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Kara Danvers looks up at the curtain of dark hair before her. It’s time, she decides, because she’s been putting this off for a month now. ‘Hey,’ she raps at the seat in front of her and schools her face into the right shade of embarrassed. ‘Do you have a pen I can borrow?’
The sound of the wall clock echoes in her head as the girl twists in her seat.
Kara can’t help but stare. First it’s the hollow of a pale cheek. Twin green irises shift into a melancholy grey with every flicker of the fluorescent bulbs overhead. The girl arches one delicate eyebrow, her lips unmoving.
‘Do you have a pen I can borrow?’ Kara repeats. A hint of panic flutters at her chest when the girl returns her gaze to the front of the class. She smothers the instantaneous urge to apologize for being such an inconvenience. It would be so easy to rifle through her bookbag and hold up the pen she knows is stuck at the very bottom—discarded candy wrappers and crumpled notes its easy company—laugh and let the girl write their in-class essay in relative peace.
Kara watches as the girl shuffles in her seat. Before she knows it there’s a thin pen being thrust under her nose. But the girl merely holds it over her shoulder, still staring resolutely forward.
‘Thank you,’ Kara whispers.
Later Kara rallies her courage a second time. Over the din of twenty-eight teenagers scrambling to collect their things, she says, ‘Thanks, um…’
She digs her nail into a groove on her desk and watches the girl gather her belongings—another sleek pen, a slim black folio and the assigned reading stuffed with note flags—into a leather satchel.
‘Lena,’ the girl offers finally and reaches for the pen. She clicks her satchel closed. ‘Luthor.’
‘Thanks, Lena,’ Kara grins and leaves her hand outstretched. ‘Kara Danvers.’
‘I know.’ Lena’s face is unreadable as Kara’s grin widens when she takes her hand. It neither falters nor fades even when she clambers into the car with Alex hours later.
‘How was your day, sweetheart?’ Eliza asks with kind eyes. She reaches over the centre console to give Kara’s arm a gentle squeeze.
‘I think I made a friend,’ Kara breathes. She ignores Alex’s derisive snort and thinks maybe, just maybe, life on earth won’t be so bad after all.
/
There’s a party invitation wedged between the books in her locker, a second and equally pleasant surprise, later that week. She thumbs the bumps on its surface and flexes the cheap cardboard; she can’t help the smile that graces her lips. The address is familiar enough: Midvale is a small town. She looks around to find other people opening their lockers to similar invitations.
Kara spots Lena Luthor nine lockers down, her brow knit tightly together while she palms the same piece of cardboard.
/
‘It’s a rite of passage,’ Alex deadpans. ‘You have to go.’
Kara looks skeptical. Both at Alex’s suggestion and at the plate of carrots and dip Eliza set out for them after school.
‘No, for real. I think you should go. I’ll even lend you something to wear,’ Alex insists, sounding expansive. ‘I’d go with you, but calculus midterms are coming up and, well—’ she mimes a noose tightening around her throat.
So Kara goes, if only to make Alex happy. She barely makes it over the threshold when her senses kick into overdrive. She feels the air ripple around the subwoofer in the living room, smells the yeast in the flecks of beer drying around multiple kegs, tastes the stale tobacco in the draft coming in from the verandah.
Her breathing is shallow and she blinks back tears.
‘Where’s the—’ Kara mumbles to the person closest to her and scrambles for an excuse. Just when she pictures Alex gripping her forearms and counting one mississippi two mississippi in her ear, another wave of stimuli has her doubled over. She grabs a handful of the person’s shirt before she’s pointed toward the staircase. Both hands are pressed to her temple to keep her head from splitting itself open as she takes to the steps two at a time. Her feet dig into plush carpet as she hits the landing.
She focuses.
There, Kara stumbles toward the room farthest down the hallway. Her hand twists on the doorknob and she hears the mechanism give before something else roars in her ears: two heartbeats, one slow and steady, the other like a hummingbird’s.
