Eve threw the sheets off her bed with a smile, whirled into her school clothes, and skipped every other stair on the way down to the kitchen. She found the cornflake supply low. She liked saving the world but not scrambled eggs. “Later, Mom!” Eve raced out the door with an empty stomach, then ran back in to slip on her shoes.
Other teenagers identified as superheroes and told everyone to make it seem like they were crazy, but Eve — who used her long hair as a black shield to block bullets, whose bright blue eyes turned red for heat vision — hated reverse psychology and kept everything inside. Just last week, she remembered fighting a knife-wielding, shapeshifting, dimension-hopping, monstrous figure who smiled and vanished into thin air after Eve asked him to turn over a new leaf and help her change the world. He was probably already working alongside her five years in the future; after all, it was obvious he liked her.
Eve raced out of the house and jumped on the bike she found abandoned on a street corner; her flying abilities only worked when no one was looking, and she didn’t fancy dropping out of the sky. She brushed rust specks off her plaid skirt, adjusted her white button-up shirt, and pedaled.
High school: the ultimate superhero sacrifice. Eve mastered quantum mechanics, chemistry, and physics long ago but failed tests on purpose. If she earned all As, the villains would find her quick, even in New York, the city where anyone who wasn’t a hero felt like an ant. Eve lived in poverty — again, to throw off the villains — and at night, after locking the door and waiting in bed until she closed her eyes and her Mom was clueless, Eve went to work.
Villains feared Eve throughout the galactic underbelly — she thwarted countless alien invasions — and every cosmic creature knew she wouldn’t rest until she found her Dad. Years ago, a supervillain invaded and ruined Eve’s memory, and Eve didn’t realize what had happened until she saw that her friends had fathers. Eve always thought her mother suffered mental breakdowns because she was crazy; now, Eve knew her Mom didn’t think she was loved. Eve would find the slimeball who did this, fix her family, save Dad, and win Lady Justice — a close associate — another victory.
Eve attended a school where whites were rare to avoid spies and to stay briefed on galactic gossip, because blacks regularly updated their manga collections. Manga was distributed by the Cosmic Police Force across dimensions to pass along secret messages about new weapons, new threats, and new missions, though only superheroes could read the signs.
John Smith approached down the hall. “Hey Eve” — he gave a quick nod — “great job yesterday.” Eve nodded back. He wasn’t woke, but Eve saw potential and needed another team member for fighting aliens. She already had two, Paul and Ford, who she saw sorting through their lockers. She strutted right up.
“You ready for tonight?” she asked. “It’ll be fun.” Paul and Ford always carried the latest editions of Attack on Titan. Eve studied both of their broad shoulders and smacked Paul in the back of the head. “Hey, I’m talking!”
Paul faced Eve and told her that the world would be better once she was dead.
He turned back to his locker.
Under Eve’s right eye, welling — she quickly reached up and rubbed it away. “Paul,” she swallowed and whispered, “what’s going on?”
“Just because you’re hurt doesn’t mean you can get away with murder.”
Were these clones? Cyborgs? “What do you mean?”
“Go learn something from that woke runner,” Paul told her. “The whole school knows. Sorry your Dad left you and your white Mom, but it’s no excuse.”
Was there a rumor? She was one of them. “I’m going to count to three, and if this doesn’t stop, I swear, I’m going to melt you with heat vision.”
Paul and Ford stared at her.
Ford shook his head. “White girls would kill themselves before admitting they were wrong.”
Eve hissed and lifted her fist to punch and saw her hand. It was snow. She pulled up her sleeve; she shook.
“This isn’t me.” Eve reached back and felt that her hair was straight. “God.”
“You changing identities again?”
“We’re under attack!” she yelled. “Ford, I need a data analysis on the area, stat! Is it the Master Computer? Time and space were altered!”
They were vulnerable, in the open.
“Stop acting,” Ford said. “You did what you did.”
“You’re a superhero!” Eve shouted. “One of the best!”
Students gathered in a circle around them; the halls closed in. Paul blinked; his cheeks loosened.
“You okay?” Paul asked. This was bad: they had forgotten they were superheroes. Eve looked to her right and spun around, ready for battle but unsure who to fight. What happened yesterday? Had the Master Computer infiltrated her mind too?
