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until, one day, we decide to strike out on our own and become Supers ourselves.
    This is me not holding my breath.
    â€œCome on, people,” Mr. Masters chides. “The world isn’t going to save itself.”
    I find a seat in front of the giant screen on the far wall, and Jenna settles next to me. H.E.R.O headquarters takes up the entire school basement. In addition to the central hall, where we go to get lectures, there is a large room that runs team combat training simulations and a laboratory for the kinds of science experiments that would give Mrs. Williams, the seventh-grade science teacher, a heart attack. We also each have our own specially engineered rooms that are designed to test our unique abilities. Most of them are filled with practice explosives, lasers, and weapon-toting robots, all meant to simulate the dangers faced by Supers and their sidekicks in the real world. Eric’s room, for instance, looks like a mini dojo, even down to the Japanese scrolls on the wall. Jenna’s has a holographic projector that can generate a posse of gun-wielding hoodlums for her to disarm.
    My room has perfume. And eye charts. And dog whistles. See some evil, hear some evil, smell some evil: that’s my motto. Last week I read the fine print on a credit card application from forty feet away. I identified the sound of a feather landing on a pillow. I smelled one part lemon juice in five hundred parts water. Sharks around the world, eat your hearts out.
    Thankfully, H.E.R.O. training isn’t all about mastering our powers, or I would be totally bored. Every other Monday we have a half hour of forensics—fingerprinting, bullet caliber identification, CSI stuff—and a half hour of martial arts, led by Eric, whose sidekick name is Shizuka Shi, or Silent Death. A little dramatic for someone who refuses to squash spiders, but it sure sounds cool in Japanese. Wednesdays usually offer at least a half hour of lock picking, bomb defusing, police procedure, or something else fun. Friday is usually pizza day. All in all, it is pretty cool, even if I have to spend ten minutes each session just sitting around smelling stuff.
    On days after an “event,” however, being a member of H.E.R.O. isn’t much fun at all. It doesn’t happen often—hardly at all, really—that a supervillain puts one of us in genuine danger. But when it does, Mr. Masters’s face is fixed frown-ways as he ushers us down the stairs.
    â€œAll right, people,” he says sternly. “Let’s get started.”
    Mr. Masters crunches his final pork rind and then fires up the screen. Before he can get going, a light-brown hand appears out of the wall, followed by an arm, a pair of sandals, and a T-shirt that says FAB-U-LUS in glittery white sequins. All of this is connected eventually to the head of Nikki Walters, aka the Wisp, who wears the same nervous expression as always, like a deer about to bolt. Her short black hair is braided into a hundred strands that dance like wind chimes as she shuffles through the wall.
    â€œSorry, sorry, so sorry.” She apologizes to each of us individually, saving a “Really sorry, Mr. Masters” for last.
    â€œIt’s all right, Nikki. Though in the future, it’s probably safer to just use the stairs.”
    Nikki nods and sits down in the seat in front of me, and I hold my breath, still expecting her to just fall through it, even though I’ve seen her sit down a hundred times before. I shouldn’t worry. She has terrific control of her powers already—mostly because she uses them every Friday to sneak out of the house. If her parents ever caught her with half of her body hanging out of their brick siding, it would probably be the end of her career as a superhero sidekick. But she has a boyfriend—or at least she is in a perpetual state of being somebody’s girlfriend—so her priorities are a little out of whack.
    My priorities, on the