Captain Superlative Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by J.S. Puller

  Cover design by Phil Caminiti and Maria Elias

  Cover art © 2018 by Chloe Bonfield

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-368-02610-9

  Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

  For my favorite superheroes, my parents—Deborah Goldberg and Neil Puller

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  We released paper lanterns into the night. They floated toward the moon. I don’t know who brought them. None of this was planned. We all just found ourselves in the parking lot of Deerwood Park Middle School, sitting on the hoods of SUVs, our legs sticking to the paint in the heat of an Illinois summer. We watched the lanterns dance and twirl, going higher and higher. They were like a school of sky fish, moving together as one.

  Captain Superlative would have loved seeing them. And seeing us too. The entire seventh-grade class. Technically eighth graders, and the top of the food chain now that it was July.

  Even though she was gone, I heard her voice again.

  “I’m going to be a superhero.”

  I smiled a little bit, imagining that I could feel her warmth and her presence at my side, just behind my shoulder, where she liked to stand. The glittering lanterns turned into the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling of her bedroom. I was almost there with her, like a breeze in the air, watching as she sat on the foot of her bed in pink pj’s, her lopsided blue wig on her head like a crown.

  “I’m going to be a superhero.”

  It was her voice, that stubborn and determined voice that sounded so confident that you couldn’t help but believe anything she said. She wasn’t saying it to anyone, though. Just to herself. She was alone, staring at the wallpaper of cabbage roses.

  “I’m going to be a superhero.”

  That’s how I like to believe it began.

  Of course, no one knows for sure how it really happened. There were plenty of different versions that popped up over the course of the second semester. They were just stories, though. Half-truths and imaginings. Jokes and guesses. They passed from one person to the next, with each listener adding their own special twist to it. Soon the characters—once simple classmates—were bigger than before. Stronger. Better. Superlative.

  I think, in her case, maybe the word was justified. She earned the right to be called superlative.

  “Janey…”

  A real voice. A voice in the present tense. Paige’s voice. I turned to look at her along the line of my shoulder. The light of the lanterns played against the dark planes of her face and across the tops of her cornrows. She looked angelic, like a little fairy. It was remarkable how much she’d changed since January. She was an entirely different person now, head held high. But I could see the swollen bags under her eyes, the glistening beneath her nose. She was hurting.

  We all were.

  I slid down from the hood of my dad’s car and walked over to Paige. Our arms wrapped around each other’s waist and we turned to watch the lanterns together.

  “I was thinking about her this morning,” Paige said, after a few moments of companionable silence.

  No need to ask who she was talking about. There was only one her.

  “Me too,” I said. “What about her?”

  “Just how it’s going to be weird,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Not seeing her here every day.”

  “Yeah. But she wouldn’t want us getting all weepy about it.”

  Paige let out a small, breathy laugh. “Probably not.”

  “You know exactly what she would say.”

  “Something about not wasting time being sad when there was work to be done and citizens in need.”

  I smiled. “Exactly.”

  Doors to open and giants to slay. Captain Superlative was so annoyingly set in her ways.

  Not everyone can just decide who it is they’re going to be. Especially not at the age of twelve. A lot of us need to figure it out over time. And we usually screw it up. More than once. More than five times. Or ten. The road to figuring out who you are is paved with failures. But that’s life.

  I guess you could say I speak from some experience. One particular experience, really; a wild ride that began back in January.

  Ostracism.

  Ms. Hinton scrawled the word across the dry-erase board in thick, faded black strokes, the marker squeaking a little with age. I leaned my chin into my palm, watching the motes of dust dance in a shaft of light from the window overlooking the parking lot. “Does anyone know what this means?”

  I knew. It came up the other day when I was watching TV with my dad and he’d explained it to me.

  Oddball.

  Outlander.

  Outsider.

  Outcast.

  Still, I didn’t raise my hand. I just sat at my desk in the back of the room, staring at the dust, trying to keep my expression blank. Counting the motes helped keep me from looking interested. They were sluggish and languid, like the January sunlight was slowly freezing them. Any second and they would come to a complete standstill, fossilized in a single moment of time. The margins of my notebook were carefully filled with idle doodles—wavy lines and patterned polka dots and little stars. I didn’t even bother to look at them as I drew, randomly connecting them, creating an abstract shape that meant nothing at all.

  It was dangerous to show too much of an interest in class. You’d be labeled as a nerd. I had daydreaming down to a science. I knew exactly how to zone out; just the right amount to fit in with everyone else, while still picking up enough of what the teacher was saying to avoid being grounded by my dad for getting a C or a D. The middle of the pack was the safest place, never rushing too far forward.

  Paige McCoy was the only one to raise her hand, fingers twitching slightly in the air.

  “Yes, Paige?” Ms. Hinton said.

