Captain Superlative

by J. S. Puller

  Yeah. I did.

  Paige nodded again. “Okay. We’ll tell someone.”

  “Okay.”

  “After the dance,” she said. “Let Dagmar have her night as queen.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  I wasn’t entirely convinced that waiting was a good idea. Who knew what else her father could do to her in just a few days? Not to mention the fact that we could lose our nerve. But I surrendered. It seemed only fair. And since we didn’t know where to begin, we could use the time to figure it out. “All right.”

  Paige sank down to the floor. I moved to sit next to her. For a while, we were silent together. It was all a lot to take in, both what we’d witnessed and what we were planning to do. But somewhere in the back of my head, I heard my dad laughing, reminding me that being a superhero was never easy.

  Had I become one overnight? Had I somehow crossed the threshold from sidekick to hero?

  Wasn’t that something?

  I didn’t deserve the mantle. Not after the way I’d treated my mentor. I needed to make that up to her.

  An idea started to form. Absently, I twisted the marker that I was still holding. I pulled off the cap, drawing an insignia on the back of my hand, an insignia that I’d seen in one of my dad’s comic books. Just one little star-shaped symbol made the difference in how a normal person was seen by the world at large. Just one little image took that person across the line from ordinary to extraordinary. It gifted that person with the title of hero. It made that person superlative.

  Supreme.

  Sensational.

  Special.

  “Are you going to the dance?” I asked Paige.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No one asked me.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Really?” She sounded genuinely surprised. “I heard that Tyler was going to ask you.”

  I shrugged, barely registering it. “Well, he didn’t. How about we go together?”

  Paige eyed me critically. “You know everyone will just make fun of us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But who cares?”

  She smirked a little. “Okay.”

  “But I need your help with something.”

  “What?”

  “I have an idea, something I want to do,” I said, examining the drawing on my hand. “But it’s going to take a lot of help. We’d have to talk to Tyler and April and Raquel and all the others from today.”

  “Janey. What are you thinking?”

  “I want to do something. For someone that I’ve wronged.”

  “Captain Superlative?”

  I wasn’t all that surprised that Paige knew we were on bad terms. “Yeah.”

  Paige nodded. “Good. You two need to patch things up.”

  “I know.”

  “Especially since you’re running out of time.”

  That one threw me. “What?”

  “Well, I mean…since she’s…”

  “She’s what?”

  “Sick.”

  Sick.

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

  I stared at Paige for a full minute. “How did you know?”

  “Janey…” Her voice was gentle. “You can see it.”

  “You can?”

  She shrugged. “I know I can. And some others are starting to see it too. She’s been sitting out of gym for weeks. And…”

  “And what?”

  “And her wig fell off during Science. A couple of us saw. Tyler saw.”

  I felt red heat rising in my cheeks. It was hard to accept the possibility that I’d been so blind to what was right in front of me. But then, this wasn’t exactly the first time. I hadn’t really seen Dagmar before. Or Paige. Or, maybe most tragically, myself. Not until very recently. “Oh.”

  Paige seemed to be reading my mind. She gave me a sympathetic grimace and touched my arm. “What’s the plan?”

  “Plan?”

  “For the dance.”

  “The dance. Right.”

  And I told her. I told her exactly what I was thinking. I told her, and I knew from her smile and her knowing eyes that it was a good idea. Maybe my first one ever. Possibly my last. But if it was my last, I was certainly going to go out with a bang. And I wasn’t going to be alone.

  Someone very wise had once said to me that I got my heroic streak from my dad, because he was a super-duper, first-rate sort of guy. But I wasn’t the only one who’d picked up a few super-duper qualities from a parent. When Mrs. Li saw me at the door, I wouldn’t have blamed her at all if she’d slammed it shut in my face. I would have deserved it. And worse. I can’t imagine what she must have thought of me showing up unannounced one day, storming out without saying good-bye, leaving her daughter in tears, then reappearing two days later on a Friday afternoon. I know I would have been disgusted with me. But she apparently shared her daughter’s forgiving nature.

  “Hello, Jane,” she said as she opened the door.

  “Hello,” I said, ducking my head meekly.

  “Come inside, come inside.”

  “Thanks.” She stepped out of the way and I followed her into the entry hall, slipping out of my shoes without being told this time. I put them by the red high-top sneakers. And by my other pair of shoes, the ones I’d abandoned two days before.

  I tried not to look at them. Mrs. Li pointedly didn’t say anything about it.

  “Can I get you some tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’d like to talk to Caitlyn. It’s kind of important.”

  Mrs. Li nodded. “You can go upstairs.”

  “Thanks.”

  She opened her mouth, as if to say something more. I don’t know. Maybe to politely ask me not to make her daughter cry again. But whatever it was, she didn’t say it.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her.

  She seemed to accept that.

