Nicole Overman was a mild-mannered sixth-grader at Lincoln Park Elementary School in the Wilson School District.
OK, maybe she was a bit of a tomboy, fond of camouflage clothing, but otherwise she was mild-mannered.
The characters that she studied and sketched, however, were the larger- than-life superheroes of comic-book fame.
Nikki’s favorite was the Flash.
She got so good at drawing superhero figures in her notebooks that she started creating characters of her own.
She would share her drawings with her classmates and they regis-tered their approval.
Next to each sketch of a newly created superhero, Nikki would write a brief synopsis of how they acquired their super powers. The synopsis included a list of their strengths and the one thing, like Superman’s kryptonite, that could sap their powers and lead to their demise.
A sketch of Nikki would include details of how she got her super drawing powers. It would list among her strengths her love for her classmates and community and how her bright and charming personal-ity could win over the most dastardly bully.
But her own heart would be her kryptonite.
Nikki had always had a heart murmur. Since birth, her doctors told her parents, David and Cathy Overman of Lincoln Park, that it was nothing to worry about. Then the murmur got louder and her doctor recommended that she have surgery.
But surgeons at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found two holes in Nikki’s heart.
They performed surgery to close the holes and her prognosis was good when on Jan. 9 she suffered convulsions and slipped into a coma.
Nikki died Jan. 10 of complications.
Her family, classmates and school staff were devastated.
“The whole community was affected,” said Lincoln Park Principal Dina G. Wert.
In memory of Nikki, her classmates and friends put on a Jump Rope-a-Thon for the American Heart Association. An event that usually raises $5,000 raised $15,000 in Nikki’s name.
Still, there was something missing at Lincoln Park Elementary.
“I knew I had to get the students involved in something physical that would help them remember Nikki,” Wert said.
The students and staff hadn’t yet come to grips with their loss.
Taking a page from Nikki’s life, Wert obtained some of Nikki’s sketches from her parents. Robert Chappel, an art teacher at Wilson High School in Reading, grabbed three of his brightest students and they met with the sixth-graders.
Seniors Joe Palumbo and Ben Sweeney, both 18, and junior Matt Levy, 17, interviewed the sixth-graders and came up with a plan.
They would create a circle of superhero friends.
The three high school artists drew a 20-foot circle in the middle of Lincoln Park Elementary’s playground and began sketching outlines of the superheroes.
Wert took money collected by Nikki’s classmates for a memorial fund and used some of it to buy paint at a store in Spring Township.
Over a week, Palumbo, Sweeney and Levy sketched outlines of su-perheroes, then guided the sixth-graders as they painted inside the lines.
At first, one or two curious students would watch the painters from a window inside the school that overlooked the playground. A day later, a few teachers had stopped to talk near the window.
By midweek, students and teachers would gather at the window to marvel at the comic-book characters coming to life on the macadam of the school playground.
After the circle of friends was completed, the students continued to work even harder on a character taking shape in the center of the cir-cle. From the window no one could make out the figure.
There was the Flash, the Hulk and Superman, but who was that in the middle — and why was the new character twice as big as the others?
On Tuesday, the mystery was solved as Nikki’s parents pulled back a parachute to officially unveil the mural.
Dressed in a gold, wind-swept cape and powder-blue camouflage pants, it’s not a bird or a plane.
It’s Super Nikki.
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