mr. Fisher, made them put the collection together. He’d even told them what to say. They were scrawled with the same sentence over and over again in marker and crayon and colored pencil:

  I’m glad you’re back and I’m really sorry your mother died.

  Every single one.

  I tried to get back into the normal routine, doing my times tables and my spelling words. But it was like a bubble of air had been formed around me. My classmates kept their distance. They watched me like some kind of curiosity in a carnival or a strange exhibit in a museum.

  And that afternoon, when I sat down on the bench beside April—my best friend in the whole world—to wait for my dad to pick me up, she scooted away from me. She tried to be subtle about it, but third graders (and Aprils) are never subtle. I saw what she did. I saw how terrified she was to let her arm brush against mine. And the way she watched me out of the corners of her eyes, in case I made any sudden movements, in case I tried to come nearer.

  When her dad came to pick her up, wearing his crisp blue police uniform, she flung herself at him, full throttle, burying her face in his stomach. He knelt down to ask her what was wrong, but she just started wailing.

  That was when I figured it out. They were scared of me. I was different. I was strange.

  I was a freak.

  I blinked myself back into the present, breathing a sigh of relief that that incident had been forgotten.

  Mostly.

  I was pretty sure April had forgotten we were ever friends, anyway. I hadn’t really spoken to her since that day.

  And now I imagined Captain Superlative in the hospital, a splash of color against the sterile white of the corridors, shouting, “Captain Superlative is here to make all troubles disappear!”

  If good deeds were her favorite things, then a hospital was definitely the right place for her. I could see her racing through the halls, so busy with tasks that she never stopped for a second, never even noticed the terribleness written across the very walls of the building. She brought patients Jell-O, affectionately telling them that red was the best flavor. She cheered up the nursing staff with cheesy jokes. (“The doctor said to the nurse, ‘Did you take that patient’s temperature?’ The nurse said, ‘No, Doctor. Why? Is it missing?’”) It suddenly made sense why she’d so expertly been able to help Kevin in his wheelchair. She was in there, wheeling people from one place to the next on a regular basis, wasn’t she?

  And she definitely donated blood.

  She probably had AB negative, which we’d learned in Science last year was the rarest blood type.

  “Have a pint on me,” she would say, stretching out her arm, offering up a vein, unafraid of needles or pain.

  It was easy to come up with a thousand things she could be doing in there. And exhausting. But what I couldn’t figure out was what was behind it all. I knew there had to be something, but…what? All I could say for certain was that she definitely wasn’t an alien or a mutant.

  I must have been there for hours. I felt stupid just sitting alone on a bench, so I took out my math worksheet and halfheartedly filled in the answers, before turning it over to draw a few tropical starfish like the ones in my dad’s waiting room, swimming through a coral reef. I got cold and then numb. And so tired of sitting still. But as the hours ticked by, more and more I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off of the automatic doors. Hospitals weren’t really monsters. I knew that. She had to come out again sometime.

  She had to.

  And she did.

  The sun was gone, the slate-gray sky slowly turning to charcoal. It made the red of her cape and the blue of her wig more vivid when she appeared. But what was more shocking was the fact that she wasn’t alone. A man and a woman were standing with her, each of them holding one of her hands. The man was wearing a suit, with a tie covered in crisscrossing stripes. He had thin black hair in a ring around his otherwise bald head. The woman was in a gray pencil skirt and high heels, her shiny black hair pulled back behind her head with a big plastic clip.

  I don’t know why I was so surprised to see them with her. It’s not like I really thought that she just rose out of the ocean one day. Even superheroes had to have parents, didn’t they?

  The three of them made their way through the parking lot. Her dad walked in front, leading the way, while she and her mother followed under a shared umbrella, holding hands. I thought they were heading to a car, but instead they turned onto the sidewalk and started walking back into town. I scooted forward to the edge of the bench, watching them until I was afraid I would lose them. Then I sprang up and started following.

  I heard Captain Superlative say something to her mother, but I couldn’t understand it. Wolly? Woolly?

