Before reading

1.	Have you ever felt “different”? Why?
2.	Who or what is a superhero? Name one and say what is “super” about him or her.
While reading
3.	Why does Zed feel he is different from the other children?

1. You can’t spell zero without a Zed

When Zed first realised he was a superhero, he was surprised.

He’d never much felt like a superhero. He’d never done anything especially superheroic, except maybe that time last year when he was goalie for the Wentville Primary School Under 12s against Bighton Primary and he’d saved a penalty taken by Daniel Dundee, who was as big as a gorilla and had a head like a flowerpot and everyone said he should be playing under 16, he was so big. That was impressive, but it wasn’t exactly saving the world.

“Anyway,” Zed’s friend Katey always reminded him, “that was by accident. You just shut your eyes and fell over, and your face happened to be in the way of the ball.”

It was true. All that next week kids at school slapped him on the back and asked him about the save, but he never spoke about it. He didn’t want anyone to guess how lucky he’d been.

Zed wasn’t normally lucky, or at least not with good luck. Normally he had the worst luck of anyone in the history of the world. If anyone was going to bump over a pot of glue and then step in it so that his shoes made a sticky, sucky sound when he walked, it would be Zed. If anyone was going to staple a piece of paper to his thumb or have his hair cut on the day the barber was in a bad mood, it would be Zed.

“Maybe all people have the same amount of bad luck in their lives,” he once said to Katey, “and when I grow up my life will be easy because I’m getting all the bad luck out of the way now.”

“Maybe,” she’d said, in a kind sort of way. Katey was always kind.

Zed had always felt different from other kids, and not just because he was a little bit shorter than everyone else, and a little bit skinnier, and he looked a little bit different, and his hair seemed to grow in ways no one else’s did and never seemed to lie down and behave itself when he brushed it.

Other kids seemed to get along better than he could: they found the same things interesting and knew what to say to each other. When he tried to talk to them, he seemed as if he was speaking a slightly different language, or as if he was an alien who’d only just learnt human ways before beaming down, and who kept getting bits of it not quite right.

He could talk to Katey, but they’d been friends almost as long as they’d been alive. But even Katey would sometimes say: “Zed, you are the strangest person I know”.

But still – being different didn’t necessarily mean he was a superhero. It was only after a sudden, unexpected adventure, from which he just barely escaped with his life, that it all began to fall into place.

After reading

4.	What is Zed’s point of view about bad luck? Why does he feel this way?
5.	Why does he get on so well with Katey?
6.	Zed says he has had “an adventure from which he barely escaped with his life”. Suggest some possibilities.