Dying was going to be hell on my sleep schedule, but it seemed to be pretty effective as a hangover cure.

These discoveries were a bit of extra trivia to add to the facts I’d learned from the news and the rushed current events curriculum of my past few history classes. Death was weird these days. Sometimes it didn’t quite take, and the people who bounced back from it were always enhanced somehow. In my case, apparently, I’d gotten the ability to create bubbles of light and control the contents. Other people had the ability to fly, move things with their minds, punch with the force of a grenade going off, or otherwise violate the laws of physics. Communing with animals, telling the future, looking through walls? “Nothing is impossible” was the paradigm now, and nobody really knew why.

We knew that it was driven by something intelligent, in any case. Dexter Clay’s stunt made that clear from the start. Some guy, knowing full well it might not work, gambled for powers by chugging a host of household chemicals and bragging about it until he couldn’t talk anymore. People kept an eye on the guy’s body, which meant there would’ve been a bunch of witnesses if anyone tried to meddle with the process. Thus, when the words “NOT LIKE THAT” were found carved into Dexter’s skin, it was pretty obvious that we were dealing with a higher power.

Which one? Hell if I know. People blamed aliens, people blamed angels, people blamed demons, and people blamed the government. Same as anything else, really.

I’d say it was nothing to worry about, normally. But the fact of the matter was that we knew the people who had powers were chosen to get powers, based on one thing or another. And now that I was in that group, I couldn’t stop myself from circling back to wondering why. Why foist the responsibility of superpowers onto a high schooler whose most recent informed decision was going to a house party instead of studying for a trigonometry test?

Was it charity? A push to get my life back on track, or some shit? …Or was I one of the people who was supposed to end up a villain?

Nah. That wasn’t my style.

I would probably turn out as a superhero, eventually. It seemed like the right thing to do, I guess. But not right this second. For one thing, Brandy was hardly in need of heroes. My death was probably the most newsworthy local occurrence this year. Aside from that, it was who-knows A.M. and I was in the middle of the woods. There wasn’t a lot to do just yet, heroics-wise.

Priority one? I had to focus mostly on getting back into town. After that, I’d have the rest of the early-morning hours to figure out how breaking this news to people would work, and which people I’d even tell at all. That was an eerily familiar train of thought.

♜

All in all, I’d been able to enjoy my walk. Being out in nature, feeling like me for once, whatever that meant. Not so caught up in the details of life, in the scheduling and the tasks and priorities. Hardly any needs or wants crossed my mind, with everything in sort of a new perspective, but not so new that I had to flounder for answers before I could just be.

Once I was a few blocks into Brandy, I’d found an alley and drawn up a bubble around myself. It was easier the second time, knowing that the first step should be turning off pain signals so I couldn’t feel my body shifting around like old milk in a sieve. I was back to normal, as far as anyone could tell, by the time I got home.

I didn’t have my house key, but letting myself in wasn’t that tricky. It was a one-story house, so my window wasn’t even off the ground level. A sphere of light appeared, bisected by the wall, and I stood inside the circle as it spun like a trick door in an old mystery story. My power didn’t even leave a mark on the walls when it faded into that cloud of blue embers and drifted away.

I did lay down for a while, but I still wasn’t tired when dawn rolled around.

Having boiled my flesh twice tonight, there wasn’t a ton of point, but I found myself in the shower out of habit anyway. I ran a razor over my skin, trimming stubble that I’d manually placed not two hours ago when undoing the much cleaner shave my power was capable of. If I was going to have a secret identity, there could be no crack in the facade.

Seeing myself in the mirror, I’d almost call the night’s events a dream. There were details that seemed out of my reach, after all. Hair? Shoulder-length, the longest I could get away with, and blonde. Eye color? Boring brown. Countless little details of the way I was built that I couldn’t just up and change, or even work toward changing.

And yet.

I wrung my hair and ran a towel over everything, then found my way into the outfit I’d brought into the bathroom. From there, the next step in my typical routine was to head to the kitchen and track down breakfast.

“You gave us a right scare last night,” a deep voice filled the hall behind me.

I nodded.

“You’re alright?”

“Fine, sir.”

After a few moments with no reply, I continued down the walkway and began my search for something to eat. I was dragged away from the cereal cupboard by a hug from my mother.

“Really,” I insisted. “Right as rain. I lost track of time.”

She sighed.

♜

Mr. Clove’s classroom was at the front of the school, and his entire second-period English class was gathered around the window and staring as she walked, casually, right up to the front door.

“It’s her,” Pat noted. “For real, I mean.”

“What’s she doing here?” Jade asked.

“In Brandy?” Pat turned to her.

She rolled her eyes. “At school.”

“Alright, show’s over,” Mr. Clove sighed. “Would everyone return to their seats, now?”

“Seriously,” Jade muttered. “Extraordinaire?”

Her deskmate shrugged.

Mr. Clove tapped the blackboard. As far as I knew, he was the only teacher who still had an authentic blackboard, with real chalk and everything. “Now. As we had been discussing, Cisneros has her narrator begin the story with a history of the family moving from place to place. The book does establish the setting as early as page one, but that introduction is couched in this larger context, almost drowned out by the surrounding mentions of other places that Esperanza has lived. What might the point of all that be?”

Mr. Clove’s focus drifted from one corner of the room to the other, gauging how attentive people were. It was a coin flip at that point. Heads and he’d pick the most engaged student, looking for a proper answer to the question. Tails and he’d say the name of whoever seemed closest to dozing off so they could snap back to reality.

“Clara?”

It wasn’t a real coin flip, obviously. I could just picture him imagining one every time.

“It makes the reader feel less rooted, and that immediately puts us in the same mindset as the narrator. It’s a shortcut to empathy.”

“I’d hesitate to use words like shortcut, but I like where your head’s at,” Mr. Clove said.

The intercom system made a soft ping, cutting the discussion short so that everyone could listen to whatever announcement followed.

“Christopher Lowe, to the front office, please,” the secretary’s voice filled the room.

I scrunched my eyes closed. Shit.

The next I saw of the room, everyone in it had turned to stare at me. Clara’s eyebrows disagreed on which direction to move when she was concerned. Jade grinned. Pat was wide-eyed, his jaw set off to one side rather than hanging open. Even Mr. Clove took a moment to run one hand over the top of his shining head.

“Um. Excuse me, then,” I groaned, leaning out of my chair.

Saying that my mind went blank would paint the wrong picture. A more accurate description might be that my thoughts were overlapping, to the point that I couldn’t sort one out from another. Whether that was nervousness, excitement, both, or neither, the source was clear enough.

There was a chance that it was a coincidence, sure.

But there was also a chance that I’d just been summoned to a meeting with the world’s first superhero.

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