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Smart Kids: Phillip Manning
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“Different’s worse,” he says, and he’s Superman--tall and powerful and larger than life, and despite what I told him, I know he’s fast enough to take the remote from my hand before I can do more than depress the button a fraction of an inch. But he doesn’t. He just stands there and talks to me, and there’s something in his voice that makes me pause. Something that moves past the intelligence spiraling through my brain like colored ropes, like fancy fireworks in a straight line. There’s something in his voice that sounds a lot like sadness.

Lex Luthor is trying to talk, watching us with cold eyes that sizzle right through me. The remote is heavy in my hand. My brain is never still, never silent, opening up pathways I’ve never even imagined, as if the entire universe is right at my feet, and I should be planning my next move, laughing in glee at all of the plans I have for Metropolis, for the world, for places so much bigger than the island we all thought we wanted.

Only…only Superman is still standing there, looking at me, telling me just how bad being different is--and he’s the one who’s seen the universe. He’s the one who’s come from galaxies away and flown here to make a new home, the one who has the entire world clamoring for his attention, who has a key to the city and a charitable organization named after him and the spotlight always on him.

And he still looks sad.

“I’m not Superman,” Clark Kent had said. “I wish I were.”

But Superman wishes he was ordinary.

It’s a dilemma maybe more complex than even this Mentamide 6 can unravel. A puzzle I can’t quite wrap my head around. Because an ordinary man wants to be extraordinary, and a super man wants to be normal. It doesn’t make sense.

But then, maybe a kid wanting to be an adult doesn’t make sense either. I don’t know anymore. Everything’s so confusing and mixed up, rocketed back and forth between extraordinary intelligence and ordinary thoughts.

“Different is wishing you weren’t,” Superman says, and then he stops.

And Luthor can talk all he wants, Superman can show me as many parks and kites as there are in the world, but I already know what my decision is. It’s not the smart one or the obvious one or the one Luthor thinks I’ll make. It’s not even the one *I* would have thought I’d make.

But Superman knows what he’s talking about (and Clark Kent was lying), and I don’t want to be different anymore.

So I make the *right* choice.

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