“I’m fine,” Eve lied. “Just tell me what happened twenty-four hours ago.”
Ford shut his locker. “She’s always lying.”
Eve stopped a Zombie Apocalypse during the night, but during the day — during the day — what did she do during the day?
“Refresh my memory,” Eve asked. “That’s an order!”
Paul opened his mouth and Eve could tell soul-knives were about to shoot out again, and she quickly ducked and weaved away and, where the weak freshmen collected, burst through the encircling students. She ran down the hall and felt her lungs falling behind. She never breathed this hard.
“This is bad.” She couldn’t reach Mac 4. She tapped her wrist, activating a call to the space station. Nothing: the enemy must have downed the satellites. Eve used her shoulder to push open the bathroom door into retro tiling, and that’s when she saw it. Her face. Pale. Tired. Eve punched the mirror. This was the most powerful villain she had ever faced. Not only had he made Eve look terrible, but he had also altered space and time to make her responsible for doing something awful. Now, her friends hated her, and divided, the enemy would pick them off one by one. She needed a weapon — a pistol, a katana — something banned from school property. Whatever the enemy made everyone think happened yesterday must have been traumatic: Eve had never seen Paul and Ford with flaring nostrils. After all the zombies they decapitated together, all the interstellar ghosts they exorcised — hatred.
Eve needed a plan. To regroup. To blend in. They’d find her in the bathroom; she needed to think. Who could have done it?
She smacked her forehead.
“The Bookworm!” Eve blurted. Should she kill him now? Yes. The sooner he was dead, the sooner she could get back to reality. Where was he? The library! But the library was on the other side of the school; students crowded the halls. She needed a gun. No, heat vision.
Footsteps. Eve slid into a stall and held the door to keep it from banging shut. The entrance swung open; two black girls entered.
“You here?” one asked. Eve moaned and, with years of training under her belt, stumbled out of the stall dramatically and collapsed to her knees, hugging her stomach.
“Internal bleeding!”
“You weren’t sick yesterday when you — ”
“Give it a rest,” the other girl with dreadlocks chimed in. “She’s always acting without paying attention.” She held out a hand to Eve. “You need the nurse?”
Eve nodded, accepted the help up, and draped her arm over the black girl’s shoulder for further dramatic effect. They shuffled out of the bathroom, and Eve found the whole school waiting. Paul and Ford stood in front, and Ford pointed at the floor. “Let her crawl.”
Paul tapped him in the chest. “She’s not herself,” Paul said, feeling bad for earlier and proving himself as Eve’s second-in-command.
“You know what she — !”
Paul stood his ground. “Just let her see a doctor.”
Eve coughed, covered her mouth, and slid a finger down her throat. Vomit burst between her hands — perfection — the students screamed. Stupid Bookworm, that personification of evil thought he could defeat Eve by turning the school against her, but Eve outsmarted him. Books never got people as far as acting.
Loyally, Paul dragged Ford over and traded off with the dreadlocked girl to prop up Eve from under her shoulders. At the nurse’s office, with a little more vomit and claims she possessed heat vision, Eve successfully got herself submitted to the hospital and struggled to conceal her glee. She decided to act like the whole “superhero thing” was a joke and to not use any of her powers. If the Bookworm was behind all this, he would have already programed his satellites to detect any trace of superhero activity around the globe. One leap over a building, and the satellites would pinpoint her location and use a laser blast to erase her with New York.
