The Caped 6th Grader (5 page)

“That's one of my favorite things about color,” she said, her marker moving swiftly across the page. “So many possibilities, so many subtle mysteries. Colors are complex, they can be more than one thing—kind of like people.”

I'd never thought of it like that before. “I like that!” I said, rolling the bluish greenish pencil between my palms. “But I'm still not sure which box to put this in.”

Electra glanced up from her drawing and checked the pencil.

“Let's call that one green-blue,” she said. “I see a touch more of the cobalt tone in it, so put it in the blue box. Somewhere in that box you'll find one that's similar, but with more of an emerald tint.”

“When I find that one, I'll put it in the green box, right?”

Electra smiled. “Color … such a wonderful way to learn the concept of compromise!”

After that, I picked through the pencil collection and Electra explained to me some of the technical aspects involved in drawing and producing a comic book.

“I don't go in much for all that computer-graphic stuff,” she said, using the side of her thumb to smudge and blend the edge of a sketch. “I like good old-fashioned art.”

Before I knew it, the clock on her desk (with the lightning-bolt-shaped hands!) was striking three.

“Zoe, would you mind seeing yourself out?” asked Electra, fishing through the red box for a raspberry-colored pencil. “I'm in the middle of a great thought and I don't want to lose it.”

“Sure thing,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Looking forward to it.”

I grabbed my backpack, made my way downstairs, and closed the front door behind me. When my feet hit the front walk, it was all I could do to keep from breaking into superspeed, I was so excited.

Electra Allbright was looking forward to seeing me!

Man! How cool was that?

I'll tell you how cool that was: supercool!

AT
home, I had a marathon IM session with Emily. She all about her day at the magazine. I probably should have gotten a jump start on my chores for the week, but it seemed that the whole sixth grade was online and wanted to share their first-day news.

Howie was the only one who wasn't online—knowing him, he'd stopped at the video store on the way home and rented every police movie ever made, just to bone up on the lingo.

I stayed on the computer until Mom called me down for dinner. I could smell something spicy and I knew what we were having.

“Tacos. Awesome!” I slid into my chair and happily began to pile shredded cheese and tomatoes into my corn tortilla.

“How was your first day on the job?” asked Mom, handing a bowl of chopped olives to my dad.

“Well …” I scanned the table for the taco sauce. “It was good. Electra was drawing a really cool background page, and she told me all about how comic books are made while I sorted pencils.” I bit into my taco, remembering the blue-green/green-blue issue. “It was way more complicated than you'd think.”

“Sounds like you learned your first lesson about grown-up work,” said Dad. “Even the little things can be challenging.”

“And important,” Mom added. “In any profession there are a million small jobs that can make or break the end result.”

“Even if you're just sitting there at a desk for hours, sorting pencils,” I said with a nod. I sounded very wise and experienced.

Dad took the bottle of taco sauce and drizzled some over his dinner. “Nobody starts at the top, kid.”

Except superheroes
, I thought, hiding a smile behind my taco. And it's true. Even the smallest superhero duty is a big deal. I supposed I should be glad that my nonsuper job for the next two weeks was going to be a low-stress one.

“And sooner or later,” Mom said with a sigh, “we all feel like we're just chained to our desk.”

“Speaking of being chained to a desk,” said Dad, “would you like to hear about Howie's first day on the job?”

I gulped down the bite of taco I'd just taken. “Howie got chained to a desk?”

“Well, handcuffed, to be precise,” Dad said, chuckling.

“TELL ME!”

“Well, it was lunchtime when Howie and I got to the station house, so there weren't too many detectives around. Anyway, one of the uniform cops, Ted Morrison, came down to our department to consult on a case. Of course, he had his sidearm and his
cuffs with him, and Howie was pretty fascinated. He was staring at Morrison as though he were some kind
of superhero.”

I let out a loud choke of laughter.

“Morrison offered to show Howie the cuffs. One minute Howie was just holding them, and the next he'd somehow managed to cuff himself to the bottom drawer of the chief's desk.”

