Because of the way Jaime held the paper and the envelope, only one word showed through his fingers: TRUST. Theo’s heart hiccuped. “Right,” he said.
“So,” Jaime said, glancing up over the top of his glasses. “How funny would it be if I were holding a letter stolen from one of the Morningstarrs right here?”
CHAPTER SIX
Jaime
Jaime scanned the letter again and again, then sat down on a stone bench so abruptly that he bruised his own butt. Long before Jaime became Jaime—when he was just little James Eduardo with his big black glasses and the red cape his father bought him one Halloween—he was obsessed with superpowers. He stood in front of the microwave to absorb the rays; he tickled spiders in the hopes they’d bite; he chewed mint and bay leaves so he’d become immune to toxins; he made his own Cerebro using one of his grandma’s colanders; he searched the sky at night sure a green lantern would find him, or maybe even the Green Goblin. There was no end to the ways a regular boy could become a super boy; his comic books were filled with them. Sometimes, a single superhero could have so many different beginnings that their stories were hard to keep straight. No, it didn’t happen like that, it happened like this! No, this! Now, this! Wait . . . this!
Which one was the right story? Which one was the real story? And how would you ever be sure, when everything could always start all over again?
He told himself that one day something special would happen, something amazing and surprising and unexpected—a lightning strike, an alien invasion, an experiment gone wrong—and he would have to be prepared. He practiced ninja moves, sword thrusts, scissor kicks and uppercuts, speed running, wall climbing, and cat crouching, driving Mima crazy in the process. She would say, “Why do you not stop moving for one single second?”
And Jaime would say, “I am getting ready for my next beginning!”
Mima would say, “And I am getting ready to tie you to your chair!”
When he got to third grade at Charles Reason Elementary, he had to stop wearing the cape—because it wasn’t a part of the uniform and because the other kids made fun of him. But the cape wasn’t the only reason. They also made fun of him because he was tiny—the smallest, skinniest boy in the class, barely the size of a kindergartner. “Just one of your ’locs is bigger than you are,” the other kids said.
Worse, what boy named Jaime Eduardo Cruz understood some Spanish but couldn’t speak much beyond hola and gracias and uno, dos, tres? It didn’t seem to matter that kids named Wagner couldn’t speak German, or kids named Maccarone couldn’t speak Italian. It didn’t seem to matter that his mother spoke English, and had studied Latin at her high school in New Jersey, or that that his grandmother was fluent in so many languages that she occasionally sounded like translation software.
The two kids who didn’t make fun of Jaime were the two kids who got made fun of more than Jaime. Because they didn’t speak Spanish or German or Arabic or Chinese or Latin, they spoke some loopy, made-up language. And they spoke it a lot, mostly to each other.
“Whabat abarabe yaboabu drabawabing?”
Jaime looked up from his purple workbook. “Huh?”
A girl with a braid nearly down to her waist turned his purple workbook around so she could see. “Whabo abis thabis?”
He knew who she was, of course. She lived across the hall from Mima. He scanned the room and found her twin, who sat in the corner, reading a hardcover book with no pictures on the front. His normally huge, bushy hair had been shorn, and he looked sad and naked without it, as if someone had stolen his magic staff or his rocket car or lasso of truth.
The girl tapped the figure of Miles Morales he’d drawn on the inside of his workbook and asked again. “Whabo abis thabis?”
“That’s Ultimate Spider-Man. He’s different from the other Spider-Man.”
She regarded the drawing. “Drabaw maborabe!”
“Huh?”
“Drabaw maborabe! Drabaw maborabe!” Even though she was speaking very fast, he got the gist. He thought a minute, then drew a quick picture of the Wasp.
She clapped. He was so surprised, he looked around to see if anyone else was looking, if this was a joke. Most kids thought his drawings were okay, but nobody had ever clapped for them before. So he drew her a picture of Iron Man. Captain America. The Falcon. The Falcon when he became Captain America. The Morning Star, whose powers came from a malfunctioning Lion battery. Storm. Sunspot. And then, because she sort of reminded him of her, Kitty Pryde.
“Tess Biedermann!” the teacher barked. “Are you done with your workbook page?”
“Yabes!”
“English, please.”
“Yes. I finished the whole book.”
“You . . . excuse me?”
Tess said, “It was kind of fun. So I kept going.” Tess grabbed her workbook and held it up, smiling.
The teacher was not smiling. The teacher stared at her; then her eyes slid to her brother in the back of the room. “Theo? Did you do your whole workbook?”
“Nabo,” he said.
“English!”
“No.”
“Did you finish your page?”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“The directions don’t make sense.”
“You didn’t understand them?”
“I understood what they wanted me to do, but they weren’t clearly written. I thought I should read this book instead. It’s about nuclear fusion. Harnessing the power of the stars.”
The teacher slumped at her desk, covering one half of her face with her hand, so that one eye was visible through the V between her pinky and ring finger. It made her look a little like a pirate, and a little like a really annoyed third-grade teacher. “What about you, Jaime? Are you reading about nuclear fusion?”
“No,” he said. “I finished my page. I’m drawing superheroes.”
“What else would you be doing.” This was not a question.
Jaime said, “Tony Stark uses cold fusion. For his Iron Man suit.”
“Even if you could create a reactor that small, you’d still have storage problems. And side effects,” Theo said.
“He does,” said Jaime.
“Hmmm,” said Theo.
The teacher rested her elbows on her desk and put both hands over her face. “I want everyone in their seats. Those who have not completed their worksheets, finish them now. Everyone who has completed their entire workbook can sit quietly and practice meditation.”
Before she sat down, Tess Biedermann leaned down and whispered, “You should create your own superhero. A brand-new one nobody’s ever seen before.”
“I am,” he said, wondering how she knew.
Later, when his grandmother found him scribbling away, drawing one superhero after the next—different outfits, different talismans, different powers—she asked him what he was doing. He said, “I am trying to find the right beginning.” Mima clucked her tongue and told him that he was clearly a cuckoo boy, because anyone could see he had already begun.
Now Jaime sat on a bruised butt in the gallery of the Liberty Statue holding a letter about a letter, a letter about so many things, and had the strangest feeling that this was its own kind of beginning.
“Jaime!” Tess stomped her foot.