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“I’ll race you,” Kid Flash says out of the blue one afternoon. Superboy cocks an eyebrow. It’s not fair to be suspicious; logically, he knows that. But so far in his life he hasn’t been very good at being logical, and the invitation comes out of nowhere.
“Alright,” he says slowly. “Where?”
“Anywhere!” Kid Flash exclaims, throwing his arms akimbo. “Rome! The moon! Kansas – okay, not Kansas,” he amends quickly when Superboy scowls. “Ohio!”
“What’s in Ohio?” Superboy asks, curiosity getting the better of him. He’s never been to Ohio, or, well. Anyplace else, really.
“I don’t know,” Kid Flash says, rolling his eyes like Superboy’s missing the entire point. Maybe he is, but he’s not the one who suggested it in the first place. “The world’s largest ball of twine?”
“There’s a world’s largest ball of twine?” Superboy says, feeling very lost. “Why would someone make a large ball of twine?”
Kid Flash gives him a pitying look, like Superboy is something particularly pathetic that just crawled out from under some rock. It makes his fist clench even if he knows (logically, again logically, and he needs to be better at it; Superman probably thinks logically all the time without any effort at all, ever) Kid Flash doesn’t mean anything by it.
He’s snapped out of his thoughts when Kid Flash claps him on the shoulder.
“Bro, we’re going to Ohio,” he says with a wild grin.
--
The world’s largest ball of twine is not in Ohio.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is, though, and Kid Flash seems really excited about that. Mostly, Superboy just feels lost. Kid Flash – “Wally, bro, call me Wally,” he says, and Superboy doesn’t have any name to give him back – insisted they wear “civvies” so they’d “blend” and Superboy feels vulnerable and strange without the S-shield on his chest. He’s never been without it before.
(“But these are my normal clothes,” Superboy protests when Kid Flash – when Wally shoves an armful of t-shirts at him.
“Yeah, but you fight secret crime in them,” Wally says. “Therefore, not civvies. We gotta do this roadtrip thing right, okay?”
Superboy doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he just picks the first shirt out of the pile.)
“So it’s a museum of music?” Superboy says, checking to make sure he’s getting all of this right.
Wally throws his arms up in the air. Superboy wonders if he should do it too, if it’s normal, one of those things he needs to learn, but when he thinks about doing it he mostly feels ridiculous. His arms stay at his sides.
“Not just music!” Wally says. “Rock’n’roll!”
“Uh,” Superboy says. He’s beginning to regret this; he feels uncomfortable in these clothes, in his skin, standing among all these people, older men and women in shorts and fanny packs, taking pictures of everything. He scratches at a spot on his arm. “Cool?”
Wally pauses.
“Maybe you’re not ready for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” he declares, and Superboy breathes a silent sigh of relief. “It’s all cool. Let’s go somewhere different.”
“Where?” Superboy asks. Wally thinks about it. He twists his lips, tilts his head, crosses his arms and taps one foot while Superboy just stands there, feeling like a rock.
“What’s someplace everybody likes?” he asks, and Superboy nearly opens his mouth to say that he doesn’t know, but then he realizes this is another one of those questions that aren’t meant for answers. Wally snaps his fingers. “I know!”
--
The zoo is fun, at first. Superboy knows all these animals, knows their names and their habitats. But the images are static in his mind; they’re not real. The animals in the zoo are real, and he and Wally spend a couple of hours running from exhibit to exhibit.
Wally especially likes the spider monkeys.
“They kind of remind you of Rob, huh?” he says.
Superboy tilts his head to the side. One of the monkeys seems to be gnawing on its own hand.
“I guess,” he says. “Not really?”
“With all the leaping?” Wally says, making a hand motion that’s probably supposed to symbolize a flying somersault. “And the never shutting up?”
“The never shutting up reminds me of you,” Superboy says before he can stop himself. He feels his face heat up, but Wally only laughs. Superboy feels his lips twitch upwards.
