It's A Bird! It's A Plane! Read online

  “The rats didn’t perform the way I wanted today,” she said. “But I’m sure we’ll have another chance tomorrow to perfect the experiment.”

  “Did you try the Shakespeare strategy we talked about?”

  Carrie perked up. “I did! They had no clue!” A proud grin spread across her face.

  “There it is!” he said, reflecting her expression and returning to his inventory. “Sunshine always clears away the clouds.” Then, somewhat more seriously, “Time’s ticking, kiddo.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Carrie groaned. She had an hour before sixth period, an hour to center and gird herself for the rest of the school day. Unpacking her books, she quickly buried the Brides magazine under the comics she’d brought for the day. Wonder Woman. Captain Marvel. Power Girl. Jessica Jones. Last came the Riverside Shakespeare, which thumped the table like an anvil.

  “Reading anything good lately?” Johns asked, nodding at the booty she’d unloaded.

  “I’m halfway through Henry V. I’m not sure if I like Prince Harry or not. But I like Falstaff!”

  Johns nodded. “Sounds familiar. How about in the comic-book department?”

  “The new Jessica Jones is pretty good. Better than the Netflix show even! The new Wonder Woman is cool, better than they have been. Story’s finally getting interesting.”

  Closing the last book he was checking in, Johns placed it on the stack of re-shelves. “I was always a Marvel man myself. More complex characters, people with real problems. DC’s heroes were always so two-dimensional. Except Bruce Wayne, of course.”

  “Right,” Carrie said. She scanned the comic covers on the desk. All of them touted strong, if idealized, women—powerful, dynamic, and kicking ass. She loved devouring those stories and picturing herself tossing Wonder Woman’s lasso or turning the unwanted hand a thug placed on her backside and throwing him through a store window like Jessica Jones.

  But if she were honest with herself, Batman was her favorite hero. He didn’t take crap from anyone, and he had no special powers to make him super—other than uber-intelligence, athletic prowess, and willpower. Prone to anger and violence, he was as human as heroes came. Carrie could relate. Except for the athlete part, she thought self-consciously.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” Johns was saying. “And like I said, clock’s ticking.”

  She shook herself back into social mode. “A surprise?”

  The librarian was trying not to smile and made himself busy with a new stack of returns.

  It’s a gift! Mr. Johns got me something! Oh my gosh!

  “It’s back in the stacks, in Pooh Corner,” he said as he stamped quite deliberately.

  Suddenly excited, Carrie headed for the part of the library farthest away from the rest of the school, a secluded corner she’d dubbed Pooh Corner. She loved to sit on the floor surrounded by the stacks and read during fifth period, to breathe in the musty aroma that seemed to hang in the air around her like a cloud of imagination. Carrie thought of the Corner as the place where books were born in the library because that’s where Mr. Johns kept his new acquisitions until they were assigned a Dewey Decimal number and placed in their permanent homes on the shelves.

  She turned at the last row of books that led to Pooh Corner and nearly stepped on a black mask some student must have dropped earlier in the day. A Robin mask, the thought came to her, though really it was just a cheap, plastic mask from the Halloween store. She ignored it and approached the new acquisitions stacked vertically in the very place where she always sat on the floor to read. Her eyes went wide as the multicolored covers teased their inner treasure.

  On top, a collection: Batman: From the 30’s to the 70’s. Carrie reached out slowly and picked it up, savoring the moment and feeling the weight of future adventures in her trembling hands. An older version of Batman and Robin from the 1960’s graced the dust jacket. They stood, ready to leap into action, perched on a rooftop with the moon spotlighting them from behind. Carrie opened the heavy collection and saw images of the Dark Knight and his ward she’d never seen before, some almost comical in their simplicity. She flipped the pages quickly, drinking in the Dynamic Duo through the ages, and between black-and-white story panels, color cover collections leapt off the page at her. She was seeing Batman evolve from his very first story, right before her eyes.

  “Oh, Mr. Johns,” she whispered.