The gray drapes over the hospital window blocked out sites of speeding taxis and couples searching for a bite; the old nurse asked Eve if her mother was coming. Eve asked that the lights be turned off, and around midnight, her cheek sinking into the pillow, sweat beads dotting her arms under the weighted blanket, Eve ordered her thoughts to form into a plan. For now, she needed to get used to being like everyone else. She immediately failed, and so instead thought about killing Satan. It wouldn’t be easy: the Bookworm was smart. But he was also geeky: he read more manga than her and seemed to do it for fun versus duty. He also wore contacts: poke attacks wouldn’t work. Eve rolled in bed from one hip to the other, feeling an ache, further proof of her mortality. Before the Bookworm could speak, she’d kill him. He wielded a silver tongue and could talk angels out of Heaven. If only she could use heat vision! No superpowers: she needed to hide, act like everything was normal. Eve would pretend like she remembered what happened yesterday and apologize, claiming she acted like a superhero to avoid accepting fault. She was a good actress (she learned from studying married couples): the trick was to think things she didn’t believe, to feel things she didn’t feel. In Romeo and Juliet, when Eve was on an undercover mission (which often lasted up to five years, except when Mission Control felt generous) to see if a monstrous, shape-shifting alien was using theatre as a cover for his plot to fill society with hallucinatory, amnesia-causing trauma, Eve played Juliet, and when she screamed for help (to make sure the coast was clear) and stabbed herself (with a retractable blade) to convince the alien-disguised-as-Romeo-who-didn’t-know-the-script to desire death because the girl he loved was gone, everyone in the audience thought she was dead. Eve didn’t know if she would be able to get used to Paul and Ford being powerless, but she’d have to try. In their altered state, they couldn’t handle the truth.
II
It was a typical week. Eve apologized to her friends for whatever she did, went back to class, studied for quizzes, and paid close attention to her peers to make sure that she acted “normal.” She didn’t even go crime-fighting; for the first time in years, she slept without even a dream.
Chalk scratched the blackboard; the teacher mentioned the algebra final. Eve rested her elbow on her desk and fitted her chin into the cup of her palm. She glanced out the window and saw buildings and billboards. They blocked any possible view of clouds with shapes she could guess.
She sighed, loudly, and considered leaping out the window. The wrinkles in Paul’s shirt shifted right when he looked over his shoulder from the desk in front of hers.
“So you stopped reading and hate everything?”
Another strange comment — everyone thought Eve liked to read! She reviewed manga, but read books? That evil Bookworm: she couldn’t wait to finish him off. He manipulated reality to make Eve like him, which wasn’t just evil, but cruel.
Eve smiled. “How can I hate everything when I’ve got you?”
Paul’s mouth hung open long enough for Eve to notice fillings, undeniable evidence of powerlessness. Heroes championed perfect teeth.
“Is that sarcasm?” he asked. Of course, had she been nice? It was worse than she thought. Superheroes were stern: if people thought she was friendly, they’d never take her seriously. The Bookworm turned her into a nice white girl.
Sick.
Just sick.
“Sorry.” Eve threw in a little laugh for anime-charm. Paul’s cheeks turned red, and he whirled back around, nearly tipping over his desk. That afternoon. That’s when Eve would end this madness. She was tired of living in a fake world, of being like most people, the majority, of never making a difference. Eve eyed the red bookbag by her desk. In the front pocket was a knife.
After the last bell, Eve briefed Ford and Paul that she would study in the library; they left without even a nod. Eve discovered that her mother was still at work whenever she went home: Eve could easily get away with being an hour or seven late. Once the knife split the Bookworm’s heart in two, the spacetime continuum would reset and sort everything out. Eve smiled at the thought of killing zombies again.
Eve gripped the straps of her bookbag and ran by the lockers lining the hall, barely missing a janitor who rudely asked her to walk. She shoved open the library door and twirled to roundhouse-kick it shut — the slam would inform the Bookworm that death was imminent — and stubbed her toe. She swallowed a scream and planted her foot to regain composure, waved at the glaring librarian, and glided across the carpeted floor. If intel was accurate — she asked the computer geeks — the Bookworm sat near the dictionaries in his “spot.” He was always in back, reading and studying and — sick. What was his human name? She would act like she remembered. No, she would act totally clueless. Maybe the Bookworm thought her memories also changed when he altered the universe? Just in case, she would introduce herself as if they were meeting for the first time. That would throw him off. Eve snatched a random book off a shelf for camouflage.
There.
Reading.
Propped up on a white couch, he held a book between his legs like a hostage and turned a page to suggest intelligence. Short brown hair, limestone skin, black eyes — hoodie. The students said he ran cross country, but actually all he ever did was read.
“I’m Eve.”
The Bookworm looked up. The jerk made himself handsome! His jawbone rivaled Apollo’s symmetry — another close associate — and from his nervously clenched teeth, words trickled out.
