Page 22 of No Capes
“Nice to meet you. Here I am, Madeline, ready to fight the bad guys. I could start flying at any given moment, and I wear this suit that’s somehow repels dirt and blood but not cheese or tomatoes. Thing is, at the end of the day, Superhuman is still human. A lot of people have trouble remembering that.”
“Yeah,” I reply, as if he’s stating the obvious.Wow, I congratulate myself,I am having a suave day. “But us NSRPs need to forget that. We need to believe that there are people like you out there, people who are more than human.”
“NSRPs?”
“Non-Super Regular Persons.” He hasn’t heard that acronym before? It’s common jargon among Goldies. “It’s inspiring that Superheroes exist,” I babble, “to remind everyone that what people do matters. And Supers set amazing examples for society to follow—you show us that there are people who want to do what’s good more than anything. Or more than that, what’sright.” I close my mouth, heart pounding from putting so many sentences together. Am I still ahead? Did that make sense to him?
I know not everyone feels this way about Supers, but at least the Goldies do.How do Supers view their powers? Are they a gift? Or a curse?
Golden Ace has more powers than the typical Super: super speed, strength, flight, and inhumanly fast reflexes. Goldies think he has more, but any others have only been rumors so far.
Golden Ace studies me for eleven heartbeats. I counted. At last, he says, “I’m glad I bumped into you.”
“Um. Me too,” I reply.He’s not at all what I expected.
Golden Ace chuckles, and the backstage door swings open. A well-dressed man with a trying-too-hard haircut joins us in the hall.
“Gold, you ready?” Mayor Phillip Bridges greets us. Phil is shorter than Golden Ace, about my height. With a woolen sweater and jeans, he’s tried hard to communicate a look that saysI’m powerful but still relatable to a group of teenagers who are just happy not to be in class.
“What’s up, Madeline? Gold, I see you’ve met my favorite sister-in-law.”
“She’s very cool,” says Golden Ace. He jogs over to Phil. Right before heading in, he looks back at me. “Time to do Super-slash-human things, I guess.”
“Maddy, give your old man my best, yeah?” Phil salutes me and the door slams after him. The auditorium explodes with excitement.
She’s very cool.Holy freaking Aces.Golden Ace said I was cool!
Chants of “Ace, Ace, Ace,” last long enough for me to return.
Kristen has awoken from her power nap and monitors Golden Ace like he’s a magician and she’s trying to figure out his tricks.
“He has the worst costume,” she says. “If I designed that bad boy, Golden Ace would be on the cover of every fashion magazine in the world. Seriously, some of the fabric is off. It looks like he spilled something.”
“I met him in the hall. He’s nice.”
She groans. “You let me sleep while you met Golden Ace. You owe me big time.”
Someone behind us shushes us. Kristen sticks her tongue out at them, and we settle in for the speech. It hasn’t escaped me that the chairs beside Molly are still empty. The lights are so dim thatI can’t look for Aaron.Where are they?How had Fox, Damian, and Aaron gotten out of this? Do they know that freaking Golden Ace is here?
Golden Ace speaks to us for a grand total of six minutes. Something about unity and working together against evil. I have trouble paying attention after I spot the stain on his spandex.
Finally, he gestures to Mayor Bridges and they trade places. Golden Ace slips out, off to do more Super-slash-human things.
“What’s up, Capital High?” Phil rides on the energy Golden Ace created as my classmates cheer. “Give it up one more time for my man Golden Ace, and we’ll get this party started.”
“Ah,” says Kristen. “G.A. was the warm-up.”
I’ve heard Phil’s speech a million times. He wants to help us kids reach our full potential, and that means staying courageous and going to him directly—or rather to his hotline—if something unusual happens in our neighborhoods. Given Arielle’s effort to warn my dad and me about a crime spike, I should have known Phil would eventually speak to the entire school.
Kristen, however, does not tune Phil out and at some point whispers, “Mayors get tested for powers, right?”
What is it with everyone asking if random people have powers?
“Duh. Major conflict of interest.” Phil comes from money, but there’s no sum high enough to bribe Super test administrators. The penalty for falsely reporting the result of a Super test is life in prison.
“Only high school and pro athletes, politicians, and cops get tested,” I add. “The feds have an undercover branch that keeps the data.” The government sends out representatives every year to administer the test, and these reps are the only people who can know for sure if someone has powers, which is why Arielle was so smug when she was chosen to administer the high school tests. We get re-tested every year, since no one knows howpeople get powers—whether people are born with them or if powers develop over time.
“But people who think they might have powers wouldn’t run for office or play sports, right?” asks Kristen.
