The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Meets World

by Shannon Hale

  KEVIN B: Seriously, try to think of a “hero” that would be even less useless than a girl with squirrel powers.

  KEVIN C: Mouse Girl.

  KEVIN B: Sloth Girl.

  KEVIN C: Twig Girl.

  KEVIN B: Real-Life Girl.

  [laughter]

  Apparently the first video had prompted several other TuberTVers to take aim at Squirrel Girl, because there were oh-so-many related links. And Doreen kept clicking them.115

  The TuberTV channel Earth News Report spent ten minutes ranting:

  Squirrel Girl is not just another run-of-the-mill wannabe hero practicing dangerous vigilantism, but actually a troublesome new villain on the scene, masquerading as a hero. The so-called hero videos were clearly preplanned setups. As if Squirrel Girl just happened to “save the day” in the exact location where multiple cameras were recording her “heroics” from every angle.

  Others have already pointed out the many troubling aspects of the “Squirrel Girl vs. Robot Spider” video. But this reporter finds the older video, “Squirrel Girl vs. Carjacker,” even more disturbing. First she stops the car by causing it to flip and crash in a crowded intersection. It was a miracle that no bystanders were injured. Or the baby that was inside the car. And then once she supposedly saves the baby, what does she do? Puts it high in a tree. A tall tree comes in at number seven on Earth News Report’s list of Top Ten Worst Places to Put a Baby. Number one is a live volcano. Indeed, such irresponsible actions makes this reporter question whether she was, in fact, attempting to save the baby or if she was the original kidnapper all along.

  What do villains do? Destroy property: check. Operate in secret: check. Have strange and disturbing powers: check. Show off their purported strengths to the world: check. So I ask you, what is Squirrel Girl?116

  Someone called FancyPantsTV created a music video, overlaying the insulting pop song “I Be Smart” to the fight. The video was edited to look like the robot spider won, and cheering sound effects were laid over the part where Squirrel Girl seemed to be defeated.

  And the mockery wasn’t limited to TuberTV. An image search pulled up a still frame of Squirrel Girl falling butt-first. It had turned into a meme, hundreds of contributions shared across social media.

  NO WONDER SHE’S THE BUTT OF SO MANY JOKES

  APPARENTLY SQUIRRELS DON’T ALWAYS LAND ON THEIR FEET

  AW, NUTS!

  THE TAILBONE’S CONNECTED TO THE FUNNY BONE….

  SHE’S A GIRL. WHO LOOKS LIKE A SQUIRREL. GET IT? GET IT?

  WE NEED SQUIRREL GIRL TO SAVE THE DAY!*

  *SAID NO ONE EVER

  Doreen knew she should stop.117 But she couldn’t seem to help it.118 For so many years Squirrel Girl had been her secret, silent self, her daydream identity, her core. Now thousands of people knew that name, had seen her at what she’d thought was her best. And according to these comments sections, they hated her.

  ANONYMOUS

  Squirrel Girl is a meme, a one-note idea that somehow we’re supposed to take seriously?

  ANONYMOUS

  Like why does Squirrel Girl even exist? what is the point?

  ANONYMOUS

  Squirrel Girl is either a really bad Halloween costume or a really good prank

  ANONYMOUS

  Squirrel Girl honestly thinks she’s a hero? Captain America is a hero. Spider-Man is a hero. Squirrel Girl is a Joke.

  ANONYMOUS

  Weirdo

  ANONYMOUS

  Freak

  ANONYMOUS

  Squirrel-shaped waste of space

  Doreen had sat down at her locker, hunched over her phone, obsessively clicking link after link, making search after search. She didn’t know how long she’d been there, but her tail was sore in her pants. She was aware of someone standing beside her.

  “You okay?” Ana Sofía asked.

  Doreen nodded.

  Because of course she was okay. She was always okay. She was Doreen Green, age fourteen, freak weirdo squirrel-tailed girl who…who…

  Doreen shook her head.

  “You can’t pay attention to the internet,” said Ana Sofía. “It’s full of sad little trolls with no life beyond mocking those who actually try to do good things, while craving the pathetic attention they get from slinging their nastiness around. Anyone who really knows you wouldn’t believe that garbage.”