  The curtains were open in Caitlyn’s room. The misty February light flooding in through the windows gave it a dreamy brightness. She was sitting by the windows in her pink pj’s with a purple polka-dot scarf wrapped around her head, resting her chin on the sill as she looked out. I knew in an instant that she’d seen me come running up the driveway. And I didn’t need to announce myself at the threshold of her door. She could feel me behind her shoulder.

  “Are you going to yell at me again, Janey?” she asked dully, without looking back at me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good.”

  She continued to stare out the window. The silence was uncomfortable. But I didn’t say a word. I waited, letting her think. Her sleeves were rolled up. I noticed a pale, pinkish rash on her left arm in the bend of her elbow. She scratched at it absently. I knew now that it was a symptom of her disease. I’d hesitantly approached my dad, as mild as Selina, and asked him to tell me about leukemia. I thought it might upset him, scratch up the ghost of my mother, but he’d been incredibly patient and understanding about the whole thing. My admiration for Caitlyn Li had swollen like a balloon. It seemed like nothing but spit and paper clips were holding her together.

  And her incredible force of will.

  “I’m not completely delusional, you know,” she finally said, turning to look over at me. She seemed so impossibly tired. “I know I’m not a real superhero.”

  I took that as my invitation and stepped into the room, setting my bag down by the door. I opened it, pulling out the latest issue of Hawkgirl. I’d picked it up on my way over. “I don’t know,” I said, perching myself on the foot of her bed, looking down at the glossy cover.

  “What?”

  “Maybe you are. From everything my dad’s told me about superheroes, you fit the profile. I mean, you do have a tragic origin story.”

  She smiled faintly. “I do.”

  “And a secret identity.” I paused. And then shook my head. “Well, not so secret, I guess.”<
br />
  That made her laugh. Just a little. “Uh-huh.”

  “And a sidekick.”

  The laughter faded. She pulled her legs up onto the window seat, hugging her knees to her chest. She was so small. Folded up like that, she looked like I could pick her up and put her in my pocket. And keep her. “Not lately,” she said. “I had one for a while, but she got it into her head that I was some kind of selfish coward. Or something like that.”

  Or something like that. Looking back on my anger, even I couldn’t exactly explain it. Probably because it had come from a place of fear instead of real anger. Fear for my own existence as a seventh-grade pariah. Fear of losing the best friend I’d ever had. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The words weren’t nearly enough of an apology. “Thanks,” she said anyway. That was what superheroes were supposed to do. Defend and protect the imperfect, like me.

  “I shouldn’t have said all those things,” I raced on, thirsty for her forgiveness. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Stop.” She held up a hand.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  Of course she did. I smiled slightly, staring down at my hand. The superhero symbol I’d drawn yesterday had faded, but I could still see its outline. “I think that I understand things better now.”

  “Now that you know the truth about me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That I’m sick.”

  I didn’t want that to be the truth about her. And it wasn’t. It was only a small part of it. “You’re sick. And no one can help you. And…and there’s no feeling worse than when no one can help you.” She’d flat-out told me that. I just hadn’t been listening. “That’s why you do it. That’s why you’re a superhero. That’s why you were helping Paige and everyone else. So they don’t have to feel like you do.”

  She stood up from her seat, walking over to sit next to me on the bed. Her weight felt unbearably heavy beside me. Spit and paper clips holding her together. And her incredible force of will. “I knew you were special, Janey,” she said, reaching out to touch my arm with her thin, bony fingers. “That’s why you had to be the one. Superlative.”

  “Life is too short to be anything less.”

  “Exactly.”

  “There is one thing I don’t understand, though.”

  “What?”

  “If you’re so sick, why on earth are you still going to school? I mean, I’d be so out of there.”

  She laughed. “Because,” she said, “I decided that I wanted to be a superhero. You can’t do that sitting all alone in bed.”

  “True.”

  “And the principal said I could. As long as I didn’t disrupt classes or anything.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  That made me smile. So the teachers were in on it. That felt kind of nice now. Like they’d given us the gift of Captain Superlative. “Cool.”

  “My parents think I’m crazy,” she added, grimacing.

  “But they’re letting you do it anyway?”

  “Well, I still get my mom’s trademark ‘neutral disappointed face’ every time I come down to dinner in my cape. But they came around. Eventually.”

  Somehow that didn’t surprise me. She could probably convince a rainy day to let in the sun. “I’d like things to go back,” I said.

  “Back?”

  “To the way they were. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as I was when I was being your sidekick.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  She grinned. “It was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And we were a good team.”

  “The best.” I really meant that.

  She gave my arm a gentle squeeze before letting go. “I wish we could go back. We can’t.”

  I felt my stomach drop a little bit. “Can’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She tilted her head to look at me sideways. “I think you know why not.”

  She was right. And I hated it. But my dad had explained quite a lot about leukemia. Including the unfair odds, especially for JMML. Odds that even an incredible force of will might not be able to beat. But the world was always spinning forward. There were doctors and scientists and new discoveries every day. I wanted to hope. I needed to hope. “Isn’t there anything…”

  “Someone can do?” she finished for me.

