Chapter Text
Joan first suspects that there is something different about her during the summer that she is eleven years old.
It’s a warm, sunny afternoon during the first week of summer break, and she is lying in the grass in her front yard where she is supposed to be keeping an eye on her younger brother. She cannot fully focus on the library copy of The Fellowship of the Ring while Mark is running around the yard being his normal noisy seven-year-old self, but at least having to listen to him singing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song at the top of his lungs means that he isn’t getting into trouble. Between that and the other sounds of the neighborhood—cars driving by, a trio of older boys racing up and down the street on their bikes, someone mowing the lawn a few houses down—she might as well give up on making progress in her book. She’s going to have to read fast if she wants to get through her latest stack of library books before they’re due, however, and so she perseveres through the distractions.
“Joanie! Hey! Joanie! Look!” Mark calls out in a bid for her attention.
“What?” she replies, barely raising her eyes from her book.
“You’re not looking,” he pouts.
With a sigh, she looks up and sees him perched on a tree branch, his legs swinging back and forth where they dangle several feet from the ground. “You’d better be careful,” she warns. “Mom and Dad don’t like you climbing up that high.”
“They don’t have to know,” he says. “And don’t you dare tattle on me.”
Joan rolls her eyes and returns to her book. She tries to focus on the words on the page, but she can’t read more than a few words at a time when she is becoming increasingly aware of a strange tingling in her head. The sensation comes and goes, and it is more uncomfortable than painful, but it makes her worry that there might be something wrong with her. She wonders if she should tell her parents about it or whether they will dismiss her concerns as a preteen overreaction. Or maybe it’s nothing, she tells herself as the tingling recedes again, and she turns the page to fall deeper into the adventures in Middle-earth.
A few minutes later, Mark’s yelp breaks through the air, and from there everything seems to happen in slow motion.
She sees him tumble from the tree branch before her brain can fully process what is happening, and once she realizes that he is falling she instantly knows with a lurch in her stomach that she does not have enough time to break his fall. She scrambles to her feet regardless and rushes toward the tree with her heart pounding. The tingling in her head spreads throughout her body until she feels bursts of energy coursing through her limbs to the ends of her fingertips. As if out of instinct, she reaches toward the tree despite remaining several feet away. Somehow, impossibly, the momentum of Mark’s fall slows, leaving him suspended in midair. His mouth rounds in shock when he realizes that he is no longer plummeting toward the ground in accordance with how gravity is supposed to work, and soon he has landed on his feet with the gentleness of an invisible hand setting him down. He stares at Joan in wonder, hardly daring to believe how he has avoided what could have easily been a disaster.
Joan’s hand remains outstretched toward him, and she lets it fall to her side as a sudden exhaustion overcomes her. Breathing heavily like she has been forced to run a mile in gym class, she hesitantly moves closer to him. The buzz of energy that she’d felt rushing through her body has subsided, and the whole sequence of events has played out so quickly that she is starting to suspect that she has imagined the whole thing.
“Are you okay?” she asks Mark, checking him over. “Does anything hurt?”
He shakes his head. He looks up at the tree branch that he has fallen from and then back at Joan with confusion in his eyes. “What did you do?” he asks.
“I didn’t do anything,” she replies. “I saw that you were falling and ran toward the tree, but then you…” She stops there, not wanting to say out loud the impossible thing that has occurred.
“You reached your hand out like this.” He mimics the gesture. “And then I wasn’t falling anymore. It was like I was floating. Like you were making me float.” A grin spreads across his face, his eyes shining with amazement. “You have superpowers, Joanie,” he declares reverently.
Joan opens her mouth to disagree, but she cannot deny that she’d felt something running through her veins when she’d reached out to him, stretching out from her mind to disrupt the regular forces of the universe. Normally she wouldn’t believe his account of the incident and chalk it up to his overactive imagination, but when his story matches hers it has to be real. An icky feeling of unease settles in her stomach at the prospect of her mind and body performing something extraordinary beyond her control. She cannot show Mark how terrified she is, and so she decides to keep her fear to herself for now.
“Are you sure you haven’t been reading too many comic books?” she teases him instead.
“Nope. Besides, you’re cooler than any superhero. Well, except maybe Spider-Man, because Spider-Man’s the coolest. Hey, I’ve got an idea,” he then says, rushing off across the yard before she has a chance to ask him what he’s doing. “Maybe you can try to do it again. I’ll throw this Frisbee at you, and you can stop it in midair like you did to me when I fell out of the tree.”