  Her mother replied. She had a firm but kind voice. The type of voice a strict kindergarten teacher would have. But I couldn’t understand her either. I realized that they weren’t speaking English. What was it, though? Chinese, maybe?

  How would I know?

  Her dad looked back over his shoulder and made a remark of some kind. Both of them smiled.

  The walk wasn’t very long. I noticed that they didn’t say much. Captain Superlative and her mother never let go of each other’s hand, but there was no small talk, no joking around or teasing. Neither of her parents was asking her about her day. They didn’t seem to be playing any games or negotiating what they were going to watch on TV. She wasn’t asked to take off her mask, neon wig, and cape. They just walked together until they finally turned up a driveway.

  And you know something? Even though I was expecting it to have purple siding and a million flamingos on the front lawn, Captain Superlative’s house was about as normal as normal could be. A small, squat redbrick home with a welcome mat on the front step.

  And a name on the mailbox.

  As Captain Superlative and her parents disappeared through the front door, I spotted it. Written out in gold letters, along the side of the post that held the box: Li. My first clue to Captain Superlative’s identity, a last name.

  Li.

  Jackpot!

  Joy!

  Jubilation!

  The school library was a big square room off of the computer lab. One entire wall was made up of windows, looking out into the hallway. The other walls were covered in bookshelves, mostly with reference books, nonfiction, and copies of our textbooks. Along the half of the room closest to the windows were round tables, some with only two chairs, some with up to eight. As I headed inside, I noticed that there was no one sitting at the tables. No surprise, I guess. It was lunch period. But I’d never seen the library look so deserted. There wasn’t even a librarian sitting behind the counter. I felt like I was the only living soul in the universe, along with my heartbeat and my breathlessness and my single, solitary purpose.

  Rows and rows of bookshelves stretched across the length of the far end of the room, beyond the tables, like the walls of a neat and orderly garden maze. These were the fiction shelves. But there was another, smaller shelf sitting beside the librarian’s desk, with the yearbooks from every class as far back as the school went, from last year all the way back to the black-and-white years. I swiped the yearbook with the red cover, the timber-wolf logo of our school emblazoned across the front. Last year’s design. And with a quick glance from side to side, just in case anyone was watching, I dove into the s
hadows of the bookshelves, hiding from the windows.

  Someone named Li. Someone in my grade, whose picture was hidden in the carefully organized rows of photos from last year’s sixth graders. I sank down to the ground, resting the yearbook on my thighs, clumsily thumbing through the pages. I couldn’t quite figure out if I was nervous or excited. They felt the same. And I couldn’t figure out why I would be nervous or excited. But I knew that I was close to uncovering the secret of Captain Superlative’s identity. And somehow, I was sure, if I could just do that, I could understand why she was so…weird.

  Li, Li, Li.

  The pictures were arranged alphabetically, first by grade, then by last name. And there were only five million Lis among last year’s sixth graders. Well. Okay. Maybe six, but it was still a lot. Their unblinking eyes stared up at me from the page. It was easy to eliminate the two boys, but that left four possible girls. I remembered Virginia Li, a girl with a toothy grin and an obsession with all things pink. She’d packed her pink suitcase and moved away last summer, though, when her dad was transferred to another fort. Jennie Li was one of those kids who made it clear that she didn’t care about anything except school. She was too busy giving Dagmar a run for her money as top of the class to bother with costumes. Meredith Li was a soccer player, proudly wearing her uniform in her photo. Dagmar and April would have known her in an instant, obviously. Most kids would have. The soccer players were very hard to misplace.

  So it was Caitlyn Li who jumped out at me.

  She was a petite girl, one I didn’t know very well. Vaguely, I seemed to remember that her family had moved to Deerwood Park from China, sometime back in third grade. It was the only thing that had made her remarkable and, after our teacher, Mr. Fisher, made the appropriate introductions, she’d been quickly forgotten. She had a shining curtain of black hair, cut to her shoulders, and delicate, graceful features. Her dark eyes gleamed, like she knew a secret that I didn’t know. I slid my index finger over the top of her face, trying to imagine her with a mask and bright blue wig. I could actually see it. Caitlyn Li could be…