  “Yeah.”

  She leaned back on her palms. “Well. Yes. There is something. Something that you can do.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Me?”

  “You.”

  “What?” I wasn’t a doctor. I was just a vet’s kid. A vet’s kid who, up until very recently, had been nothing more than air.

  “All the stuff we’ve done in the school,” she said. “I don’t want it to go away. When I do. I need you to try, Janey.”

  “Try?”

  “Be superlative.”

  Oh.

  Oh.

  At once, I understood what it was she was asking me. But she didn’t even have to ask. “It won’t go away,” I said, without a trace of uncertainty or hesitation. “Believe me, it won’t. I promise.”

  Things had changed.

  It’s entirely possible she was a little bit surprised by my quick reply. “Good. Good. That’s good.” She paused. “That’s why all superheroes have sidekicks, you know.”

  “Why?”

  She nodded to the nightstand, where her wig lay in a crumpled mess. “Someone has to take up the mantle.”

  I laughed, a little happily, a little sadly. My idea from the night before was growing and growing, but I didn’t want to tell her about it. Not yet. It would be a surprise. The surprise of a lifetime, I was sure. “I don’t think I could ever fill your shoes,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “not if you keep wearing those ugly Blue Shoes.”

  This time the laughter was all out of joy. “Oh, those things are history, believe me.”

  “Good. Anyway, don’t try to fill my shoes. Find your own shoes. Just maybe ones that lead you to doing good sometimes, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, wiggling my toes a little to make her laugh.

  We talked for hours after that. Not about superheroes or leukemia or Blue Shoes. We shed all of those external trappings, everything on the outside that didn’t really matter, and were just ourselves.

  I talked about my mother. I’d never really talked about her before with anyone. We didn’t talk about her death, of course. Because neither of us wanted her to be defined in that way. But I shared my memories about her. The headboard. The necklace. The way that she used to make my dad smile, which I saw shadows of from time to time when he was pleased with something that I’d done.

  “I have this one memory,” I said. “It’s not exactly a memory. I can only see her eyes. Brown. Like mine. Looking at me. Down. From the stars. Like we were lying on the front lawn, staring up at the sky or something.” But I wasn’t sure it had actually happened. It might have just been something I wanted to be real. “I don’t know if it’s a memory or a dream.”

  “It could be both,” she said.

  “Both. Maybe.”

  She told me all the things I never knew about her, about her family and her life. About Captain Superlative’s real origin story. “My birth name is actually Li Hailan,” she said.

  “Li Hailan,” I repeated, trying to get the pronunciation right.

  “Li is the most common family name in the world.”

  If that was true, that was the only thing about her that was common. “Does it mean anything?”

  “Li means plum. Hailan means ocean waves or ripples.” She made little ripples with her fingertips. “I always felt like one of my parents accidentally dropped a plum into a pond one day and decided on my name.”

  I laughed. “It’s pretty.”

  “We changed it to Caitlyn when we moved here because it sounded a little like Hailan.�
��

  “Why’d you change it at all?”

  “To fit in. To be American.” She’d always been an outsider, even before she started running around in a cape. A stranger in a strange world. “I was a lot like you,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to notice me. I was afraid they would think I was weird, or something.”

  “What changed?”

  “I changed.”

  It was long past dark when she finally confessed, “I’m kind of tired. I should get some sleep now.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “Thanks, Janey.”

  There was a lot encompassed in that thanks. I was pretty sure I understood it all.

  “Sure.” I stood up, stretching my arms up over my head. I walked over to the nightstand, setting the comic book I’d brought her beneath the little fan. “Hey,” I said suddenly, “are you going to go to the dance tomorrow?”

  “The Valentine’s Day dance?” she said, scooting back on her hands until she hit her pile of pillows. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Good,” I said, pulling the strap of my bag across my shoulder. “Then I’ll see you there.”

  And maybe surprise her a little.

  Or a lot.

  Nothing less than a superlative would do.

  It had snowed the night before. The walkway leading up to the front doors of Deerwood Park Middle School was coated in a silver sheen. Large and lazy snowflakes continued to fall sporadically, like little pieces of dryer lint, from the trees and streetlights. The janitor had sloshed blue antifreeze into the snowbanks, piled up along the sides of the driveway. It created patterns of melt, the muddy grass and pavement peeking out from the pristine snow—a combination of pretty and ugly, like you find in any middle school.

  I could feel my dad watching me in the car’s rearview mirror. I looked up, catching his twinkly blue eyes. We had just pulled up into the circle drive out front. The seventh-grade dance was still three hours away, so the school was quiet. No sign of the flood of station wagons and hybrids that would soon descend.

  “Are you ready, Janey?” Dad asked, turning over his shoulder to face me. The corners of his eyes were turned up and crinkled.

  “Yeah,” I said, zipping my coat all the way to my chin.

  He reached his arm back between the seats, brushing my hair away from my face. “Try and have a little fun tonight.”