The Extraordinaries

by TJ Klune

  Their street was lined with trees, the leaves turning from green to gold. The air was cool, and horns honked as soon as the lights changed. A cop car rolled by, but Nick ignored it. His dad still hadn’t texted him.

  He’d have to deal with that later.

  Nick went up the steps to the Gray house and rang the doorbell. Martha had told him long ago that he could come in whenever he pleased, but he needed to make a good impression today.

  They’d come to his mom’s funeral. Bob had worn an ill-fitting suit—too small for his ever-expanding middle—and Martha had hugged him so hard, he felt his bones creak. She didn’t tell him she was sorry, or that everything would get better. Nick would have screamed if she had—he’d heard it so many times already. Instead, as Seth stood at his side and held his hand, she’d whispered to him that if he ever needed an escape, to come to their house, and she would help him do whatever was needed.

  He’d never forgotten that, even through the hazy fog that descended for months when Before had become After.

  He heard the familiar chimes ring in the house and stepped back to wait. Bob was probably still at work, Seth up in his room, comforter pulled over his head and crinkled tissues on the floor by his bed.

  He could see the outline of someone approaching through the glass on the door. He forced a smile on his face as the door opened.

  Martha’s eyes widened in shock when she saw him. It was brief, and he couldn’t be sure it even happened, since she smiled brightly. “Nick! Well, isn’t this a surprise. Whatever are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in class?”

  “Hi, Mrs. Gray. I just came to see Seth, since he was sick. And it’s three thirty. School got out almost an hour ago.”

  Her smile widened. “Of course it’s three thirty and school is out already. Why, I must have lost track of time. Come in! Come in, dear child, and let me look at you. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen your face.”

  He didn’t even get a chance to respond before she’d grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the house, shutting the door behind him. “Yes,” she said, and she was speaking so loudly, it was almost like she was shouting. “It has been forever since Nicholas Bell has been in this house. And right at this very moment!”

  Nick tilted his head at her. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, dear, just fine,” she said loudly as she dragged him toward the kitchen. “Come! Come, even though it’s been months since you’ve been here, Nick, you still have an affinity for my peanut butter cookies, don’t you? I just made a fresh batch yesterday, and we should make sure you have at least six or seven before you head upstairs to see Seth, the poor boy.”

  “Uh, sure?” Nick said. “Also, you’re a lot stronger than I expected you to be for someone your age. No offense.”

  “None taken,” she said, looking back at him and smiling again. The wrinkles around her eyes deepened. “I used to have to lift patients at least three times your size. Built up some muscles. Speaking of, you’re still as skinny as all get out. Maybe ten cookies before you go up and see Seth.”

  Nick winced as she bellowed that last word.

  The kitchen was as homey as he remembered it, small and tidy. Martha and Bob had lived in the same brownstone since they’d married more than thirty years earlier. When Nick had asked why they didn’t have any kids before Seth, Martha told him he shouldn’t ask others that as it might be painful for some people, but in her case, life always seemed to get in the way. But then she’d said that maybe someone somewhere knew that Seth would need a home one day, and it was a good enough reason for her.

  She shoved Nick down at the large table where he’d sat many times before, the vase of autumn flowers in the middle rattling but not tipping over. “There,” she said. “Comfy? Good. Now, I know that one cannot have ten peanut butter cookies without having a glass of—”

  A crash came from somewhere below.

  Nick looked down at the floor. “Is there someone in the basement?”

  Martha laughed a little wildly. “Of course not! Seth is ill upstairs, and Bob is at the apartment building fixing a sprung pipe.”

  “Uh, then what was that noise?”

  “I didn’t hear any—”

  Another crash. This time the floor shook.

  “Oh,” Martha said. She turned toward the cookie jar shaped like a duck that she’d found in a flea market in 1978, or so she’d told Nick. Rather proudly too. “That. That is … the washing machine. Absolutely dreadful thing. It needs a new … filtering … valve. Yes, a new filtering valve. Bob is going to get right on that as soon as he gets home. In fact, after he’s done with the leaking pipe at the apartment, he was going to go pick up—”

  Footsteps ran up the basement stairs.