  “Ostracism is when you get kicked out,” Paige said. She had a thin voice, one that always sounded tired.

  “Yes.” Ms. Hinton nodded curtly. “The idea was invented by the ancient Greeks, the Athenians to be specific. Who, as I hope you remember from before winter break, came up with a crazy little thing we like to call ‘democracy.’ Ostracism was a big part of their democracy. It was temporary banishment by popular vote. Usually of citizens that others considered dangerous to the state. Can you imagine that? Everyone coming together to vote someone out of the city?”

  Dagmar Hagen’s manicured hand shot up. “Ms. Hinton?”

  “Yes?”

  “Was there any way to argue against the vote?” she asked. “Or if you were voted out, did that
mean you couldn’t come back?”

  “Citizens were allowed to come back after ten years,” Ms. Hinton said, delighted that Dagmar had asked the question. Dagmar was every teacher’s favorite—daughter of the woman who’d led Deerwood Park’s champion cheerleading squad twenty years ago and a perfect straight-A student. Dagmar had followed in her mother’s competitive footsteps and led the sixth-grade soccer team to victory last summer—giving us incredible bragging rights over our rivals at Kohn Junior High—and was destined to do the same this year. It seemed like Ms. Hinton always had a special smile reserved just for Dagmar. “But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be voted out again.”

  “So could the people just keep kicking someone out again and again until they got the message?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “That is so sad!”

  Ms. Hinton laughed and turned to write the definition on the board.

  Dagmar’s eyes cut over to Paige. It was clear who Dagmar had in mind to vote out of the city, but I doubted Paige cared at this point. It was just a way of life.

  The bell rang.

  Everyone dragged themselves to their feet, shoving social-studies books haphazardly into bags. The sound of plastic Blue Shoes squeaked on the tiles. Ms. Hinton knew better than to try to get another word in. She shook her head and waved us out the door, calling, “Dagmar, say hello to your mother for me. Tell her I hope she had a good holiday.”

  “I will!”

  And then Ms. Hinton sat behind her desk and started flipping through her planner, going into the secret realm of meditation that all teachers seemed to know about.

  The second her back was turned, Dagmar ripped a sheet out of her notebook with slow, careful exactness. We could hear the holes in the paper tear away from each ring of the binder. She leaned over, writing Paige’s name across the blue lines in her neat, extra-curly handwriting. Casually, she crumpled it up, tossing it behind her with expert precision. The paper bounced off Paige’s shoulder as Dagmar glided out of the classroom, her minions flocking after her like moths to a flame.

  What a pair they were, Dagmar and Paige. Complete opposites. Where Dagmar was light, Paige was dark. Where Dagmar was tall, Paige was short. Where Dagmar was fire, Paige was earth.

  Paige didn’t even look at the sheet of paper. She let it slough off into a corner as she collected her books, balanced them precariously in her arms, and ducked out into the hallway.

  She wouldn’t be any safer out there, I thought, looping the strap of my bag over my shoulder. Not when Dagmar had followers around her. And Dagmar always had followers, for one reason or another. Sometimes, they gathered to laugh through a hashtag on her phone, which should have been kept in her locker, as per the rules of the school. Sometimes it was under the irrational hope that some of her “cool” would rub off. Or else, it was to avail themselves of her “charitable” giving. She’d just won the school service award for student tutoring. Teachers thought she was some kind of angel on a quest to help those less fortunate or less attentive in class, but most of us knew the truth. Dagmar only helped the girls on the soccer team with their homework. You couldn’t be on the team with bad grades. Dagmar’s “selflessness” meant that they all passed their classes, so they could all stay together and so that no one else could join.

  Dagmar was single-handedly holding the championship team together, and they knew it. The moths worshiped the ground she fluttered above. Really, everyone who wanted to stick it to Kohn Junior High did too.

  Which was pretty much everyone.

  I could already hear the peals of laughter from Dagmar and her friends. The moths had all copied Dagmar, writing Paige’s name on sheets of paper and throwing them at Paige as she passed by with her head down. It was a pity we weren’t the ancient Greeks. At least then, Paige could have escaped to the blissful isolation of exile. But here? Paige was being voted out of the city with nowhere to go. And no doubt, as Dagmar suggested, she would be voted out again and again.

  I waited until everyone cleared the room before I trudged through the doorway, so that they wouldn’t see me. Then again, no one ever really saw me. I was as unimportant as air. And equally invisible.

  Intangible.

  Insignificant.

  Inconsequential, a wonderful new word I’d recently picked up from my dad.

  It was better that way.

  It was just after winter break. The freshly cleaned halls echoed with the sound of friends filling in friends about their holiday adventures. The halls were also dotted with lost, confused faces. January always brought about a wave of new kids. They popped up like dandelions, usually the kids of military families from the active fort on the edge of Deerwood Park.

