Captain Superlative

by J. S. Puller

  Not exactly a concrete answer.

  So the Li house was uncharted territory for me.

  I stood at the spot where the sidewalk met the driveway, staring up at the small, squat redbrick home. There were two windows over the garage. The curtains—an inexplicable neon shade of green—were drawn. I knew that Captain Superlative was in that room. I felt her presence on the other side of the glass, just as sure as I felt it whenever she was standing behind my shoulder.

  But why? Why was she in a place shut out of the light, instead of zooming through the halls, her arms raised above her head, flying?

  Why wasn’t she with me?

  Each step I took toward the welcome mat on the front stoop felt heavy, like a part of me didn’t want to take the next step. The dark, weighty dread felt like lifting a million pounds when I raised my finger to press the doorbell.

  The cheeriness of the chime was out of place.

  After a moment, Mrs. Li opened the front door. She was just like I remembered her, wearing a pencil skirt and a clip in her glossy black hair. The only difference was that she was wearing a strange pair of slippers instead of heels. Her dark eyes peered out at me, over the tops of a tiny pair of glasses. “Hello,” she said. She had a strong accent, and that same firm tenderness I remembered from the hospital.

  “Hi.”

  A pause. She waited patiently, but when I didn’t speak, she asked, “May I help you?”

  “Uh, I was looking for Captain Su…I mean…Caitlyn.” It felt unnatural to call her that.

  “Oh.” There was something inside of that “oh” that sounded fearful.

  “I’m a friend of hers,” I said quickly. “Janey. Jane Silverman.”

  “Yes. She has mentioned you. Quite a bit.” Her smile was hollow, not quite reaching her eyes.

  “She wasn’t in school today, so I wondered—”

  “Today was a bad day.”

  I stood there, blinking, uncomprehending. “Bad day?”

  “The whole week has been bad.”

  “Bad week? What do you mean?” Somehow I didn’t think Captain Superlative was capable of having a bad day, let alone a bad week. Not even a bad second.

  “The treatments have been making her tired.”

  “Treatments?” The word didn’t make sense. I mean, I knew it was a word. My dad used it plenty, talking about medications and procedures for his animals. But what did it have to do with Captain Superlative?

  Mrs. Li pursed her lips. “She did not tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” I hadn’t seen her all week. Hadn’t heard from her.

  “I think, perhaps, you should come back tomorrow and—”

  “What’s going on?” I didn’t mean to interrupt. And I didn’t mean for my voice to suddenly get high and tight.

  “I am not sure if I should be the one to tell you, Jane.”

  What did that even mean? “Tell me what?”

  She sighed softly, rubbing her eye underneath one lens of her glasses as she let out a few words in what I assumed was Chinese. After a second or two, she seemed to make a decision, stepping out of the doorway and gesturing for me to come inside. Beside the door, under a gurgling little fountain with stones and bamboo shoots, I saw a neat row of shoes and boots, including Captain Superlative’s red high-top sneakers. Mrs. Li didn’t say anything, but she nodded toward the line of shoes, indicating that I should take mine off.

  Numbly, I took off my shoes and lined them up next to the red high-tops.

  The Li house was all straight lines and even spaces, from the way the art was hung on the walls to the arrangement of the furniture. She led me through a living room with carefully placed furniture to an immaculately clean kitchen—one that smelled faintly of ginger. It was yellow. Plants sat on top of all of the cabinets, giving it a warm, forest-y feel. A couple of bubbling pots sat on the stove. Mrs. Li sat me down at the wooden kitchen table. “Let me pour you some tea,” she said.

  I sat up, about to object, but she’d already turned her back on me, fussing with the electric teakettle.

  I took a moment to study the kitchen. At first glance, it was no different from any other kitchen, but small details started to jump out at me. There were a few personal touches here and there: dragon-trimmed dishware, red lanterns hanging from the ceiling, a jade dragon standing guard on the counter over a leather-bound book with Chinese characters stamped on the cover in gold. Turning my head slightly to one side, I saw that the book was a photo album, like you would find in any other house.

