Hero by Perry Moore Page A

the train passed. By the time I was a teenager, those trips felt like punishment, but in the pictures we were nothing but broad smiles in desiccated towns. We laughed with unbridled joy whenever the trains finally whizzed past and sent the wind whipping through our hair.
    I rubbed my finger over the picture of my mother at my kindergarten graduation. Time seemed to have faded it. My mother stood behind my father in the back row of the audience, and her image had become blurry. I remember how uncomfortable my mother was with having her picture taken. She must have fidgeted each time someone snapped the shot; that would explain the blur. I flipped through the rest of the pages and noticed that while the shots seemed clear, Mora's image in them had become increasingly faded. She'd been growing fainter and fainter by the year, and I was surprised I'd never noticed it before. By the time I saw the picture from my first-ever basketball game, you could barely see her at all sitting behind my father on the bleachers.
    I checked my watch. I'd been stupid to look at old pictures. I should have been on the road long ago. It was a quarter of eleven, and I hadn't even figured out what I was going to do for money.
    I flipped the album's pages to my mom's favorite shot—of the beer can exploding on us. I peeled back the cellophane so I could remove the picture and noticed a little strip of paper poking out from behind it. I stripped the photo off the sticky page, and there it was.
    I couldn't believe what I saw.
    I glanced around the room. Maybe there was a camera, maybe this was a practical joke. It had to be. But when I looked back down at the page, it was plain as day.
    A note.
    The edges of the paper were almost as dry and brittle as the picture. I tore off all the other photos, one by one, and discovered underneath each a hidden treasure of pictures, another set of photos I was never meant to see, until now.
    I stared down at the note in my hands, my fingertips numb, and the words, written in my mother's perfect, deliberate cursive, burned in my mind:
    To my son. Know yourself.
    I tucked the stack of photos into my bag and ran out the door.

CHAPTER  FOUR
    AS THE BUS PULLED OUT of the terminal, I remem¬bered I'd forgotten to drag the trash can to the curb for pickup tomorrow. That would be Dad's first clue I was gone. I'd man¬aged to say good-bye to the house, and I remembered thinking that I was forgetting something as I watched the bats dance in and out of the glow of streetlights. It was too late to worry about anything else but leaving now.
    I settled into an empty seat in the back of the bus by the bathroom. The faded cushions smelled like an ashtray, and I leaned my head against the window and stared back at the terminal as we pulled on the highway. I reached down for my bag and pulled out the stack of pictures I'd swiped from the album, a secret history. I craned my head above the seat to make sure no one in the bus was looking back in my direction, and then I started leafing through the piles.
    The first picture of my mother wasn't really a picture of her at all, but of her boot. It was an original black-and-white photo from a newspaper clipping, and there was a chubby, middle-aged woman with a bad perm dressed like a female wrestler in a Halloween mask, and what looked like cardboard, polka-dot wings hastily pinned to the back of her unitard. The chubby woman lay flat on the ground, knocked out, a single stylish boot pinning down her chest. She was wrapped in a lariat pulled taut into the air above her by an unseen force, like her assailant had been magically airbrushed out of the picture, except for the boot.
    Inscribed on the picture was the following message:
    Congratulations on nabbing your first villain. Keep up the good work! Yours in courage, Captain Victory.
    I kept staring at the pictures in disbelief. I didn't blink once for at least an hour. My mother had been a hero. All these years, and I had no idea. The