“My goodness,” said Mom, filling a second taco for me and handing it across the table. “Poor Howie!”

“Oh, it gets better,” said Dad, smiling. “At this point, Ted and I still hadn't noticed what Howie had done. And Howie was too embarrassed to ask for the key, so he quietly opened the chief's top drawer, took out a paper clip, and tried to pick the lock on the handcuffs.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “The paper clip broke in the lock and jammed it.”

“Right! How did you know?”

I rolled my eyes. “Dad, I've known the kid for ten years. Trust me, that is
such a
Howie thing to do!” It wasn't that I didn't feel any sympathy for Howie—I did. But after being friends with a boy like Howie for so long, the goofy things that happen to him don't surprise you so much anymore.

“Poor Howie,” said Mom again.

“The worst part,” Dad continued, “was that the chief keeps his lunch in the bottom drawer, but with Howie hooked to the handle, there was no way for the chief to get to his pastrami on rye. It took three detectives and a janitor with a hacksaw to finally solve the problem.” Dad was trying to keep from laughing as he finished the story.

“Howie must have felt awful,” said Mom.

“He did at first,” said Dad. “But it turns out that back when
Morrison was a rookie, he had a handcuff mishap his first day on the job. Cuffed himself to the steering wheel of a squad car, I think it was.”

I'd finished my second taco and was reaching for a third shell.

“Looks like you worked up an appetite with all that pencil sorting,” Mom observed.

“I guess I did,” I said, heaping olives and jalapeño peppers into the shell. “And you know something? I can't wait to do it again tomorrow!”

I locked my bedroom door.

I never had to do that before I became a superhero, but I couldn't take a chance on Mom or Dad popping in to say goodnight while I was flipping through the scrapbook.

I plunked the large album in front of me on my bed and opened it. On the first page was an inscription in gold ink:

Cool. I'd never read anything with the word
writ
in it before!

Feeling curious and important, I turned the page and found an elaborate diagram: the Zip family tree.

I studied it for several minutes, suddenly ravenous for information about my Super roots. I already knew that my grandpa Zack's grandmother, Zelda (also known, according to a notation in the diagram, as Hero Zephyr), was a superhero. Zelda s uncle Zeke (aka Hero Zinger) was a hero, as was her cousin Zita. Some of my relatives had married into other Super clans; others, like Grandpa, had married Ordinaries.

I scanned the page until I came to the place where Grandpa had carefully filled in my name—Zoe Alexandra Richards—and my birth date. By counting upward through the branches of the tree, I determined that I was a sixth-generation hero.

And so was Zander.

My breath caught in my throat as I slid my finger across the page and saw that, although no one had ever so much as mentioned it before, I actually had a distant cousin who was twelve years old like me. In fact, according to the record, we'd been born only a few days apart.

His name was Alexander Richards, but he was called Zander. (Apparently my family takes the whole
Z
, thing very seriously.) I wondered why Grandpa Zack hadn't mentioned Zander to me. I kind of liked knowing I had a cousin my own age out there somewhere who was going through the same weird and wonderful experience I was. I made a mental note to ask Grandpa about it as soon as he and Gran returned from vacation. But Zander, being a “Gen 11” like me, was part of the Zip present, and this paper I had to write was supposed to be about the past, so I figured I could leave my questions about this Zander kid for a later date and turned the page.

Gumption? The.
word was sort of familiar, but I had to stop and think about its meaning. Then I remembered—we'd had it on a vocabulary test a few weeks earlier.
Gumption: boldness; spunk; guts.
I went back to the article.

That last part sounded oddly familiar. I kept on reading:

I flipped to the next page and was not surprised to see a news clipping that included a photo of Zip apprehending N-Cina-Ray-Tor. The arrest, according to the headline, took place only one day after my grandpa had saved the earth from this bad guy's missile.

Filled with pride, I closed the book. Maybe writing this essay wouldn't be such a drag after all. It might be fun—not to mention informative—to learn about my legacy. And I'd already learned one extremely cool thing: not only is my grandfather Sweetbriar's premier dry cleaner, he was also one awesome superhero in his day!