by J. S. Puller
“Hi, Paige,” Captain Superlative said as Paige dropped her things on the table.
“What are you doing?” I asked, nodding to the dictionary.
Paige laughed. “Writing a song.”
“What’s it called?” Captain Superlative asked.
“I think it’s called ‘The Girl Next Door,’” Paige said.
“You think?”
“I’m not sure yet. Songs have a way of deciding these things for you, once you finish them.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I’m still working on the tune. It’ll probably go something like this.” Paige closed her eyes and hummed for a moment, before she actually sang:
The demons are people
And the people are demons
And the scales of justice
Will never be even
When life gets you down
The demons make it worse
Of all the things I’ve learned
This lesson was my first
I was astonished. Paige’s voice was so sweet, so beautiful. Like birdsong. It hung in the air even after she was done. And I wasn’t sure whether to applaud or cry or what. Captain Superlative frowned though, tilting her head. “Why’s it called ‘The Girl Next Door’?”
Paige shook her head. “I don’t know yet. I’ll figure it out.”
The rest of the day was more of the same. Between classes, Captain Superlative and I walked the halls. I spent my free period in the library with her, going from table to table, offering help to the sixth graders on the material that I’d already learned. Captain Superlative was better with social studies and math, but I actually knew more of the answers to their questions about science and language arts.
“We complement each other nicely,” she said as we left one table of grateful kids studying for a quiz.
“I guess we do.”
After the final bell, I skipped out of my class, racing to the front entrance. There were two sets of double doors, and now there were two of us to (wo)man them. Captain Superlative took the left. I took the right. We opened them when there were people who needed to get through. Closed them to keep out the cold air when there weren’t.
“Getting twice as much work done!” Captain Superlative said.
“Yeah.” It was true.
“You show that door who’s boss! Give it a good ‘boom’ next time.”
I laughed. “I’m not going to do that.”
“Give it a try, it’ll be fun. Watch!” She opened the door for a pair of eighth graders. “Boom!”
I shook my head.
“Try it, Janey!”
It was so silly, but when I opened the door for Mr. Collins, I shouted, “Kapow!”
“That’s the spirit!”
Tuesday ended without any disasters. I found myself feeling giddy with excitement when I told my dad about my adventures. And proud. Proud of myself, even if I’d only done the little things.
He was proud of me too. I could tell because he said so—and because he decided we should go to the movies, even though it was a school night.
“Not that superheroes should expect rewards,” he warned me as we got into the car.
“I know, Dad.”
“They’re not in it for the money or the product endorsements.”
I pictured Captain Superlative’s face on a box of cereal and couldn’t stop laughing.
Dagmar was back the next day. I didn’t see her all morning, but I felt her presence everywhere. There were whispers in the halls. And this time, kids stopped to whisper to me. “She’s in a bad mood,” Kevin Marks said, with a conspiratorial glance to one side. “Nasty black eye. I think she took a soccer ball to the face.”
“That doesn’t sound fun,” I said.
“Nope,” he agreed, wheeling himself through the auditorium door I was holding open. “Thanks, Janey!”
“She didn’t get hit in the face,” April said, when I picked up a calculator that had fallen out of her bag. “She wasn’t even at practice yesterday. Her mom took her to a spa! You know, one of those super-fancy, fabulous places where you can get all kinds of cool, weird treatments that clean out your pores and stuff.”
I had no idea what she meant, really. But I’d never heard of someone coming back from a luxury spa with a black eye before. “That’s weird,” I said.
April shrugged. “That’s Dagmar. Thanks, Janey.” And off she went, shoving the calculator back into her bag. Right before she reached the bend in the hallway, though, she turned to look over her shoulder at me. “Hey, Janey?”
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t we hang out anymore?”
“I…” How did I put that into words? Because you started treating me like a freak after my mother died? Did she not even remember? She’d been the one to end our friendship.
Hadn’t she?
“I miss you,” she continued. “That’s all.”
And she was gone.
“Believe me, it’s not from a spa,” Paige said, when I sat down at her table during lunch, recounting the story with more than a little confusion.
“What happened?”
Paige frowned slightly, closing her dictionary over a piece of loose-leaf paper with the latest verses of what I assumed was her song. I saw the words people and demons, anyway. “It’s kind of complicated. And I’m not sure I should say. How much do you know about Dagmar’s family?”
“I know that her mother is some kind of sophisticated and fashion—”
A shadow fell over us.
There was Dagmar, as golden as ever. She wore a red dress with a gold thread pattern in the fabric. Her curls were loose, falling around her neck and shoulders. They almost pulled the attention away from the heavily caked makeup around her black eye. Almost.
Her gaze zeroed in on Paige, the way it had a thousand times before. But this was the thousand-and-first time. Things were different now. I put my hands down on the table and stood up, partly blocking her view. I could do that now that I wasn’t just air. I was a solid person, with a shape and with substance.
And a mission.
“Hi, Dagmar,” I said.