‘Oh my god, Lena—’
Lena breaks away from the girl above her. Kara hears the rush of blood coursing through two sets of vascular systems—sees aortas branching and winding and pulsing until they end in burst capillaries.
On the pale column of a neck.
By an exposed clavicle.
Kara doesn’t need to reach out to feel the added moisture in the air, evaporating just above slick skin. There’s a rhythm to the flutter of eyelashes against rosy cheeks, and she picks up a scent she thinks she’s smelled before. A sweet musk infused with perfume—expensive, likely European, and entirely bruised from the friction of another person’s skin.
‘—I am so sorry,’ Kara stammers. She’s out the door as fast as she barged through it, hurling more apologies over her shoulder.
She races past the undulating crowd, to where the back garden and woods blur into one, and gulps air into her lungs. Her skin tingles and she’s surprised she can feel the cold enough to make the fine hairs on her arm stand on end. Only, wait, it isn’t the cold. She taps at her arm one digit at a time, just like Alex taught her.
And when she finally manages to keep the world at bay, Kara tries listening again, casting her senses to the room: Lena’s heart still beats its slow thrum.
/
‘We’re not, not dating,’ Lena states when she sees Kara open her mouth at lunch the next day. She sets her tray down at Kara’s table and swings her legs over the moulded plastic seat. Her back is taut and primed for a challenge.
But Kara lets her shoulders rise and fall. ‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she says because it’s true, but mostly because she really wants to cram the rest of her pizza into her mouth and Lena interrupted her mid-bite.
Lena narrows her eyes before thrusting her own tray at Kara, who gapes.
Sitting pretty are two slices.
What does bother Kara are the low voices she picks up in the hallways between classes. Unkind and derogatory and full of malice. She strains a little to gather the meaning of veiled statements and murmurs passed on, and she balls her fists over and over until she feels marginally better.
/
‘So how come Earth-people don’t like it when girls kiss other girls?’
Kara almost cracks one of Alex’s ribs in her rush to heimlich the chunk of pretzel she’s managed to swallow whole.
‘We’re just people , Kara—’
‘Squishy people,’ Kara corrects. She wrinkles her nose.
‘—it’s, um,’ Alex clears her throat, ‘Why are you asking me this?’
Kara shrugs. ‘I walked in on Lena kissing another girl at that party a couple weeks ago—’
Alex foregoes the straw in her soda cup and tips its entire contents into her mouth. She tries for an encouraging smile as she crunches on shards of ice.
‘—and I heard people talking about her in the hallways. A lot of it wasn’t very nice,’ Kara frowns. ‘I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal here. It never was on Krypton.’
‘People can be,’ Alex swallows and starts to fold her pretzel wrapper into smaller and smaller squares, ‘pretty mean sometimes. A lot of them just don’t understand.’ She trails off and stares absently at the crowd milling around them at the food court.
‘I mean, it didn’t look like Lena was hiding it or anything. She looked almost…’ but happy isn’t the right word because Kara’s not sure what that looks like on Lena yet so she says instead, ‘Comfortable. Like it was probably the most comfortable I’d seen her.’
‘Well,’ Alex says evenly, ‘that’s nice.’
Kara notes that unlike Lena’s heart, Alex’s is attempting to beat itself right out of her chest.
/
Kara slips the hall pass into her back pocket and makes her way down the corridor. She stops in front of the locker directly opposite Lena’s, ducks, and pretends to adjust her shoelaces. She focuses on the flimsy metal before her.
Macroeconomics and microeconomics? Kara makes a face when she commits Lena’s schedule to memory.
Numbers? Gross. Kara knows for a fact Lena’s favorite is shop class, which they both share. In it, Lena’s somehow managed to commandeer an entire station to herself, left to tinker and manipulate unsupervised. Kara doesn’t blame Mr. Calhoun for being a little intimidated. Lena is a third his age after all. Kara assumes stoic billionaire geniuses are in short supply at Midvale High and she imagines Lena’s teacher evaluations are the epitome of diplomacy.
