Work Text:
Amy had seen people fly before, but until that afternoon the important thing about them had been that they were people in bright clothes doing exciting things. She knew capes. She knew masks. She knew that some people in stories were stronger than everybody else and that they could catch falling things or lift things that should have been too heavy. She knew that bad people sometimes wore darker clothes and that good people could be knocked down and then get up again. The parts existed separately in her mind, vivid and usable, but they had not yet arranged themselves around her.
She was sitting on the floor with a thin children's comic spread across both knees when the arrangement finally began. The page showed a woman in a red costume moving over a city, no aeroplane around her, no wings extending from her shoulders, no visible machine at all. One fist was out in front. The other arm was drawn back. Her hair streamed behind her. Amy stared at the picture longer than she had stared at the fight on the previous page.
Tracey was beside her with another book, turning pages quickly and then turning back because she had skipped something she wanted. Amy leaned closer to the flying woman until the top of her head nearly touched the paper. “She's flying.”
Tracey looked because Amy had said it, then went back to her own book. “She has a cape.”
“No, look. She's just flying.”
“She has a cape,” Tracey repeated.
Amy ignored the cape. The woman did not have wings. She was not sitting in anything. There was no propeller. There was no engine. The city was below her and she was simply in the air because that was one of the things she could do.
Amy turned back a page, then forward again. A little printed burst near the top contained the word SUPER. She could not read every word on the page by herself, but she recognized that one. Super was an easy word because it appeared in other places, on boxes and signs and in the mouths of adults who used it to mean very good. It also belonged to these people. Superheroes.
She said the word quietly. “Super.”
The room did not change. Tracey turned another page. Somewhere farther away a cupboard door closed. Amy looked again at the flying woman, then down at her own hands.
Super Ames.
The memory did not arrive as a complete scene. She did not see herself at two from outside. She remembered being held, the feel of her arms spread wide, the yard moving beneath her, the tree passing and passing again. She remembered Jennifer. She remembered the name. Super Ames. She had heard it hundreds of times since then, often while already being lifted, sometimes before her feet left the ground. It had always been the name of the plane she became.
Except the woman on the page was not a plane.
Amy looked at the word again.
Super.
She got to her feet so quickly that the comic slid onto the carpet.
Tracey complained, “You bent it.”
“I know what Super Ames is.”
Tracey looked up. “You.”
“No.” Amy snatched the comic from the floor and flattened the corner with both palms. “I mean what I am.”
Tracey had already lost interest. “You're Amy.”
Amy gathered the comic against her chest and went looking for Jennifer.
She checked the kitchen first, then the porch, then the room where Glenda had been sorting a basket of clean washing. “Where's Jennifer?” she asked.
Glenda looked up from matching two small socks. “Outside, I think. Why?”
“I know something.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It is.”
Glenda pointed toward the back door. “Try the yard.”
Amy ran, then remembered the comic and slowed just enough not to crumple it. Jennifer was near the steps with a glass in one hand, looking toward the flower bed. Amy called her name before she was halfway across the porch. Jennifer turned.
“I know,” Amy announced.
Jennifer set the glass down on the rail. “You know?”
“I know what Super Ames is.”
Jennifer's expression changed so slightly that Amy did not notice. “All right.”
Amy thrust the comic toward her, already opening it to the right page. “Look.” She found the flying woman, tapped her hard enough to make the paper jump, and said, “She's a superhero.”
“She is.”
“And she's flying.”
“She is.”
“But she doesn't have a plane.”
“No.”
“She doesn't have wings either.”
Jennifer crouched so they were closer to the same height. “Looks like she doesn't need them.”
Amy's face brightened at the confirmation. She laid one finger over the word on the page. “And it says super.”
Jennifer waited.
Amy leaned forward, incapable of holding the conclusion inside herself any longer. “Super Ames is a superhero.”
