“See you tomorrow.” Emma climbed out of the pool after finishing a hard set of butterfly.

“Let me know how it goes.” Ollie ducked under water to blow bubbles and catch her breath before the next set.

“Where you going?” Coach shouted when Emma picked up her duffel bag.

Emma blushed and stammered. “Got an interview for my freshman project.”

Coach sighed and waved her off. He wasn’t happy with her. Yesterday, she’d ditched practice and then she was ducking out again, but she’d stayed up half the night making up her questions for Andres. She needed to do this interview for her project and maybe she could figure out this whole superhero thing better if she just talked to him.

In the bathroom, she toweled off and, still damp, wiggled into her spandex suit before pulling her regular clothes over the costume. She shoved the the thing of green face paint, the makeup wipes, and the crown thing into her cargo pockets. Who knew when Geek Fire might need to make an appearance? Then she took off on her bike towards Dredgetown.

It seemed like it took her forever to get to the arcade and lock up her bike. Andres sat in a folding chair in front with a pizza box on his lap. A dry cleaner’s, a bar, and a liquor store shared the same parking lot. She hadn’t been there since she was a kid, but as she locked her bike to a post, she fought the urge to stare at the winos in front of the liquor store.

“Your bike will be safe inside the arcade.” Andres rose to his feet and set the pizza box on a trash can. “Out here, not so much.”

Emma chewed her lip as Andres folded up the chair. Like always, just looking at him made things tighten in her belly. Something about his short, cropped hair and the green eyes set in his dark face set her heart on fire. But he lived in Dredgetown, Nan would never approve.

Unlike him, she was a mess. Her freezing cold feet stuck halfway out of her sandals and sweat dripped down her face. She wore her backpack on both shoulders with her duffel bag slung across that. Not to mention, her hair was falling out of her swimmer’s bun to make a tangled mess of swim-cap and helmet hair.

“Hey,” Emma said breathlessly when she realized she’d been staring too long.

“Hey.” Andres opened the door and set the chair inside. Emma followed with her bike.

“You sure they won’t mind my—”

“Not an issue. Let me put the duffel bag inside the arcade, too.” Andres had his hand on the duffel bag strap, ready to lift the oversized bag.

“I got it.” Emma was used to carrying the thing, but he was already lifting it onto his shoulder like her answer didn’t matter.

“Trust me. I’ll carry it. It’s better this way. If I let you carry it…”

“Let me carry it?”

What was that supposed to mean? It was her bag. She put her hand on the strap and tugged. When he let go with a smile, she stumbled backwards under the sudden weight of it.

She knocked through the arcade’s door, nearly falling over inside. After setting the duffel and backpack next to her bike, she popped back outside.

Three stores down, a homeless guy with a brown paper bag cackled at her.

“Let’s turn our phones off in case someone’s listening.”

Nan would kill her if she couldn’t reach Emma, but it might keep Ollie’s incessant texting at bay and Andres might be on to something. Her cell phone was always on, she hoped the Super Commission hadn’t been listening.

“Now let’s go for that walk.” Andres slammed the arcade door shut and steered her towards the parking lot.

Did that mean he didn’t want to be seen with her?

“Sorry.” He gave her an apologetic look as he continued herding her away. “This is so weird to me. I mean… I’ve never talked about this before.”

“Me either.” Emma stood there feeling stupid for a few moments, blinking at Andres.

“Let’s go for a walk.” This time Andres didn’t move to help her.

Emma nodded. With her wet hair, she felt a little cold but at least she didn’t have to stare at his perfection. Emma whispered, “So… we’re both supers.”

“Yeah. I guess I kind of been in the news, but I’m just fast.” Andres scrunched up his face. “You saw me. I saw you flying. Anything else?”

Emma patted the paper in her back pocket. She’d figured this would happen. He’d want to talk to her about what was going on with her. She’d need to get things going so she could figure her project—and well, for figuring out this Ice Queen business.

“Geek Fire.”

“What’s that even mean?” Andres asked after a beat.

“I spit two chemicals. When they mix they catch fire. Like Greek fire but…I’m a geek.”

“You’re that Dragon Girl from Pueblo.” He said Pueblo like he was talking Spanish, the b so soft it was almost a v. The vowels were smooth and quickly blended together.

“Geek Fire’s the name I’m trying—”

Andres laughed, a sound that normally sent warm quivers through her belly. “They all call you Dragon Girl.”

“I don’t even—”

Andres shushed her and pointed to people chilling in a nearby car with its windows down.

Emma sighed. She waited until they were far enough passed, but by then she’d lost her train of thought.

She wanted to tell him about how she didn’t really breathe fire, but no one else had accepted her argument, so she doubted he would either.

Instead, she didn’t say any of that. She didn’t even get to one of the questions on her script. She just stood there, struggling to remember what she wanted to ask him.

“Listen.” Andres cupped his ear and pointed towards something in the distance.

Screaming. Someone was screaming.

“What is it?” Emma asked, her heart racing.

“Don’t know.” He sized her up. “You got your costume?”