“Dagmar! You’re back!” Captain Superlative came loping over to us from another table, where she’d been helping some sixth graders with math.
Dagmar whirled around, first looking at her, then back at me.
“Do you want to sit with us?” Captain Superlative asked, gesturing to an empty stretch of bench beside Paige. “We could talk or something.”
I smiled.
Powerless rage flickered in Dagmar’s eyes. There was a hunger in her, an aching need to rip someone’s throat out. I saw her fingers twitch. Would she do it? The cafeteria got quiet as more kids turned to look at us. Dagmar thrived on an audience. But this particular audience was made up of witnesses. I hadn’t realized how much goodwill Captain Superlative had built in the school so quickly.
Dagmar felt it too, I think.
“Hey, is there a problem over there?” Tyler and a few of his friends, two tables away, had turned to watch with everyone else.
Dagmar’s eyes flicked back and forth, from Tyler to me and Captain Superlative. Angrily, she slammed her palm on the top of the table, shaking our cartons of milk. With a snarl, she turned around, stalking out of the cafeteria. Not even April made to follow her. We all just watched her through the glass as she blazed down the hall and disappeared.
Captain Superlative frowned a little, shaking her head. She seemed lost in her own thoughts, until someone across the room dropped a fork and startled her back to the present. It had gotten incredibly quiet.
How many times had we seen the story go the other way? All too often it was Dagmar who sent someone else running from the room, fighting back tears at a witty comeback or the crushing pain of humiliation. It had never been like this before. Never. I think we knew that this was an important moment, even if no one was prepared to say as much. Maybe because we were still in it. It’s hard to reflect on a moment you�
��re still living inside of.
The fork broke the silence. And the cafeteria returned to normal, everyone chatting and laughing and joking around.
Only Paige was quiet. She looked like she wanted to say something, but when I looked over at her, inviting her to speak, she shook her head and went back to working on her song.
I let it pass without another thought.
It was another moment.
I’d figure it out, eventually.
“You should draw something on Ms. Hinton’s board,” Captain Superlative said to me one afternoon.
Three weeks, and what felt like a lifetime, had gone by. It was more than a little surreal to go from being part of absolutely zero clubs to being a member of the most exclusive one in school. But being with Captain Superlative meant a new adventure every day. We had our regular duties, of course. We (wo)manned the doors in the mornings and afternoons, teaching them—those monsters, as Captain Superlative called them—a lesson they would never forget. We helped pick up books and papers and pencils in the bustling hallways. We became Paige’s personal hallway escorts. We passed out mints in the cafeteria every time we knew about a big test. We even helped scrub the dry-erase boards at the end of the day.
We were in Ms. Hinton’s room when Captain Superlative made the suggestion. I turned and gave her a bewildered look. “What?”
“I’ve seen the way you doodle,” she said, standing up on her tiptoes. She could just barely reach the top of the board with the very end of the eraser. “You’re really good.”
I reached over with my own eraser to help her with the high parts. “You think so?”
“Yeah.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek. “What would I even draw?”
Captain Superlative shrugged. “How about a moose?”
“Why a moose?”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never drawn a moose before.”
“Give it a shot.”
The moose ended up looking more like a lopsided egg with two hands sticking out of it, but Ms. Hinton said she loved it anyway.
The weeks went by and Captain Superlative continued to push me to pick a superhero name—which made me think more about her name. Superlative. It came from deep inside her, a need to be bigger, better, bestest. Our regular duties were just that to her. Regular. “There has to be more,” she would mutter, more to herself than to me.
“Like what?” I would ask.
“Something.”
Our work started to move beyond Deerwood Park Middle School. Captain Superlative almost always had something important after school. But on the days when she had time, she’d walk home with me. It started with one of those walks. Someone had tossed an empty plastic bottle on the sidewalk and I accidentally kicked it. It went skipping down the sidewalk, turning end over end with a few hollow clanks before it fell on its side and rolled toward the curb. Captain Superlative stopped and scooped it up. I wrinkled my nose. “Ew.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got my gloves.” For a moment, she just stared at the bottle, as if it held the secret of the universe somewhere. Then the moment seemed to pass and we continued walking.
A few squares of sidewalk later, she stopped again, this time to grab a crushed tin can from the gutter beside the curb. I shook my head. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll drop these in the recycling bin when I get home,” she said. “The town is a citizen too! It’s not just people who need our help.”
“That’s gross.”
“You’re just intimidated.”
“Intimidated?”
She puffed out her chest a little, eyes gleaming underneath her mask. “Yeah. Because you know that you can’t pick up more than me before we get to your apartment.”
I immediately knew what she was doing. And I wasn’t about to let her goad me into it. “I have longer arms,” I replied with a dismissive shrug. “I can hold more stuff.” And I put a firm nod on the end of the sentence. To indicate it was the end.
It wasn’t.
“Prove it.”
She went loping ahead, snatching a flattened french fries box. She looked over her shoulder at me, but I just shook my head. “I’m not playing that game.”