Jennifer knew at once exactly what had happened. She remembered Amy at two, both arms extending sideways, the sudden engine noise answering a word Amy had understood differently from the way it had been offered. She remembered deciding not to correct her because there had been nothing to correct. The aeroplane had become real enough within seconds. She had carried that plane through rooms and yards, through Texas and night and imaginary oceans, letting Amy dictate routes that no actual aircraft could have flown. The original thought had become so thoroughly Amy's that Jennifer had nearly forgotten her own first meaning.
Now Amy stood in front of her with the flushed triumph of somebody who believed she had discovered a secret hidden inside her own name.
Jennifer did not say, That's what I meant.
She looked at the comic, then at Amy. “That makes a lot of sense.”
Amy nodded furiously. “Because superheroes can fly, and I can fly when I'm Super Ames. And Super is in the name. That's why.”
“That is pretty strong evidence.”
“I figured it out.”
“You did.”
The pleasure on Amy's face was so complete that Jennifer felt the old meaning leave her without loss. If the idea had begun with Jennifer, the discovery belonged wholly to Amy. There would have been something mean, even if only gently mean, in reaching backward to claim ownership now.
Jennifer let Amy enjoy the discovery before offering anything more. Amy reopened the comic and crouched on the porch board, making Jennifer crouch with her. She showed her the same page again, then the next, where the woman had landed on the roof of a building. “She doesn't need an airport,” Amy explained. “She just goes down there.” Jennifer nodded. Amy turned back to the flying picture. “And she can go where cars can't go.”
“That sounds useful.”
“And she can go over houses.”
“Also useful.”
Amy turned another page, frowned at a panel she did not fully understand, then flipped back to the image that had solved everything. She seemed unwilling to leave it, as though the proof might evaporate if she moved too far away. Jennifer sat on the edge of the step beside her. The yard was quiet except for the little dry movement of leaves and the faint noises from inside the house. Amy traced the outline of the drawn woman's fist without quite touching the ink.
Jennifer asked, “So if Super Ames is a superhero, what does that mean she can do?”
Amy looked up. Until then she had treated the discovery as a correction to a word. Jennifer's question opened it. She knew what superheroes did. She had not yet considered that their privileges might now belong to her. “Fly,” she said first.
“We already knew that one.”
Amy nodded. “But superhero flying.”
“Different.”
“No plane wings.” She lifted both arms sideways, then immediately folded them again as though embarrassed to have demonstrated the obsolete method. “And I can go fast.”
“How fast?”
Amy searched for the largest available measure. “Faster than cars.”
“That's fast.”
“Faster than trains.”
“Very fast.”
“Faster than birds.”
Jennifer waited.
“Faster than everything.”
“There we are.”
Amy stared down at the page again. “And I can save people.”
The words came more quietly. Jennifer looked at her rather than the comic. “Yes. Superheroes do a lot of that.”
“If somebody falls, I catch them.” Amy's hand closed around an imaginary person. “If something is too heavy, I pick it up.”
“Are you strong too?”
Amy had not yet decided that. Her eyes widened. “Yes.”
“How strong?”
“Really strong.”
Jennifer nodded as if this had been established by evidence. “That could come in handy.”
Amy's list began expanding faster. “And I can see in the dark. And I can hear things far away. And I can find people if they're lost.” She pointed through the open door. “If Tracey's lost, I find her.”
“Tracey's in the other room.”
“I know. I can find her.”
“Excellent proof.”
Amy hurried inside to verify the power anyway. Jennifer followed at an ordinary pace and found Amy standing triumphantly beside Tracey, who had not moved from the rug. “I found her.”
Tracey looked up, mystified. “I wasn't hiding.”
“I still found you.”
Amy ran back toward Jennifer before Tracey could argue. The superhero identity was no longer a theory. It was accruing powers by the minute. “And maybe I can be invisible.”
“Maybe?”
Amy considered whether a superhero ought to know. “I can.”
“Can I see you now?”
“Yes.”
“Then how does it work?”
“I have to turn it on.”
“How?”
Amy closed her eyes tightly. Nothing happened. She opened them. “It's on.”
