Chapter 1 – Ride to School
Journal entry #1
Date: Monday – Do I really have to go to school today? Again?
Dear journal, or whatever, this is all new to me so I’ll just go with it. Have you ever wanted to have superpowers? I mean, wanted to fly, or be super-strong, or see through walls – something like that? Well, in my world, ninety-nine percent of the population has superpowers, while one percent of the population doesn’t. Guess which group I’m in... You guessed it. I’m in the group that doesn’t have superpowers. I’m what is affectionately referred to as a super-not and, yeah, it stinks.
Way back before my parents were born, a huge comet passed by planet Earth. Scientists had been tracking it for years, and many people thought it was going to destroy our world. But it didn’t. Instead, it streaked by about a thousand miles away. And while the comet didn’t destroy our planet, it did change our lives forever.
In the years following the comet’s near miss, people began noticing strange behavior in some of the earth’s younger population. These days, it’s not that big of a deal for a toddler to lift up a couch with one arm to retrieve a wayward pacifier, or for a two-year-old to fly up to the top of a tree and bring ‘kitty’ back down to earth, but back then, it was really something. You get the picture. Practically everyone born after the comet came was some form of ‘super’... except, of course, for my kind – the super-nots.
I wonder if going to high school was this tough back in the days before most of the population had superpowers? I’m sure it was nothing like going to high school now, where 99% of the student body have superpowers, and you don’t. Like I said, it stinks.
Right now I’m waiting for the school bus, already counting the seconds until the dismissal bell rings. One of the people who makes this whole thing bearable is my best friend, Faedra. She’s a super-not too, and we’ve been friends since third grade. Here she comes now. Gotta go.
* * * * *
My mom had given me a new journal for my birthday and suggested I start writing as a way to help me deal with living life as a super-not. I wasn’t quite sure what to write, but I’d decided to give it a shot. I closed the journal and slipped it into my backpack as I saw Faedra walking up to the bus stop.
“Hey, Dylan.”
“Hey, Faedra.”
“I’m so excited about the pep rally today! I can’t wait to hear the Cool Tones play my song!”
Faedra may not have had superpowers, but she was a talented song writer. She wrote an awesome fight song for our school, and the school’s jazz band was going to play it at the pep rally at the end of the day.
“Yeah, that’s gonna rock. I’m happy for you.”
My face and my voice must not have matched the excitement I was trying to convey with my words. Faedra was frowning.
“What’s the matter, Dylan?”
I turned to see that the bus was pulling up to our stop, and Bruno stuck his big fat head out of one of the bus windows and yelled, “Hey, Dylan the super-not! Get on this bus so you can do my homework!”
Faedra smiled at me sheepishly.
“That’s what’s the matter,” I said to Faedra as we got on the bus.
We picked a seat near the front of the bus. I was hoping that Bruno was just being his usual charming self and didn’t, in fact, have any homework that he wanted me to do for him on the way to school. Before the bus driver closed the door and pulled away, however, Bruno had lumbered up the aisle and pushed the kid sitting behind us up against the window so that he could fit his six-foot-two, one hundred ninety-pound frame into the seat behind us. The kid pushed up against the window – some skinny ninth grader from the looks of it – looked terrified.
Bruno’s meat hook of an arm reached over the seat from behind me and plopped his Pre-Algebra book down on my lap. I noticed there was a blank sheet of paper and a pencil shoved between the pages – how thoughtful of him.
“I need problems one through ten done by the time we get to school,” he boomed.
“Has it ever occurred to you to try to do your homework before forcing someone else to do it for you?” I replied, trying not to be too snarky and failing miserably.
“Hey, I’m going to play pro football. Probably won’t even go to college anyway since the leagues can draft supers straight out of high school, so who needs to know how to do this stuff? I just need a passing grade so my old man doesn’t ground me.”
The thought of deliberately putting all of the wrong answers down for the homework I was about to do for him briefly crossed my mind, but it was quickly replaced with a vision of Bruno sticking my head in the toilet in the boy’s bathroom in retribution. So, instead of resisting, I did what most people did when Bruno ‘asked’ them to do his homework – I started working the math problems for him. You have to wonder why his teachers hadn’t caught on yet. I mean, how many different forms of handwriting could one kid have? Practically everyone on the bus had done homework for him at some point, and yet he’d never gotten called on it. The teachers were probably just as scared of him as the students were. He was, after all, super-strong, and most of the teachers were single-power brainiacs who wouldn’t stand a chance against somebody like Bruno.
I made a mental note to jot down some notes on the hierarchy of superpowers in my journal for posterity’s sake. Most supers were single-powered, meaning that they had only one enhanced power trait. Flying, super-strength, enhanced mental capacity, super-speed – et cetera. Some people were doubles, meaning they had two superpowers. That happens about ten percent of the time. About one-tenth of one percent of people were triples, with three superpowers. Bruno was the garden variety single-power super. Most of the teachers were single-power super-smart supers, or, as most people called them, brainiacs.
I finished Bruno’s homework as the bus pulled into the school’s unloading zone and handed it back to him.
“Thanks, super-not. You better get me an ‘A’ or it’ll be toilet-scrubbin’ time.”
He lumbered past our seat and down the steps of the bus. The kid he’d smushed up against the window gave a big sigh of relief.
“He’s such a bully,” Faedra observed.
“Let’s forget about it,” I replied. “The good news is that’s probably the worst thing that will happen to me all day.”
Boy, was I wrong.