Superman

by Matt De La Peña

  “You were safely tucked inside here, wrapped in blankets,” Jonathan said. “And you looked like a perfectly normal human baby boy.”

  “Except I wasn’t,” Clark said under his breath.

  “Well, there’s more to it than that.” His dad pointed at a glass square in the middle of the control panel. “Put your hand in there.”

  Clark hesitated.

  The square had strange green symbols etched all over the dark surface. Most were entirely foreign, but one of them resembled the letter S.

  “Go on, Clark.”

  He slowly pressed his hand against the surface of the glass. The panel lit up instantly, and the symbols began to glow—especially the S. A beam of blue light suddenly emerged from the center console, displaying a hologram in the middle of the barn. Clark started to remove his hand, but his dad held it firmly in place, saying, “It’s time.”

  The image of a man’s face flickered into being. He appeared to be in his late thirties. He had a chiseled face and dark eyes, and there were silver streaks running through his coarse black hair.

  Something about the man felt oddly familiar.

  “My name is Jor-El,” he said in a deep voice. “And I am from the planet Krypton.”

  The color drained from Clark’s face.

  Another…planet?

  Jonathan stared at the ground, unmoved. This obviously wasn’t the first time he’d seen the message. And since it required Clark’s hand to activate, he wondered if he’d seen it, too, when he was too young to comprehend it all.

  As the hologram continued, it shifted from the face of Jor-El to an image of a bright blue-and-green planet orbiting a distant red star.

  “Some time ago,” Jor-El’s voice went on, “we became aware that our planet was doomed to inevitable destruction. My wife, Lara, was pregnant with our first child. You, Kal-El.”

  “Who?” Clark swallowed uncomfortably.

  “You, Clark,” Jonathan answered. “Your given name was Kal-El.”

  “But…that’s impossible.”

  “We knew we did not have time to save ourselves,” Jor-El continued, his face reappearing in the hologram. “But we had enough time to construct a spacecraft equipped to carry you to the nearest planet that, we hope, will sustain life from Krypton.”

  The man’s mouth moved slightly out of sync with his words, like a poorly dubbed foreign movie. Even in his shock, it occurred to Clark that some strange technology might be translating the words from an alien language into English.

  “Because of your genetic and cosmic makeup, Kal-El, we believe you will react to the natural environment differently than the planet’s indigenous beings. What this means for you is hard to say. It is our hope, of course, that it will not render you weak and vulnerable. Regardless, it is a risk we must take. There is no other choice.”

  The hologram cut out for several maddening seconds, then reappeared.

  “By the time you see this, our home planet of Krypton will long have been destroyed. Gone for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of solar revolutions. Your mother and I, I’m sorry to say, will also be gone. But you, Kal-El, must carry on in the name of Krypton. Be well, my son. And do your family and planet proud. We love you very much and always will.”

  The hologram cut out again, only this time the spaceship also went dark.

  Clark sat down in the dirt, physically and emotionally wrecked. He wanted to go back to his room and sleep for days. And when he awoke, maybe this whole thing would turn out to be a dream.

  Only he knew it wasn’t a dream.

  It was real life.

  His life.

  He pictured an eight-year-old version of himself lifting a thousand-pound four-wheeler off his neighbor’s legs. Pictured sparks flying when he’d touched the electrified wire in the steer pen. Pictured himself taking a handoff for the very first time on a football field, defenders bouncing off him like rag dolls.

  “Clark,” Jonathan pleaded. “Clark, listen to me.”

  All these things he could do. His powers. But it wasn’t because he was special.

  It was because he was an alien.

  A freak.

  “Clark, please.” His dad reached for his trembling shoulder. But Jonathan wasn’t his dad at all. He was some random human who had just happened to find a spaceship in his field.

  It could have been anyone that day.

  In any field.

  In any world.

  “We thought about reporting the crash,” Jonathan was saying in his ear. “Or bringing you to the authorities. But I have to believe things happen for a reason. And once we held you…”

  Clark heard the words, but he couldn’t make sense of them. He couldn’t make sense of anything. Not the spaceship or the folded blankets or the hologram with the man’s shocking message. That he was Clark’s real dad. This strange alien from Krypton.

  “You see, we’d recently discovered we could never have children of our own. So when you showed up like that, out of nowhere…well, we decided to raise you as our own, Clark. We became your family—at least here on Earth. And I promise you, we’ve always done our very best.”

  Clark shrugged out of Jonathan’s grasp and stood up. “I gotta go.”

  “But, Clark—”

  “I gotta go!” He put his backpack on.

  His entire life had been a lie.

  Jonathan slowly moved toward Clark with a profound hurt in his eyes. He reached an open palm out, but Clark ignored it and took off out of the barn.

  He heard Jonathan’s voice calling after him, but Clark didn’t turn back.

  He could never turn back.

  Not now that he knew the truth.