  Nice. But nothing superlative.

  Captain Superlative’s mother had a cup of tea, a bowl of chunks of fruit with toothpicks stuck in them, and a plate of almond cookies down in front of me before she finally sat in the chair across the table. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I felt like she was stalling. She ran her fingers over her skirt, smoothing it against her thighs. I noticed that her hands were unsteady.

  “Thank you,” I said, looking down at the tea.

  “Would you like different cookies? I have some Oreos in the pantry.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Chocolate chip?”

  “I’m all right.”

  I wasn’t all right.

  She nodded slightly and sat there, watching me. Feeling entirely too exposed, I picked up the cup and took a small sip. I didn’t like tea, but I managed to swallow it down, scalding my tongue a little. I gave her a smile and she seemed somewhat reassured. “It’s very good.”

  “Good.”

  An awkward silence followed, before I exhaled through my nose. “I’d like to see…Caitlyn.”

  “She is upstairs. Recovering. Have a cookie.”

  “Recovering from what?”

  “The treatment.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Mrs. Li took off her glasses, carefully folding them up and setting them down on the table. She clutched her hands in a formal sort of way. I felt myself bracing for some kind of collision. “Caitlyn is sick.”

  “Sick.”

  And I immediately knew. Maybe not in the part of my mind that did the thinking. That part was probably trying very hard not to understand, to protect me. It was more in the part of me that remembered the way my dad used to say the word when he was talking about my mother:

  Sick.

  The weight hanging in the middle. Like the vowel sound was stuck on a piece of gum, gluing the word in the air.

  Your mother is sick.

  She wasn’t talking about the flu.

  Heat started to well up in my eyes and I found myself gripping my necklace again, so tight that it drove the sharp points of the star into my palm. Why did people do that? Why did they talk around unpleasant things with everyday words like sick that could mean anything? I could never really figure it out. Not when I was nine and just starting to understand things. Not now either.

  Life, I guess, was easier when you could say the bad thing without actually saying the bad thing.

  I realized that I had been silent for…a minute? An hour? A year? Captain Superlative’s mother sat there patiently, waiting for me. “I’m sorry,” I said in a mumble. “Sick?”

  “Caitlyn has JMML.”

  “What?”

  “Juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia.”

  Leukemia. It was a word I knew like my own name. A word that had taken my mother away from me. I’m not sure which was harder, Mrs. Li having to say it or me having to hear it. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t a competition. “Cancer,” I said in a voice that was barely above a whisper.

  “Yes.”

  The hospital. The monster that gobbled up people and never let them go. She hadn’t been there trying to help other people. She’d been there for herself. For herself. For medicine. For chemicals being pumped into her system. For treatments. Treatments that were leading to bad seconds and bad days and bad weeks. “She didn’t tell me.” The words came out sharp.

  “I do not think she wanted anyone to know.”

  “I want to
see her.”

  Mrs. Li shook her head. “She needs to rest.”

  “I want to see her.”

  She opened her mouth. And then closed it. Hard. I should have cared more that I was being rude. But a frantic energy was taking hold of me. The kind that could turn into almost anything.

  “Wait here,” she said, standing up. “I will go see if she is awake.”

  Captain Superlative’s mother slipped out of the room. Her slippered feet padded up the stairs, going around a corner. The floorboards above me creaked with age. There weren’t any voices, though.

  I leaned over and grabbed the photo album, setting it down on the table and opening it up. Perfectly normal, perfectly happy faces smiled back at me. A husband and a wife and their lovely daughter, Caitlyn, looking just like her picture in the yearbook with that glossy curtain of black hair. They were posing in front of the Museum of Science and Industry. They were lined up along the railing of Wrigley Field. They were standing in front of Deerwood Park Elementary School, sending little Caitlyn off on her first day of classes. No capes or masks or wigs. There was nothing to hide then. They vanished into the woodwork of normal.

