Hero by Day

Chapter 14 - The Purple Lady

"This. This is what I am. This is who I am, come hell or high water. If I deny it, I deny everything I've ever done, everything I've ever fought for."

~ Oliver Queen (Green Arrow)

Being a superhero had its ups and downs. I couldn't get acne, I had superhuman powers, and most of the city looked up to me as a hero. I also had no free time, I was outnumbered by my superhuman enemies, and a good number of the city was turning against me because of the Remedists.

I was just having the best of times, wasn't I?

I mean, if I wasn't already stressed out enough, my mother reminded me that morning about the college situation.

"Honey, I've got you all these flyers from schools in the area." She had started, handing me a comically huge pile of pamphlets and college magazines. "I've sorted them out by vicinity to the city and sub sectioned by the majors they offer."

I'd smiled and took the huge pile on my way to work. I didn't tell my mom that I was not planning to look at the pamphlets with as much enthusiasm as she might've wanted me to. In fact, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to college just yet. Trying to balance superhero life and college classes/homework would be hard.

(I know all those supers in Empire and Iris Cities can do it, but I have no idea how. I mean, I could barely manage my own workload and I was only in High School.)

Daniel himself told me that he just skipped college all together and went straight to owning the comic book store. He had said, "I don't need a degree to run a store selling a dying breed of storytelling," which was true.

But I could hear mom's voice in my head right now, "You better go to college, Olly, or that scholarship to Eldredge Academy will mean nothing. You don't want to become a street rat, do you? You need to get a college level education, like your father."

It was always the same argument for anything really. "Be like your father." I was tired of it.

Mom really missed dad. It wasn't obvious most days, but it was still there. I would occasionally walk in on her with her head in her hands, or staring out the window with a blank expression on her face. Once I even spotted her in the bedroom clutching his old medal from serving in the military like it was a lifeline.

She also knew that we were poor. She knew we couldn't pay for college, which meant I would have to get a really good scholarship if I wanted a higher level of education. Which was why she was so proud of me making it into Eldredge on a full ride.

So, while at work at the counter, I at least made a feeble attempt at looking through the catalogs. And by feeble, I mean I put them in the range of my site, as to remind me to look at them eventually.

"Dude, you're screwed." Eric commented as he walked by, grinning at the pile sitting on the counter.

"How do you mean?"

He chuckled and checked his phone.

"College, man. It ruins your life."

Eric, I guess you could say, was a drifter. He went through about two months of college before dropping out to work for Daniel. He had said college was a waste of time and all he learned was how to properly smoke a blunt, but I knew the real reason he left. Eric was the kind of person who lived for action. Of course he would get bored sitting in a lecture room full of a hundred other bored faces and a teacher who didn't care about the subject they were teaching.

He also met a girl in college, something I learned later. She was Miss Popularity, and Eris was, of course, drawn to her just like every other freshman in their class. Long story short, Eric arrived at the comic book shop two months later to run the Man Cave and he'd barely had any human interaction since.