The tired-looking school secretary met me at the entrance to the front office, then quickly redirected me to the nurse’s room. I wasn’t entirely sure he knew what was going on, honestly. Not that I did either, to be fair, but he should’ve been in a better position to assess the situation.

Whatever.

I opened the door.

Extraordinaire’s costume was unmistakable, but something about seeing it in person had more of an effect on me than any of the photographs or footage available. When she turned around, which she did the instant the door opened, her cape billowed out a little, sweeping out of the way momentarily. It was a medium-dark green fabric with a velvety texture that I’d never noticed until now. The cape was attached at her shoulders to the vest of her costume — a load-bearing vest, like a police officer would wear, but without any pockets in the upper half to break up the green emblem embroidered into the darker material. Three horizontal lines across the center of her chest, with the middle shorter than the other two.

That emblem was meant to evoke the capital letter at the start of Extraordinaire’s name, of course. Online commenters had pointed out fairly quickly, though, that it was also the Chinese symbol for the number three. They took to spelling her name with an initial “3” at first, and with increasingly flimsy number substitutions afterward to one-up the previous meme. I think the final result wound up being thirty-two trillion, seven-hundred and ninety-four billion, ninety-five million, one-hundred and eighty-four thousand, one-hundred and ninety-three.

…I was too starstruck to break off that incredibly stupid train of thought, preventing me from picking one of the many greetings available in the English language.

“Christopher?” Extraordinaire asked. “Hm. Perhaps not.”

I’d flinched. She noticed before I did.

“…Crystal,” I said.

“Oh. I see.”

There was a clacking noise approximating the rhythm of the words exchanged, just a beat behind whichever of us was speaking.

“I don’t need too much of your time, Crystal,” she said, with the plastic staccato behind each syllable. “Just a few questions will satisfy my curiosity. I’ll let you go first, though.”

I took another look over the vest portion of her costume to find the source of the noise. There was a small keyboard at her left hip, where a police officer might hang a weapon holster from their belt. A stenographer’s keyboard, with a few unlabelled buttons rather than a full alphabet.

“I can stop recording, if it makes you uncomfortable.” She’d caught me looking, apparently. “I can also strike things from the document I’m typing.”

“Don’t you have a photographic memory?” I asked.

Extraordinaire gave a half-grin in response, as if I’d made a joke that she didn’t want to laugh at.

She was good at everything. Well, she could be. Skill came to her at a moment’s notice, replicating a lifetime of training in even the most obscure discipline with just the thought that it would come in handy. That would include memory techniques, stenography, interpreting body language… and a whole lot of things that hadn’t come up in this room yet.

“Why type at all, then?”

“To remind people, and to make the clicking sounds,” she answered.

What?

She gave that half-grin again.

I was consciously aware that she wasn’t a mind-reader. Not literally. But damn.

“Right,” I said. “Um. What… is this?”

“As mentioned, I have a short list of questions for you,” Extraordinaire spoke and typed.

“Why?”

“Because you were reported missing,” she explained. “I try to check for non-emergency police calls whenever I visit a town this size, to see if there’s anything in particular I can help out with.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other.

“Of course, you’re not missing,” Extraordinaire observed. “Your scarf is, though.”

“How’d…?”

“The skin on your neck is comparatively pale, so I figured it was more exposed right now than it is in your typical outdoor attire.”

My eyes went wide. I knew, conceptually, how cold-reading worked, but-

“Just kidding,” Extraordinaire said.

…What?

She laughed. “That would be an insane leap in logic, wouldn’t it? No, I’ve seen your yearbook photos, and I asked a few people to describe you. The scarf was a common element in all those reference points.”

Okay, good. She really was human.

“I misplaced it,” I said.

“Fine, don’t tell me.”

Fucking mind reader.

“I don’t remember taking it off, but I don’t know where it is now.”

“So there’s a gap in your memory?” Extraordinaire extrapolated.

“I was unconscious,” I said. There wasn’t really much point in being dishonest, now that I had firsthand confirmation that she could sense it somehow. I wasn’t sure if that was a testament to her skill, or if it had more to do with how bad my lying was.

“Unconscious,” she echoed.

“Yes. Very.”

Extraordinaire drew a card from one of the many pockets throughout her costume. “Any idea why you were reported missing?”

“I was supposed to be home by eleven o’clock, and I… definitely wasn’t. I don’t know what time I got back. I guess they called it in as a non-emergency, just to have the concern on someone’s radar. I don’t think they were expecting you.”

I hoped my tone made it clear that wasn’t meant to be rude, then I imagined rolling my eyes at myself for humoring the possibility that Extraordinaire would miss that nuance.

She handed me the card, her cape trailing behind her as she crossed the room to do so.

“I’ve figured out what I wanted to know,” she said. “If you want some pointers, I’ll be around for the next couple of days. There’s a few projects I can work on here. Feel free to stop by, if you see them.”

I scanned the card, finding just her three-line emblem and a phone number. Elegantly straightforward.

What the hell? I have Extraordinaire’s phone number?

“Be careful,” she said, in parting. The soft fabric of her cape brushed against my hand as she passed, and that was that.

I was left in the nurse’s room, slumping as the tension of being in a superhero’s presence drained from me.

In terms of secular living memory, at least, she was the first person to properly come back from the dead. Her real name was Kaitlyn Marsh, and it was one of the two names she’d been called in headlines three years ago. The Miracle Girl, they called her. Tragically slain at seventeen, a pedestrian struck by a drunk driver on a dirt road in Kansas. Hardly news. But she got back up. She’d been fully dead by the time she got to the hospital, she’d been left in the morgue for a few hours, and she’d gotten up.

It was surprising at the time. A miracle.

The media didn’t really leave Kaitlyn alone after that first story. She never had much to say about what happens after we die, but the reporters interviewing her always caught her in the middle of some hobby she’d never mentioned before. The Miracle Girl had a knack for archery, splitting arrows on her first day of practice. The Miracle Girl was a prodigy on the tightrope after setting one up in her backyard. The Miracle Girl this, Miracle Girl that, until she finally told the interviewers to quit calling her that.

Kaitlyn eventually admitted that, after coming back from the dead, she’d been able to learn things without really putting in the effort. Any effort. One journalist compared her to a superhero, and she said that sounded like a great idea. Her next big news story was her debut in costume. She’d helped with some wildfire evacuations, and she’d given the media her new name, which she was still going by now. With her identity as a real-life superhero cemented, Extraordinaire began traveling from place to place, continuing to save people from various dangers.

It was an inspiring story. She was just the sort of person I should be taking cues from, now that I had something with which great responsibility allegedly came. And beyond just serving as a role model from afar, she was here, subtly encouraging me to ask her for advice once I had the courage to do so.

But I wasn’t really sure what I could learn from her. Sure, teaching was a skill she could pick up, and she’d be an expert in any subject I wanted to take a crash course in. Anything a normal person could do. It made it hard to narrow down, honestly. The thing I wanted to understand most right now was my new power, and that wasn’t something normal people had access to. It was beyond her scope. If I needed a mentor, someone with a more explicitly supernatural power might be a better fit. They could at least relate to experiences beyond the physical limitations of a human being.

For not more than a second, I nearly took the idea of asking Extraordinaire to tutor me in math seriously. It wasn’t much less than a second, though. I couldn’t get away with hanging out here much longer before it counted as cutting class.

I stowed the card in the same pocket as my phone, and I ventured back into the school’s hallways, as if nothing was unusual about today.

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