The High Five

Superheroes in Space

There were no accidents in space, just things you failed to prepare for, Jess reminded herself. Those were the words of Lee Ardevaker who performed the first space rescue. When the supply vessel Ekrekor was crippled from debris, he took a maintenance shuttle and evacuated three survivors from the spinning wreckage. Lee Ardevaker was one of Jess's all-time heroes. His superpower was that he had always known what to do in any situation. He always had a plan.

Jess had a superpower too. She was good at following instructions. It hadn't seemed all that super when Uncle Henry first told her, but she had come to see just how important it was. The key to defeating a villain or saving the world was having a good plan. And what good was a plan if you didn't follow it to the tee?

The rest of the crew were always trying to trade away their maintenance tasks with her. They thought it was drudge work, but Jess knew different. Past disasters showed that every single 0-Ring, heat tile, and wire insulator mattered. As she went about her tasks, she mentally rehearsed what could go wrong. Maybe she wasn't as smart as Bobby or as good at fixing things as Tayen, but no one was as good at finding problems as she was. Every time she replaced a filter, degreased a valve, or ran a routine diagnostic, she was averting a potential disaster.

Now The High Five had its first major crisis. The double jinx. It wasn't just superstition, it was prophecy—and prophecies had power. She was here because of a prophecy her uncle had made about her, "One day, Jess, you're going to go to space." Impossible as it seemed, it had indeed come true.

What could the double jinx be? Was a supervillain planning to hijack the ship? Bobby was always going on about how people wanted their mission to fail. Maybe a spy posing as one of the maintenance crew had sneaked aboard and planted a time bomb. If so, the bad guys had made one big mistake. They hadn't counted on having someone like Jess on board who knew every nook and cranny of the ship.

Jess had not always dreamed of being an astronaut. She hadn't even known what one was until she was almost twelve. A late bloomer, she didn't start talking until she was five when all at once she began blurting out complete sentences in the voices of the cartoon characters that she watched all day long. She was almost nine when she learned to read with the aid of comic books. Thereafter, she read and re-read them with a kind of hunger. She had an outstanding memory. Before long, she could name every superhero, villain, and sidekick that had ever appeared in one of her comic books. They weren't just characters to her. They were a kind of extended family.

When her real family split up, it didn't bother her much at first. Her older brother went to live with their dad while she stayed behind with her mom. It was just the two of them for a while, which she liked. She and her brother used to play superheroes together, but he had grown tired of it, and his friends were sometimes mean to her. When her mom remarried, Jess didn't pay much attention to the new man in the house. She called him Father Two when her mother explained, "I know you miss your dad, but John is your father too." But Father Two was not like the original, and things were about to change for the worse.

"She has to learn about something besides her goddamn comic books," Father Two said. "She's already three grades behind. She can't even do basic addition and subtraction."

When her mother spoke up in her defense, he cut her off. "What's she going to do when she grows up? She can't live with us forever. We've tried things your way. It's not working. Why won't you admit that?"

"What do you suggest then?" her mother said.

"If she loves her comics so much, let's see how she likes losing them."

The next day Father Two sat her down with a pad full of math problems. "Finish all of these by the time I get home, or there will be serious consequences. Understand?"