“Yes you are!” She shot ahead again, this time to grab another crushed can. “Come on, Janey. Catch up! I’m ahead of you.”
“I’m not doing it!” I said, cupping my hands around my mouth. I had to press the corners of my lips together to keep from smiling, though.
“You can go faster than that!” She lurched forward for an abandoned coffee cup with the name Mark written on the side.
“Nope!”
“Come on, Janey!”
“I will not.” But I could feel it. I could feel the urge to chase after her building up inside of me, tingling up my legs and getting my heart racing like a drumbeat.
“Come on!”
It was too delicious to resist. I followed her down the sidewalk as she half goaded, half encouraged me, clapping the bottle against the coffee cup. Faster and faster. The wind swept my hair back from my face, exposing my neck and shoulders. With every step, I felt myself becoming lighter. The world had relinquished its hold on me, and I knew that any second I’d be in the stratosphere, bound for the stars.
So this is what it feels like to fly.
Just like that, the world outside the school was equally under our protection. We’d swing by the supermarket and help people load groceries (my idea). We’d stop to scrape up the ice along the walkway (hers). Or we might brush the fine and powdery snow of a fresh flurry off parked cars (both of us, really). And always, we stayed true to Captain Superlative’s mission to cheer people up. One day, we stopped just to watch Tyler and his friends play football in the park, her cheering for one team, me cheering for the other. (I miraculously ended up cheering for Tyler’s team.)
Once—although I’d invited her many times before—Captain Superlative stayed at my apartment for dinner. My dad was falling over himself to be a good host. He told a thousand jokes. He and Captain Superlative struck up an animated conversation about their favorite superheroes (my dad liked Batman, Captain Superlative liked Hawkgirl, but they both agreed that Spider-Man was terrific). He made all of his best recipes. Most amazing of all, he even excused me from dish duty, insisting that the two of us should go hide out in my room.
“Spend some quality time in the Fortress of Solitude,” he said, shooing us out of the kitchen with a dishrag. “I’m sure you have plots to plot and schemes to scheme.”
I had no idea what that meant.
But Captain Superlative had the answer. As soon as I closed the door, her eyes widened beneath her mask and she suggested we cut out valentines for everyone in the seventh grade. It was no fun when you didn’t get a valentine on Valentine’s Day. We owed it to our fellow citizens to spread the love.
We got busy cutting and drawing.
“I don’t remember how it works,” she said, sitting with the soles of her feet pressed together on the end of my bed, cutting a heart out of some red construction paper. Selina was nestled in between her legs, purring loud enough for me to hear.
“I say the word,” I said. “And then you have to come up with a word that starts with the same letter and means something similar.”
“I think you’d pretty much beat me every time,” she said, shaking her head.
“I could start you off easy?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about peaceful?”
“Peaceful…pleasant?”
“That’s a good one!” I said, giving her a grin. “Then I would say something like pacifying.”
“Is that really a word?”
“Of course. You’ve never heard it before?”
“English isn’t my first language, Janey.”
“It isn’t?”
She shook her head, setting the heart onto the pile by her side. My job was to draw something on each heart, then put it into another pile. I cou
ldn’t think of anything clever to draw, mostly just valentine-y stuff. Kissy lips and flowers. Later, we’d decorate them with glitter and stickers. My yearbook from last year sat open on my desk, with the pictures and names of all of our classmates, so that we could address them personally. That was the most important part, Captain Superlative told me.
As I started to draw a silhouette of a cupid with a bow and arrow, I watched Captain Superlative work. Of course, unmasking her as Caitlyn Li meant that I knew she was Chinese, but somehow I’d forgotten. She wasn’t a person, not really. She was a force of nature. And a force of nature had no first language. It spoke every language without saying a word.
I wondered what else I didn’t know about Captain Superlative.
“You know what we should do?” she asked.
“What?”
“We should—” She broke off suddenly, coughing. “We should—” She couldn’t stop coughing. Just like when she laughed, she put her whole body into it, shoulders bunching up, head dropping into her hands.
“Are you okay?”
Her face turned bright pink under the mask. “Excuse—” Cough. “Me—” Cough. “A second.” She shot out of my room, crossed the hall to the bathroom, and slammed the door, leaving Selina in a confused pile on the floor. She looked up at me and mewed pitifully. I just shrugged.
I heard the sink running under the continued sound of her coughing fit. Slowly, she got the cough under control. Another minute or two and she came back, face still pink and damp, but smiling all the same.
“What was that?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
It didn’t sound like nothing.
“Yeah. And hey, I had an idea.” She sank down on the bed again. “We should put a little picture by each person’s name, representing one of the clubs they list in the yearbook. That would really personalize it.”
“I don’t know,” I said, wrinkling up my nose. “What do you draw that represents the quiz bowl team?”
“You’re the artist,” she said. I liked that she called me that. “You tell me.”
I considered it a moment. “I could draw one of those funny graduation hats. What are they called?”