“I don’t know if I—” she begins.
He does not wait for her to respond before tossing the Frisbee with an exaggerated wind-up of power. She gamely reaches her hand out like she had done a minute earlier to see if she can harness whatever energy slowed Mark’s fall, but the Frisbee does not halt or divert its path. Instead it collides with her, brushing against her arm before she can dodge out of its way.
“Ow!” she exclaims.
“You were supposed to stop it,” Mark says.
“Well, obviously I didn’t.” She rubs her arm where the Frisbee has hit her. “I don’t know, Mark. Whatever I did, I’m not sure if I can do it again.”
“Maybe I have to fall out of the tree again for it to work,” he suggests.
“Don’t you dare,” she replies, not wanting to re-experience the fear that had overcome her when she had seen him tumble from the branch.
She takes stock of her surroundings, wondering if anyone nearby has also witnessed the strange occurrence that has occurred here in the Bryant front yard. No cars pass by on the street, the boys on their bikes have ridden out of her direct sight, and the sound of the lawnmower has stopped. She cannot guarantee that anyone hasn’t seen Mark floating in the air, and although she’s sure Mark would be delighted to have the two of them be the talk of the neighborhood because of what he believes to be superhuman powers, she hopes with every fiber of her being that these events will remain a secret between them.
“We should go inside,” she says, worried that staying outside will create a greater risk of something weird happening again. When Mark’s face falls in disappointment, she adds, hoping to distract him from further talk of superpowers, “We can eat popsicles and put on a movie.”
Mark considers her suggestion. “Only if you let me have the last red popsicle and I get to choose the movie,” he replies.
“Deal,” Joan agrees.
They clean up the toys spread across the yard and head inside, and as Joan hands Mark the last strawberry popsicle from the box in the freezer, she hopes that by the end of the day he will have forgotten all about the dramatic way that she has saved him.
Mark’s fascination with superpowers, however, cannot be stifled no matter how much Joan wants to leave the incident behind her.
“Joanie has superpowers,” he declares at the dinner table that night after not having said anything else about it all afternoon. He states the words as if he is making a simple observation about the weather, with as much confidence as saying that the sky is blue or the sun is bright.
Joan kicks him under the table. “Mark!” she scowls, immediately regretting that she hasn’t specifically made him promise not to say anything to their parents.
Their parents exchange glances, as if they are sharing some kind of wordless parent communication to determine whether they should humor him or dismiss his claim. “I don’t think your sister has superpowers, Mark,” their mom eventually says, gentle but firm.
“She does,” Mark insists. “We were playing outside earlier today and I fell out of the big oak tree. Or I would have fallen out, but she made me stop falling. It was like I was floating in the air, or maybe like something was holding me up. Then I landed right on my feet and wasn’t hurt at all.”
Joan watches her parents’ reaction closely. At his description of how she stopped his fall, she sees a distinct flash of fear in both of their eyes. Maybe it’s just because they’re worried about how Mark could have been hurt, but a gut instinct deep inside her makes her think that it might go deeper than a general concern for his safety. She has seen her parents afraid for her and Mark on prior occasions, but not like this.
“You know we don’t like you climbing up too high in that tree,” their dad scolds him, and the flash of fear is gone, replaced by his usual sternness that he exudes whenever either of his children misbehave.
“Yeah, but I didn’t get hurt, did I? Joanie saved me, and it was really, really cool!”
“But what if Joan hadn’t been there?” their mom asks. “You could have really hurt yourself. And Joan, you should have told him to not climb so high.”
“I did. He didn’t listen,” says Joan, pushing her remaining food around on her plate with her fork. “But he’s right. He wasn’t hurt, and I’ll try to keep a better eye on him next time.”
“Whatever happened when you fell out of the tree, I’m sure you just imagined it,” their dad says. “Sometimes our brains come up with strange things in moments of crisis, and that must be what happened to you. There’s no such thing as superpowers.”
“But it really did happen!” Mark insists. He looks imploringly at Joan. “Tell them, Joanie. You saw it. You know you were the one who made me float like that.”
Joan meets his pleading eyes and knows that she has a decision to make. She can tell the truth no matter how nonsensical it sounds and allow Mark to continue to crow about how cool she is for doing something impossible, or she can go along with her parents’ dismissal of what happened and accept the logical explanation for the series of events that occurred this afternoon. There’s no such thing as superpowers, her dad’s voice echoes in her head. She would rather believe those words, because the possibility that superpowers are real is what put the look of terror in her parents’ eyes, and that scares her more than anything else.