  “Hey, Ana Sofía!” Lucy Tang came stalking up the hall. “You lied to us. Squirrel Girl isn’t a hero. She’s a joke.”

  Ana Sofía’s jaw clenched with annoyance, but her cheeks burned with embarrassment. “I couldn’t understand you.”

  “Squirrel Girl!” said Lucy, leaning closer. “She is a JOKE!”

  Ana Sofía’s cheeks burned darker. “No, she is NOT.”

  “I stood up for you,” said Lucy. “I told the rest of the Somebodies to believe in you and Squirrel Girl because my brother did. They trusted me and let you in the group. Now they’re mad at me. Thanks a lot. Heidi says you’re out, Ana Sofía, you and your dorky friend.” Lucy turned and stalked away.

  “Out? Of your inane club?” Ana Sofía hollered at her back. “We were never in! Because we didn’t want to be! Not because of any other reason—”

  Lucy was gone.

  Ana Sofía made a noise of frustration and punched a locker. And then she just kept staring at it. Almost as if she wanted to pretend that Doreen wasn’t there.

  Doreen stood up and waited till Ana Sofía finally looked at her.

  “Are you disappointed in me?” Doreen asked.

  Ana Sofía shrugged. People who walked by mostly ignored Doreen, but no one ignored Ana Sofía. And there was no kindness in their eyes.

  “Maybe I’m not,” Doreen signed, “a Super Hero after all.”

  “Doreen,” Ana Sofía said, “don’t be naïve. You were never a Super Hero.”

  The hallway was empty now. Just the two girls, looking at each other.

  “I’m just gonna go home, okay?” said Doreen.

  She shouldered her backpack and left.

  Ana Sofía didn’t follow. Doreen kinda thought she might. Or text. Or something.

  A few blocks from the school, a gray squirrel chittered to her from a branch.

  “Hey, T-Toe.”

  The squirrels were upset, Tippy-Toe reported. Miranda Creepsforth had been chittering about how before Squirrel Girl, there were no squirrel death traps. Before her, there were no pits or exploding gas bugs in squirrel mouths. They had trusted her, the first big human they had ever trusted. And then she had knocked down a maple tree and sent young squirrels to risk their lives against a dangerous robot.

  “I get it,” said Doreen. “I’m trouble. You better stay away from me, Tip. You don’t want your clan to toss you out, too.”

  She walked away. Tippy-Toe didn’t follow either.

  Doreen climbed the front steps of her house, one at a time. She dragged herself to her room, fell face-forward onto her bed, and reached up to click on the radio.

  “I’m soooo aloooooone,” sang the radio.119

  “Truth,” she said into her pillow. It sounded like “Mmmf.”

  Sad music. Doreen totally got it now. Before, she’d never understood why anyone would bother with music you couldn’t dance to or at least leap around to in a mosh pit.120 But right then, all she could bear was slow, depressing ballads in minor keys with lyrics about how everything was pointless.

  “Mmmf,” Doreen said into the pillow. “Mmmmmmmfff…”

  After a while, she changed the station to see if a fresh beat might cheer her. The pop tune’s bouncy rhythm stabbed her brain with such agony she pulled the radio’s cord right out of the wall. And the outlet along with it.

  Music usually scooped up her frantic, broken pieces and smoothed her all together again, soothing and cool. But now, every part of her insides were so raw and aching even the slight beat caused pain.

  Several silent hours later, the light from the windows dimmed into evening, sliding toward night. She was s
till lying down, her tail over her head.

  Her parents sat on the edge of her mattress. Doreen knew it was them because she could smell them, even through her tail.

  “I made a mistake,” Doreen said into her pillow. “You were right. I’m too young. I can’t handle being Squirrel Girl. This suuuuuucks.”

  “Doreen…” said her mother.

  “I’m not a hero. I’m not Squirrel Girl. And I can’t go back to school ever again. My plan is to lie here till I dissolve into a puddle.”

  “Even in the depths of despair she’s making plans,” said Dor. “Such a clever girl.”

  Doreen twitched aside her tail and blinked up at them. Her face felt soggy from pillow crying.

