Read Online Hero by Perry Moore - Free Book Online

world's very first costumed hero, had his arm around his former sidekick, my father, Major Might, who in turn had his arm around his current sidekick, the Right Wing. Each one flashed a handsome smile for my mother, chins held high. Perfect teeth. They each had a raised fist in the air with the three middle fingers up, signifying three generations of the world's most virtuous warriors for truth, justice, and a better way. I studied my Dad's smile in that photo and decided I'd never seen him happier, or more proud.
    I remembered the old guy, Captain Victory. He'd been the only one to lend my father money after he couldn't get work and the bank seized our house. Up until a few years ago, when I started to get serious about sports, Dad had dragged me with him to the nursing home to visit his mentor every weekend. All I remember was the rotten smell of that old folk's home, sickly-sweet wafts of disinfectant meant to cover up the putrid smell of decay. The old man couldn't talk by then, so mostly my dad would bring in pictures or read the newspaper to him, stopping after every other story to grimace at the state of the world. Then Dad would give me a dollar and send me down to the cafeteria to get a bowl of Jell-O cubes, and I'd sit there and watch Dad try to spoon a few shaky cubes into the old guy's mouth.
    There weren't too many shots of Mom in her costume after that. I guess it was always a challenge to snap a good shot of an invisible superhero in action. Then there was a brief piece in a magazine column that asked, "Whatever Happened to Invisible Lass?" The subtitle speculated that it was "The Ultimate Vanishing Act." Apparently, Mom had been as careful to hide her civilian identity from the public as she'd been in hiding her public identity from me. There was never another mention of the Invisible Lass, and just like that, she was gone. I flipped to another shot and that's where my parents' wed¬ding pictures began. I lifted the picture of Mom stuffing a piece of grocery-store wedding cake into Dad's mouth. The hidden pictures stopped there, back to the normal order of things. After a series of honeymoon pictures, mostly of Mom sunbathing and Dad on water skis, I saw the first shot of my mother in a maternity dress, her belly swollen with me crouched up inside her. She was taking a turkey out of the oven and holding it up proudly, while my dad was pointing at her tummy, a goofy grin on his face. I had never seen that expression on Dad before.
    So this was it. This must be why I could do these superhuman things. I had inherited powers from my mother. I wasn't losing my mind at all. I shut out a nagging voice in the back of ] my head that said Thanks a whole lot for up and leaving me on my own right now when I could really use someone like, oh I don't know, my mother to talk to about these major events happening in my life. Instead I held the clippings and pictures in my hand and rested my head on the sticky bus window and looked up at the stars and thought about the future.
    I woke up and wiped a thin trickle of drool off my cheek. In front of me I noticed a three-hundred-pound lady in a pineapple-print muumuu, who snorted every time the bus hit a bump in the road. She munched on a Fudgsicle and stared out the window. Beyond her was a young mother with thinning hair threatening to discipline her little girl with an oversize hairbrush. The kid couldn't have been more than five, and she was whining about wanting to go to bed. She had her tiny index finger shoved up her nose, and with her other finger she picked at her long, unwashed hair, in desperate need of some baby shampoo and an industrial-strength detangler. We made brief eye contact, and she immediately stopped complaining, just before her mom smacked her in the thigh with the back of the plastic brush. The little girl howled and yanked the brush out of her mother's hand and moved to smack her back when—
    SCREEEECH!
    The bus skidded across the highway. The