Page 112 of No Capes
I shift, getting a little more comfortable. I remember Fox, as Dark Static, saying that if I asked what Damian’s event was, the one where his powers came out, he’d tell me.
“I’ll tell you, sure,” says Damian.
“Hey, you promised you wouldn’t read my mind.” I say, though I’m glad his power is working.
“I can’t control it as well anymore,” Damian admits sheepishly. “I swear. Careful what you think around me.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” I admit. It makes sense that if he had known Arielle’s true motivations, he wouldn’t say anything to protect all of us. But why hadn’t he read Phil’s mind to discover what he was planning? They were both at Hallowfest and the school assembly that day.
“I can only hear what people are thinking in the moment they’re thinking it,” says Damian. “It’s not like I could touch his hand and see his whole life. Same with Brynn. She was careful with what she thought around me. That’s why you never want people to know all of your powers. I learned that the hard way.” He shakes his head. “Anyway, you know some of my origin story.”
“I do?” Had there been anything on the Goldie site?
“What you interrupted on Hallowfest? With Zane.”
“Zane Milligan?”
“Yeah. We had a thing before he started dealing, but he went back to it after Aaron-slash-Patrick came, which is what you saw at the comic book shop. Zane wanted to get together again, but I wouldn’t do it if he was still dealing. He swore to me that night that he’d stop.”
Wow.I digest this. That night, I’d thoughtZanewas Golden Ace.
“Not everyone has parents as nice as yours,” says Damian. “When I was eleven, I tried to come out to my dad, who honestly believes I was put on this planet to be the next him, by the way—hence theJr.My entire identity growing up was being his ‘golden boy’—a law school bound star athlete. But that night… forget being the golden child, he looked at me like I wasn’t even human. He had to see me that way, in order to hate me.”
Damian swallows. “So I took it back. And now, well, Golden Ace is like Superman. Who’s more ‘golden boy’ than Superman? And my kryptonite is also close to home. That freaking gold. Things changed again when I met you in the hallway at school, before the assembly.”
“For real?” I didn’t realize I’d made an impression.
“You told me that people need Supers, because we need to believe in people who are more than human. I realized that’s why I needed Golden Ace, because he made me believe in something. And he made my dad seem small. But I didn’t want to be bigger than anyone else. I just wanted to be the best version of myself. After that, I didn’t want to use Golden Ace to hide behind anymore. So, I ended my deal with Molly and tried hanging out with Zane. Someday, I hope Capital City will know this part of Golden Ace. For him to be the Super for kids like me, and more than a hero, someday.”
Rustling leaves and the sounds of autumn take the space between our thoughts. “Thanks for telling me,” I say. “Fox told me that you and Molly were never really together. That must have been traumatic, pretending to date someone, especially because she hates Supers.”
“Molly doesn’t hate Supers.” Damian laughs.
“She’s basically president of the Anti-Golden-Ace committee.”
“Nah. She knew I was Golden Ace before Fox did. She pretended to loathe Golden Ace, just in case anyone eversuspected I might be him, because Golden Ace would never date someone who hates Supers, right? She wanted to help me.”
Wow.
He tilts back in his chair. “What else would you like to ask? Since I’m in such a sharing mood.”
“Actually, there is one thing. How did you pass your sports Super test? Fox and I had Arielle to lie for us.”
“Ah,” he says. “You want to know how I made the tennis team.”
“Definitely.”
“If you could stand, you would strangle me for this.”
“Now you have to tell me.”
“Non-supers design the Super test, right?” he starts. “I just listened to the administrator’s thoughts when I was taking the test, and it was like they were literally telling me what they were looking for.”
I think back to my own Super test. Arielle had forced me to drink a lot of liquids and monitored my body’s vitals to see how I reacted to them. “What?” I ask. “How can you fake your own vitals?”
“You drink the liquids, right? And if you’re a Super, your heart rate would be normal after you drink the blue cup, because that’s the control, but then it would be higher after the purple cup, and lower after the red cup,” he explains. “I meditated to keep my heart constant. It’s a glorified polygraph.”
“That’s it? I thought they would have checked for some kind of Super genome or tried to poison you or something.”