If anyone cared to ask, Kara’s favorite subjects are recess and lunch followed by the fifteen percent of home economics that involves eating food. The making thereof, she could do without.
/
Then the dreams start. Kara is horrified when she realizes they’re recurring dreams—but only mildly.
She’s taken to leaving a glass of water on her nightstand to combat the dryness in her throat and the flush of her skin. The sky is often a pale, dusky pink and no amount of tossing or turning can lure her back into slumber; neither can the warm, blessed blanket of silence draping the house in the early dawn.
The sound of something ripping jolts her awake one morning. ‘Nightmares,’ she offers along with the torn sheets to Eliza later in the laundry room. Eliza who tuts once and envelops her in her arms without a word of blame. They’re almost the same height.
They’re fairly pedestrian at first, the dreams. Her mind replays only what she’s already observed in real life. Lena sucking on the inside of her cheek when she’s doing homework. Lena’s fingers gripping the slim stick of chalk when she balances equations in front of the class. Lena walking through the soccer field with an armful of physics textbooks to her favorite spot under the bleachers.
Then one day her mind decides creativity trumps any semblance of platonic admiration, and those same hands start to reach for her, fingertips brushing over her eyelids and tracing the roundness of her cheek.
/
Kara vaults herself up the bus steps to find Lena at the very front, gaze fixed to a spot outside her window, oblivious to the chaos of pre-field trip shenanigans. There’s a vacant seat next to her so Kara stands in the aisle and clears her throat.
‘Kara,’ she acknowledges when the seat dips. She turns her attention to a sheaf of medical journals in her lap.
‘I’ll trade you,’ Kara smiles brightly.
‘Come again?’
‘I’ll trade you one of those for some of my snacks.’ Kara holds out a packet of gummy worms.
Lena eyes the bag and fans the journals out like they’re playing cards. She explains, ‘It’s a long, boring ride to National City. Plus I’ve been to the museum a bunch of times already.’
Kara lets out a low whistle at the titles before making her choice. She snaps it out of Lena’s hand with a flourish.
Lena juts her lower lip in a fake pout. ‘I wanted that one.’
A gentle shove is Kara’s response.
They skim through the journals and gnaw at the candy for most of the ride. The sugar crystals make Kara’s teeth hurt but she thinks she likes the sound of Lena’s laugh when she sticks out a purple-tinged tongue at her.
As the school bus approaches the off-ramp, Lena shrinks almost imperceptibly into her seat. Kara spots her knuckles go white.
She covers Lena’s hand with her own and barely has a moment to notice the Luthor Corp logo fly past their window. She has to crane her neck to take in the chrome-encased structure stretching toward the sky with no apparent end in sight.
Lena’s voice sounds unnaturally calm, ‘I sent for the application myself, you know.’
Kara looks back at her. This time it’s her turn to ask, ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’m at Midvale High because I want to be. Not at National City Polytech or some MIT prep school.’ Lena gives her a smile, the kind that doesn’t meet one’s eyes, before continuing. ‘I figured it was my last shot at being normal since my family wants me to be anything but.’
She looks down at their hands and doesn’t act surprised when she finds their fingers intertwined.
‘That’s why I chose Midvale.’
/
Skipping rocks in the sound and walking in the woods on the outskirts of Midvale are things Kara does to pass the time. Her adoptive habitat is a far cry from the holo-rivers and gleaming spires of Argo City, and she can’t help but feel a little thankful for it.
But she keeps her standing date with the sun for a reason.
Turns out the echoes of don’t do this or stop yourself from doing that fade the faster she hurls herself through the air. No powers, she might have promised everyone, but there’s no one to chase after her up here.
/
Kara reaches the bus stop just as the deluge starts. It seeps into her canvas shoes and she does the only thing which makes any sense in the moment: shakes her fists at the sky while yelling in Kryptonian.
