Nikki Powergloves- A Hero is Born

by David Estes

  Chapter Fourteen: Nikki licks Spencer’s face

  “Why don’t we just start at the top of your list, which would be green,” Nikki suggested. Before Spencer had a chance to answer she grabbed the gloves with the leaf printed on them and slipped them over her hands. “What do you think the leaf means, Spence?”

  “It’s gotta be the ability to grow things, but I’m not sure where that would really come in handy.”

  “Okay, let me try.” After the storm incident, Nikki wanted to be very careful when trying out any new powers, so she scoured the ground for the smallest plant she could find, a tiny weed with a small yellow flower on it—a dandelion. Pointing her green finger at it, she imagined it growing into a good-sized flower.

  To their astonishment, the plant sprouted up, high into the air above their heads. The thin stalk widened to a foot in diameter to support the sunflower-sized flower that now sprouted from its peak.

  A look of excitement crossed Spencer’s face. “I know how we can use this one! Eek eek eek!” he exclaimed. Nikki waited for him to continue. “What are you most sad about?” Spencer asked cryptically.

  Over the last couple of days Nikki had been most sad about the destruction she had accidentally caused to their small town, but she knew that Spencer was getting at something in particular. It hit her like a baseball bat to the side of the head: “The farmers’ crops getting destroyed,” she declared confidently. “I can use this power to help regrow their vegetables!”

  “Bingo,” Spencer replied.

  Nikki jumped up and down in excitement. “I have to do it now. I have to fix what I did.”

  “Calm down, Eager-Beaver. It can wait another few hours. We should go through the rest of the gloves and see if there are any others that can help fix things.”

  Trying to control her excitement, Nikki placed the “growing” gloves back in their spot and replaced them with the next pair on the list, the purple ones, next to which Spencer had written, “muscly arm making a fist.”

  Nikki decided to take a guess at this power. “I think it must be super-strength,” she offered.

  “Give it a try,” Spencer said.

  Nikki looked around for a test subject, but finding none, she pictured herself picking up a certain friend of hers. She walked over to Spencer and lifted him up high above her head like he was made of cotton.

  “Hey! Lemme down, Nikks! This isn’t funny! Whooooop!”

  She lowered him gently to the ground and back onto his feet. He glared at her. “You could have picked up the treasure chest or the statue, you know,” he said.

  “I totally forgot about them, I swear,” Nikki said, laughing. But just for good measure she trotted over to the chest and picked it up with one arm and curled it like a barbell, as if it were no heavier than a feather.

  Ignoring Spencer, who was pouting because he’d just been picked up like he was a child, by a girl no less, Nikki snatched the orange gloves from the box and put them on. A crisp drawing of a pair of shoes made it clear what this power would be. Seconds later she was doing laps around Spencer—she was going so fast that the only evidence of her movement was a blur of color that passed by his field of vision every couple of seconds.

  After about thirty seconds, Spencer called out, “Okay, Speed-Racer, I think we’ve figured this one out, too.”

  As if emerging from a hole in time, Nikki appeared from the blur, her legs slowing to a jog, then to a walk, and finally to a full stop. “That was great, I’m not even tired!” she announced.

  “Congratulations,” Spencer said. He was clearly beginning to tire of Nikki getting to have all the fun. He wrote something down on his inventory sheet. “Gray is next,” he said.

  Nikki swapped her orange gloves for the gray ones, and turned her hands over and back a few times, so she could see all sides of them. “I don’t see a drawing on these,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Spencer replied, “maybe for these gloves you have to try and imagine a bunch of different things and try to figure it out by trial and error.”

  “I don’t think so…” Nikki trailed off. She looked at the sky. Still looking up, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing at all. Not sure if anything happened, she slowly opened her eyes. Everything appeared to be the same as it had been. Except for one thing. Spencer was looking at her with his mouth open, like he had just seen a ghost.

  “Where’d you go, Nikki?” he asked.

  Thinking he was playing a joke on her, Nikki replied, “What are you talking about? I’m right here.”

  Spencer nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of her voice. “Can I touch your arm?” he asked. What a weird request, Nikki thought.

