“Am I really going to fly with this thing?”

“Like a bird,” Jeff replied, as he welded bits of metal together.

I was nervously talking to myself, actually, and didn’t mean for Jeff to her me.

About a month before the big trip, I went over to Jeff’s house. He was busy in the backyard welding metal into a box. Welding, you know, because it involved Jeff’s favorite thing: fire. Okay, comic books were Jeff’s favorite thing; fire was a close second.

“What are you making?” I asked him.

“Just finishing the housing for the wings,” he said, turning off the torch.

“Okay,” I said, unsure what that meant.

The housing , as it turns out, was a metal box that was as wide as my torso and would reach from my neck to my waist. It fit perfectly on my back. Jeff did good work, I have to say. Two leather straps crossed my chest. A cable ran from the housing to another little metal box. Jeff picked up the little box and firmly pushed a red button. With a whoosh, the framework for the wings popped out.

“Whoa!” I said, taken by surprise! “That was cool!”

I did some of my own resistance tests. The frame was sturdy. We just needed to add canvas. The wings were going to be beautiful when they were finished.

Why didn’t I back out of the whole thing then? It was another one of those opportunities when I could have quit while I was ahead. When I saw the wings, though, I started to get excited, as if this could really work. I imagined myself flying around the city, the wind in my face, like when my dad and I went hang gliding. Then, I could picture people looking up in awe, as if I were NCC’s personal hero. I was hooked.

From that moment on, Jeff and I spent almost every waking moment working on the wings and the “suit,” as Jeff called it. Jeff preferred the term “suit,” because that’s what our comic book heroes called them. I called it a “costume” because, should I be stopped, no one would know who I was. When we’d finished, I strapped on the wings.

“I feel like a low-budget Armored Man with bat wings.” I said. “How do I look?”

“You’re shiny and new!” Jeff replied enthusiastically. We both started laughing. “I think we should paint the housing black, though. You don’t want to be too visible. Darkness is your friend.”

Would it fly, though? And, where would we test it?

Valley View Elementary School, which Jeff and I both attended, had a huge concrete playground, which was fairly flat. Better yet, it was in a remote area and practically empty on the weekends. So, we decided to test the suit out there, early on the weekend. Jeff brought plenty of coffee (his third favorite thing) and he drove us over to the school before sunrise. We hauled everything up to the roof of one of the school buildings (it had been our fourth grade classroom, incidentally) and I put on the suit.

“Remember when we went to school here?” I said, looking down at the playground.

“I remember the jocks beating on us,” Jeff said. “Actually, I think I have that on video.”

“You have video of the jocks beating us during school?”

“It wasn’t during school actually. Do you remember when my dad bought me that video camera?”

“Yes!” I said, laughing. “We made those cheesy Mr. Wonderful and Dr. Life movies!”

He nodded and continued, “while we were filming, a bunch of jocks assaulted us.”

“Oh, right,” I said, rubbing the top of my head. “One of them knocked me over and I hit my head on the concrete.”

“Speaking of which, you’ll need this,” he said, handing me a motorcycle helmet.

“Great.”

He continued, “I hooked up speakers on the inside of the helmet and this cord,” he said, pulling on the thin, black cord hanging from the molding at the bottom right side of the helmet, “connects to your cell phone. So, we’ll be in constant contact.”

I took the cord and plugged it into my cell phone, which fit into a pocket Jeff sewed into the chest of the suit. The phone rang and I hit the receive button.

“Can you hear me?” Jeff’s voice came through the helmet’s speakers.

“Yes, I can hear you just fine,” I said into the microphone Jeff wired into the helmet, “and in stereo.”

He gave me the thumbs up. “Whenever you’re ready, dude.”

I tugged once more on the leather handles underneath the wings to test their strength. They were sturdy. I held my breath, said a quick prayer, jumped off the roof... and flew. It worked. The thing actually worked! There was an initial jolt, which, in all honesty, might have been my heart when I realized there was no ground under my feet. But, then I could feel lift and I went up. It felt wonderful. Jeff’s screams of excitement rang in my ears; I was screaming too. I’m not sure who started it. The wings were sturdy enough that I could let go of the handles. With my hands free, I could check the variometer. By adjusting my center of gravity, I was able to change direction. I flew higher, beyond the school grounds, and then outside the city. If anyone saw me, I couldn’t tell. The helmet’s visor was blocking the wind, so I lifted the visor momentarily, so I could feel the wind against my face.

Satisfied with my test, I told him, “I’m going to land now. There’s a big empty field. I’ll aim for that.”

“I’m on my way!”

My heart raced. Flying with this thing was incredible, but would I be able to land? I drew on my experiences hang gliding with my dad and started a straight vertical climb. Once I’d lost momentum, I retracted the wings and began a nose dive.

“Patience,” I said, telling myself to not extend the wings too soon.

With the ground quickly approaching, though, I panicked. Whoosh! I opened up the wings. Air caught the wings and I began to slow down, but I was still going too fast. My feet hit the ground. I tried to run, but the wings kept pulling me forward. My feet slipped and, next thing I knew, my legs were dragging against the ground. I retraced the wings and stopped, falling face forward. “Ow!” I was glad Jeff suggested the helmet.

