The Least Useful Superpower

Winnie Zhao discovered her superpower on a Tuesday, which she thought was the most boring day of the week to discover anything important.

She was sitting at the kitchen table eating a grilled cheese sandwich when a strange tingly feeling buzzed through her fingers, up her arms, and settled right behind her eyeballs.

"Mom," Winnie said, putting down her sandwich. "This cheese is going to go bad in three days."

Her mom looked up from her laptop. "What?"

"Three days," Winnie repeated. She didn't know how she knew. She just knew, the same way she knew which shoe was left and which was right.

Her mom checked the package in the fridge. The expiration date read Thursday. Three days away.

"Lucky guess," her mom said.

But it wasn't a lucky guess. It was never a lucky guess.

At school the next day, Winnie's best friend Marco unwrapped his lunch and pulled out a cheese stick. The tingle hit Winnie immediately.

"Don't eat that," she whispered.

"Why not?"

"It expired yesterday."

Marco sniffed it. "Smells fine."

"Trust me."

Marco did not trust her. Marco ate the cheese stick. Marco spent the afternoon in the nurse's office with a stomachache.

After that, Marco trusted her.

Now, Winnie had read plenty of books about kids with superpowers. They could fly. They could turn invisible. They could talk to animals or shoot lightning from their fingertips or breathe underwater.

Winnie could tell when cheese was about to expire.

"It's the least useful superpower in the entire universe," she told Marco, who was sitting on the swings beside her at recess.

"I don't know," Marco said, rubbing his stomach at the memory. "It was pretty useful to me."

"But I can't fight crime with it. I can't save the world. Nobody's going to make a movie called Cheese Girl."

"I'd watch that movie," Marco said.

Winnie dragged her sneakers through the wood chips. She wanted a real superpower. She wanted to matter.

The next week, Winnie's class took a field trip to Crawford's Family Farm, which had cows and goats and a big red barn and a shop that sold homemade cheese.

Winnie was not excited.

But the farm was actually wonderful. The goats nibbled at her jacket and made her laugh. The cows had enormous wet eyes that looked like they were thinking deep thoughts. Old Mr. Crawford showed them how milk became cheese, and Winnie had to admit it was pretty interesting.

Then they walked into the farm shop.

The tingle hit Winnie so hard she stumbled.

It wasn't a small tingle like a cheese stick. It wasn't a medium tingle like the block of cheddar at home. This was a tidal wave. Her fingers buzzed. Her teeth buzzed. The little hairs on her arms stood straight up.

"Whoa," she whispered.

She looked around the shop. There were wheels of cheese on every shelf, wedges in a big glass case, and a whole table of samples set out on little toothpicks for visitors to try.

Something was very, very wrong with a lot of cheese.

"Marco," she hissed, grabbing his sleeve.

"What?"

"The cheese. In the big case. The whole bottom row. It's already expired. Like, days ago."

Marco's eyes went wide. "All of it?"

Winnie closed her eyes and concentrated. The tingle separated into individual threads, like she could follow each one to its source. "The bottom two rows. And the samples on the table — those are fine. But the stuff in the case..." She shook her head. "Something's wrong with their refrigerator. The bottom is warm."

"What do we do?"

Winnie bit her lip. This was a real farm with a real shop where real people bought cheese and took it home to their families. If someone bought that cheese and ate it, they wouldn't just get a stomachache like Marco. There was a lot of bad cheese in there.

But she was eight years old. She couldn't just walk up to a grown-up and say, "Excuse me, I have cheese powers."

Could she?

She looked at Marco. Marco looked at her.

"What would Cheese Girl do?" he asked.

And despite everything, Winnie laughed.

She found Mr. Crawford near the barn. He was old and tall and had a beard like a cloud.

"Excuse me," Winnie said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. She tried again. "Excuse me, Mr. Crawford?"

He looked down at her with kind eyes. "Yes, young lady?"

"I think something might be wrong with the refrigerator case in your shop. The one with the cheese. I think the bottom part isn't cold enough."

Mr. Crawford's bushy eyebrows scrunched together. "What makes you say that?"

Winnie had prepared for this question. "I touched the glass at the bottom when I was looking, and it felt warm. My mom says cheese has to stay cold or it goes bad."

It wasn't the whole truth. But it wasn't a lie, either. And sometimes, Winnie figured, you had to explain things in a way people could understand.

Mr. Crawford stared at her for a long moment. Then he walked to the shop, pressed his hand against the bottom of the glass case, and frowned.

He opened the case and pulled out a thermometer from under the counter. He checked it. His frown deepened.

"Well, I'll be," he muttered. He looked at Winnie. "You're right. The compressor must've gone out on the lower unit. This cheese is all above safe temperature." He started pulling wheels and wedges off the bottom shelves. "Could've made a lot of people sick. Whole weekend crowd comes through tomorrow."

He stopped and looked at Winnie again.

"What's your name?"

"Winnie."

"Winnie, you just saved me a heap of trouble. And you might've saved some folks from getting real sick." He reached over to the sample table and handed her a piece of aged gouda on a toothpick. "That one's good. I promise."

Winnie ate it. It was the best cheese she'd ever tasted. And the tingle confirmed: perfectly fresh.

On the bus ride home, Marco sat beside her with his arms crossed and a very smug look on his face.

"So," he said.

"So what?"

"So you just saved a whole weekend's worth of families from bad cheese."

Winnie looked out the window at the fields rolling by. She was smiling, but she was trying not to let Marco see. "It wasn't that big a deal."

"Mr. Crawford said it was a big deal."

"Fine. It was a medium deal."

"Cheese Girl," Marco whispered, like a movie announcer. "She knows when your dairy is scary."

"Please never say that again."

"She puts the POWER in sour."

"Marco, I will push you off this bus."

But she was laughing. They were both laughing so hard that their teacher, Ms. Ramirez, turned around and gave them The Look, which only made them laugh harder.

That night, Winnie sat on her bed and thought about superpowers. She thought about flying and invisibility and lightning bolts. She thought about Mr. Crawford pulling bad cheese off the shelves. She thought about Marco's stomachache. She thought about all those families who would walk into the farm shop that weekend and buy cheese that was safe to eat, and never even know that an eight-year-old girl was the reason why.

Maybe that was what a real superpower looked like. Not the big, flashy kind from books and movies. The kind where you help people, and they don't even know they've been helped.

She held her hands out in front of her and wiggled her fingers.

The tingle was still there, faint and quiet, like it was sleeping.

"Okay," she said to her superpower. "Maybe you're not the least useful."

She paused.

"But if you could also give me the ability to fly, that would really help."

Her fingers just tingled.

"Yeah," Winnie sighed, flopping back on her pillow. "I figured."

She fell asleep smiling.