“Maybe Dad’s right,” she says. “It all happened so fast. You can’t know for sure that it was me.”
Mark’s face crumples, as if she has served him the ultimate betrayal. He slumps back in his chair and crosses his arms in front of his chest, scowling at his plate. Joan isn’t sure whether this response is better or worse than him arguing with her, but regret fills her nonetheless at the choice that she has made.
“Eat the rest of your dinner, both of you,” their mom tells them. “We’re not talking about this anymore.”
Joan stabs a piece of broccoli with her fork and brings it to her mouth. As her parents’ conversation turns to the boring topic of their jobs, she and Mark glare at each other in a wordless expression of their mutual irritation. After they have both finished their meals and are excused from the table, Mark immediately goes upstairs to his bedroom. Joan should follow him and apologize for upsetting him, but it’s his own fault for bringing up the superpowers thing in the first place. She therefore dutifully stays behind in the kitchen when her parents request her help with the dishes, glad that she has a reason to put some distance between her and Mark.
Later, when she is curled up in the beanbag chair in her bedroom with The Fellowship of the Ring in her hands once again, the knob on the door turns as Mark lets himself in without knocking first. At first she chooses to ignore him rather than yell at him to get out of her room, but when he starts rummaging through her desk drawers she cannot let his presence go unacknowledged any longer.
“What are you looking for?” she asks.
“Your markers,” he replies.
“Bottom drawer in the pencil case.”
Over the top of her book, she sees him retrieve the case of markers, which he balances on top of their shared notebook in which they frequently draw pictures and write notes to each other. He makes a path toward the door without another word to her, and another stab of guilt pierces her at the reminder of how she has hurt his feelings.
“Mark, wait,” she says before he passes through the doorway.
He turns around to face her. “What?”
“I’m sorry about earlier.” She slides a bookmark into her book and puts it aside to give him her full attention. “I shouldn’t have said that you imagined everything.”
“But you were supposed to believe me,” says Mark. “You know what happened. And why wouldn’t you want to have superpowers? If I had them, I definitely wouldn’t pretend that I didn’t.”
“Well…” Joan begins, hesitant to tell him about the terror that she saw in their parents’ eyes. Even though she has no idea what caused that fear, it feels like something that she needs to protect him from. She doesn’t want to lie to him again, however, and so instead she says, “Mom and Dad seemed kind of scared when you brought it up. I didn’t want them to think there’s something wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Joanie.” Mark takes a few steps further into the room. “They’re stupid if they think that what you did was scary.”
“It scared me,” Joan admits. She wraps her arms around herself for support at the confession.
Mark moves closer to her to join her on the beanbag chair, and she shifts aside to make room for him. He leans against her with his head resting on her shoulder, all prior animosity between them forgotten.
“I’m sorry you were scared,” he says. “I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” she assures him. “I’m just glad that you weren’t afraid. You broke the laws of gravity without freaking out even a little bit. That makes you a lot braver than I am.”
“Brave enough to be your sidekick?” he asks, and Joan nods. His eyes then light up as he moves his head away from her shoulder. “Oh, right, I forgot! I was gonna draw you a picture in the notebook.”
“Is that why you’re stealing my markers?” she asks as he takes a marker out of the case and opens the notebook to the next blank page.
“It’s not stealing. You knew I was taking them,” Mark says, rolling his eyes.
Joan watches over his shoulder as he draws the simple image of a girl wearing a cape, who reaches out toward a tree with one of her hands. After Mark has finished coloring in between the lines that he has drawn, he writes a message to her underneath the image: Dear Joanie, Thanks for being my superhero today. Your the coolist! Love, Mark.
She smiles at the reinforcement that her little brother will always think that she hangs the stars and the moon no matter what strange power she holds inside her. She takes a marker from the case and writes a response to him: Thanks Mark. You’re the best sidekick ever. Love, Joanie.
“Come on, let’s go see if Mom and Dad will let us have ice cream,” Mark says after he has read what she has written. He leaps up from the beanbag chair, and the movement scatters a few of the markers that he has used. “I want my superhero sidekick name to be Ice Cream Man!”
“Ice Cream Boy,” Joan corrects him. “You’re not old enough to have ‘Man’ in your name yet.”