  Then the basement door opened.

  Then it slammed closed.

  Then more footsteps up the stairs to the second floor.

  Another door slammed shut upstairs.

  Martha turned with a plate stacked high with peanut butter cookies. “Our house is haunted!” she said cheerfully. “It’s just the oddest thing.”

  “Haunted,” Nick said slowly as he picked up a cookie from the plate she’d set in front of him. “So … that was a ghost?”

  She nodded, her white hair falling in her face as she went back to the fridge to pour a glass of milk. “Oh, yes. We did some research on it and everything. Apparently, this whole block used to be a tuberculosis … insane … asylum. Yes, exactly. People got tuberculosis and they went insane and then they died. Right where you’re sitting. And now their spirits have awoken for reasons that don’t need to be looked into, and here we are. Isn’t that wonderful? Eat your cookie.”

  Nick stared at her.

  She set a glass of milk in front of him and waited.

  Finally, Nick breathed, “Whoa. A tuberculosis insane asylum and now there are ghosts? Why didn’t Seth tell me about this? Don’t you know what this means? My god, I’ll have to look into it when I get home. We need to find out where they were buried so we can salt and burn their bones to put the spirits to rest. And if they’re malevolent, we may need to hire a medium.”

  “Exactly,” Martha said, patting his hand. “You do that. Have another cookie. In fact, I will insist you eat every single cookie on that plate before going upstairs.”

  “There’s like, twenty cookies here.”

  “Then you best get started,” she trilled. “And while you eat everything, you can tell me what you’ve been up to every day since I’ve seen you last. And be detailed. You know how I love details.”

  “That’s … a lot of days. I haven’t seen you since…”

  “May twenty-second,” Martha said. “After you and that boy broke up, and you came over here and cried, and I made you grilled cheese and tomato soup like when you were ten.”

  “I didn’t cry,” Nick mumbled through a mouthful of peanut butter cookie.

  “Oh, I apologize,” she said. “Your face must have been wet from the rain that wasn’t falling at the time. Describe every day, Nicky. And I’ll know if you missed one.”

  * * *

  By the time Nick escaped and made his way upstairs, he was fuller than he’d been in a long time. He’d made it to July 2 and had eighteen cookies before Martha had suddenly cut him off and said he could go upstairs. If anything, it reaffirmed that he had a sharp memory and the capacity to eat a crapload of cookies. Both were good things to know about himself.

  The old wooden stairs creaked under his Chucks, his hand sliding along the railing. The wall to his right was covered with framed photographs: Bob and Martha with big hair and parachute pants, Bob and Martha on vacation in front of a gigantic ball of yarn, Bob and Martha and little Seth at a park, snow falling all around them.

  Nick was in some too, here and there. Nick and Seth in a blanket fort. Nick and Seth dressed like Jean Grey and Wolverine (Nick was nine, okay?) Nick and Seth standing on the pier, holding tufts of pink cotton candy almost as big as they were. Nick and Seth sitti
ng in front of a TV, shoulder to shoulder, Nick’s head tilted back in a laugh and Seth smiling quietly.

  It was physical history of a good life, the wall cluttered with shared moments, some of which Nick had forgotten about.

  As always, Nick stopped near the top of the stairs in front of one photograph in particular. The frame was old and worn, and the glass had a little crack in the right corner. The subjects were a little blurry and out of focus, but it reminded Nick of the one of him and Mom, standing near the lighthouse.

  In it, Seth was four, and he was sitting on the shoulders of a thin, bespectacled man with a receding hairline. The man had his hands wrapped around Seth’s ankles, and Seth’s hands were thrown up in the air, curled into little fists. A woman stood next to the man, looking up at Seth, a smile on her face that Nick recognized on her son time and time again.