Jeff drove up as I was picking myself off the ground and making sure my genitals were still there.

“Are you alright?” he yelled from the car.

“Yes!” I said. “That landing must have looked like a sports blooper. Guess I’ll have to work on that. Dude, I can’t believe it actually worked!” I just kept laughing. “How did you find me?”

Jeff waved a little tablet. “GPS,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Besides a little giddy, fine.”

The next few days, we did several more tests. Each time, I went farther and farther. We did it early in the morning, so there were less people around to see me. Eventually, we started doing it at night too. I figured it would probably be good to do a night run, to see how difficult it would be. The visor is tinted, so I had to take it off at night. The tests went by without a hitch. If anyone saw me, they must have thought I was a big shiny bird, like maybe a hawk. From time to time, I checked the newspaper headlines to see if someone sighted a big bird or UFO or something, but, so far, there was no mention of any flying anomaly. So, it seemed safe.

One day, we decided to test what I started calling the “rocket boots,” a term which Jeff hated. “They’re not rocket boots,” he said condescendingly. “You’re going to use them sparingly for vertical take-offs only. You can’t use them to propel yourself around the city at breakneck speed. That’s not what they’re designed for. The wings are going to do the majority of the work. You can only glide, not fly.

“Okay, Mom,” I said, “sparingly. I got it.”

I gave the button a quick tap. Fire spewed from the canisters on the side of the boots, but only for a second. It was enough to lift me to my tiptoes, but that was it.

“No, that’s not going to work,” Jeff scolded. “Hold it down for a few seconds.”

This went on for a while. Eventually, we discovered that I had to crouch, lean forward and hit the button for about ten seconds before I got off the ground and lift/air/the wings finally kicked in. It reminded me of what we had to do to use the horn on the Firestorm. Besides, it must have looked ridiculous. “Yeah. I’ll do my best to avoid having to use the rockets.”

“Sounds good.”

We started loading stuff into the car. “Hey,” I said, “let’s hang out tonight. Just you and me, like the old days.”

“Sure,” Jeff agreed. “It has been a while, hasn’t it? Why don’t you spend the night at my house?”

“A sleepover, really? We’re not ten anymore.”

“Not a sleepover,” he said. “For us in coll… [I know Jeff was about to say “college,” but he quickly changed his sentence when he remembered I wasn’t going to college.] We adults say ‘crashing on your couch.’”

We finished packing the car.

Jeff’s mom made dinner for us and then we went up to his room. So, yeah, it was a sleepover. Dinners at Jeff’s house were different than at mine, though. At my house, with Mom working crazy hours, I’d often end up eating alone in front of my computer screen. Unlike my parents, Jeff’s parents were still married, they all did things together. When I went to Jeff’s, we’d eat dinner together at a table and have a conversation.

At the end of the night, though, Jeff and I did go up to his room and turn on the computer. That was pretty normal for us.

“What are we going to watch?” I asked.

He clicked on a file and a video screen popped up. As the video started, I said, “Is that..? “

“That’s us, dude!“

We were maybe thirteen years when we made a short film about our favorite comic book heroes, Mr. Wonderful and Dr. Life. We collaborated on a script, made our own cheesy costumes from old bed sheets and filmed ourselves acting out our heroes’ adventures.

“And, there they are,” I said.

Sure enough, in the middle of the movie, Mark Manners and his friends came down the street, heckled us and started beating on us. Jeff’s old video camera didn’t have any sound, so at least we didn’t have to listen to us getting beaten. We did make a recording that we, one day, hoped to combine with the video, but the tape got lost.

“It’s a good thing this was a few years ago,” Jeff said as we watched ourselves getting beaten. “If this had happened nowadays, someone would have taken video of it on their cellphone and posted it on the Internet.”

“If there had been video of this abuse back then, maybe we could have gotten an adult to stop it, “I added.“

“Good point, “ Jeff said. “In any case, we may not have video from the last time you fought Mark Manners, but I’m sure kids will be talking about it for years. Bards will sing songs telling the story of how you stood up to the giant and felled him with one blow. In fact, I think I may just have to write my own song. ”

“Couldn’t have done it without you, “ I told him. “The 2x4 was your idea. I wouldn’t have thought of that on my own. Alright, I’m done watching this.” I clicked on the the video to close it.

“Oh, wait, “ he said and clicked on a different file,” check this out. I edited out the beatings.”

The video popped up and showed the story the way we had intended it… without sound.

“That’s cool.” I said.

Then, other videos came on. I’d forgotten about all the scenes we’d shot. Some of them were just to try out different camera effects like Dr. Life disappearing from one spot and reappearing in another.

In another scene, we’d hung a watering can from a hook over the garage to make it look as if Mr. Wonderful was making it rain. He couldn’t do it in the comics, but we wanted to try it. Of course, I started cracking up when I got wet.

It was a great night. Watching those old movies and thinking about our favorite heroes made me excited for the trip I was about to take. I’d be up in the sky, flying just like them. I practically had to force myself to get some sleep that night.

Next Chapter: Chapter Fourteen