  She set the Batman collection down and saw Ultimate Spider-Man: Volume One was the next title in the tower of books. Carrie scanned down the spines of the volumes below it and found a trove of other colorful Marvel and DC titles, not yet tagged for the library’s shelves, pristine and perfect. Mr. Johns had ordered all of them for her, she realized. A whole encyclopedia of comic collections. He’d ordered them for her.

  She sat down in her place in Pooh Corner and began to examine them, one at a time and slowly. It would take her at least the remainder of fifth period just to appreciate them all, and many more wonderfully luxuriant hours beyond that to read them. She’d be lucky to even touch all their covers before she had to go to sixth period.

  Crack!

  Carrie jumped at the loud noise. It had sounded like a car backfiring, like a pop and a bang happening at the same time. She knew the chemistry lab wasn’t far from the library and wondered if an experiment gone wrong might cancel classes for the rest of the day. Carrie angled a hopeful ear.

  Boom!

  A second backfire, deeper and more resonant and sounding closer. Wait, how did someone get a car inside the school?

  Carrie heard a door slam open. She heard blinds clatter against glass. The door to the library had blinds. She heard screams beyond, from the cafeteria maybe.

  What in the world?

  “What are you—oh my God!”

  Mr. Johns?

  “Shut up! Just shut up!” The voice was shrill—frightened and thrilled at the same time. “Come out from behind there, right now!”

  Carrie heard the rustling of fast feet at the front of the library. She set down a hardback Ultimate Fantastic Four and pressed against the wall of Pooh Corner. Something was very, very wrong. A smack! and Mr. Johns cried out.

  Mr. Johns!

  “Is there anyone else in here? And don’t lie to me!” The voice held a strange lilt, as if the man speaking had sucked on helium balloons.

  Carrie’s heart kicked into overdrive. A moment passed, an eternity in which she waited for Mr. Johns to speak the truth of her presence. He always spoke the truth. Instead, she heard shuck-shock—the sound of a pump-action shotgun.

  “No! It’s just me!” Mr. Johns sounded scared. Terrified. “Why are you doing this? Who are you?”

  “Get up!”

  Carrie glanced down at the superheroes scattered on the floor around her. Her gaze fastened on the Batman collection she’d seen first on the top of the stack, with the Dynamic Duo poised on the rooftop.

  I wish you were real. I wish you were here.

  She heard feet moving, coming toward Pooh Corner. Carrie glanced around desperately and had the absurd thought that if she stacked the collections up high enough, she could hide behind them.

  “Move!”

  Mr. Johns appeared at the end of the row of books. He threw his eyes at her, then quickly looked away again. She’d seen his desperate apology there, a half-second glance railing at his inability to protect her.

  Oh, no.

  Then a shorter man appeared and pressed the barrel of his shotgun into Mr. Johns’s back, forcing him against the stacks that lined the back wall of the library. He was slight, not tall at all, shorter than Mr. Johns, even. He wore a trenchcoat and ski mask, all black, and a heavy jacket—no, a flak jacket like she’d seen in Call of Duty.

  The gunman in the trenchcoat looked right first, down the row away from Carrie.

  She closed her eyes, waiting.

  Please don’t see me, please don’t see me, please don’t see me!

  She opened her eyes, afraid to look but needing to look at the
same time.

  Trenchcoat glanced left and directly at her. She saw Mr. Johns wince in his certainty of what was about to happen, knowing he was helpless to help her.

  Carrie watched the eyes behind the ski mask rake over Pooh Corner. She stared straight at them as they stared back, seemingly not at her but through her. After a heartbeat that lasted forever, the lilting voice said, “Okay, come on, then.”

  The shotgun motioned for Mr. Johns to move, and the awestruck librarian headed back toward the front of the library. Trenchcoat followed, mouthing threats and promises of death if Johns didn’t do exactly as he was told.

  Her mouth open wide, her mind disbelieving, Carrie sat, shaking. Her palms were sweating. What had just happened? Why hadn’t the gunman seen her? She looked at the floor and the pile of hardback comics scattered around her, searching in her mind for an answer that made any kind of sense at all. Her eyes stopped short when they spotted the cover of the Ultimate Fantastic Four. The heroes were there, each of their powers on display—Reed Richards’s elastic Mr. Fantastic, The Thing’s rocky skin and huge fists ready to pummel, Johnny Storm’s flaming body, and … his sister, Sue Storm Richards, her upper half clad in the familiar blue of the Four’s costume, and her lower half—her lower half turning transparent as she became Invisible Girl.