Jennifer looked past her with exaggerated confusion. “Amy?”
Amy clapped both hands over her mouth to contain her laughter.
Glenda came in carrying the laundry basket and nearly walked into the game without knowing it. Jennifer held up one hand. “Careful. There may be an invisible superhero in the doorway.”
Glenda looked directly at Amy. “Is that right?”
Amy's shoulders shook.
Glenda shifted the basket to her hip and stepped carefully around a large amount of empty space beside Amy. “Wouldn't want to bump into her.”
Amy lost control. “You can't see me!”
Glenda turned toward the sound. “Who said that?”
“Me.”
“Who's me?”
“Super Ames.”
“Oh, good. I was wondering where you went.”
Amy opened her eyes wider and announced, “Now you can see me.”
Glenda looked at her properly. “There you are.”
The joke was not used to make the power ridiculous. In Amy's mind it demonstrated that invisibility worked because the adults had obeyed it. She came back to Jennifer glowing with success. “I can do it.”
“You certainly disappeared.”
Amy picked up the comic from where she had set it on a chair. “I can do lots.”
Jennifer tapped the cover gently. “Then you had better fly before you discover so many powers we can't keep track of them.”
Amy turned the comic around again and studied the flying pose. “I was doing it wrong.”
Jennifer's eyebrows rose. “Were you?”
“I was doing plane wings.” Amy put both arms sideways to demonstrate. “But superheroes don't do that.”
“Some might.”
“This one doesn't.”
“No.”
Amy closed the comic. “I want to fly.”
Jennifer stood. “All right.”
Amy raised both arms to be picked up. The gesture had not changed since she was two, though she was taller now and spoke in whole little arguments rather than points and single words. Jennifer lifted her into the familiar hold.
Amy's arms started to open sideways by habit.
She stopped.
For one moment she looked almost embarrassed by her own body having remembered before her mind did. Then she pulled her left arm in and pushed her right fist forward.
There was no engine noise.
Jennifer felt the change more strongly than she expected. It would have been easy to laugh with affection, easy to mention that planes had apparently been retired. She said nothing. She simply began walking.
Amy watched the yard pass below her with a new expression. She had always considered herself the thing that flew, but now the flight seemed to mean something different. The old plane had moved between places. The superhero was a person going somewhere because something needed to be done.
“I can take off anywhere,” Amy said.
“I suppose you can.”
“I don't need a runway.”
“Very useful.”
“And I can land anywhere.”
Jennifer looked at the flower bed. “Anywhere safe.”
“Anywhere safe,” Amy agreed.
They crossed the yard once without a mission. Amy kept her fist forward and tested the pose, switching arms when one got tired. At the tree she said, “Higher,” then, after Jennifer raised her, “Superheroes go really high.”
“I'm limited by my own height.”
Amy considered this practical obstacle. “When I'm bigger I can go higher by myself.”
“That's convenient.”
They passed the marigolds. Amy looked down at them and said, “I can see tiny things from up here because I have super eyes.”
Jennifer followed her gaze. “What can you see?”
“A bug.”
There was, in fact, a small dark insect moving along the edge of one leaf. “Very super.”
Amy looked around for something else her new identity might allow. “And I'm strong.”
“How strong?”
“So strong.”
“That is quite strong.”
“I can lift a car.”
Jennifer nodded. “Good to know.”
“And the house.”
“That seems less useful.”
“If it gets stuck.”
“Houses do have that problem.”
Amy accepted this as agreement. They were nearing the porch again when Tracey came out carrying the comic Amy had abandoned. “You left this.”
Amy, still airborne, said, “I'm a superhero now.”
Tracey looked at Jennifer, then at Amy's fist. “You were a plane.”
“No, I wasn't.”
“You went nnnnnnn.” Tracey reproduced the old engine noise with devastating accuracy.
Amy's face tightened. “I was a superhero.”
“You did plane arms.”
“I was flying.”
Tracey spread both arms and made the noise again.
Amy looked at Jennifer with the first alarm of somebody discovering that history contained witnesses.