They go see the penguins next, on Wally’s insistence. Superboy doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t this, staring at a bunch of birds in a room painted to look like the Antarctic. One of them looks at him, and he feels a pang in his chest.
“Do you think they miss being in the wild?” he asks.
“Nah,” Wally says casually. “Most of them were probably bred in captivity. They don’t know any better.”
Superboy nods slowly. He presses his hands up against the glass, staring at one of the baby penguins, fuzzy and grey and huddled in a corner. It’s better out here, he wants to tell it. Which is stupid, because it’s a penguin, but that doesn’t stop the ache inside.
Wally stares at him for a long moment. It makes Superboy bristle, the muscles in his shoulders tensing up.
“I think I know our next stop,” Wally says, oddly serious.
--
“Aren’t you cold?” Wally demands through chattering teeth.
Superboy shrugs.
“Should’ve stopped for parkas,” Wally mutters. He crosses his arms and huddles in on himself.
“What are we doing here?” Superboy asks.
“Right,” Wally says, straightening up. “Follow me!”
He zooms away before Superboy can reply. He huffs and kicks at some snow, but, well. He does want to know why Wally brought him here, to this snowy middle of nowhere. He runs after him.
He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t what he finds: Wally, surrounded by penguins. Real life penguins, out in the wild, and Superboy skids to a halt in front of them.
“The ones in the zoo were making you sad,” Wally says, patting one of the birds on the head. “I figured, hey, why not go straight to the penguin source?”
Superboy swallows hard.
“I…” he starts, reaching for the words. “Thanks.”
“No prob,” Wally grins. “What are friends for?”
The penguin underneath Wally’s hand has other ideas, apparently, because it squawks and bolts. Wally loses his balance, windmills his arms, and only just barely keeps from falling into a whole pack of penguins, who all start squawking and flapping at him in turn.
Superboy can’t help it; he bursts out laughing. It’s the look on Wally’s face and the penguins’ outrage, and the fact that they’re actually at the South Pole. It bubbles up from somewhere deep inside of him, someplace he wasn’t sure he had.
Wally really does lose his balance then and Superboy doubles over, clutching at his stomach. Wally shakes snow from his hair and points at Superboy, mouth agape.
“You!” he says. “You can laugh!”
“Of course I can!” Superboy protests, and he means for it to come out annoyed, but he just can’t muster up the effort. He’s too happy to be here.
He flops down in the snow next to Wally and together they watch the penguins.
--
Superboy expects it to be a one time thing. But Wally runs up to him on the next day and asks if he wants to race somewhere else. The day after that, too. Not the day after that day, because they have a mission, but then the next day it’s right back on schedule.
Superboy finds himself looking forward to it. A lot.
They go to the Grand Canyon, and Rome, and, because Wally insists he has to, Disneyland. Superboy’s not really sure what the appeal of a giant mouse wearing pants is, but he lets Wally ramble on about the movies while they eat overpriced churros.
--
On Wednesday, Wally insists they get french fries. From France.
Paris isn’t exactly like Superboy thought. Turns out it’s not just the Eiffel Tower and guys in striped shirts eating baguettes.
“Bon jour!” Wally says to the street cart owner. “Dos pommes frites, por favor!”
Superboy is pretty sure that’s not how you order fries, but the guy seems to get the message all the same. Wally hands him his.
“Last chance to get snails,” he says. Superboy wrinkles his nose at the thought.
“No thanks,” he says. Wally shrugs.
“Fine, if you want to miss a cultural experience,” he says. He points towards the distance. “Race you to that hill!”
Which hill is on the tip of Superboy’s tongue, but Wally’s already gone. It takes him a few minutes to find him, seated underneath a tree and already halfway through his fries.
“Too slow,” he snickers when Superboy sits down next to him. A week ago the sound would have made him want to slam his fist into a wall, but now he knows Wally doesn’t mean it badly. Doesn’t make it any less infuriating, but the edge is gone. It doesn’t make him grind his teeth anymore.