  It was easy to pick them out. They had maps—and they hadn’t gotten their Blue Shoes yet.

  Drifting through the halls that morning, I noticed something else. Something I’d never felt before—a buzz mixed with the usual slamming of lockers, the usual shuffling of feet, the usual begging Dagmar to sneak a peek at the latest cat video. All of that tended to fade away into a murky cloud of white noise. But not today. There was a thrum in the air, like a vibrating guitar string. Kids were talking. They were talking about something exciting. Something that managed to break into my solitude.

  At first, I thought it might be the anticipation of the Valentine’s Day dances. They were over a month away, but already there were pink and red and purple flyers littering the walls, covered in goopy hearts and little fat cupids, aiming arrows at one another. The rules had changed this year. The sixth- and seventh-grade dances were going all the way to ten o’clock. And the eighth-grade dance would last until eleven. Any change like that would have called for gossip and excitement.

  But it wasn’t about the dances.

  “You will not believe what I just saw.”

  I recognized the voice. Tyler Jeffries. He was standing with a group of seventh-grade boys, just outside the gym locker rooms.

  Tyler Jeffries pretty much was Deerwood Park Middle School. Smart, funny, gorgeous, and talented. He was the highlight of every school play. He stole every scene. Kids hung on his every word, every note. I couldn’t wait to see him in the spring production of Beauty and the Beast. He was playing Gaston. A part that was all wrong for him, in my opinion. A boy like him was a boy who got the girl in the end. As far as I was concerned, Tyler Jeffries was a Greek god. Better, really. Greek gods had flaws. Tyler Jeffries was perfect. Everyone thought so, and I was no exception.

  Tyler Jeffries’s sandy-brown hair and speckled hazel eyes were the object of most people’s attention. But not mine. I was obsessed with the arch of his upper lip. It’s strange, I know, but that lip made me think of the perfect bend in a Persian archer’s bow. Or the top of a heart. I was forever drawing it in the margins of my notebook. I dreamed of Tyler Jeffries launching a fatal kiss at me.

  Nothing else could get my heart racing so much.

  Or at all.

  When Tyler Jeffries was interested in something, it was worth noting. That was the rule. I strained to hear what it was he was saying to his friends. “What did you see, pretty boy?” one of them asked.

  “It was the weirdest thing ever,” he said.

  “Weirder than your dance moves?”

  “Hey now. I’m an artist.”

  “Maybe an abstract artist.”

  “You’re just jealous,” Tyler said, throwing his arms up in the air and flailing them like a Muppet. It was more like he was swatting a swarm of flies than dancing, but somehow he made it work.

  The boys laughed. “Keep telling yourself that,” one said.

  They disappeared into the locker room, chuckling and teasing, the battered wooden door swinging shut behind them and their excitement.

  What had he seen?

  The next passing period, the hallway hum returned.

  Dagmar and her best friend, April Cormack, were standing side by side in front of the wooden trophy case near the gym, scrolling through something on Dagmar�
�s phone. In their matching soccer-team uniforms and Blue Shoes, they looked like twin backup hip-hop dancers.

  Dagmar’s curly hair was like a living flame. She always had her head turned to a perfect angle, showing off her best features. It was as if she were expecting everyone in the hall to turn into paparazzi, clamoring to get her picture. Even when she was distracted, she was posing. And something was obviously distracting her. She and April muttered in fury to one another, their heads bunched together.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Dagmar said.

  “Not even a little bit,” April said.

  “How could anyone even do that?!”

  “I know, right?”

  That was all I could hear.

  It was the same again the next passing period. And the one after that. Soon, even Paige was talking about it. Whatever “it” was.

  “Is it really true?” she asked, sidling up beside me.

  No one ever asked me anything.

  I opened my mouth to reply, to ask what she meant. Too slow. I saw Dagmar and her moths out of the corner of my eye, sweeping down the hall with the speed of a forest fire. Smoothly, I turned, pretending to open the locker to one side. Dagmar blew past me, veering in Paige’s direction. “Hey, Paige,” she said, eyes demurely looking up from her phone. “This just came up on the news. ‘Local Woman Caught Shoplifting from Dollar Store.’ There’s a picture. Isn’t this your mom?”

  She turned the screen of her phone in Paige’s direction, but Paige stormed past her without looking. “You know that’s not my mom,” she said.

  “Oops,” Dagmar replied.

  The moths all laughed.

  I clutched the charm on my necklace. It was a little silver star with a blue glass bead in the middle that had once belonged to my mother. I wore it every day. As a way to be close to her, I guess. I turned the combination lock on a locker that didn’t even belong to me, waiting for everyone to go away.

  By the end of the day, I’d almost gotten used to the hum, sinking back into it like the usual, comfortable haze. Whatever the new gossip was, I figured it wouldn’t have much influence on my existence. How did you influence the air, anyway?