Sudden Superhero

2. The Rope is Obviously Not My Friend Today

I WASN'T SICK. In fact, I was the exact opposite of sick: I felt great. Energized like waking up from a twelve-hour-nap kind of energized. Mom had noticed at the breakfast table this morning and asked if I'd chugged coffee (the answer was no), and I really couldn't explain why I felt so good. She obviously didn't believe me about the coffee, because she then gave me a two-minute lecture about getting addicted to caffeine, but I said I'd be late if I didn't leave right then, and she let me off the hook.

School was a significant distance away, but I was too hyper to sit on the bus. I walked instead, finding myself skipping down the sidewalk while humming the tune to a song I couldn't get out of my head. People gave me odd looks as I passed by them, and I forced myself to go slower for the rest of the way to Wilson High, but the urge to skip was still there, supported by unnaturally high energy.

Just what it was, I couldn't put my finger on. Considering that I was a generally happy person, my current joyous mood shouldn't surprise me, but this seemed...different. I didn't know why. Whatever it was, morning math would kill it.

I didn't hate math; I was good at it, and who hates a class they're good at? The teacher was great, but the lessons were never exciting enough to keep my attention, and I always ended up staring out the window, daydreaming. The class was a real morning-enthusiasm killer.

I twirled my pencil around my fingers, staring down at the problem in the book that I was supposed to be doing. It was the kind of problem that you look at and realize how much work you have to do for it, and suddenly your will to do anything slowly drains from you and you just stare at it, hoping that someone will come to your rescue and say you don't have to do it. I stared at it for a good five minutes before I raised my hand and asked to do the problem on the whiteboard to force myself to actually do something. As predicted, the solution took up a good ten minutes plus half the whiteboard, and as soon as I sat down in my seat, the bell rang. Time for gym.

Gym was almost as dreadful as math, and the reason for that was my personal tormentor, Dana Edgar. She was an attitude-toting girl with a huge chip on her shoulder, and I was the subject of her insults. It had been this way since elementary school, but we'd found out two years ago that we were distant cousins, and somehow, being related made everything worse. I didn't care much about what she had to say about me, but I was always dreading seeing her. I couldn't stand to hear her talk, but if I talked back, we'd end up arguing, and I would hate that even more. So I tried to be neutral, letting her think she was winning even though it made my skin crawl.

Dana was standing by the girl's locker room door, across from the boy's door, when I rounded the corner of the hall. She waited for me there every day without fail. On some days she would make some snarky remark, and on others she would just glare at me, but I could always count on seeing her there.

"Morning, Dana," I said. It was no use trying to ignore her; she would do something whether or not I acknowledged her presence.

"Morning, loser," she said dryly.

Apparently, 'loser' was all she could come up with today, because she went into the locker room without another word. Shaking my head, I went through the boy's door.

After quickly getting changed, I sat cross-legged on the gym floor, waiting for class to start. It was an unspoken rule among the students that everyone had to change slowly to stall as much as possible, but the locker room was crowded, and I'd rather be out here than wait in there.

"Hey, Peter." Ben yawned, sitting down in front of me.

My best—and quite possibly only—friend Benjamin Ramirez was always yawning. He never got enough sleep because he was constantly studying. He was the president of Wilson High's academic team, which would be competing in the district Academic Bowl in a few days, and he was spending hours preparing for it. Sleep was for the weak, he liked to say.