But then an unmarked black car makes its way down the road, slowing as it reaches her. She sucks in a breath and clutches at the straps of her backpack, her forefoot digging into the blacktop.
She’ll never fall prey to the temptation of midday flights ever again.
The car veers off the road and crunches on gravel. It’s right in front of her and she’s bent at the knees.
The door swings open.
‘All right there, Danvers?’ Lena’s smirk is clear despite the sheeting rain. She scoots back into the vehicle and gestures for Kara to enter.
Kara nods in thanks when she offers her a small towel. ‘Eliza and Alex are in California checking out college campuses,’ Kara explains, wiping the moisture from her glasses. ‘They’ll be back tomorrow. I’ve never caught the bus before and I forgot my umbrella.’
‘They left you to fend for yourself?’ Lena inquires. She pokes at Kara’s ribs, ‘You’re not exactly the most self-sufficient.’
‘I’m pretty independent,’ Kara declares. ‘And Eliza left me a bunch of food in the freezer. Microwaves are a beautiful thing.’ She tries not to think about the pop tart she burnt earlier—she figured she’d shave a few seconds off her morning routine and forego the toaster entirely. Turns out heat vision both solves a lot of problems and is also really good at creating them.
‘Mmm,’ is all Lena has to say about that, already lost in the schematics she has pulled up on her tablet.
/
Kara turns the invitation over once more in her hands. She runs a finger over the pastiche of colors and cut paper, suddenly self-conscious. She drops it in Lena’s locker anyway.
It’s my birthday, Kara reasons, she has to say yes.
/
‘Sure I’ll come to your party,’ Lena says at lunch. ‘Who else is going?’
Kara pretends to think. ‘Well, you are,’ she says slowly.
/
Eliza hugs her for a really long time and whispers, ‘Happy birthday, my darling girl.’ She places a kiss atop Kara’s head and adds, ‘I love you.’
Alex punches her in the shoulder before she realizes what she’s doing and somehow—just not very gracefully, Kara observes—manages to disguise her wince into a cough.
Kara blows out the candles to her cake and shovels forkful after forkful of it into her mouth; she grins because it’s exactly as sweet as it looks. Eliza looks a little sheepish as she shrugs and tries to hide two tins of icing and the one box of cake mix sitting on the kitchen counter.
Kara trains her fork at the glittery party hat clashing with Lena’s hair and mouths, ‘Cute.’ Lena rolls her eyes and takes dainty bites in between answering Eliza’s pointed questions about Luthor Corp’s latest tech.
Eventually mugs of warm milk are thrust into their hands and they are shooed out of the kitchen. Alex stretches languidly out on the sofa and switches the TV on, leaving Kara to guide Lena out onto the deck. They swaddle themselves in blankets and stare at the stars in relative silence.
‘I made you something,’ Lena holds out a slim box the length of her hand. ‘Maybe you’ll be less likely to lose this one if it’s from a friend.’
It’s a fountain pen, sitting in crushed velvet.
‘Thank you, Lena.’ Kara smiles into her mug of warm milk. She scratches absently at the wool blend against her thighs. It weighs on her, thinking about what the science guild would have given on this very same occasion to mark her first step into adulthood. Probably some symbolic cryocore she would have to admire the heft and weight of, then use to glean answers to their galaxy’s most nebulous mysteries upon careful reflection.
No, Kara likes this present just fine.
/
‘So prom’s coming up,’ Kara ventures, slapping her safety goggles over her glasses. She knows full well she looks ridiculous and the labcoat is a bit much. Nothing in this high school lab can hurt her but she doesn’t need to prove that to anyone.
Lena appraises her with an amused smirk. ‘Mmm,’ she says while stooping to eye the meniscus of their beaker.
‘Wanna go—’ Kara scratches loops into her pad, going for nonchalant.
Lena makes a non-committal noise in her throat.
‘—together?’
And Kara thinks Lena fumbling with their bunsen is enough of an answer.