  Like people were supposed to.

  The floorboards creaked again, and I snapped the photo album shut, sliding it back into place. The unseeing eyes of the jade dragon were the only witness to my crime. Her mother appeared two seconds later, working her hands against each other. “She says you can come up. For a little while. Just take the stairs. First door on the left, once you get to the landing. Go ahead in.”

  I stood up, mumbling my thanks like I was supposed to. I followed the line of her hand as she gestured around the corner, taking the steps one at a time, my hand sliding along the wooden banister. The numbness was beginning to unravel at the edges, fraying into deep anxiety.

  Agitation.

  Aggression.

  Anger.

  Captain Superlative’s bedroom, at least, lived up to expectations. In a way. It was a clash between normal and a freak show. The neon-green curtains hung beside bland beige wallpaper with a pattern of cabbage roses. Scattered across the plain white ceiling were glow-in-the-dark stars, stuck on with putty that oozed out between the points. They were arranged in constellations I didn’t recognize, telling stories that I didn’t know.

  On the walls were posters. Larger-than-life superheroes stood with their hands on their hips, their chests open and exposed, their chins raised in defiance. Their bright colors were at odds with the cabbage roses, as if defying them. Beneath the posters, dozens upon dozens of comic books littered the floors, intermingling with valentines and homemade posters for Dagmar’s Valentine’s Day dance queen campaign. They were ones I hadn’t seen. And they were in Captain Superlative’s handwriting.

  Her bed had a neat little dust ruffle—snow white—peeking out from underneath a tie-dyed comforter that was an explosion of pink and yellow and blue. She was sitting up against half a dozen mismatched pillows on her sturdy, solid headboard, wearing bright pink pj’s that were absolutely hanging off of her frail, tiny frame. Her wig was lopsided, like she’d just put it on very quickly. And for once, she wasn’t wearing her mask.

  Outside of the yearbook pictures and the photo album, it was the first time I’d seen Caitlyn Li’s face. She didn’t exactly look like the pictures. Her face was gaunt, the lines of her cheeks curving inward slightly, giving her cheekbones an angular quality. Her face was colorless and dull, except for the dark purple bags under her eyes that were painful to look at. The only thing that was the same was the smile, which shone just as brightly as in the photos, as in the halls, from underneath the frayed edge of her mask. She was happy to see me. Happy.

  It made me want to explode.

  “Did you help a lot of citizens in school today?” she asked without any preamble. “I hope you were manning the doors.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice came out fierce and sharp, and I didn’t even care.

  There was no way to hide her expression from me now. Her smile faltered and the lines around her eyes hardened. The tone hit her. Almost like a slap to the face, which made me disgustingly happy. “Tell you what?” Her voice was wary. As well it should have been.

  “You know what.”

  I half expected her to squirm and claim she had no idea. People did that sometimes. It was to be expected. But what she said was even more infuriating. “It just didn’t come up.” She turned decisively to her nightstand, ramping up the speed of a small electric fan that had been whirling with all the urgency of a mini-golf windmill.

  Didn’t come up? Didn’t come up? We weren’t talking about the weather or the color of her socks! “That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s not an excuse.” She made a big show out of fluffing one of her pillows as the wind blew in her face. It was pale pink with a gray-and-white skunk embroidered across the middle, framed with a thin line of white lace. “You never asked me if I was sick.”

  “That’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to ask.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not the sort of thing that I want to talk about. I’ve been talking about it my whole life.” She gave an exasperated sigh. “It started when I was two. I thought it was over and done with, but it’s not. It’s just not.” She wrinkled her nose, sinking back. “It’s never over.”

  “You should have told me!” I made a futile, useless gesture, as though I wanted to hit something. But there was nothing to hit.

  “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? You’re sorry?”

  “Yes.” She looked me dead in the eyes. “Sorry.”

