Chuck Weinstein was standing in line at Smallman Street Deli when a tall man wearing a black ski mask pushed through the door, shot a bullet into the ceiling, and said, “Get on the ground, all of you, before somebody gets hurt.”

As Chuck crouched, another man in a ski-mask pushed through the door. He was shorter than the first, but wider, with a gut that sagged over the waistband of his jeans. In one hand he held a burlap sack. In the other, the stock of a submachine gun. He swept the muzzle down the line of ten or fifteen scared patrons and then back, casually, as if to suggest that any one of them might be randomly selected for death.

“Phones, wallets, watches,” he said. “Everything goes in the bag.”

As the muzzle passed over Chuck, he wondered, dimly, if he would die. He hoped not. Not here, crouched on the dirty linoleum that smelled of his kindergarten classroom. Not with a headline that would read, “High School Engineering Prodigy Killed After Running To Deli For Bagels.” No, he wanted to die with the whole world praising his heroism.

And… why not? He stood. “My dear sirs, you’re making a mistake,” he said, and he had a noble, affected accent, and a dashing leather hat. Monster, his ninety pound German Shepherd, appeared at his side.

“One more step, buddy, and I’ll blow your brains out,” the man with the submachine gun said. “Be a shame to kill a kid, especially one with such a cool hat.” He looked at Monster. “And with such a fluffy dog. But one more step and I’ll do it.”

Chuck patted Monster’s head. The dog panted cheerfully. “Put that away,” Chuck said to the robber, pointing to his gun. “Someone might get hurt.”

“I told you, buddy,” the man said, raising the rifle to his shoulder. “Take one more step.”

Chuck took another step. The man pulled the trigger. The bullet left his gun at 2,300 feet per second, crossed the room, and stopped in the air a few inches in front of Chuck’s outstretched hand.

“What are you?” the man whispered, because of course he didn’t know that Chuck possessed superpowers.

Chuck flicked his wrist and the bullet shot back toward the man, tearing its way through his ventricles and arteries and making his chest look like a crushed watermelon.

“I hate for all this unpleasantness,” Chuck said, as the man collapsed. “But I won’t let you hurt the innocent.”

The other robber registered the scene with mute horror, his mouth moving like bicycle pedals that weren’t connected to a chain. “Jack,” he said, finally. “You killed Jack!” He raised his pistol. Chuck, smiling now, wiggled his fingers, and the pistol jumped into his own hand. He looked at the stock, rubbed a speck of dirt from the side, and then shot the remaining robber in the face.

“Eighty-seven?”

Chuck looked up. Simcha, the deli’s portly owner, was scanning his customers. Chuck sighed. In his imagination, he could be whatever he wanted. In real life, he was just Chuck Weinstein, smarter-than-average-kid who wanted a bagel.

“That’s me,” he said, raising his ticket. “Everything bagel with plain cream cheese, please.”

--

Superheroes didn’t have to go to school, or write papers on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and they knew how to say something clever when Meg Shaw leaned across her desk and whispered, “Did you see the news?”

Meg Shaw was, at eighteen, perhaps the most beautiful girl at Taylor Allderdice High School. At least, Chuck thought she was. They’d met three years earlier at Steel City Con: he was dressed as Dream, one of the Endless from The Sandman comic book series, and she was Death, Dream’s sister. When they’d made eye contact from across the room he wanted to shrink until he disappeared, à la Hank Pym, the Antman, but she recognized him from school and asked him to lunch. Over turkey sandwiches, they discovered mutual interests in superheroes and music. By senior year, they were best friends.

When Meg said “news,” she meant that someone had chained three men—all wanted for sex trafficking—to a light post near the local police station. It was a story out of one of their comic books.

“They said that one of the dudes had his kneecap shattered by a thirty-eight caliber steel ball, fired from a slingshot,” Chuck said. “Who shoots bad guys with a slingshot?”

“I know,” Meg said, under her breath. “So cool. Who do you think it was? A superhero? Do you think he needs sidekicks?”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“First I have to learn how to control metal with my—”

“Mr. Weinstein, are you and Ms. Shaw exchanging your reports? You need to trade reports so you can edit her work.”

Chuck glanced at Ms. Henshaw, who’d looked up from her crossword puzzle and was now staring at him through the lenses of her rhinestone embossed cat-eye glasses. He hated Ms. Henshaw and her stupid old lady glasses.

“All right, give me your report,” Chuck said to Meg. “And it better not be about Lord of the Flies again.”

Sheepishly, Meg handed him a stack of papers. “A Report on Invisible Man,” the cover page said. “By Meg Shaw.” Chuck flipped through the pages; they were all blank except for the first page, which contained two sentences.

“Piggy’s glasses represent logic, reason, and peace,” said the first sentence. “When they shattered, so too did Ralph’s hope for a civilized society.”

