Dealing with bullies is never easy. Many grade-schoolers of all grades know this quite well. Myrtle Tanning also knew it all too well, and had her own way of dealing with them. She hid, however, whenever, wherever she could. She had gotten quite used to just staying unnoticed wherever she went. She even had a few teachers mark her absent on days she'd been in class, she had gotten so good at it.

Middle school was when it was at its worst. Having Myrtle as a name really didn't help her with this, who woulda thought it? So, when she started her first year of High School as an infamous 'scrub' freshman, she doubled down on her efforts not to be noticed. The boys had started noticing her more easily last year, and she really didn't want any more attention than she had to bear.

She was shy to begin with, and with her name being so easy to rhyme with turtle and other annoying phrases, she really didn't like attention of any kind. She had always been on the short side, so that helped, and she had a rather average brown hair color, with features that would generally be considered 'pretty', but not drop dead gorgeous or anything like that. Brown hair, brown eyes, average features in nearly every way, and generally quiet in all she did, after finding her stride, she found going unnoticed relatively easy, even in a school with daily attendance called in every class.

So, it took her a while to realize what had changed a few months into her freshman year of High School. She was doing everything how she always had, nobody really bothered her, and she didn't go out of her way to change that – why would she? But life doesn't let those who wish to go unnoticed go unpunished for succeeding in such endeavors. So when she had gone marked “absent” for a week in a row, the next school day, one of her teachers took it upon themselves to triple check, and kept calling her name more times than usual.

“Myrtle? Miss Tanning?” Her English teacher called out for the fourth time. “Is Myrtle here?”

“Yeah, I said present like five times!” She responded, finally letting her frustration out. “Here I am!” And she even stood up to get the annoying teacher to stop.

“Huh, guess she still isn't here.” The teacher said. “Steve?” And so the class continued. Myrtle was relieved that the teacher stopped bothering her, but nobody seemed to notice her standing up either, which was weird. This started her paying more attention, and soon she discovered her new “condition”. Nothing she did got her noticed.

At first, she was ecstatic. No more bullies messing with her, no more boys pulling her hair from behind in class for reasons she couldn't understand. Finally she could live her life how she wanted. But, one should always be careful what they wish for, as most wishes would have unforeseen consequences if fulfilled.

It started getting uncomfortable a few days later. After two weeks, she started getting nervous – nothing she did got any attention from anyone, and even her mother, the only person she really got along with, seemed to forget that she existed. People only commented on her when they were forced to admit she existed, like when teachers called roll. After a month, she started panicking.

This was not a normal way things should be. No matter how much she liked not being forced to interact with people, nobody is designed to live completely without interacting with other people. And no matter how much she used to think that she didn't want to be noticed, this was too much, even for her. So, she started trying even harder to be noticed.

For the first time in ages, she initiated a hug with her mother when she came from school, purposely trying to not just be noticed, but felt, loved, and show her love for her mother. Nothing. She shouted and threw a tantrum. Not even the bird at the window did so much as flinch. She kept trying more and more things. She ate her lunch in the middle of a quad, in the middle of a circle of people who were talking to each other – still no one noticed her.

After a week of actively trying to be noticed, she finally noticed something different from before. She had taken to wearing bizarre clothes and clashing bright colors and making as much noise as she could as she went from one place to the next, and paying as much attention to her presence and the noise she made as she moved, and everything about her that could be noticed. She even studied the most popular looking people around her and how they changed the people around them, and finally she felt it.

She was emitting some sort of energy or something. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she was constantly pulling it into herself. Finally having something to act on, she continued studying it as she went through the rest of her school day. When it was finally time to go home, she rushed to her mother, stood directly in front of her, and paused. In her excitement, she studied her mother as she got ready to try her next attempt to be seen. But her excitement died quickly as she really looked at her mother for the first time since she noticed that she wasn't noticeable.

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She looked... deflated. Sad. Like something really important had been lost, but she couldn't remember what or why. Pushing against the weird pull she had finally felt, Myrtle reached forwards, and pulled her mother into a hug, and finally, she was Seen. And both of them burst into tears of joy, sadness, confusion, and a dozen other emotions that neither of them frankly paid much attention to because they both finally felt whole for the first time in months.

“Mom, you finally see me!” Myrtle cried, sobbing into her shoulder. “I have missed you so so much!”

“Myrtle, my baby... what happened? Where have you been?” her mother gasped, tears streaming down her face.

Their reunion continued for a long time but, eventually, Myrtle was worn out in every way, and couldn't keep pushing. Slowly her mother stopped paying her as much attention, and then lost track of her. Myrtle really felt it then. Her life was different; she was different. And she needed practice, and more endurance.