  Did she think she actually had superpowers? Did she believe that a magic word was going to sweep away the things she wanted to disappear? I shook my head. Magic wasn’t real. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because!” How could she not understand something like that? “Because it’s not!”

  “Life doesn’t always have to be so complicated, Janey.”

  “It’s life!” Complicated seemed like as good a definition of life as any I’d ever heard.

  “Well, why do you think I wanted to become a superhero?”

  The question came out of nowhere. “What?”

  She brightened a little bit, in that way of hers. “There’s nothing complicated about that. It feels right.” She shrugged. “It’s easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “You just have to do the right thing. You don’t have to worry about what people think. You don’t have to dress like other people dress. You don’t have to be afraid of anything.” I saw a change come over her, one I hadn’t anticipated. The brightness faded. Before, I’d seen her without any cloth over her face. But now—now I was finally seeing Caitlyn Li without a mask. “Superheroes are more themselves than anyone else. They’re strong. Smart. Capable. Superheroes are never scared of the dark.”

  “So that’s the reason.” I was back in the library, back in that day that we never seemed to talk about, holding the yearbook in my lap, wondering why anyone would suddenly decide to become a superhero. I’d never come up with a real answer, but even in guessing, I would never have imagined this. I couldn’t have. It was just too strange and horrible. “That’s the real reason.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why you wanted to do this whole superhero thing. It wasn’t about doing good. It was about being…” I struggled to find the right word. “Selfish. You’re being selfish!”

  Caitlyn sat up in bed. “What?”

  “Yeah!” There was no turning back. “Yeah! That’s exactly it!” I kicked one of the comic books on the floor, glaring at it. This was the source of the infection, what had driven her insane. I suddenly wanted to rip all of them to pieces.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You were doing it for you! Because superheroes are never afraid!” It made so much sense to me that I barely even heard her. I’d solved my puzzle. I just didn’t like the
answer.

  “Janey! That’s not the reason!”

  “And you are. You’re afraid. Don’t lie!”

  “Well, of course I’m afraid!”

  It should have felt like a victory. It was. I’d been right. But I felt a hollowness settle over the room instead. Caitlyn couldn’t look at me. She fidgeted, reaching under her comforter and pulling out a red sheet. Her cape, I realized, seeing the big C glued to the back. She held it against her shoulder like a security blanket. Which was what it had been, all along.

  A lucky red security blanket.

  “I don’t want to die,” she said quietly. “My parents had plans for me. I had plans for me. But I’m going to. We thought it was gone, but it’s not. It’s here, and it’s here to stay, and I’m going to die. We all are, eventually. But a little bit sooner for me.” Her voice got bigger again. “I don’t want to go without actually being someone first. I don’t want to go quietly.”

  “That’s what people do,” I said.

  Caitlyn shook her head. “You can’t tell me how to die any more than you can tell me how to live.”

  It sounded too much like a riddle. Like something a comic-book character would say. “This isn’t how people face death!” I kicked another one of the comic books. I wanted to reach out and shake her. I wanted to drag her down to the photo album and show her all of those pictures, remind her that she was normal.

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I’ve seen it!”

  She frowned. “Your mother?”

  It was a part of me I didn’t want to share. Least of all with her, least of all with someone I didn’t feel like I could trust. “Don’t talk about her.” Not a request, but a demand.

  “I’m not the same person as her.”

  “Yeah. I know that. At least when she left me, it was honest.”

  “Janey!”

  I wasn’t with Caitlyn then. I was nine years old again, trying to understand what my life was without my mother. Nothing felt right. As if I had to relearn how to do everything, to compensate for that lost presence.

  She’s gone.

  It was happening again. Captain Superlative would leave another void. I suddenly saw my life without her. I got a taste of it this afternoon, after all. Hadn’t I? Tyler and his friends. They were laughing. At me. Of course. Why hadn’t I realized it sooner? Everyone would laugh at me. The freak. The only freak. Once she was gone, that was all I would be. Facing down those doors by myself.