  “No, you freak,” she said. She was about to hurl another insult at him when she noticed something that didn’t make any sense. Looking down, she couldn’t see her feet. In fact, she couldn’t see any part of herself! “What happened to me, Spence, I’m gone!” she yelled.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you, but instead of listening you called me a freak. You’ve just discovered the power of the gray gloves: invisibility.”

  Coming to terms with the fact that she couldn’t see herself, she decided to have a little fun with it. She snuck around to the back of Spencer and yanked his shorts down to his ankles. Wearing only tighty-whities, Spencer’s legs looked even whiter and skinnier than usual, and Nikki let out a loud “Whoop!” and began laughing uncontrollably.

  “Nikki!! I can’t believe you did that! Areeeebaaa!” Spencer screamed. He tugged his shorts back up and started running around with his arms out, trying to catch his invisible friend. She easily evaded him and soon he became tired and stopped. “Nikki, here I am trying to help you and you keep messing around with me. I seem to remember that just a few days ago you were on the verge of destroying the gloves until somebody talked you out of it.”

  Feeling bad for what she had done to her friend, Nikki pulled off the gloves and reappeared. “I’m sorry, Spence. You’re right, you have been here for me and I should be nicer. Let’s get through the rest of them and then we can plan our next move.”

  With both sides declaring a truce, Nikki turned back to the chest and extracted the brown gloves, the ones with the paw print on them. She was particularly interested to test her theory on this pair of gloves. Nikki had been a dog-lover since she was a little girl and having the chance to enter their world, if only for a short time, was more than she could ever hope for.

  Concentrating hard, she pictured herself running free, not a care in the world, her floppy ears picking up every sound within a mile of where she was. When Nikki opened her eyes, everything looked different. Instead of looking into Spencer’s eyes, her vision fell upon his legs. She looked up to find his face. He seemed like a giant now and he had to reach down to pet her under her chin.

  Talking in a baby voice he said, “Now, that’s a good girl. Can you do a trick for me, Floppy-Ears? If you’re good I’ll give you a biscuit!”

  Nikki tried to say, “Be quiet, Spence! I’m still a human inside,” but all that came out was a low, guttural growl. Spencer jumped back.

  “Whoa, Nikki. No need to get angry, I was just kidding around. Anyway, it’s hard to talk to you like a human when you look so much like a dog.” He looked closer at her paws. “Wow, cool! You still have the gloves on, but they look different, like doggie gloves. They fit you perfectly still. But your clothes disappeared. Hmmm, I wonder if you will be naked when you turn back into a human. I hope not!” Spencer chuckled to himself and Nikki growled again, but then waited for him to continue.

  Thinking aloud, Spencer said, “Since you can’t ask me any questions, I wonder what I would want to know if I was a dog? Hmmm, I guess I would want to know a bit about my appearance.”

  Spencer sauntered around her in a circle, like a horse buyer inspecting a prize breed. “Firstly, you seem to be a German shepherd and are quite big, probably about five times the size of Mr. Miyagi. You look almost like a
small wolf and I suspect you can run pretty fast if you want to.”

  Nikki tried to picture what she looked like as Spencer described her. He continued, “Oh, and your breath smells awful, like you’ve been chowing down on garlic and onions.” Spencer grinned his toothy grin.

  With Spencer still laughing to himself, Nikki the dog leapt forward and tackled him to the ground, landing hard on top of his chest. She took her long tongue and lapped it across his face a few times, making sure that every bit of it was slimed by her doggie drool.

  “Aww, c’mon, Slobber-Lips, I was just joking! Gross!” Spencer wailed, trying to wipe his face with the bottom of his shirt.

  Using her paws, Nikki pushed the gloves off and magically morphed back into her natural, human form. She was laughing so hard she was nearly crying. “You should’ve seen your face, Spence, it was classic!”

  When he finished drying his face, he looked at her deviously and said, “You know, Nikki, technically you just kissed me about eight times. I thought we were just friends!”

  Before he could even laugh at his own joke, Nikki had slipped on the gloves and changed. But this time she wasn’t a dog.