Capeless: A Short Story

CAPELESS

I held three tickets in my trembling hands, the envelope they came in ripped into a thousand pieces and strewn about my quasi-tidy room. I picked a few bits of envelope from my braided hair and stared at the tickets and the stoic image of a masked man dressed all in red printed on them.

They say that heroes walk among us. Capeless. Unseen. They say they're unknown to the little people milling about their everyday lives and that we're blind to their heroics until they don their mask to beat the living snot out of evildoers. But that's a load of crap. Heroes are very much caped and very much seen, especially in the case of the Blood Revenger, played by the dreamy and exceptionally muscular Marcen Weston. He was everything a hero should be, and I was going to meet him.

Marcen rarely did meet-and-greets with his fans, so when he tweeted that he'd be stopping by the grand opening of the Skylark Razor, an obscenely tall skyscraper slash condo slash store-type monstrosity just five hours away from my bedroom, I knew it was my destiny to shake his hand. Or you know, have dinner with him and walk along the beach strip where he'd propose and whisper secrets about Season Three in my ear, because after that Season Two finale, he owed me. Us. He owed us.

I picked up the phone beside my bed, the corded, pink one with the faded, half-peeling My Little Pony stickers on it and dialed Jess, Best Friend Number One. I had my cell but reception in our area sucked, and this was important news that required a hardwire to the world. She answered and I didn't even say hello, I just said, "They came." A squeal came from the other end, the kind that only dogs and other sixteen-year-old girls with tickets to a Marcen Weston meet-and-greet can hear. We hung up immediately and I dialed Megan, Best Friend Number Two, but only because I organized my best friends in alphabetical order and not by some hierarchy of loyalty like most of the other girls in high school did. More squeals. More oh-emm-gees. More hanging up.

I ran out of my room and down the stairs, nearly crashing into my dad who was coming upstairs with Mathew, my annoying 7-year-old brother. "Slow down, Katherine. You're gonna kill yourself," Dad said and Mathew parroted my dad as I made it to the first floor in just four bounds. I rounded the corner into the kitchen and Mom was there reading the paper and eating toast smeared with disgusting marmalade. She looked up over her reading glasses and I showed her the tickets, trying to speak words but only able to express myself with excited grunts and mumbles. "I'm glad they came," she said, not fully grasping the awesomeness of the situation. "Now get something to eat before you're late for school."

As if I'd be late on a momentous day like today. I grabbed a protein bar and an apple (two things I hadn't planned on eating but took to prevent the disdainful head shake I knew was coming if I didn't do something to appease her) and picked the bits of envelope from my haphazard hair. I then began the daily ritual of searching for my schoolbooks, which always seemed to evade me in the mornings.

"Looking for these?" my dad said, holding said books in his hands.

"Looking for these?" Matty mimicked again, standing there with his over-sized, Blood Revenger-themed backpack. He was a fan too but in that lame little-kid way that didn't appreciate the talent or looks of the acting god that played my hero every Sunday night at nine o'clock. Eight central.

"I need you to take Mathew to school this morning," Dad said, fully squelching my momentum. "I've got an interview this morning."

Dad had been out of work for a few months since his company had - air quotes - restructured. There'd been a lot of that going on. Megan's mom had been "restructured" a few months before my dad and had received her first job offer just last week. Still, it didn't mean I wanted a little-brother tagging along this morning, ruining the epic Marcen Weston ticket reveal. I waved Matty over with an impatient sigh, loud enough to make my feelings on the matter known. "Thank-you, Katherine," my mom said without looking up from her crossword puzzle.