  Nick had never met these two people. They’d been gone before the day on the swings. Seth had a few memories of them that he hoarded like a dragon does gold. Nick knew a couple of them, but not all. He didn’t mind. He was aware that sometimes, things needed to be kept hidden in shadow because if they were brought out too much into the light, they would fade.

  He wondered if Seth talked to them like Nick did with his mom.

  He moved on.

  There were three doors in the hallway at the top of the stairs. The door to the right led to the only bathroom in the house. The door to the left was Martha and Bob’s bedroom, all old wood and frilly lace, much to Bob’s consternation.

  The last door—the one at the end of the hall—had a battered sign hanging off of it.

  SETH’S ROOM

  He knocked on the door.

  “Come in!” a breathless voice said.

  Nick frowned and shook his head before opening the door.

  From the ceiling hung a replica model of a 1918 Yellow Curtiss JN-4 biplane. The propeller was broken, Nick’s contribution to the entire project that had started out great, but then had caused him to be bored out of his mind. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sit still for six hours and put together a model airplane. It was just that he was incapable of doing so. So, on hour three, he’d been so twitchy that he’d accidentally broken the propeller, the audible snap making him look down at his hands in horror. But Seth had shrugged, saying their plane would look as if it’d been in war now, which made it better.

  Seth was good like that.

  There were bookshelves filled with hundreds of books, most of which Nick had never touched and would never read. There was, however, a shelf toward the bottom that was lined with graphic novels and stacks of comic books Nick had given Seth. And Seth had read each and every one dutifully. Or, at least, he’d tried to read each and every one, but Nick had been so excited at the sight of a comic book in his best friend’s hands that he’d sat right behind Seth peering over his shoulder, pointing out each panel, telling him all the backstory that Seth would have missed. He’d been worried, at first, that Seth wouldn’t like them (and worse, that he’d think they were stupid), but that hadn’t happened. He spent hours with Nick talking about heroes and villains, letting Nick babble at him about how cool Storm was, or how hardcore Venom could be.

  It was different now, since Shadow Star and Pyro Storm appeared. They were comic books come to life, right in his city. Nick had known about Extraordinaries before, but they’d been the stuff of legends, in places far away from home. It wasn’t until he’d seen with his own eyes Pyro Storm fly or Shadow Star crawl up the side of a building that it’d hit Nick just how astonishing they could be. After Guardian left for unknown reasons years earlier, the idea of Extraordinaries had been something the people of Nova City only saw from their television and computer screens. It was easy to think of them as almost fictional. It wasn’t until Pyro Storm and Shadow Star had revealed themselves that people started to give a shit again about Extraordinaries.

  When Nick became an Extraordinary and teamed up on and off the field with Shadow Star, maybe someone would write a comic book about him, filled with colorful panels of POW and BLAM and heroic deeds against the forces of evil.

  He made a mental note to put together a pitch for Marvel and DC and Vertigo after he’d gotten his powers. He did have to expand his brand, after all. Comic books, TV shows, movies. He hoped they would hire someone with nice abs to play him. That seemed like it’d be the right thing to do, even if it would be embellishing a little.

  Seth was lying in bed, propped up by two pillows. His comforter was pulled up to his chin, and he was staring at Nick with wide eyes. A trickle of sweat ran down his forehead.

  “Hi!” he squeaked. He coughed. Then, in a much lower voice, said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Nick said, closing the door behind him. “Are you dying?”

  “Um. No?”

  “That’s good.” Nick let his backpack fall to the floor. “Because Martha told me about the ghosts here, and it would totally suck if you died and became trapped like they did. I don’t know how I’d feel about having to salt and burn your bones.”

  Seth squinted at him. “The … ghosts?”

  “Yes, the ghosts.” Nick frowned. “And speaking of, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me your house used to be a tuberculosis insane asylum and is haunted now. That seems like information one tells his best friend.”

  “Tuberculosis … insane … asylum?”