As soon as Emma nodded, air whooshed past her, and Andres disappeared in a blur. She ducked behind a pickup, yanked off her street clothes and pulled out the paint. She clipped on the headgear that Ollie had made her, and flew towards the sound of screaming.

Emma hovered over a run-down apartment complex. The playground set in the middle was missing a swing, and the slide was half torn out, but the monkey bars looked solid.

At the bottom of the busted-out slide, a tiny girl clutched a rag doll to her tiny chest and whispered to it. Barely more than a toddler. Her skin was ashen, like someone had spilled chalk over her dark skin.

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Where was Andres? He should have beat her there.

“You mean she ain’t my kid?” a man asked, waving the gun back and forth between a woman and the girl.

Even as Emma swam through the sky toward the scene, she looked for Andres, but couldn’t see him. Had she beat him there? But that didn’t make sense. He was faster than her.

The woman was doing all the screaming. Tears ran down her face. “I ain’t said she ain’t your kid. I said you ain’t a father to her.” The woman wiped at the tears, leaving smears of mascara and green eyeshadow all over her face. “If you was any kind of father, there’d be no gun. There’d be rent money, and the damn electricity would be on.”

The little girl’s mouth opened and closed. It looked like she was trying to say Daddy, but no sound came out.

Emma’s heart broke. This poor little girl. Emma was close enough to do something, to say something. She wanted backup, but Andres still wasn’t there. Had something happened to him?

“Put down the gun,” Emma said in her best superhero voice. She was proud of herself, her voice sounded almost as good as it had in Banana Splitz. She sounded powerful.

The man turned towards her, took one look at her floating in the sky and, instead of doing the sensible thing, shot at her.

Heart skipping, Emma plummeted like a stone. She’d been getting better at controlling her flight and could turn it on and off at will now.

“No!” Andres appeared as if out of nowhere. He slammed into her just as she started flying again, sending them both into a crazy spin.

What did he think he was doing hitting her? He needed to go after the gun! Emma kept trying to swim higher into the sky, but Andres dragged her down.

They crashed. Her knees burned. Her shoulders scraped the ground. He let go.

Emma floated horizontally to get her bearings, leaving a cursing Andres to stand beside her. On the ground. Where he belonged.

“What the hell?” The man and the woman stared at them.

Emma and Andres stayed frozen for a moment. But Emma’s glasses had come loose and were falling off her face. She pulled them back on. That was almost bad.

Andres grabbed Emma and yanked her to his chest. Then, he zoomed away so fast the air stung her. Emma scrunched her eyes tight and struggled to hold on to her glasses. It felt like being on the freeway with your head sticking out the window. Only worse. Her hair, already a wet rat’s nest, tangled even more.

When Andres stopped, her eyes were watering, and the skin on her face was chapped.

“What were you thinking? You could’ve been shot!” Andres’s teeth clicked with the force of his words.

“Why didn’t you just take his gun like you did at the Outlet?” Emma squirmed out of his arms. Her glasses were bent all to hell and wouldn’t go back on her face right.

“Superheroes don’t do domestic disturbances.” Andres folded his arms across his chest. “Families need to work it out for themselves.”

Emma paced, throwing her arms into the air, clutching her bent glasses in her right hand. “That man was going to shoot the little girl!”

“She’s his daughter. He won’t shoot her.”

“That’s not what it looked like to me. Families don’t work it out by themselves. They just don’t.” Emma collapsed to the ground, wrapping her arms around her legs and pressing her eyes against her knees. “They don’t work it out by themselves.”

Andres put a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me.” Emma slapped his hand away. She curled back into herself, eyes pressed tight against her knees. Darkness and geometric patterns danced against her eyes. She watched the shapes the gentle pressure of her knees made. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.”

The colors behind her eyelids shifted. Green, purple, shimmering diamonds to rectangles to triangles, to dots. The words, ‘don’t touch me’ became a chant, losing all meaning. Her body grew stiff and cold.

When she sat up and pulled her eyes away from her knees, Andres was still there, staring at her open-mouthed.

For sure, she’d ruined any chance of him wanting to date her.

“You okay?” he asked.

Emma shook her head, not trusting words yet. She wanted to write down her feelings. Not feelings. Those she couldn’t comprehend just yet. No, she wanted to write and let it all spill out of her. All of everything bottled up inside. She needed to get it out, but, for now, the shifting diamonds helped. Her tweezers would help. If she plucked a dozen leg hairs, she might come back to herself.

She swallowed hard, gasping in the air. Her cheeks stung from the salty tears. She wiped them away. Working out what she needed to say and putting it all into words took time. The questions in her pocket forgotten, the words arranged themselves. “Families don’t just work it out for themselves.” Emma’s voice shook. “You should have grabbed his gun or gotten that little girl out of there.”

“Superheroes don’t mess with domestic—”

“Bull.” Emma shot to her feet. “We can step in when we’re needed. That little girl needed help.”

“Didn’t need you getting shot.”

Emma started levitating. She would find that little girl. Get her out of there herself. “I’m going to help her.”

