Blog of a Teenage Superhero

Chapter Seventeen: Bathroom Breakdowns

If you don't already fight crime on your free time, I don't suggest it, because it's 51% getting beat up and 49% hiding your scars. I'm already covered in thick waves of spreading lumps and bruises, most of which I mask easily with my Hello-Kitty pull-over top. I hide the gash on the corner of my forehead by combing my hair over in a Clark Kent-esque left part, and my "waves" are so tangled and bushy I spend at least twenty minutes rummaging for coconut oil.

 I only find three broken mugs and a split pair of scissors. Kai's doing. The kid is a walking kiss of disaster.

I have cold pizza for breakfast. By the time I'm dressed for school, Dad is already gone.

The day is okay. Finn laughs at my hair, since he's always finding new, exciting facets of me to laugh at. Branders tells me absences become habit and that if I keep this up, why, I'll become a truant. Practically already am.

I crack open a textbook. I make a point of scribbling down every word he says. Because I'm sorry, I can't hear him over the sound of Monet Jackson being the best student she can be, and if Mom could see me now, she'd shed a tear of joy for her lanky little soon-to-be Harvard student.

Branders happens, class happens, lunch happens—I spend that in the library with my face shoved into the pages of an AP Art History textbook, napping apparently, becuase I remember studying, and then I remember waking in a pool of my own drool, looking up into the smug faces of kids who think they're cool because they found a particularly lame older kid.

The beauty of childhood.

But these six hours are all a footnote to the real torture: the after-school pitching. Six adults sitting at a green plastic table, drumming pens to notepads while half a cafeteria full of classroom reps watch. The historian brings charts. The president brings smiles. And me? I get to talk.

"Your speech was so funny," Max says. "You'll be great," Max says. And I'm already swung by the way he puts emphasis on his words like the sounds are too small to contain all his enthusiasm. His whole body trembles with it. It's adorable, which, I suppose, is it what leads me to stand in front of a white screen, my hands shaking and my head filled with so much pressure I think my eyes will spring out of their sockets.

Percy thumbs-up me from the back of the room, mouthing 'Go Monet!' Golden Boy Chip studies me, his mouth pressed into a hard line, the skull on his shirt grinning wickedly. There are fresh bruises on the side of his face.

The duo is pleasantly distracting, and I stare at a bouncing Percy to steady my shaking breath.

"Um," I say, running my fingers over my itchy hair part. "We're looking to start a carnival. A student run one, a cheap one. It could be an annual thing, just to set up, like, a fund for superhero battle fixings, in case another fight breaks out at our school."

Principal Laurel raises both eyebrows. She has two chunky red bows clipped into her curly hair. Red and black bangles clink and jangle on her wrists, a vision of school spirit that I can only dream of. "An interesting concept. It's refreshing to see student involvement. Tell me, do you have a budget proposed?"

By the time the treasurer steps forward, I'm drenched in sweat and even Max is too nervous to smile. He nudges me instead. Besides Kai, he's the touchiest person I know, only seconded by Percy. I bet Percy, Max, and Chip are just like me and my boys, except they're always hugging.

"Thank you," Laurel says after the treasurer finishes, "Please give us time to deliberate."

For a Student Council, we sure as heck don't have much autonomy, through the representatives spring up and launch into arguments and proposals, all of which the poor secretary has to record. He breaks two pens. I think of starting a fund to get him a laptop.