She never had much endurance for social interactions, and she didn't really crave them. But now she knew that she needed them. So she started doing little things; she'd push at the weird energy during breakfast and talk with her mom in the morning, she'd push at it again during roll call and make sure she wasn't marked absent. She even practiced having conversations with people from time to time.

The next surprise came when her mother noticed her before she had fully pushed that energy away one night at dinner. “Oh, there you are Myrtle. Come sit at the table, I just finished making dinner.”

Myrtle jumped in surprise, and almost forgot to keep pushing the energy away. She even stopped pushing it harder, and kept it at that … “level”. She continued talking to her mother and finished dinner. Her father never so much as looked at her that night, but she didn't care, and barely noticed. But her mother did, and talked to her about it the next day.

With practice, she found she could “help” some people notice her more easily, and she even actively helped her mother get used to noticing her without her having to do as much. The next spring, after she got home from school, she went straight to her mother again, as she had started to get used to doing. But before she even started pushing, her mother turned and saw her, starting a conversation.

The one good thing about this whole thing that happened to her was that her relationship with her mother had improved by leaps and bounds. She and her mother talked every day now, and they practiced together with noticing Myrtle. After a few minutes of talking that day, her mother asked her to start pushing again, as it was getting difficult to keep track of her again – even though they were sitting next to each other on the couch. Apparently she had not become immune, just better at seeing through whatever Myrtle was doing, or not doing, or whatever was going on.

They knew that super-humans had started showing up on the news more and more often lately, and there was even one guy who was talked about, but never seen, not really. He just showed up as a blur of red – and sometimes a bit of yellow – on whatever camera managed to catch a glimpse of him. So they knew of the people who would soon become known as superheroes, and their theory was that one of them had done something to Myrtle, and she had learned to resist it.

But the real surprise came when she started accidentally pushing against the energy at random times. She had started always pushing a little, and learned to keep a constant small amount of resistance – just to build up her ability to resist it and increase her endurance in doing so. But the first accidental full release was the most embarrassing, as is often the case. Or rather, the first time she noticed was the most embarrassing – she was on the toilet, and was not having an easy time.

“Oh geez, what was that?!” came from the next stall.

She had made noise, and been noticed! For the rest of that day she didn't do her usual practice and was really careful about only pushing against the energy only when she needed to answer teachers or be noticed for something she felt important. That was unfortunately only the first time such events occurred, but thankfully it was the worst of the bunch.

Once she was showering after P.E. and focusing a little too much on a bit of soot that had somehow gotten on her thigh when she bumped into the girl next to her and she was noticed, but that was only a little embarrassing, and she was quickly forgotten. Another time, she was focusing too hard on a drawing in her art class, and her teacher came over to give her some advice. Embarrassing, but helpful, so she didn't mind too much. She did reduce how much she was pushing though.

The next breakthrough came a year later, as she was talking with her mother, and managed to help her mother be less noticeable too. They went shopping later, and were able to try clothes on without being bothered even though it was a really busy day at the store. No, they didn't steal anything, they weren't bad people! How rude of you to make such an assumption. They did enjoy being able to walk out of certain stores without being stared at, though. That was nice.

Soon she began to realize that what she had been pushing against was her own power, not something done to her, and she was able to use it in other ways, even drawing attention to herself and allowing a kidnapping victim to escape once. She, of course, left soon after the other person got to safety, but you really should have seen the look on the kidnapper's face when she just appeared, right in the middle of the abandoned house they were hiding in.

Little by little she got more powerful, and more able to focus her powers as she wanted. She still spent very little time actually resisting it – it was just too nice to be able to go unnoticed for a shy girl like her. But she did learn to make other people more noticeable, and practiced making random other people in the crowd suddenly attract the attention of passersby. She saw this one girl in a red dress that really looked quite nice, and when a particularly shabby and confused looking guy started walking towards them, she made the other girl attract everyone's attention. It was really sad that nobody was paying her any attention.

The creepy guy who showed up behind the shabby guy was really scary, so as soon as she noticed him, she stopped her trick, and the other guy got really scared, and the creepy guy chased the shabby guy away. That was kinda sad, cause she thought the shabby guy actually looked quite nice, but that's the price she paid willingly to stay unseen as a shy girl. Anyways, she kept getting better at this, and even started playing around at football games to see if she could get the candid camera to pick specific people.

She is now, ironically, well-known as one of the best heroes. Well, I say well-known, but she still gets forgotten more often than she is remembered. The secret government AI run database added another name to its roster either way, and a new hero was born of a shy girl wanting to be ignored.