  Clark ran faster than he’d ever run before. These powers were all he had to hold on to now. They were his protective shield. His salvation.

  Soon he reached speeds that blurred everything around him. Winds battered his face and tore a hole through his jacket. His shirt. He ripped the torn clothing off his back and flung it away as he bounded over neighbors’ fences, trespassing through farms and cattle ranches and cornfields. This town, Smallville, was all he’d ever known. Yet now he understood it was no longer his to claim. Home was millions of miles away. Home was out beyond the solar system somewhere. Among the distant stars.

  No, that wasn’t right. According to the man on the hologram, his birthplace, Krypton, had exploded. So his real home no longer existed.

  Clark Kent no longer existed either.

  That was a made-up name. A made-up persona.

  He was Kal-El.

  His mind drifted to the missing undocumented workers. If the people of Smallville only knew there was a real alien living among them…

  He stopped at a large barn on the Pullman farm. He knew the Mankins Corporation had recently purchased it but had yet to take over, so it was all but vacant. Clark climbed atop a massive tractor and stared blankly at the wall in front of him—then through the wall. He scanned the fields and the farmhouse, confirming he was the only one around.

  If his whole life was a lie, then what mattered?

  Nothing.

  Clark shifted the tractor into neutral, hopped off the springy seat, and gave the hulking machine a powerful shove. The tractor lurched forward, crashing through the barn doors and caroming down the hill, toward a large pond.

  He sprinted in front of the runaway tractor and spun, closing his eyes and holding out his arms and waiting for the massive machine to knock him senseless.

  For once in his life, he wanted to feel something.

  That wasn’t what happened.

  The tractor slammed into Clark’s bare chest, but he hardly budged. The front loader crumpled in the collision and fell off, and the grille folded in on itself. The remainder of the machine stopped cold and settled in front of him with a kind o
f sigh.

  Clark had hardly felt a thing.

  No marks on him anywhere.

  He grew so angry, he grabbed the cab of the machine in his bare hands and spun around and heaved it toward the pond. He fell onto the ground, watching the tractor land with a great splash in the far end of the water, where it slowly began to sink.

  Clark climbed to his feet and bounded down to the pond and let out a long, deep exhale—an exhale that froze the entire body of water in an instant.

  Freak!

  You’re an alien freak!

  He stared at the frozen pond, trying to figure out how he could possibly go on with his life. No matter what he did, no matter who he befriended, he would never be one of them.

  He was destined to be alone.

  Forever.

  And what kind of an existence was that?

  He glanced back up the hill, where the broken loader still lay. Then he looked at the frozen pond again. A silly idea occurred to him, and he marched back into the barn and began sifting through the junk drawers for a ball of twine. He found the twine inside the bottom drawer and ripped off four large pieces and shoved them into his pocket, then turned and left the barn.

  Seconds later, he was kneeling in the grass in front of the loader. He tore off eight small strips of the steel from the side, each one about a foot long. He then pressed each strip in his bare hands to flatten it. Next, he concentrated on the middle of each piece until a thin laser shot out from his eyes and he was able to weld two perpendicular pieces together, and then he burned a small hole through the center of the bottom one. He did this three more times and let them cool for a few minutes before slipping them into his backpack.

  He then pulled out the crumpled letter Gloria had tried to throw away.

  He took out a Smallville High T-shirt from a recent pep rally and put it on while studying her address.

  A few minutes later, Clark found himself moving through downtown Smallville.

  It was almost nine, and the moon had overtaken the sun in the sky, but many of the businesses were still open. The restaurants and cafés. The two-screen movie house. And there were dozens of people out and about. Young couples on dates. Families. Old people with canes moving slowly down the wide sidewalk. He recognized almost all of them. This was his community. But it also wasn’t.

  What would happen if he told them the truth?

  What if he stood atop the library steps right now and announced that he was really an alien named Kal-El? That he’d landed here in a spaceship when he was only a baby.

  Would they run away screaming?

  Would they call Deputy Rogers?

  And what would the police do once they had him in custody? Stare? Prod him with a stick? Draw a sample of his blood?

  He walked south through the downtown and out the other end. Smallville was too tiny and rural to have an actual “bad” area. But the neighborhoods in the south end were more downtrodden. The streets grew narrower and were full of potholes. Some store signs were in both Spanish and English, and there were bars over many of the windows. A few dilapidated fences surrounding abandoned lots were covered in graffiti, and he remembered Mrs. Sovak’s lecture about Smallville’s hidden history of redlining. It hit him even harder in the context of what he’d just learned about himself.

  When Clark arrived at Gloria’s building, he glanced at the letter again, this time looking for her apartment number. It was 3B. He glanced up at the faded facade of the structure, assuming the number three meant the third floor. There were only three windows on that level, and one was high and very small, which made Clark think it was a bathroom window. That left two possibilities. He picked up a tiny pebble and lobbed it at the closest one.

  The pebble tapped the glass and fell away.