  No. No way.

  It didn’t make any sense, no sense at all. Carrie couldn’t turn invisible. Especially when she wanted to. Flash Magnuson and the rest of his entourage had proven that again at lunch. But Trenchcoat hadn’t seen her, had he? Could she—no, that just wasn’t possible.

  Was it?

  I mean—why didn’t he see me? He looked right at me! I—

  The alert from the school’s public address system sounded three long, grating notes. A voice she guessed was the principal’s began to speak, hastily urging teachers and students to shelter in their classrooms until further notice. His tone was calm but shaking. Three more buzzing alerts followed, then silence.

  Carrie had heard about things like this. Gun-wielding killers, teens with a grudge against the world, coming after those they blamed for whatever the hell it was they blamed them for. And now a man—no, a boy, she thought, making the connection with the high tenor of the voice behind the ski mask—had come to Rosecranz High and taken someone she cared about hostage. The only person here who had ever cared about her.

  She looked down at her hand and saw it was anything but invisible. Its shaking was all too apparent, and her palm glistened with the sweat of fear. And yet, what had happened had happened. Trenchcoat hadn’t seen her.

  And he’d looked right at her.

  Carrie slowly clenched her hand into a fist and held it tight until her knuckles turned white.

  I’m coming, Mr. Johns. Don’t worry. I’m coming to save you.

  • • •

  The police would be coming too, that much she knew. Carrie peered around the end of the row to Pooh Corner, down the library’s main aisle toward the empty reception area. She heard the rattle and bang of the aluminum blinds as the main door opened to the cafeteria. Then she heard Trenchcoat bark a quick, “Go!”

  They were leaving the library. She took a step forward and felt something give underfoot. Carrie looked down and saw the cheap, plastic mask she’d almost stepped on earlier. She stared at it, thinking, Invisible Girl doesn’t wear a mask. Then her rational mind chimed in, But I’m not Invisible Girl!

  She was no hero. This was no comic book.

  But what had happened had happened. Trenchcoat hadn’t seen her. And if she put the mask on, would she be embracing this new reality, whatever it was, too fiercely? If she actually allowed herself to believe, would she try to grab the magic so tightly that it slipped through her fingers?

  She bent down and picked up the mask. The police were coming. And if things escalated, if Trenchcoat got crazier, Mr. Johns might get hurt. Killed, even. That much she knew.

  Batman wears a mask. Spider-Man does. One way or another, most heroes wear a mask, she realized in a moment where a truth you’ve known all along becomes a sudden, profound revelation. Either as their hero selves or as their secret identities, like Clark Kent and Kara Danvers and Diana Prince wear glasses.

  Glasses were kind of like a mask, right? The way heroes hid their secret identities to protect themselves and the ones they cared about from evil-doers. Like Mr. Johns had tried to protect her when he’d told Trenchcoat he was alone in the library.

  Maybe instead of chasing her new reality away, wearing the mask would actually cement it into place. At least long enough to save Mr. Johns like he’d tried to save her. Stretching the rubber band around her raven hair, Carrie put the mask on.

  Walking quietly, wishing her steps could be invisible too, she approached the door with its aluminum blinds. There were screams in the cafeteria as lunch staff scrambled to find cover.

  Boom!

  More screams drowned out by the buckshot from the shells hitting a wall across the lunch room. The blast had come from her left. Carrie caught a glimpse of the gunman’s long coat as he turned the corner and disappeared deeper into the school.

  Please don’t see me, please don’t see me, please don’t see me! she chanted again as she slipped out of the library. Had that been what had invoked her invisibility before? Carrie had no idea, but she figured saying a little superhero prayer couldn’t hurt.

  More screams from the corridor to the left. She hurried her steps to follow.

  “Everybody on the floor!” Trenchcoat piped in a breaking voice. “Right now!”

  Her heart pounding in her chest, Carrie chanced one eye around the corner and saw the door to the chemistry lab standing open.