  “Did you see the…stuff…online?”

  “We did,” said Maureen. “Sweetie—”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s all over,” said Doreen.

  “All that talk about Squirrel Girl?” said Maureen. “That’s not about you. You’re not her, right? You’re a fourteen-year-old ninth-grade student at Union Junior High.”

  “Yes, you did a good job keeping her identity secret,” said Dor.

  “If only Thor had a secret identity, that poor man…”

  “I’m not Thor,” said Doreen. “That MM villain guy thinks I’m a joke. He says everyone knows I’m a joke. And he was right.”

  “And that’s another reason for a secret identity,” said Maureen. “Your real self, Doreen Green, will always be safe no matter what people say about Squirrel Girl.”

  “But I think…” She swallowed what she was going to say: I think Squirrel Girl IS my real self. “I can’t believe…For a while there I really thought I could be a Super Hero.”

  “You could,” said Dor. “We’ve always known that.”

  Doreen rolled her eyes. “You saw the videos.”

  “Yes sirree, I sure did,” said Dor. “All of them. And while a few people from the internets have landed on my Folks Who Will Never Get Invited to One of My Barbecues list, well, I have to say, I enjoyed seeing you in action so much I think I’ll add those to our family videos. Still, just because you could be a hero doesn’t mean you have to be.”

  “It’s okay, Doreen,” said her mother. “No pressure. You don’t have to be Squirrel Girl. You’re young, you can wait. Take your time. Be a kid. Then when you’re an adult, see how you feel.”

  Doreen nodded. She sat up and hugged her parents with her arms and her tail. And she did feel a little better. But a part inside her, that core self she’d always called Squirrel Girl, shriveled up just a little. Ached quite a lot. And seemed too far away to ever reach again.

  MICRO-MANAGER

  Mike steepled his fingers together as he waited for his program to run all the online commentary about Squirrel Girl. One by one he watched increasingly hateful and aggressive comments about his opponent scroll by. He preferred not to use the internet as a tool for work. For research and for Baddit, certainly, but to depend on the net as your own weapon was unwise. Too hard to control.

  Nonetheless, he had planted several seeds of doubt about Squirrel Girl onto the net. His data had shown that her powers seemed to get a boost from either confidence or overwhelming ignorance. He must begin their final battle with the upper hand, and that meant doing his best to damage that confidence.

  The internet had taken his seeds and grown an entire garden of mockery and ridicule. It was, in many respects, what he had wanted. But his drones were now reporting no further sightings of Squirrel Girl. Had she been scared away by all the hatred? Perhaps he had done his job too well. Defeating his opponent through shame was all well and good, but it didn’t make for an exciting victory video. He needed scouts from Hydra to see his work in action.

  He grabbed the tablet sitting beside the monitor and opened a telnet session to one of the hidden servers back in the Romanger house. After the conflict with Squirrel Girl and the robot parents, he had moved most of his operations off-site to the warehouse his parents had once purchased for materials storage. But the databases that managed the AI and personality profiles for his aerial drones were still in the house. They weren’t particularly important, as he had no plans to change the drones’ primary operational parameters, so he hadn’t bothered to relocate them yet. Besides, he’d booby-trapped everything there anyway, so if the authorities discovered his hidden server room, the house would blow up in their faces.

  He accessed the subroutines for the second-generation aerial drones he still had monitoring the neighborhood. That particular model had been installed with a front-mounted Tesla coil weapon that shot short-range electrical bursts. The weapon was intended for use against meddling vermin but would work equally well as a charring tool. If, for example, he wanted to burn some graffiti into various locations around town.

  Mike uploaded an image of the phrase I SUPPORT SQUIRREL GIRL and instructed one of the drones to etch it onto three locations where Squirrel Girl had been seen in the past. He committed the change to the drone’s behavioral profile and leaned back, closing the laptop.

  “There,” he said. “She will see the graffiti and think she still has supporters. Perhaps then she will come out of hiding long enough TO BE DESTROYED.”

  Mike Romanger, the Micro-Manager, began to laugh. He had planned a long evil laugh, but was interrupted mid MWA-HA-HA by a beep on his computer followed by the message COMMAND NOT UNDERSTOOD. PLEASE REPEAT.