  Seth’s cold must have infected his brain. He sounded like he didn’t know what Nick was talking about. “Right,” Nick said slowly. “The tuberculosis insane asylum. Your aunt just told me all about it. Didn’t you hear those footsteps running up the stairs and the door slamming?” Nick’s eyes widened as he looked around. “Oh my god, are they here right now?”

  “Oh,” Seth said. “Right. The ghosts! Sorry. I thought you were talking about something else. This flu. Man, it is really making me woozy.”

  “I thought you had a cold.”

  Seth nodded furiously. “Right. A cold. That’s exactly what I meant.” He coughed roughly. “Oh man, such a bad cold. So sick. From the flooding. You should leave since I’m contagious, and I don’t want you to catch it.”

  “I ate oranges,” Nick told him, sitting on the edge of the bed. Seth pulled his feet away to make room.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat an orange.”

  “Why is everyone saying that to me today?” Nick wondered aloud. “I do eat fruit, you know. Like, maybe not all the time, but I do.”

  “When was the last time you ate an orange?”

  Nick didn’t think he’d eaten an orange in at least three years. “This morning. So I’m chock full of vitamin C and therefore, immune to your affliction.”

  “Well, better to be safe than sorry,” Seth said, pulling his covers up to his mouth. “You should probably go home, and then we can talk on the phone.”

  Nick shrugged. “I’m already here. If I’m going to be infected, it’s happened by now.”

  Seth sighed.

  “Are you okay? You’re acting kinda weird.”

  “I’m fine,” Seth said. “Just, you know. Medicine head, and all that.” He coughed again.

  Seth needed to take better care of himself. “Do you need me to bring you something? I was going to get you soup, but then I didn’t have any money, so I didn’t.”

  “Thought that counts, I suppose.”

  “Right? You’re welcome.”

  “You’re all heart, Nicky.”

  Nick opened his mouth to say something about how boring today had been, or about how he’d fought with his dad, or maybe even about how Shadow Star and Pyro Storm had brawled all-out the night before. He could have said any number of things. But then his mouth was hijacked by a rebel part of his brain, and he said, “You kissed me on the cheek yesterday.”

  Seth’s eyes widened above his blanket. “I … did?”

  “Wow,” Nick breathed. “I did not mean to bring that up. Honestly, I was going to try and work my way up to it in like five or six weeks.”

/>   “And yet there it is.”

  “Right? I’m braver than I give myself credit for.” He grinned. “I’m going to make a good Extraordinary.”

  “It’s weird how not weird it is that I can totally follow your line of thinking.”

  “You’re fluent in Nick, I guess.”

  “Years of practice.”

  Nick felt like he was about to burst. “So the kissing! We should talk about the kissing!”

  Seth winced. “I would really rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Nick patted his foot under the comforter. It felt like he was wearing boots, but it must have just been the blankets. Seth would never wear boots to bed. That would be ridiculous. “Too late. It’s already out there.”

  “It’s not that big of a deal.”

  That caused a strange twist in Nick’s stomach that almost felt like disappointment. “Oh.”

  “I mean, friends do that all the time.”

  “They do?”

  Seth shrugged. “I read they do.”

  “What? Where?”

  Seth was sweating even more. “The internet.”

  “Where did you find that?” Nick demanded. “I tried to look it up, and all I could find were quizzes about what I’d be like in bed that I absolutely did not take!” He’d taken three of them. According to one, he was a modern woman in the streets, and a tigress in the sheets. He didn’t know what to do with any of that. Tigers were cool and all, but he didn’t think he had the posture to be a modern woman.

  The comforter dropped a little. “Why were you looking that up?”

  Nick blanched. “Um. For reasons completely unrelated to the topic at hand.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” Nick said, suddenly defensive. His skin felt warm, and he wondered if he’d already been infected. “You know I like to look things up. It’s one of my things.”

  Seth was looking at him strangely. If Nick didn’t know any better, he’d have thought Seth was almost … hopeful. “I just—I don’t know. It felt like the right thing to do. I was going to face … all that flooding, and I didn’t want to do it without saying goodbye.”