Mark’s response of “Whatever” echoes through the hall as he dashes out of Joan’s room at full speed. He waits for her at the top of the stairs so that they can descend together without their parents scolding him for running in the house. “Now we need a superhero name for you,” he says. “Hmm… How about Super Magic Floating Girl?”
“That makes it sound like I’m the one who’s floating,” Joan replies as they approach the kitchen. “Plus it’s way too long.”
She does not hear what Mark says in response. Instead her attention is drawn to the sound of her parents’ voices in the living room, where they are speaking to each other in the quiet tones they use when something serious is going on that they don’t want her and Mark to know about. Her curiosity piqued, she moves through the kitchen with silent steps so that she can more clearly hear what they are discussing in the next room.
“What are you—” Mark begins.
She shushes him before he can say anything else, jerking her head toward the living room in an unspoken indicator that she is listening to the conversation happening there. Mark follows her lead, squeezing in beside her so that they can both lurk out of sight while being able to hear their parents’ words more clearly.
“... we can’t be sure that it’s the same thing,” their dad is saying.
“But what other explanation could there be?” Their mom’s voice is low and anxious in her response. “If it happens again, how long can we keep convincing them that it was just their imaginations?”
Mark opens his mouth to say something to Joan from their hiding place, but she elbows him to get him to remain quiet. He mouths a silent “ow” and swats her arm in retaliation.
“Joan already seems convinced,” their dad says. “She’s sensible enough to know it shouldn’t be possible. If she’s…” He hesitates around his words, as if he is searching for the best way to phrase a sensitive topic. “If she can in fact do something like that, it’s best not to let her get any ideas.”
Joan’s heart races at the mention of her name. Do her parents know something that she doesn’t about what happened today, something that makes her strange powers fit into the broader context of the world? Is that why they looked so scared at the dinner table an hour ago? The thought that her parents might be keeping such a big secret from her makes her stomach twist into a knot. She’s old enough to know that they have secrets of their own, grown-up things that she doesn’t yet understand, but she has not expected any of them to be about her.
“I just can’t stand the thought of her being capable of something so dangerous,” her mom says. “Sometimes I still close my eyes and see—”
“I know. I know.” Her dad’s voice is gentle, and although Joan cannot see her parents from where she is standing she can easily picture him taking hold of her mom’s hand in a gesture of comfort. “You don’t have to worry. I refuse to let Joan be one of those things.”
Something hot and uncomfortable rises inside Joan at these words. Part of her wants to walk into the living room and demand to know what they are talking about, but instead she turns and flees through the kitchen, not stopping until she reaches the bottom of the stairs where she can no longer hear her parents’ voices. She sits on the last stair, her and Mark’s quest for ice cream forgotten as she wipes away the tears that have formed in her eyes.
“Joanie?” Mark says softly.
She looks up to acknowledge him, having not realized that he has followed her. She sniffles and wipes her eyes again as he sits down next to her.
“What did they mean?” he asks. “Why would you be dangerous? Don’t they know that you saved me?”
“I don’t know.” Joan draws her knees up toward her chest and hugs her legs close. “But they definitely know something about all of this that they don’t want to tell us about. Something bad.”
“And maybe that’s why they looked scared at dinner?” Mark guesses.
“I think so.”
The carefree discussion about superheroes and sidekicks that they shared only a few minutes ago seems so far away now. Joan now knows for certain that all of this is much bigger than one incident in the front yard, and it ties her to one of those big adult things that her parents talk about privately in hushed tones. The disgust in her dad’s voice when he said “one of those things” plays and replays itself in her mind, hurting even more each time. One of those whats? What terrifying power could she possibly hold inside her?
“All I wanted was to tell them about something really cool that happened today,” says Mark. His lower lip wobbles with emotion. “I didn’t want it to turn out this way.”
“I know you didn’t. But I think from now on we’re definitely going to have to pretend that it was just our imagination, especially when Mom and Dad are around. And you can’t tell anyone else. It’ll have to be our special secret, just between us. Do you think you can do that?”
Mark nods solemnly, thankfully understanding how important this is to her. “I’ll even pinky-promise you.”
Joan obligingly extends her pinky finger out to him, and he follows suit to lock their pinkies together. “Not a word to anyone except for me,” she reiterates.
He mimes zipping his lips. “Operation Super Secret is now a go.”
She smiles, glad that he is doing his part to try to make her feel better after the sting of her parents’ words. When he puts an arm around her in support, she leans against him comfortably, and she hopes that she will not have to continue to fear whatever it is about her that has frightened her parents so badly.