Jennifer said, “Superheroes can try different flying styles.”
Amy's relief was immediate. “See?”
Tracey considered Jennifer's authority, then shrugged. “You still went nnnnnn.”
“That was my power sound.”
Jennifer looked away so Amy would not see the smile she could not quite suppress.
Tracey handed over the comic. Amy took it with her free hand. “Super Ames was always a superhero.”
“If you say so.” Tracey went back inside.
Amy watched the doorway close. “I was.”
Jennifer said, “I believe you.”
That settled the historical record.
The first mission arrived a few minutes later because Glenda came outside and asked whether either girl had seen the cloth rabbit that belonged to one of the younger children visiting that day. She was not asking Super Ames. She was simply looking around the yard while she spoke, one hand shading her eyes. “It was on the porch earlier. Little brown one, blue ribbon.”
Amy straightened in Jennifer's arms. “I can find it.”
Glenda smiled. “Can you?”
“I have super eyes.”
Jennifer adjusted her grip. “Apparently this is our first official case.”
Amy looked immediately toward the bench where her own rabbit had once been rescued months earlier. Nothing. She pointed to the tree. “Go there.”
Jennifer carried her. Amy scanned the ground with intense seriousness. Under the tree there were leaves, a ball, two sticks, and no rabbit. “Higher.” Jennifer raised her slightly. Amy looked toward the porch, the fence, the flower bed. “There!”
Jennifer followed her point. Something brown showed near the far edge of the yard, partly hidden beside the marigold pot.
Amy shouted, “I see it!”
Glenda called from behind them, “Where?”
“Super Ames found it!”
Jennifer carried her toward the flowers. Amy's fist remained extended until they were close enough that she decided the rescue required both hands. Jennifer lowered her. The rabbit had fallen between the pot and the porch edging, not trapped in any meaningful sense but difficult for a small child to notice. Amy reached. It was still just beyond her fingertips.
“Lower.”
Jennifer bent.
Amy grabbed one ear. “I got him.”
“Use your super strength.”
Amy pulled the rabbit free with tremendous effort entirely disproportionate to its weight. “He's heavy.”
“I thought you could lift a house.”
“I can. But he's super heavy.”
Jennifer nodded. “Special rabbit.”
Amy cradled him against her chest. “We have to take him back.”
They turned toward Glenda. Halfway there Amy said, “Wait.”
Jennifer stopped.
“I can be invisible too.”
“All right.”
“I'm invisible now.”
Jennifer looked around theatrically without moving her head much. “Where did Amy go?”
“I'm Super Ames.”
“Where did Super Ames go?”
Amy whispered, “You can't see me.”
“I can't.”
They continued across the yard. Glenda watched them approach. Amy held one finger to her lips. Jennifer understood. “Glenda,” she called, “I found the rabbit, but I seem to have misplaced Amy.”
Glenda's eyes went to the very visible child in Jennifer's arms. “That's concerning.”
Amy shook with suppressed laughter.
“Maybe she'll turn up,” Glenda said.
Amy held out the rabbit. Glenda took it from what she pretended were empty air. “Well, somebody brought this back.”
Amy could not sustain invisibility under that pressure. “It was me!”
Glenda gasped. “There you are.”
“I was invisible.”
“I can see that.”
“No, you couldn't.”
“Right. I couldn't see that.”
Amy nodded, satisfied.
Within ten minutes her powers multiplied beyond any coherent system. She could see through walls, except when Jennifer asked what was inside the house and Amy said, “I can't because the wall is too thick.” She could hear people from miles away but failed to hear Glenda call her from the porch until Jennifer pointed it out. She was so strong she could lift a car, a house, Jennifer and possibly the entire tree, yet when she tried to retrieve a small ball while being carried, she said it was too heavy until Jennifer lowered her farther. She could become invisible at will, though only when everybody around her agreed to participate. She could fly, obviously, and she no longer needed an engine to do it.