  The window remained dark.

  He waited a minute before tossing a second pebble, this time at the other window. A light turned on. The blinds were slowly swept aside, and a silhouette of what looked like Gloria appeared in the window.

  Clark waved, heart racing.

  In a few seconds, she disappeared from the window.

  His shoulders slumped and he cursed himself. Why did he just show up at her apartment building uninvited, after dark, and think she’d be happy to see him?

  But hadn’t she said they could talk anytime? That she’d drop everything?

  Just as he was turning to leave, he heard the lobby door creak open behind him. He saw Gloria standing there, dressed in jeans and a Smallville High sweatshirt, her hair pulled up.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  The kindness in her voice made his chest ache.

  He shook his head.

  She motioned for him to follow her to a short stairwell on the side of the graffiti-tagged building. She sat down and patted the spot next to her. “What is it, Clark?”

  He broke eye contact when he felt like he might get emotional. He knew he wasn’t actually going to cry, of course. He’d never shed a tear in his entire life. Not even as a kid. And now he understood why. That was the whole point.

  “Clark?”

  He shook his head again. “My dad told me some stuff tonight, and it…I don’t even know.”

  Gloria hesitated, then slowly reached out her hand to him, palm up. He took it, and the second their skin touched, an electricity surged through his entire body. “It’s okay if we just sit here awhile,” she said. “We don’t have to say anything.”

  She gazed up at the dark sky. If only he could explain to her what was up there. And where he’d come from. He gently squeezed her hand and said, “Can you go somewhere with me?”

  “When?” she asked. “Now?”

  He nodded. “I sort of planned a surprise for you. But I understand if it’s kind of late.”

  “No, I wanna do your surprise.” She looked up at her building. “Wait here a sec. I have to get my mom’s permission. With everything happening around Smallville right now, I don’t want her to worry.”

  Clark watched Gloria hurry back into her building.

  She came out less than a minute later, saying, “I could really use some kind of distraction, Clark. Lana was here earlier, talking to people. Did she tell you it’s not just Smallville? People are missing from neighboring counties and cities, too. Like Metropolis. And some of them aren’t undocumented.”

  Clark stood, crushed by this news. “What’s happening, Gloria? Who’s responsible?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t even talk about it right now. Can we just do your surprise? Please?”

  He nodded and looked out over her neighborhood. “Come on.”

  As they walked, they talked about Smallville and the protests outside city hall, and they wondered what it would be like to go somewhere else. Gloria had been to Metropolis for a summer camp once. She told him it was dirty and loud, but at the same time she’d felt at home because there were so many other people like her. Clark talked about the one time his family had driven to Iowa for a hog show. But the town they’d stayed in, he told her, felt even more like Smallville than Smallville. So he really didn’t know anything else.

  “The weirdest part,” Gloria said, “is sometimes I feel alone when I’m surrounded by my family. Like, when I bring up college, for example. Everyone gets quiet. Like they don’t even wanna go there. And it gets super awkward. I used to take it personally, but now I just sort of…I don’t know. I guess I’ve accepted that I’m different from them in some ways. And maybe that’s okay.”

  She had just put words to the way he’d felt his entire life.

  Maybe Gloria was right. Maybe it was okay to be different from your family.

  He turned to her, relieved, and said, “Even though they get weird when you bring up college, I’m sure they still love you.” He realized he was talking about more than just Gloria’s situation now. “And support you
.”

  She nodded. “They do.”

  “And you still love them.”

  Gloria smiled. “More than anything.”

  As they walked side by side toward the Pullman farm, Clark glanced at Gloria’s profile. He wanted so badly to confide in her the way she was confiding in him. To reveal what he really was. Where he really came from. But he kept his mouth shut. Because that was what his real life would always be now: a secret trapped inside.

  Gloria stopped when they came upon the fence. “What now?”

  “We’re going over.”

  She frowned. “Really? You always struck me as a rule follower.”

  “I am,” he said, grinning. “The people who owned the place have already moved out. And the new people aren’t here yet.” He boosted her over the fence, then followed.

  Soon they came upon the frozen pond.

  It sparkled under the moonlight, and Clark watched Gloria’s face light up.

  “Whoa,” she said under her breath. “How’s this possible?”

  Clark smiled. “I don’t know, but I had to show you.”

  She turned to him then, a genuine look of curiosity in her eyes. “But…why me, Clark?”

  “Because,” he told her, “you’re the kind of girl whose wishes should come true.” Clark opened his backpack and removed the four strips of metal and the twine. “Can I see your shoes?” he asked.

  “My shoes.” There was confusion mixed into her smile as she pulled off her shoes and handed them over.

  Clark used his strength to make sure her soles hugged the beds of his crude skates. The blade sat firmly underneath in a straight line. He then secured everything tightly into place with a good bit of twine.

  “Wait a second,” she said, catching on. She glanced at the pond, then back at Clark. “Are you serious?”