Chuck glanced at Meg. Most of her essays read something like this: a reference to an obscure symbol from William Golding’s book, Lord of the Flies, which was probably the only assigned reading she’d actually completed in five years of high school, and only that because Chuck had told her that one of the characters got crushed by a boulder. The essays were brilliant, in their own subversive way. But because Meg refused to do any assignment she thought was stupid, she was about one F away from repeating senior year. Again.

“Damn it, Meg,” Chuck hissed, as Meg held out her hand for his report. She smiled at him, and the lopsided grin was so full of beauty and innocence that he melted.

“You’re still coming over after school, right?” he said, under his breath. “The Arctic Monkeys album isn’t in but I’ve got—”

“Mr. Weinstein.” Ms. Henshaw was staring at him. “If I have to ask you again, you’ll need to leave the room.”

Chuck shook his head and handed Meg his essay.

That afternoon, Chuck met Meg in his treehouse. The wooden masterpiece was his pride and joy, planned and built by his own two hands. The trunk of a great oak shot through the middle of the floor, and red shelving spiraled around the trunk, holding fifty of the greatest graphic novels ever written, as well as a mismatched medley of comic books, and the complete works of Shakespeare, Jim Butcher, and Brandon Sanderson. There was a small cot in one corner, a desk in another, and a workbench with enough tools to make Hephaestus jealous. A string of red and white Christmas lights ran along the walls.

The treehouse was flawless. It was expensive. But Chuck wasn’t a normal high schooler. The summer before eighth grade, he’d entered a coding competition held by Google. Of course, he’d lied about his age, or they never would’ve let him claim the cash prize. And they definitely wouldn’t have let him freelance. By tenth grade, he was earning more than his father — or would’ve earned more, if Dr. Weinstein had been alive. Tragically, both Doctor and Mrs. Weinstein had passed away when Chuck was in the ninth grade, victims of a storm off the coast of Florida. They’d been visiting a patient of Dr. Weinstein’s who owned an island in the Bahamas when their Piper Navajo went down. The only other family he had was a senile paternal grandfather living at a nursing home in Florida, so’d pulled a bit of cyber-magic to convince anyone looking that he was living with an uncle in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Of course, no such uncle existed, but living at home and taking care of himself until college sounded more appealing than foster care. And then he met Meg, and staying at home was a done deal. He loved her — was maybe even in love with her — and the big, empty house gave her a place to stay when her dad got drunk and hit her. It was a strange relationship, but they were strange individuals, and they did the best they could to watch out for each other.

“You took your time climbing up here,” Chuck said, as Meg hoisted herself into the treehouse. “I remember the first time I climbed a tree. I thought…”

He trailed off. Meg stood in the tree house doorway, framed by the light from the house behind her. At school, she’d been wearing pants, but now she wore shorts and Chuck saw that bruises striped her shins, running from her knees to her ankles.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Meg walked over to the cot and grimaced as she eased herself onto it. She looked down at her shins, bathed in the glow of the red and white lights, and nodded.

“I’m fine,” she said, lifting a cigarette to her lips. “Dad had a bad day.”

“I just—”

“Drop it, okay?” she said. “I’m fine.”

Chuck turned away. “You want to do Kind of Blue tonight?” he said, lifting the record from his desk.

“Yeah, I could do some jazz,” Meg said. She sounded close to tears. Chuck wanted to cry, too. He pulled the record out of its slipcase, placing it onto the platter and hitting the play button.

“Supposedly it’s the best-selling jazz album of all time,” he said dully, as the tone arm swung out to meet the record. “Quadruple platinum. Number twelve on Rolling Stone’s five hundred greatest albums of all time.”

“You think you’re the only genius around here,” Meg said, sniffling. “I did my homework, same as you.” She began to ease off her shoes.

Chuck thought about bringing up Ms. Henshaw’s homework but knew it wasn’t the time. “A few years back the House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the album,” he said. “They voted four hundred and nine to zero. One of the few times they’ve agreed about anything.”

He sat down on the cot next to her and she scratched his head playfully, as if to make up with him for taking an angry tone. He lay on his back and stared at the intricate whorls in the tree house ceiling. He wondered what was better: to have parents that beat you, or to lose the ones that loved you.

In his mind, he imagined himself in the guise of a superhero: dark black trench coat, floppy leather hat. He broke into her father’s trailer, dragged the man out of a dark bedroom that smelled of beer and sweat and shame, and drove fist after fist into his stomach. Because what kind of man beat his daughter, and especially a daughter like Meg?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, as Meg took another drag of her cigarette. He rested a trembling hand on her thigh. Chuck was a genius, but even he didn’t understand everything. And smart as he was, there were some things he couldn’t change.