The Caped 6th Grader Read Online Free PDF

and degrees of sharpness. The pencils were in every color I could imagine—and a few I couldn't. Beside the box were a bunch of smaller, empty containers.
    “Bring the box and those empty ones over to my worktable,” Electra suggested. “We can chat while we work.” She pulled the extra desk chair up beside hers and we took our seats.
    “We're supposed to start off by asking questions,” I said, suddenly feeling shy. “Do you mind?”
    Electra laughed. “Of course not. That's how we learn. By asking questions.”
    “Okay.” I put the pencil boxes on the table and sat down. “Did you always want to become a comic-book author?”
    “Not exactly,” Electra said. “I had other … um, career aspirations. But even while I was pursuing those, I was always a doodler.”
    “A doodler?” I giggled, thinking of my school notebooks, which, lately, I'd been covering with little hearts and a certain name. “I'm a doodler.”
    “I noticed!” Electra grinned. “So, who's Josh?”
    My eyes grew round with surprise. “How did you know about … I mean …”
    Electra motioned to my backpack. My social studies notebook was sticking out, and it was plain to see that the whole cover was decorated in various versions of Josh's name—bubble letters, block letters, script.…
    “Oh.” I felt my face getting warm. “Yeah. Josh. Well, he's … he's …”
    “A special friend? A secret?”
    I shrugged, smiling in spite of my embarrassment. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
    “Well, don't worry. I'm good at keeping secrets.”
    Suddenly, I was eager to get back to the topic of comic books. “How do you get your ideas?” I asked, hoping it sounded like a very professional inquiry. “Do you know what's going to happen from the start, or does it come to you as you work?”
    “Oh, there's always a story in my head. All the different pieces of an adventure are swimming around in there, like memories.”
    “Memories?” I thought back to Lightning Girl's last adventure and wondered how Electra—or anyone, for that matter, besides Grandpa Zack and, well,
me
—could have a memory of tunneling to the core of the earth to douse a volcano. I supposed Electra was just making a comparison.
    “Anyway,” she continued, “it's really just a matter of taking the different elements and putting them in a proper, exciting, storylike order.”
    “Sounds difficult,” I said.
    Electra nodded. “Chronology is always the toughest part.”
    It was quiet for a moment. Then Electra picked up a black marker and uncapped it. “Now, about those pencils … I'd like you put all the red tones in one container, all the blues in another, then the greens, and so on. Got it?”
    “Sure,” I said, hoping that I'd eventually get a chance to use those pencils to draw an actual Lightning Girl scene. But if I had to start with sorting them, I was going to sort them the best I could. I wondered if I had any supersorting powers I could call on.
    I reached into the large box and pulled out a sky blue pencil, then dropped it into one of the empty boxes. The next one was bright red, like fresh strawberries; I put it in a different box.
    The third pencil I grabbed was a green one. Well, actually, it was a sort of a greenish blue. Or maybe it was more of a bluish green. It reminded me of a mermaid's tail. Green-blue, blue-green. Okay, so did it go in the green box or the blue box? So much for supersorting.
    I stared at the pencil for a long moment.
    “More complicated than you thought it'd be, hmmm?” Electra said, not looking up from the background she was sketching. I could hear the smile in her voice.
    “Yes,” I admitted.
    “That's one of my favorite things about color,” she said, her marker moving swiftly across the page. “So many possibilities, so many subtle mysteries. Colors are complex, they can be more than one thing—kind of like people.”
    I'd never thought of it like that before. “I like that!” I said, rolling the bluish