been next to impossible, and his mind had been racing, and he hadn’t been able to sit still. His parents were told he wasn’t applying himself, that he was disruptive and always felt the need to be the center of attention. Nick had been only eight when he’d tearfully told his parents that no, he didn’t want to be the center of attention at all, because that meant everyone stared at him, and treated him like he was a freak. He didn’t know why he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to twitch or move all the time, didn’t know why he talked more than he listened, but he wasn’t doing it on purpose.
After he’d been diagnosed with ADHD, things had made so much more sense. His dad had growled that the school should have known better, and there was talk about transferring him somewhere else, but Nick had begged them to stay. He couldn’t leave all his friends, he told them, though he really only had the one. But the idea of not seeing Seth every day was unbearable, and he wouldn’t allow it.
Before the Concentra, it’d been Adderall used to pump the useless brakes on his Ferrari brain, but Nick hated the way it made him feel. It brought things into razor-sharp focus, and while that wasn’t so bad, it made his headaches worse, and made him feel strangely hollowed out if he missed a dose. And before the Adderall, it’d been some other drug, and before that, something else entirely. ADHD was a bitch of a thing, the reality implied in the name. Nick’s attention had a deficit, and he was hyperactively disordered. The Concentra was supposed to be better. The transition had been a bit rough, but Nick had gotten through it. Mostly.
But he understood the cell phone battery metaphor—the bicycle brakes on his Ferrari brain. He really did. There were days when everything felt like it was dialed up to eleven, and he didn’t know how to stop it, no matter how hard he tried. For the most part, he’d accepted that some people were born to be Extraordinaries, and some people were born to be medicated so they didn’t spin out of control. Fair? Not really, but Nick was learning that his brain could do things that others couldn’t. In a way, he had his own superpower, even if it was called a disorder.
He took the lasagna from the microwave, the plate hot in his hands. When his dad had days off, they’d spend time together cooking, making meals for the upcoming weeks that could be frozen and saved for later. Lasagna was Nick’s favorite, his dad made it just right with sausage and spinach and the perfect amount of cheese.
He turned on the tiny TV in the kitchen before going to sit at the table. An afternoon soap was on, a dazzlingly beautiful woman telling a man with an eye patch that she’d had her conjoined twin removed for a reason, and he’d have to make a choice, either her or her sister.
“Get your man,” Nick said as he picked up his fork. “Don’t let him walk all over you.”
He had a mouth full of noodles when the conjoined twin love triangle was interrupted mid-scene by Action News, the red graphic shooting across the screen, screaming BREAKING! BREAKING!
The camera focused on evening anchor Steve Davis, who looked as if he’d never met a form of plastic surgery he didn’t want to try at least once. He shuffled the papers in his hands and smiled a perfect smile. “We’re interrupting your regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you something … extraordinary. We go live to Rebecca Firestone, out in the streets of Nova City. Rebecca?”
The screen cut away to Rebecca Firestone, looking as perfectly put together as she had that morning. She was holding an umbrella in one hand and her microphone in the other. “Thanks, Steve,” she said. “New footage this afternoon of a daring rescue. A passerby recorded Nova City’s very own Shadow Star apparently working overtime. Not only did he foil the attempt at the break-in at Burke Tower in the early hours of this morning, but he found the time to help stop an attempted mugging. Action News has this exclusive look at what happened.”
The screen cut to the alley where Nick had been standing only a couple of hours before.
There was Shadow Star kicking ass and taking names, knocking down Mustache Man and Male Pattern Baldness with special guest stars Nick