" 'Is it just your hands?' 'What?' 'I mean,' he let go of her wrist and her hand stopped burning, 'does anything else catch fire? Or is it just your hands? Can you breathe fire?' 'I'm not a dragon!' 'Right, of course not. Sorry. Can you shoot the plasma away from you, or does it stay on your hands?' 'I can shoot it.' 'Will you?' 'No.' "
"I need to show you something," Shea said, standing in front of Drew who seemed not to notice her until she spoke, "and you have to promise not to freak out. Or tell anyone."
"I-uh-I- What?" He stammered, glancing up at her with the same sort of nervous, trapped look the villain of the week gave her when she caught them instead of her brothers. He cleared his throat, trying to force a calm look to his face. "What do you mean?"
"Just promise," she urged him. Ideally, before she lost her courage.
He put the pen down and held up his hands. "Alright, alright, I promise."
She squeezed her eyes shut, and held her hands out in front of her. "Just- don't freak out," she muttered again, and then she lit her hands on fire.
She expected him to scream, or gasp, or… or something, but she heard nothing. Finally, she opened her eyes. He sat there staring dumbly at her hands, his eyes wide.
"How are you doing that?" He asked, after a painfully long moment. She let the flames die, and he looked up at her face. "How did you do that?"
She'd expected him to be scared, not intrigued. She'd expected to have to try and calm him down. "It's, well, it's a long story." Drew reached forward and flipped over the test he'd been grading, and gestured for her to continue. She sighed, ran a hand through her hair and sat down.
"When I was eight," she began, "my treehouse, well, technically my oldest brothers but we all used it, anyway… Um. Yeah, so, we were up in the treehouse after school one day and one minute we were all arguing over whether we wanted to ask mom to make pasta for dinner or if we wanted pizza, and then the next minute I was waking up in the hospital." She continued on to tell him, stammering and rewording her sentences constantly, the story of how the treehouse was struck by a radioactive comet, and they all woke up again having gained superpowers. She didn't go into how their parents forced the hero lifestyle on them, or how they spent nearly two years holed up in various hospitals being tested and trained like lab rats. "My brothers all have a pretty good handle on their powers, but then, theirs can't really do the damage that mine can. I mean, I've got a good handle on mine too, just sometimes… My point is I guess I figured you should know since you let me stay here and everything."
Drew remained silent for a long enough time that she very nearly slapped him, just to get him to react somehow. Slowly, he nodded. "Can you do it again?" He asked, his face splitting into a grin, like a small child.
"Wha- seriously?" His head bobbed up and down in an overly enthusiastic nod. "Ugh, fine." She held out her right hand and lit it.
"If I touch your hand now, it'll burn me?"
"I feel like that's obvious."
"But it's not burning you?"
Shea shrugged. "My hands calloused over years ago. And even if they hadn't it does take a lot to burn me now."
"Fascinating. What if I touched your wrist, or something else not burning?"
"Then you won't burn. You can get as close as you want without touching, heat doesn't really radiate out of the plasma." Drew reached forward before she'd even finished speaking, and grabbed a hold of her wrist. "Be careful!" Shea protested. "The burn will seriously suck if you do get hit."
"Is it just your hands?"
"What?"
"I mean," he let go of her wrist and her hand stopped burning, "does anything else catch fire? Or is it just your hands? Can you breathe fire?"
"I'm not a dragon!"
"Right, of course not. Sorry. Can you shoot the- you called it plasma?- can you shoot the plasma away from you, or does it stay on your hands?"
"I can shoot it."
"Will you?"
"No."
"Aww, why not?"
She poked his shoulder, causing him to wince and jerk away from her, rubbing at the spot. "Doy! Cause I don't want to burn a hole in your walls?"
"Right! Can you-"
"You know," she interrupted, "I kinda figured this would scare you. I didn't think I'd be playing twenty questions."
"Your attempt to threaten me last night would have been a lot more frightening had I known about this if that makes you feel any better. But by now you're just Shea, a runaway pest hiding away in the spare bedroom of my apartment. Even if you do have superpowers." Somehow, though she felt like she should be offended, that seemed to have been exactly the right thing to say. She barely stopped herself from throwing her arms around him and hugging him. "Is- is this why you ran away?" He asked cautiously, clearly trying not to upset her again.
"Sort of," she sighed. She lit up her hand and held it close to him again, "but I'm still not getting into that!"
"Alright, alright." Instead of cowering, he just laughed.
"I just told you something huge, you know," Shea said. "I feel like you should do the same."
"That's not how this usually works."
"Can't you just tell me what your deal was earlier?"
Drew frowned, looking much less like an excited child than he had just moments before. He pulled his knees up to his chest and sighed.
"I'm not an undergrad student," he sighed. "I skipped a number of grades and was fifteen when I started my first year of college. I'm in my third year of grad school now."
"This just sounds like bragging to me."
"Nygh- gah- I'm getting to my point!"
"Fine, jeez, just hurry up!"
