was in some too, here and there. Nick and Seth in a blanket fort. Nick and Seth dressed like Jean Grey and Wolverine (Nick was nine, okay?) Nick and Seth standing on the pier, holding tufts of pink cotton candy almost as big as they were. Nick and Seth sitting in front of a TV, shoulder to shoulder, Nick’s head tilted back in a laugh and Seth smiling quietly.
It was physical history of a good life, the wall cluttered with shared moments, some of which Nick had forgotten about.
As always, Nick stopped near the top of the stairs in front of one photograph in particular. The frame was old and worn, and the glass had a little crack in the right corner. The subjects were a little blurry and out of focus, but it reminded Nick of the one of him and Mom, standing near the lighthouse.
In it, Seth was four, and he was sitting on the shoulders of a thin, bespectacled man with a receding hairline. The man had his hands wrapped around Seth’s ankles, and Seth’s hands were thrown up in the air, curled into little fists. A woman stood next to the man, looking up at Seth, a smile on her face that Nick recognized on her son time and time again.
Nick had never met these two people. They’d been gone before the day on the swings. Seth had a few memories of them that he hoarded like a dragon does gold. Nick knew a couple of them, but not all. He didn’t mind. He was aware that sometimes, things needed to be kept hidden in shadow because if they were brought out too much into the light, they would fade.
He wondered if Seth talked to them like Nick did with his mom.
He moved on.
There were three doors in the hallway at the top of the stairs. The door to the right led to the only bathroom in the house. The door to the left was Martha and Bob’s bedroom, all old wood and frilly lace, much to Bob’s consternation.
The last door—the one at the end of the hall—had a battered sign hanging off of it.
SETH’S ROOM
He knocked on the door.
“Come in!” a breathless voice said.
Nick frowned and shook his head before opening the door.
From the ceiling hung a replica model of a 1918 Yellow Curtiss JN-4 biplane. The propeller was broken, Nick’s contribution to the entire project that had started out great, but then had caused him to be bored out of his mind. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sit still for six hours and put together a model airplane. It was just that he was incapable of doing so. So, on hour three, he’d been so twitchy that he’d accidentally broken the propeller, the audible snap making him look down at his hands in horror. But Seth had shrugged, saying their plane would look as if it’d been in war now, which made it better.
Seth was good like that.
There were bookshelves filled with hundreds of books, most of which Nick had never touched and would never read. There was, however, a shelf toward the bottom that was lined with graphic novels and stacks of comic books Nick had given Seth. And Seth had read each and every one dutifully. Or, at least, he’d tried to read each and every one, but Nick had been so excited at the sight of a comic book in his best friend’s hands that he’d sat right behind Seth peering over his shoulder, pointing out each panel, telling him all the backstory that Seth would have missed. He’d been worried, at first, that Seth wouldn’t like them (and worse, that he’d think they were stupid), but that hadn’t happened. He spent hours with Nick talking about heroes and villains, letting Nick babble at him about how cool Storm was, or how hardcore Venom could be.
It was different now, since Shadow Star and Pyro Storm appeared. They were comic books come to life, right in his city. Nick had known about Extraordinaries before, but they’d been the stuff of legends, in places far away from home. It wasn’t until he’d seen with his own eyes Pyro Storm fly or Shadow Star crawl up the side of a building that it’d hit Nick just how astonishing they could be. After Guardian left for unknown reasons years earlier, the idea of Extraordinaries had been something the people of Nova City only saw from their television and computer screens. It was easy