PROLOGUE
Danny
The start of something beautiful…
I stared at my brick of meatloaf as the new kid walked into the lunchroom with his plastic tray of food.
Everyone glanced at the strange boy for a moment before going back to talking about normal things like sports and the upcoming drudgery of the school year. Some of the kids leaned into their friends’ ears and whispered mean words casting amused glares at the new kid.
I had a lot of experience as a new kid. Last year, Mom took me to the small town of Pleasant Grove, population 2346, to live away from my father. There wasn’t much pleasant about Pleasant Grove, except for the state park around the corner. I didn’t see Dad much anymore, but I had received a birthday card from him in the mail. Inside was a whole twenty dollars, which promptly went into my rock tumbler fund.
Leaving everything behind in Springfield, Illinois and starting a new school at nine years old was the hardest thing I’d done in my young life. I’d learned a lot of difficult lessons that first year so I knew what it was like to stand in the middle of the lunchroom, hoping someone would invite me to sit next to them. Being a nerd and science geek placed me squarely at the bottom of the pack of the school hierarchy with the rest of the “losers.”
The new kid was big, likereallybig. He was tall and chubby with plump cheeks and baseball-mitt hands. His clothes were torn and stained, and his backpack looked like it had served as a Pitbull’s chew toy. But the sad and lost expression on his face made him seem so much smaller than he was. That's how I’d felt when starting Howard Klein Elementary. Small and invisible.
The desire to call out to him bubbled up my throat, but I’d been too focused on factoring polynomials when the teacher had introduced him this morning, so I didn’t know what to call him. School was fairly boring for me because it was easy. I’d skipped first grade, so I was a year younger than my peers.
The boy dragged his beat-up shoes as he passed some of the tables. There were spots for him to sit, but no one invited him to have lunch with them. Socializing was so hard. I had always been a shy boy, but something inside me clicked. As the new kid approached my table, I waved at him.
“There’s room for you to sit here,” I said softly, noting the shakiness in my voice. I wasn’t good at making friends, but probably better at it than this boy. The fat kids usually had it worse than the nerds, though there was never a day when someone wasn’t being bullied for one thing or another.
His eyes widened, and he smiled. He slid into the chair opposite me and set his tray down. “Thanks. I thought I was going to have to wait until one of the tables emptied.”
“No problem. I’m Daniel. Everyone calls me Danny.” I took a sip of my milk, my tongue suddenly stuck to the roof of my mouth.
“Jeremy. Everyone calls me Jere. Except when my Dad is mad, he calls me Jeremy Stuart Nowaki. But I don’t like that name, so call me Jere.” He gasped and pointed at my shirt. “Do you like Spiderman?”
I glanced at the graphic on my T-shirt. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“Cool. Who is your favorite Spidey villain?”
“Um… I like Doc Ock. Having all those arms is awesome. And he is ascientist.” The sudden excitement zipping through me pushed away the shyness like a bully on the playground. How neat would it be to have someone to talk about comic books with? Maybe he liked math and figuring out how electricity worked too.
Jere made a sound of disagreement. “That’s lame. The best villain is of course The Kingpin.”
“What? No way. He’s boring,” I said, wrinkling my nose.
“Maybe. But he’s rich and can buy anything he wants. And he’s smart. He might not have superpowers, but everyone knows you can do anything when you have a lot of money.”
Pursing my lips, I looked at the boy, taking in all his messy blond hair and bright gray eyes set against a rounded face. “Maybe you’re right.”
He grinned. “He can just pay all the villains to team up and buy them the best weapons.”
I thought about the whole thing as Jere bit into his meatloaf. He didn’t even bother to cut the brick into smaller pieces, just tore a chunk off of it with his teeth.
I said, “Spiderman would still win even against a hundred villains.”
“How?” Those bright gray eyes gazed at me with stark interest.
“Because there are more good people in the world than bad, and they’d help him. If we’re talking pure numbers, and accounting for the multiverse, there are more superheroes in the Marvel universe than villains. And if you mess with Spiderman, the Avengers will whip your butt.”
“Team ups, niiiiice.” A smile slowly spread over his pudgy cheeks as he did the counting in his head. “Yeah, he probably would win, but that’s because Spiderman is the coolest superhero, anyway.”
I found myself smiling just as widely.
Martin Shroeder sat down next to me with a huff. He was one of my few friends and one of a handful of nerds in our small school. “Hi, Danny. Hi, new kid. Are you practicing for the tournament next week?”
“Hey, Martin. Practice? What’s practice?” I joked.
