The Madrona Heroes Register: Echoes of the Past

Chapter 1 - The Missing Mirror

It had been a very long time since a child had exhibited a super power in the small lakeside neighborhood of Madrona. So long, in fact, that it was as if this had never happened at all. Madrona was not crawling with radioactive spiders looking to bite, or littered with crash-landed spaceships containing small boys from distant planets. Signs of normalcy and calm were everywhere. 

In fact, as you drove into the old tree-lined section of town, an actual sign read: “Madrona – The peaceable kingdom,” words inspired by an almost two hundred year old painting, currently hanging in a museum three thousand miles to the east. The painting showed a world where sworn enemies, both human and animal, live together in peace. But on this airy summer afternoon, two of the three Jordan siblings were living anything but peaceably. 

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Binny Jordan searched frantically around her room, which had the attendant swirl of strewn-about junk you would expect to find in space occupied by a ten-year-old girl. Binny’s search was impeded by all the clothes on the floor and discarded cups snuck upstairs for beverages to be consumed outside the kitchen (in flagrant violation of Binny’s parents’ rules). 

Posters of various skateboarding heroes in daring poses covered the walls. No fewer than three skateboards lay angrily split at the bottom of her closet, halves pointing upward like tombstones. Binny had the vague intention to display these on her wall someday like a hunter would exhibit his quarry: See the lives I’ve taken? Yours may be next!

Peeking out from one spot on the wall Binny’s father’s drawing of his daughter as a skateboarding superhero named “Skate Punk”. He drew Binny and her siblings as comic book heroes periodically. Mostly when he was procrastinating before drawing the technical illustrations he was paid to create.

It has to be here somewhere, she thought to herself.  The “it” in question was a small pocket mirror. It was old and covered in ornate swirly decorations and looked like it was made of precious silver. It had a hinged cover that protected the little round mirrored surface from scratches. It was Binny’s mother’s mirror, but Binny had appropriated it for herself. Stolen is such an ugly word. Unlike the used dishes in her room, her parents overlooked this infraction, since possessing the mirror seemed to make Binny happy, and unlike the dirty dishes, the mirror probably wouldn’t lead to an ant infestation. 

The mirror usually sat on the shelf next to Binny’s makeup and hair stuff. Binny liked makeup fine, though she had liked it more when she was younger. These days it gave her a shared activity with her seven-year old sister Cassie. Cassie adored make-up, dress-up, and all manner of attention getting activities. At the thought of Cassie, Binny admonished herself silently. When something was missing from Binny’s room, why did she waste time looking anywhere other than Cassie’s thieving little hands? 

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Cassie Jordan was outside at that very moment acting out an entire scene from Snow White using the very mirror Binny was looking for. “Mirror mirror, who’s the prettiest girl in the world? Me? Cassie? Cassie Jordan? Oh really? But I couldn’t agree more,” sang Cassie using the mirror like a microphone. As if that weren’t enough to draw her sister’s ire, she was also mangling the story by pretending to be Snow White, when clearly Snow White’s stepmother was the one that spoke to the mirror. As with most things that enraged Binny, Cassie wasn’t bothered in the least by this inconsistency.

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Binny marched into Cassie’s room. Binny quickly found all manner of things that were hers and definitely not in their rightful places: a large book on spying, including instructions on making codes for secret messages, a collection of hair bands which Cassie didn’t even need since her hair was much shorter than Binny’s, a suspicious number of socks that Binny knew were hers, admittedly hard to prove since their parents bought her and Cassie the same kind, and some spoons half-covered in peanut butter that Cassie had stuffed between the bed and the wall upon becoming distracted by some other mischief.