“You didn’t say which hill,” Superboy accuses. Wally pops a fry in his mouth.
“Hey, you still found me,” he says. He stretches his legs out in the grass. “This is nice, huh?”
Superboy gazes up at the sky. It’s bright and blue and full of wispy clouds. Wally points at one.
“That one kind of looks like a dragon,” he says. Superboy squints at it. Mostly, it just looks like a cloud.
“Uh,” he says. “I guess. Kind of?”
Wally rolls his eyes.
“Well, what do you think it looks like?”
Superboy thinks about it.
“A sheep,” he says at last. Wally's face falls. He clasps Superboy on the shoulder, leans over him so he can point to a different cloud.
“No, man, no,” he says, and launches into an explanation on what he calls The Ancient Art of Cloud Gazing.
--
“I can’t think of anywhere to go today,” Wally announces, flinging himself down face first on the couch. Superboy freezes, unsure what to say. Something in his chest clenches, the thing that had been nervous this whole time, wondering when this would end.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out, so he shuts it again. He stares at the floor.
Wally lifts his face up off the sofa cushions.
“Dude,” he says, “this is the part where you suggest where we go next.”
Superboy looks up. He blinks.
“What?” he says.
“C’mon,” Wally says, pulling himself into a sitting position. “Where have you always wanted to go?”
Superboy can’t think of an answer. Before this, he’d never been anywhere. Everything’s still so new; he doesn’t know where to start. Nowhere, he almost says, and everywhere, but those aren’t good answers. He thinks on it for a moment, and comes up with an answer just as Wally starts fidgeting.
“We never went to the world’s largest ball of twine,” he says. Wally’s eyebrows shoot up near his hairline.
“Seriously?” he says. Superboy nods. Wally sighs. “You got weird tastes, bro.”
He’s gone a moment later, and Superboy is just starting to wonder if he was supposed to follow when Wally zooms back in, a couple of pamphlets in his hands. He sits down opposite Superboy and spreads them out between them.
“Okay,” he says. “According to this, we’ve got the Guinness World Record confirmed ball of twine in Brooks, Missouri, but. There’s also one in Minnesota and that one gets its own Twine Ball Day, and if we go to there then we can pick up a guy named Bernie on the way.”
“Why would we do that?” Superboy asks.
“I’m getting you some better CDs,” Wally says. He flips to the next pamphlet. “And then there’s the heaviest ball of twine in Wisconsin.”
“What about that one?” Superboy asks, pointing to a fourth pamphlet. Wally picks it up and scans it. He makes a face.
“I don’t think you wanna see this one,” he says. Superboy raises an eyebrow.
“Why not?” he asks. Wally sighs and casts his eyes skyward for a brief moment.
“The largest sisal twine ball, community built,” he skims the pamphlet, “blah blah blah, twine-a-thon, blah blah, as of 2006, it’s reached a weight of 17,886 pounds and a circumference of 40 feet, blah blah, at a length of over 1,475 miles, it would reach as far as Boston, the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico City, Hudson Bay or Canada’s Northwest territories -- ”
“So what’s wrong with that one?” Superboy asks.
“You didn’t let me finish,” Wally says. “Or Canada’s Northwest territories, if unwound from its home of Cawker City, Kansas.”
“Oh,” Superboy says. There’s a moment of awkward silence.
“Sooo, not going there,” Wally says, and he moves to crinkle the pamphlet up. Superboy grabs his wrist – gently – and keeps his hand still.
“Wait,” he says, and his eyes flicker downward. “Can we go to all of them?”
“What, even Kansas?” Wally says. Superboy nods.
“I just… It’s a team built ball of twine,” he says lamely. “That sounds kind of… cool.”
When he looks back up, Wally’s rolling his eyes.
“Man, you are so weird,” he says, but he’s grinning, so Superboy grins back, and they settle down on the floor together to plot out their next trip.