York: The Shadow Cipher

CHAPTER SIX

JAIME

Jaime scanned the letter again and again, then sat down on a stone bench so abruptly that he bruised his own butt. Long before Jaime became Jaime—when he was just little James Eduardo with his big black glasses and the red cape his father bought him one Halloween— he was obsessed with superpowers. He stood in front of the microwave to absorb the rays; he tickled spi-ders in the hopes they'd bite; he chewed mint and bay leaves so he'd become immune to toxins; he made his own Cerebro using one of his grandma's colanders; he searched the sky at night sure a green lantern would find him, or maybe even the Green Goblin. There was no end to the ways a regular boy could become a superboy; his comic books were filled with them. Sometimes, a single superhero could have so many different beginnings that their stories were hard to keep straight. No, it didn't happen like that, it happened like this! No, this! Now, this! Wait . . . this!

Which one was the right story? Which one was the real story? And how would you ever be sure, when every-thing could always start all over again?

He told himself that one day something special would happen, something amazing and surprising and unexpected—a lightning strike, an alien invasion, an experiment gone wrong—and he would have to be pre-pared. He practiced ninja moves, sword thrusts, scissor kicks and uppercuts, speed running, wall climbing, and cat crouching, driving Mima crazy in the process. She would say, "Why do you not stop moving for one single second?"

And Jaime would say, "I am getting ready for my next beginning!"

Mima would say, "And I am getting ready to tie you to your chair!"

When he got to third grade at Charles Reason Elementary, he had to stop wearing the cape—because it wasn't a part of the uniform and because the other kids made fun of him. But the cape wasn't the only reason. They also made fun of him because he was tiny—the smallest, skinniest boy in the class, barely the size of a kindergartner. "Just one of your 'locs is bigger than you are," the other kids said.

Worse, what boy named Jaime Eduardo Cruz under-stood some Spanish but couldn't speak much beyond hola and gracias and uno, dos, tres? It didn't seem to matter that kids named Wagner couldn't speak German, or kids named Maccarone couldn't speak Italian. It didn't seem to matter that his mother spoke English, and had studied Latin at her high school in New Jersey, or that that his grandmother was fluent in so many languages that she occasionally sounded like translation software.

The two kids who didn't make fun of Jaime were the two kids who got made fun of more than Jaime. Because they didn't speak Spanish or German or Arabic or Chinese or Latin, they spoke some loopy, made-up lan-guage. And they spoke it a lot, mostly to each other.

"Whabat abarabe yaboabu drabawabing?"

Jaime looked up from his purple workbook. "Huh?" A girl with a braid nearly down to her waist turned his purple workbook around so she could see. "Whaboabis thabis?"

He knew who she was, of course. She lived across the hall from Mima. He scanned the room and found her twin, who sat in the corner, reading a hardcover book with no pictures on the front. His normally huge, bushy hair had been shorn, and he looked sad and naked with-out it, as if someone had stolen his magic staff or his rocket car or lasso of truth.

The girl tapped the figure of Miles Morales he'd drawn on the inside of his workbook and asked again. "Whabo abis thabis?"

"That's Ultimate Spider-Man. He's different from the other Spider-Man."

She regarded the drawing. "Drabaw maborabe!" "Huh?"

"Drabaw maborabe! Drabaw maborabe!" Even though she was speaking very fast, he got the gist. He thought a minute, then drew a quick picture of the Wasp.