"It's just- everyone expects that I'm some sort of genius because I understand math and science. And I- I can't read."
"What do you mean you can't read? Obviously you can read."
"Nygh-no- I- it's just- it's just that." Drew stopped to take a deep breath, closing his eyes. "I know how to read. It's just that I'm… I'm dyslexic, alright? And nobody knows but me, and now you, and nobody else can know, got it? I have to work harder than anyone else to make sure I don't misread something and mess everything up, and it's not easy. And if I get caught making stupid mistakes like misspelling words while grading tests then everyone is going to know and any chance I have at becoming a chemist will be ruined because nobody wants to hire some loser who can't even read."
Shea caught herself staring at him as he ranted, teetering between feeling bad for him and thinking that that was the dumbest thing she'd ever heard. "If you're good enough at math and science to skip so many grades nobody is going to care that you take a little longer to read things that everyone else," she finally said.
He smiled at her, but not a real smile. It was a watery sort of smile, a little grateful and a lot sad. "It would be nice if I could believe that, but you have no idea how many teachers I had growing up who wanted to hold me back because of one thing I couldn't do, instead of focusing on what I could do. How do you expect me to believe it won't be the same everywhere else?"
"I- I guess I don't know. I read a lot. Honestly, my books are the only thing I wish I'd brought with me when I left. I guess if you want me to I can edit stuff for you. Make sure your spellings correct and whatnot." The offer left her mouth before she even realized she was thinking of it, but she found she didn't regret it. What harm could it do, anyway, to do that?
"Really?" He asked. "I wouldn't be able to give you anything, you know if you did that."
Shea shrugged. "Yeah, why not I guess. I've got nothing better going on."
"Oh," Drew gasped all of a sudden. "I do know what I could do if you did that for me."
"What?"
"Come with me," he said, jumping off the couch. She watched as he stuffed his wallet and keys into his pocket. "Come on."
She stood up and followed him out the door. "Where are we going?"
"You'll see!"
Though he never touched her it felt as though he practically dragged her down the steps and out the door before the sleazy doorman even had the chance to see them.
"It's just around the corner," he assured her, after three and a half blocks. A moment later he began marching up the steps of a large brick building, so quickly she didn't even get the chance to see the sign outside.
When she walked in she was greeted by the sight of thousands upon thousands of books lined up in rows and rows of shelves. "A library?" She asked, turning to look at Drew, and she hated hearing the excitement in her voice.
He grinned at her. "It's not much, I know. But it's the college library, so you can pick out any books you want, and I'll check them out for you. There's a limit of six books, but that's only for textbooks. Free reading books you can take as many as you want. Although, everything is due in two weeks, so only take as many as you think you'll read in that time. Though we can come back, of course, whenever you want."
"I- uh- wow. Okay. Um. Thank you." It was something so simple, yet she never would have expected anyone let alone someone she barely knew, to do something like this for her. Her parents tried taking away her books and movies at least once a month, determined to make her focus on her hero work,
He seemed to be bouncing in place as he watched her. "Well? What are you waiting for? Go pick out some books, I'll be here when you're done."
Needing no more prompting, she nodded at him and forced herself not to literally run down the aisles in excitement. An hour later she'd collected a number of books that she'd been wanting to get around to, and a number more she'd never heard of before. All in all, she'd grabbed around ten books. She wondered if she should ask Drew if this meant she could stay with him, at least until the books were done, but she decided not to push it.
It took her another fifteen minutes to find Drew, panic growing as she started to worry that he'd tricked her, and left while she was searching for books. Relief flooded her when she spotted him, sitting at one of the tables. He had a puzzle in front of him, pieces scattered everywhere. She watched him, before going over. He put the pieces together like some sort of puzzle machine, he didn't seem to mix anything up or confuse one piece for another. It didn't even look like he'd blinked. All in all, it took him maybe four minutes to finish the whole thing. She hated that she found that impressive.
He jumped when she sat across from him, letting the books fall across the table. "Are you ready, then?"
"I think so."
"Alright, let's go."
The librarian, a blonde girl with huge blue eyes and a pin in the shape of a bubbling beaker on her shirt, seemed rather shocked to see Drew checking out something that wasn't a book on robotics or chemistry. Shea didn't like the way she looked at him, though she couldn't quite place why.
Walking back to the apartment felt very reminiscent of the night before, though now they carried books for her instead of him. And also, she only realized later, the fact that she was still wearing his Mighty Martian t-shirt.
The main difference, however, came as they passed a small pizza parlor. Drew paused in the middle of babbling to her about some chemistry concepts she couldn't understand. "Do you want pizza?"
"Yes," she said, nodding vehemently. She hadn't been allowed pizza or anything her parents considered junk food, in years. 'A hero should be healthy in all aspects of life,' they insisted. "Can we?"
"I suppose we can. Although… ah well, just one slice, okay?" She nodded again and hurried inside, deciding at the last second before the door slammed into his face, to hold the door for him.