Jennifer accepted each power at the moment it appeared and never asked Amy to reconcile one with another. To a three-year-old, contradiction was not a problem to solve. It was evidence that the world had more than one way to work.
At one point Amy announced that she could fly faster than anything. Jennifer increased her walking pace by two careful steps. “Faster.” Jennifer went slightly faster. “More.” Jennifer said, “My superpower is not dropping you.” Amy conceded that this was important and allowed the speed to remain where it was.
She invented a villain near the fence, though she could not decide what the villain looked like or what he had done. “He's bad,” she said.
“How bad?”
“He took all the cookies.”
Jennifer frowned. “Serious.”
“And he put them in his house.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get them.”
“Are they your cookies?”
Amy paused. “No.”
“Whose are they?”
“Everybody's.”
“Then you had better rescue them.”
Amy pointed forward with her fist and ordered the approach. When they reached the fence, the villain's house apparently moved. They pursued him around the tree, through the patch of shade, past the porch and back toward the flower bed. Amy narrated with increasing urgency, describing traps that Jennifer stepped over and invisible walls that Super Ames broke with one hand. Jennifer supplied almost nothing beyond questions. The mission belonged to Amy now. She did not need scenery given to her. She made it faster than Jennifer could follow.
At the marigolds Amy shouted, “Stop!”
Jennifer stopped.
“The cookies are under there.”
Jennifer looked down. “Under the flowers?”
“No. Under the ground.”
“How are you going to get them?”
Amy thought. “I can go through the ground.”
“You can?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you flew.”
“I can do both.”
Jennifer accepted the upgrade. “Of course.”
Amy leaned down, reaching toward the soil without touching it. “I'm going in.”
Jennifer lowered her by inches. Amy made a quiet whooshing noise, not an engine but something invented for this new movement. “I'm under.”
“What's it like?”
“Dark.”
“Can you see?”
“I have super eyes.”
“Right.”
Amy reached into nothing, gripped an imaginary container and strained. “Heavy.”
“Use your super strength.”
She grunted and hauled upward. “Got them.”
Jennifer raised her again. Amy hugged the invisible cookies to her chest. “We have to give them back.”
“Where do they go?”
Amy pointed toward the porch. “Everybody's there.”
They flew back. Amy distributed invisible cookies to Glenda, Tracey, Jennifer and two dolls that had been left on the step. She kept one for herself, chewed with great seriousness, then remembered Jennifer had not actually received anything because Jennifer's hands were occupied holding her. Amy pinched another imaginary cookie from the air and pressed it toward Jennifer's mouth. Jennifer pretended to eat it.
“Good?” Amy asked.
“Excellent.”
“The bad guy can't have one.”
“Because he stole them?”
“Yes.” Amy considered justice. “Maybe one little one.”
“That seems merciful.”
“He can have the broken one.”
The villain's sentence was thereby concluded.
After the cookies had been recovered, Super Ames came indoors for juice without considering the act a defeat. Amy sat at the kitchen table with both feet swinging beneath the chair and the comic open beside her cup. She kept returning to the flying page between sips. It was no longer evidence she needed to prove anything; it had become a reference. She tried making the same fist while seated, decided the angle was wrong, and asked Jennifer whether superheroes could have different ways of flying. Jennifer said, “I can't imagine why not.” Amy thought about that for a moment and relaxed. The old wing pose did not have to be erased completely. It could simply belong to a time before she knew more.
Glenda came in and saw the page. “So that's what changed the flight plan.”
Amy looked up sharply. “I was always a superhero.”
Glenda glanced at Jennifer. “Always?”
Jennifer answered before Amy had to defend herself. “As far as the official record is concerned.”
Amy nodded with force. “Always.”
Glenda put both hands up in surrender. “Then I stand corrected.”
“I just didn't know.” Amy's certainty softened around that admission. “I thought I was a plane.”
The sentence was so honest that Jennifer looked at her. Amy did not seem embarrassed by it now. She had moved through embarrassment and come out somewhere else: the plane had been what she could understand then. The superhero was what she could understand now. Neither needed to humiliate the other.
