Super by Matthew Cody

know?” asked the girl’s voice.
    “There’s only one invisible girl with that laugh, Rose,” Daniel said. Actually, there was only one invisible girl, period. From the sound of it, she was somewhere to his left. Squinting, he could just make out tiny footprints stirring the underbrush, as if someone was rocking back and forth on her feet.
    “Aww, I wanted to surprise you!” said the unseen Rose.
    “You did surprise me,” answered Daniel. “You did much better this time. You were quiet for almost seven seconds. That’s a new record!”
    She giggled again, but this time it was a proud laugh. Though he couldn’t see it, he had the feeling the invisible girl was blushing.
    “Where’s your sister, Rose?”
    “Louisa’s up the trail a ways. I wandered off again.”
    “She’s going to be worried about you. Come on.”
    If little Rose was the smallest Super, then her older sister, Louisa, was the most … reluctant. Whereas the other Supers reveled in their abilities, Louisa’s intangibility onlyserved to make her self-conscious. The two sisters’ powers were linked in a way—Rose couldn’t be seen unless she wanted to be, and Louisa couldn’t be touched. But whereas Rose spent most of her time with the Supers totally invisible, Louisa almost never activated her power. Mollie had told Daniel once that she thought Louisa was afraid she’d somehow get stuck that way, unable to touch or feel anything ever again.
    Daniel knew it was simpler than that—Louisa just wanted to be normal. Louisa and he were alike in a way: they both pretended to be something they weren’t.
    “Hey, Rose, can you do me a favor?”
    “What?”
    “Can you turn visible now? Now that you’ve surprised me and all, it would be nice to see who I’m talking to.”
    “Oh, sure.”
    Rose popped into existence next to him, standing in the shade of a small evergreen. Nearly six years old, the youngest Super had her sister’s long black hair and nut-brown eyes.
    “Rose! Rose!”
    Louisa came out of the woods a little ways ahead of them on the trail. She was obviously relieved to see her missing sister, but not panicked. By now they were all used to Rose disappearing, literally.
    “There you are!” Louisa said.
    “I surprised Daniel!” said Rose, giving her sister a huge grin. “I went seven seconds without laughing!”
    “Good for you,” said Louisa. “Hi, Daniel.”
    Whenever Louisa said hi to Daniel, she smiled in a way that made Mollie roll her eyes and Daniel feel sort of queasy. Louisa was pretty, and she treated him a lot better than Mollie did (she had never once punched him in the arm, for starters). But Daniel wasn’t ready for crushes. Fighting super-villains was simple. Crushes were complicated.
    “Hey, Louisa,” he said. “Am I the last one here?”
    “Yeah, but don’t worry. The fliers only just arrived, and it takes them, what, like two minutes from town?”
    Daniel chuckled in agreement, but the picture of Eric and Mollie soaring above the trees soured his mood. Now that he knew what flight really felt like, his jealousy was worse than ever. He didn’t like it, and he certainly wasn’t proud of how he felt, but it was there. A bitter lemon stuck in his throat.
    The three of them walked the rest of the way up the trail, and when they finally got to the tree fort, the rest of the Supers were there waiting for them. Tucked away in the woods on the south face of Mount Noble, the Supers’ tree fort was a cross between a hidden base and a makeshift museum. No one really knew how old the fort was. The inside was filled with comics, drawings, and other mementos left by previous generations of superpowered children, and the outside had been added to and repaired so many times over the years that there was probably little of the original structure intact. The newest addition had been a lookout crow’s nest up top, which gave the whole thing a ramshackle, pirate-ship appearance. It was as if Captain