“Hey—put that down!”

I grabbed the comic book from Wilson Clark’s hand and smoothed out the plastic cover.

“I was only looking at it,” he grumbled.

“If you get a fingerprint on it, it will lose half its value,” I told him. I examined the cover through the clear wrapper. “This is a Silver Swan Number Zero,” I said. “And it’s in mint condition.”

Wilson shook his head. He has curly, white-blond hair and round, blue eyes. He always looks confused.

“How can it be Number Zero?” he asked. “That doesn’t make any sense, Skipper.”

Wilson is a really good friend of mine. But sometimes I think he dropped down from the planet Mars. He just doesn’t know anything.

I held up the Silver Swan cover so he could see the big zero in the corner. “That makes it a collector’s item,” I explained. “Number Zero comes before Number One. This comic is worth ten times as much as Silver Swan Number One.”

“Huh? It is?” Wilson scratched his curly hair. He squatted down on the floor and started pawing through my carton of comic books. “How come all your comics are in these plastic bags, Skipper? How can you read them?”

See? I told you. Wilson doesn’t know anything.

“Read them? I don’t read them,” I replied. “If you read them, they lose their value.”

He stared up at me. “You don’t read them?”

“I can’t take them out of the bag,” I explained. “If I open the bag, they won’t be in mint condition anymore.”

“Ooh. This one is cool!” he exclaimed. He pulled up a copy of Star Wolf. “The cover is metal!”

“It’s worthless,” I mumbled. “It’s a second printing.”

He stared at the silvery cover, turning it in his hands, making it shine in the light. “Cool,” he muttered. His favorite word.

We were up in my room, about an hour after dinner. The sky was black outside my double windows. It gets dark so early in winter. Not like on the Silver Swan’s planet, Orcos III, where the sun never sets and all the superheroes have to wear air-conditioned costumes.

Wilson came over to get the math homework. He lives next door, and he always leaves his math book at school—so he always comes over to get the homework from me.

“You should collect comic books,” I told him. “In about twenty years, these will be worth millions.”

“I collect rubber stamps,” he said, picking up a Z-Squad annual. He studied the sneaker ad on the back cover.

“Rubber stamps?”

“Yeah. I have about a hundred of them,” he said.

“What can you do with rubber stamps?” I asked.

He dropped the comic back into the carton and stood up. “Well, you can stamp things with them,” he said, brushing off the knees of his jeans. “I have different-colored ink pads. Or you can just look at them.”

He is definitely weird.

“Are they valuable?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He picked up the math sheet from the foot of my bed. “I’d better get home, Skipper. See you tomorrow.”

He started for the door and I followed him. Our reflections stared out at us from my big dresser mirror. Wilson is so tall and skinny and blond and blue-eyed. I always feel like a dark, chubby mole next to him.

If we were in a comic book, Wilson would be the superhero, and I would be his sidekick. I’d be the pudgy, funny one who was always messing up.

It’s a good thing life isn’t a comic book—right?

As soon as Wilson left, I turned back to my dresser. My eye caught the big computer banner above the mirror: Skipper Matthews, Alien Avenger.

My dad had someone at his office print out the banner for me for my twelfth birthday a few weeks ago.

Beneath the banner, I have two great posters tacked on the wall on both sides of the dresser. One is a Jack Kirby Captain America. It’s really old and probably worth about a thousand dollars.

The other one is newer—a Spawn poster by Todd McFarlane. It’s really awesome.

In the mirror, I could see the excited look on my own face as I hurried to the dresser.

The flat brown envelope waited for me on the dressertop.

Mom and Dad said I couldn’t open it until after dinner, after I finished my homework. But I couldn’t wait.

I could feel my heart start to pound as I stared down at the envelope.

I knew what waited inside it. Just thinking about it made my heart pound even harder.

I carefully picked up the envelope. I had to open it now. I had to.