  Boom!

  The shot and the screams that followed confirmed it. Trenchcoat and Mr. Johns and a classroom full of other hostages were in the chemistry lab.

  “Do as he says. Just do as he says.”

  Mr. Johns’s voice.

  He’s okay! I still have time to save him.

  She heard stools scrape the floor as the students complied. Another voice—Coach Kirby?—said something macho.

  “Just do it, Lee, for the love of God!” Mr. Johns pleaded.

  “Oh, Coach Kirby, you just do whatever you want,” Trenchcoat said in an ominous, even hopeful, tone.

  Somewhere outside the school, echoing and distant, Carrie heard the first sirens. The police were on their way. As far as she knew, no one had been killed—yet. But when the police got here, if it was anything like she’d seen on TV, if the shooter feared for his life….

  Mr. Johns.

  Carrie invoked the name of every superhero she’d ever read about. Wonder Woman, Jessica Jones, Captain Marvel, Power Girl, Supergirl, Superman, Spider-Man, every Avenger—old roster and new—every member of the Justice League, especially the Caped Crusader. She saved the Fantastic Four and Sue Storm Richards for last, picturing the blonde-haired heroine transforming into the transparent outline of Invisible Girl on the page of a comic book. In her mind, Carrie imagined them all standing around her as she chanted again, Please don’t see me, please don’t see me, please don’t see me!

  She crept toward the chemistry lab. Her face was sweating under the plastic mask, her hands shaking again. She touched the cold frame of the doorway and, shivering, peeked around the corner.

  Trenchcoat, somehow seeming even shorter than before, stood in the middle of the room, lording it over the hostages. Mr. Johns was sitting on the floor directly in front of him, with Coach Kirby and the other students scattered around the room as if holding class sitting down.

  She saw Stephanie Seward staring at the doorway, a look on her face like she was calculating whether or not she should make a run for it. Carrie gaped back at her, mouthing, Please don’t say anything. But, like the gunman in the library, Stephanie seemed not to see her. Her eyes just kept roving hungrily over the doorframe and her escape beyond.

  Oh my God. It’s working. She can’t see me.

  The sirens
were louder now. Trenchcoat must have heard them too. He was getting fidgety, like he didn’t have a plan beyond this moment. I have to act fast, Carrie thought. Before his desperation turned into a feeling of nothing-left-to-lose.

  His back was to her, the gun held loosely at his side. She could creep up behind him and knock him out before he could hurt anyone. Quiet and stealthy, like in Assassin’s Creed. All she needed to do was….

  Wait, knock him out with what?

  Carrie stared down at her empty hands. She had no weapon. And if she tried clobbering him with just her fists, she risked the gun going off and Mr. Johns getting hurt if she didn’t knock Trenchcoat cold on the first try. Standing in the doorway, she looked around for possible weapons. Bunsen burners lined the long shelf to her left at the back of the classroom. Books and backpacks sat on desks above the students cowering on the floor, arms wrapped around one another. Flash and the rest of the Fearsome Foursome were huddled in a group together near the center of the room. Stephanie was whispering to her boyfriend.

  “Hey! Shut up over there!” yelled Trenchcoat.

  But Stephanie kept whispering, insistent. Flash, his football helmet on the desk above him, just shook his head.

  The sirens, numerous and nearer now, were a symphony of wailing banshees, rising and falling all around them.

  “I said, shut up!”

  “Please, leave them alone,” Johns begged. “Don’t hurt them. It’s not too late to—”

  “Shut up!” yelled the gunman, voice climbing in register. Like the shriek of a teenage girl screaming at her mother. Flash and Stephanie shrunk in on each other as Trenchcoat advanced. When the shotgun came up, Richard and Cassidy crab-crawled away from their clique mates.

  Carrie moved into the lab. She hated Flash and his girlfriend, but she didn’t want them to die. Maybe if she could distract Trenchcoat, make him look somewhere else, she could make them invisible too. It was an impossible thought—not really a thought at all, more like an impulse—but today had already proven itself a day for making the impossible possible. Carrie reached out and tipped a burner over at the back of the lab. It clattered to the desktop, then rolled onto the floor.