“You were lost to the world for like half an hour. Whatever was going to happen has already happened.” Andres waved his hand over his face. “Besides your makeup is all…”

Emma’s hands trembled. She wanted to bury her face back in her knees. Follow the patterns, but she had to talk to Andres—the chickenshit—and get herself home back to the mall before Nan had a conniption fit.

She finally took in where they were. A gravel track around a dry creek, surrounded by a bunch of graffitied walls. No gates opened to the area they were in, except one bit of snarled chain link on the far end. Scraggly weeds poked through the gravel. A train track ran parallel to the creek. She had no clue where they were or how to get back to the mall.

“Thanks for meeting with me.” Emma brushed off her knees and sighed. Her leggings were torn, her knees bloodied. Her shoulders stung like they’d been scraped, too. Maybe it hadn’t been tears but blood she’d wiped from her face. Even her elbows ached. The shirt she’d worked so hard to stencil the words “Geek Fire” onto had been torn to bits.

“Whatever.” Andres’ slumped against one of the cinderblock walls.

“I mean I know I’ll see you on Saturday at the speech tournament, but—”

“No, you won’t.”

The words hung there between them flat for a moment. Emma took her time getting around to understanding them.

“What do you mean I won’t? I thought you were doing this mock congress thing.” Emma struggled to bend her glasses back into some kind of shape that would fit on her face. The metal frames were bent, but not broken.

“That was before.” Andres shrugged. “What’s the point of that when I’ve got superhero business to attend to?”

“What’s the point? A way out of this grossness is the point. Success is the point.”

“What’s my success matter? I’ve got a city to protect. I draw the line at domestic squabbles because otherwise, I’d be so busy I wouldn’t even be able to eat.”

“What’s your mom think of that?” Emma asked, limping towards the gate.

Andres didn’t move. Didn’t say anything.

“What’s your mom think?” Emma repeated as if Andres hadn’t heard her the first time.

“Don’t know. Haven’t been home since I started ditching to stop crime.”

“You ran away?” Emma asked.

His mono-colored Halloween costume was just as torn and snarled as her leggings and t-shirt, but there was a layer of grime on him she hadn’t noticed before.

“I buy what I can with the money I take off the drug dealers I bring in. Other than that…” He wiped at the dirty spandex. “Been stealing showers at the school gym and food at the school cafeteria. Out of a few dumpsters. That sort of thing.”

“You poor thing.” Even though that little girl needed saving, his stance on domestic disturbances didn’t seem so crazy anymore. “I had no idea.”

“Someone gave me this power so I could help people. I gotta help them.”

This was ridiculous. He needed to put himself somewhere in this equation. “You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

“No. You need to take care of yourself.” Andres caught her arms. “I thought he shot you. You can’t announce yourself like that. Fireball first. Announcements after.”

“I had it under control.” Emma pulled away.

“Like hell you did, falling from the sky like that.” Tears streaked Andres face, too. “You’re not fast like me. I can dodge a gunshot. You can’t. You got to get a better suit, glasses, something to protect your skin.”

Emma was crying again. She wanted to shut down. To turn off. She had to get back to her stuff. The mall. Nan would be going crazy.

“My grandma’s supposed to pick me up soon. Can we… Can we just go back? I’ll see if I can’t do anything to help you.”

“I don’t need your help. You need to get your act together. No more announcing you’re a superhero. If you’re going to blast something, blast the gun.”

Emma shook her head. Her aim wasn’t that good.

“I’ve seen you get lucky twice now. How many times is that going to work before you get shot?” Andres was shouting now.

“I—” Emma didn’t know what to say. She stared down at her bare feet. She’d lost her sandals in that crazy flight. Her costume needed boots or something.

He was right. She could have been shot, but she couldn’t stay out of it when a child’s life was on the line like Andres had. Alone with her thoughts, she returned to her backpack and cleaned her face. Then she returned to the arcade and got her duffel bag.

Emma clutched her bike’s handlebars. The winos by the liquor store were still there, and she missed Andres. Not like Emma wanted to talk to him again, even if she hadn’t gotten her questions answered for the interview. She just wanted someone else to be there so the winos wouldn’t think she was easy picking.

For her project, she’d make up an interview with Dragon Girl. And she needed a better costume. Hell, since Andres had torn their costumes to shreds, she didn’t even have one anymore.

Nan’s purple Oldsmobile pulled up, Emma sighed with relief. Grateful she didn’t need to blow up a bunch of winos.

“What happened to you?” Nan asked.

“Fell off my bike.” Yet another lie. Getting powers sucked. Still, she couldn’t tell Nan the truth. She needed at least one person to still love her.

Nan studied her for a moment, shook her head, and popped the trunk.

Emma loaded her bike into the trunk and tied it closed with a bungee cord. Then, she threw her backpack and duffel in the back. Emma slouched in the passenger seat.

“Sit up straight.” Nan snapped as she put the car into drive.

Emma tried to sit up straight, but the lies and the thought of the little girl weighed heavy on her. Not to mention all the school work she still had to do tonight.

Even though she couldn’t ignore people in danger because it was a ‘domestic dispute’ like Andres, she couldn’t run around like she had been either. Andres was right. If she kept announcing herself, she was going to get herself shot.