Glenda pulled out the chair opposite her. “That's allowed.”
Amy drank more juice. “But I was still Super Ames.”
“You were.”
“And Super means superhero.”
“Apparently it does.”
Jennifer said nothing. She felt, with a small private warmth, the oddity of hearing Amy explain back to her the meaning Jennifer had first intended. It had travelled away from her, become an aeroplane for more than a year, gathered routes and engine noises and impossible hovering, and returned as something Amy believed she had found alone. Jennifer preferred it that way. A discovery was often more useful than an explanation.
Amy closed the comic and slid it toward the middle of the table. “Can superheroes be little?”
Jennifer said, “Why not?”
“They're big in the pictures.”
“They have to fit on the page somehow.”
Amy frowned, unsatisfied by the literal answer. “I mean grown-ups.”
Glenda rested her chin on one hand. “Do you have to wait until you're grown up to help somebody?”
“No.”
“Then there you go.”
Amy accepted this. “I'm a little superhero.”
“A very little one,” Glenda said, and reached across to wipe a line of juice from Amy's upper lip.
Amy tolerated the indignity. “But strong.”
“Extremely.”
To demonstrate, Amy asked for something heavy. Glenda, after a glance around the kitchen, gave her an empty mixing bowl. Amy seized it with both hands and groaned theatrically as though it weighed more than she did. Jennifer said, “Careful. That's advanced equipment.” Amy set it on the table, wiped imaginary sweat from her forehead, then lifted it over her head. “See?”
“I stand in awe,” Jennifer said.
The bowl became a car next, then a boulder, then for several seconds the whole moon. Amy's strength increased according to whatever she called it. When Glenda reclaimed the bowl to use it for its actual purpose, Amy did not object; the demonstration had proved the power. She climbed down from the chair and announced that her hearing was super too. Jennifer whispered her name from the other side of the room. Amy heard it. Glenda whispered “pickle” almost inaudibly from directly behind her. Amy did not. “That doesn't count,” Amy said. “I wasn't listening that way.”
“What way?” Glenda asked.
“Super way.”
No one demanded a technical definition.
Amy went outside again on her own feet and spent a while not being Super Ames at all. She drew lines in the dust near the step with a stick, argued with Tracey about possession of the better chalk, and carried a cup of water to the marigolds because somebody had said they were dry. Jennifer watched the superhero recede without vanishing. It was there now in the way children's inventions became durable: not because they stayed in character every second, but because they could return to them without rebuilding anything. When Amy eventually came back, there was no engine noise and no explanation. She only raised her arms and said there was a problem.
Later, when the heat had softened and the yard's shadows stretched longer, Amy asked to fly once more. Jennifer had set her down several times throughout the afternoon; being Super Ames no longer meant one continuous session but a state Amy could re-enter whenever the need arose. This time she came over quietly, raised her arms and said, “There's a problem.”
Jennifer lifted her. “What problem?”
Amy pointed toward the far end of the yard. “Over there.”
“What is it?”
“I don't know yet.”
That answer pleased Jennifer more than any elaborate explanation could have. She adjusted Amy securely against her hands. Amy put one fist forward. The old wing pose did not appear. Neither did the engine. She looked toward the place she had chosen with the grave urgency of somebody who believed an unknown problem deserved immediate attention.
Jennifer carried her across the grass with the same measured care she had used when Amy was two and believed herself an aeroplane. Nothing in Jennifer's role had changed. Her hands still supported Amy's body. Her feet still provided every inch of actual travel. She still watched branches, uneven ground and the reach of small hands before moving closer to anything. Yet Amy no longer seemed to be riding through a world Jennifer narrated. She was entering one she had made herself.
“Faster,” Amy said.
Jennifer lengthened her stride.
“Super Ames is coming.”
The marigolds passed below them, bright in the late light. Amy's fist pointed beyond them toward a danger that did not yet have a name, and Jennifer followed where she was told.