David J. Schwartz - Superpowers

On the bus back to Madison Mary Beth finally relaxed. All weekend she'd sat on her hands to remind herself not to touch anything. When she couldn't avoid using her hands she had been tentative and clumsy. Her mother asked if she was sick, and Mary Beth had let her believe it. It was a good excuse to avoid a potentially disastrous trip to the mall; Mary Beth hated to think what might happen if she tried too hard to fit into a pair of designer jeans. As it was, she had put a dent in the roof of the Jeep when she bumped her head on it. Her mother had been too relieved that she was OK to think about it much. "You always did have a hard head," she had said, after checking for blood.

She had played the sick card with her younger brother as well. They wrestled all the time, and until recently, when Peter had hit his growth spurt and started to get big, they'd been evenly matched. But Mary Beth didn't trust herself to keep her strength under control, so every time he punched her playfully in the shoulder she had to tell him she wasn't up to it. Besides, Peter was getting to the age when grappling with his older and not-blood-related sister might not be the healthiest thing.

She was tired of keeping secrets. She had read all the comics she'd bought, and she was overflowing with ideas that she couldn't wait to tell Harriet about. She had taken voluminous notes, even made some sketches. They were bad sketchesstick- and balloon-figured superheroines in unflattering costumes. Caroline was a better artist, but she wasn't in on the secret.

The secret was starting to feel like a box that she was trapped in. A box she could move around in but couldn't leave. A box on wheels, maybe. On Saturday her dad had struggled to drag his new grill around the house and onto the back patio. Three years before, at the age of fifty, he'd had a heart attack. Mary Beth wanted badly to go out and carry the 180-pound grill around for him, but she had read enough X-Men in the past five days to be afraid of how they would look at her afterward.

Despite that, Mary Beth was so excited about her new plans that she almost resented the fact that she had to be in class tomorrow. Almost. She still wanted to be a doctor. This other thing wouldn't be a distraction from that. She wouldn't let it be one.

"Bet you can't help it." Her birth mother sat in the aisle seat beside her. Wanda Benson was about ten, had pigtails, and wore a dirty T-shirt and jeans. "Doctor or superhero? That's pretty easy."

"I can do both." Mary Beth had learned back in elementary school to say the words silently to herself. Maybe her mother wasn't really there, but sometimes it was easier to talk to her than to think things through on her own.

"Bet you don't want to," said Wanda. "You didn't study for your lab at all. You read those comics all weekend."

"Nora must have thought I was losing my mind." When Mary Beth was speaking to Wanda she always referred to her adoptive mother by her first name.

"You know those people in the comics? Like Daredevil? That's not real."

"I know that."

"I'm not talking about powers," Wanda said. "I'm talking about being a lawyer and a superhero at the same time. That's totally unrealistic."

"Well, it won't be easy. Managing the time will be a definite challenge."

"Yeah. 'Specially when you become a resident and start working fourteen-hour shifts and being on call all the time. You can't just run off and leave all the sick people every time the world needs to be saved."

"Maybe."

"If I was superstrong I wouldn't be a stupid doctor. I'd make money lifting heavy stuff for people, and I'd have a secret base nobody knew about, and I'd put the bad people in a big jail in space so they wouldn't hurt any kids."

"How am I supposed to get into space?" asked Mary Beth.

"What?" The boy in the seat ahead of her turned.

Mary Beth acted like she had just woken up and told him she must have been talking in her sleep. She closed her eyes and pretended to doze off.

"I can be whatever I want," she told Wanda without saying a word. And then she did doze off, to dream of a hospital filled with balloon-figure doctors and stick-figure patients.