  He threw Oreos at the monitor until he ran out of Oreos.

  DOREEN

  Doreen kept her phone by her bed that night in case Ana Sofía texted. She didn’t. And the temptation to scour the internet for more horrible commentary on freaky Squirrel Girl was so great that, in the morning, an exhausted Doreen turned over her phone and laptop to her parents.

  Her mom called the school to report her sick. Doreen did in fact feel sick. To her stomach. In her head. Her muscles even ached as if she’d been chewed up and spit out. Maybe the Avengers had seen the videos. Maybe She-Hulk had laughed at a Squirrel Girl meme. Maybe the ground would split open beneath her and mercifully swallow her whole.

  It wasn’t like she’d never been made fun of before.

  But back in California or in Canada, whenever kids whispered about her or made up oh-so-clever nicknames like Chunky Cheeks, Blab Mouth, or Big Butt, she used to think, This isn’t really me. Doreen Green is only half of me. They’d like me if they knew the real me, if they knew Squirrel Girl.

  But now…Joke. Freak. Squirrel-shaped waste of space…

  She stayed in bed for two days.

  The third day Maureen made her daughter get out of bed at least. Doreen got as far as her backyard. She climbed into the tree house—using the ladder even, like a normal girl would. It was there that Ana Sofía found her.

  Doreen smelled her first—homemade soap, cheesy crackers, and that other scent that was all Ana Sofía. She peeked out the tree house window and saw her standing down there in the yard, looking up, just like that day after the Skunk Club when Ana Sofía had spied her leaping into a tree. This time Doreen didn’t jump down.

  “Can I come up?” Ana Sofía asked.

  Doreen shrugged.

  Ana Sofía climbed up and sat. “I thought you might like to see this.”

  Ana Sofía showed Doreen a text on her phone.

  HEIDI

  Everyone’s mad at u so dont come to my party tonight but I wanted to say I miss being a squirrel scout

  “Heidi?” asked Doreen.

  “The de facto leader of the Somebodies. She’s…well, she’s Heidi. But it’s not just her. This kid Richie at the high school wrote a mean thing about Squirrel Girl in the school paper, and last night every garbage can for blocks got dumped on his front lawn and someone spray-painted acorns all over his house.”

  She showed her another text message, this one from a Skunk Club member.

  ANTONIO

  Peeps alwys sell us short 2. Tell sg da sc gt her bck

  “Someone carved ‘I support Squirrel Girl’ in
to a few buildings,” continued Ana Sofía. “And now there’s even more acorn graffiti than ever. I’m not saying vandalism or trashing somebody’s home is a good thing, but you’ve still got…I don’t know…fans out there.”

  Doreen nodded. She supposed that should mean something to her, but it did nothing to budge the elephant-size weight of shame and loneliness pressing on her heart.

  Ana Sofía hugged her knees to her chest.

  “I should have gone after you, right?” she said. “When you left school. I should have followed. Or texted you. Or something.” She sighed. “I haven’t had a lot of friends. Not really. Honey hasn’t e-mailed me back in a year. And with most other people…well, I feel like a service project. In third grade the teacher even assigned different girls to be my friends, like because I’m deaf I’m not capable of making friends on my own. I don’t know, maybe she was right.”

  “You are my friend,” said Doreen. “If you want to be, you are. But I feel like…you wanted to be my friend because of Squirrel Girl. She was the interesting part of me. And if there is no Squirrel Girl anymore…”

  “Like, what will we talk about if we don’t talk about fighting injustice and saving the day?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Socks?” offered Ana Sofía.

  “Nuts?” said Doreen.

  “Math?”

  “Squirrels?”

  “Thor?” said Ana Sofía. “I mean…I didn’t mean to say Thor; that’s weird that I just said Thor….”

  “When I’m done being grounded,” said Doreen, “do you want to go sock shopping at the mall?”

  Ana Sofía smiled. “Sure. And maybe you could play for me some of those bands you’re always going on about.”

  “You like music?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Ana Sofía, “as long as it’s got a really good beat.”

  Doreen grinned. “Me too. Totally me too.”

  “Chok-chok!”