“I know. It’s good to see you.”
He knew?! He wasn’t pulling any punches. Eve tilted her head to imitate a cute Japanese teenager. “Is this seat taken?”
He tried to swallow subtly but the visible stretching of his esophagus betrayed him. “Take a seat.”
Eve slipped off her red bookbag and plopped it onto the couch. She folded her skirt under her legs, sat, rested her book (camouflage) on her lap, and started flipping through it.
He watched. “You read fast.”
“There are pictures on every page.”
“What are you reading?”
Eve checked the cover. “The Kama Sutra.”
“For?”
Eve clamped the cover shut and brushed the book to the floor. She leaned in close. “Talk.”
The Bookworm’s mouth fell open, releasing a spearmint counterattack. “We’re in a library.”
“Tell me who you are.”
“Tom.”
“Alright, ‘Tom’ ” — Eve fingered air quotes — “before we settle things, I wanted to give you a first-and-last chance to explain yourself. So, do yourself a favor, and stop reading.”
She imagined Tom’s heart pounding hard enough to smash itself open on his ribs, which wasn’t a preferred line of attack, but whatever worked.
“What do you mean?”
“Talk!”
“Alright, alright!” He shut his book. “You stopped coming to the library after upsetting the school. I wanted to make sure you were okay, so I came by the hospital.”
Eve raised an eyebrow.
“To check on you,” he added.
“Bookworm,” Eve started softly, “if you don’t fix the spacetime continuum, I’m going to snap your neck.”
Tom looked at her.
“I said fix it!”
Tom reached into his pocket. “Let me call the doctor.”
He pulled out a phone that Eve slapped from his hand. “Why are you doing this?!”
Tom turned pale — even without superpowers, Eve could drain blood from out of a man’s face. Students across the library shut their books and left for the exit in an orderly fashion.
The coast was clear.
Eve fiddled with the zipper of her bookbag. Still, it was best to give the villain a chance to confess. Justice and all.
“We did Romeo and Juliet together,” her archnemesis said. “You were so good. You never noticed me and always had the lead. I once asked you a question, and you addressed the whole class. Do you remember?”
“No.” Elbow drawback. Thrust. Basic training. The world would be fixed in seconds.
“You made everything so fun.” Tom looked down at his hands, folding them together and ready to pray for mercy. “I liked being around you.”
Eve glanced up. “You what?”
“I liked being around you,” Tom said with a weak smile. The Bookworm never liked being around anybody. Come to think of it, he never smiled either. “I always hoped to see you in the hall. You had the most wonderful eyes. When you started coming to the library, I was surprised. I didn’t think you could handle being alone.”
Eve slipped her hand into the bookbag to find the knife. “Is being alone hard?”
“That’s when I noticed you reading manga,” he said. “The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, a classic. That sealed the deal for me. It meant you were open.”
Was this the Bookworm? “You never blush,” she said.
He nodded. “We’ve never been alone.”
Eve froze, silent.
“You were crying while you read.” Tom looked back at his lap. “Like you wanted to get lost in the story and forget everything else. Like you wanted to start over and for the story to go differently.”
The Bookworm. Not only had he changed her world when he altered space and time, but he had also changed himself.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said, “tell you that I understood, but I just kept reading and pretending like you weren’t there.”
Eve lifted her hand from her bookbag. The Bookworm had transformed everything. Now, he was just a regular highschooler.
“You saw right through me,” he said. If she killed him, in all likelihood, nothing would happen. She would be sent to death row, stuck in a world that wouldn’t change back. She tried to use her superhero abilities to keep herself from crying.
She failed.
It was the first time Eve had tried: her powers were gone. The Bookworm sacrificed everything, even his superpowers, to imprison her in a world she couldn’t escape, a world where she didn’t belong. He hated her so much that he sacrificed his own life just to ruin hers.
Why?
“So, that’s it.” Tom looked up from his hands at her. “I love you.”
A tear ran down Eve’s cheek. There was no reason to be angry: this Tom had done nothing wrong. He was just a gentle guy who read books, lean and thoughtful. Normal. It wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of the Bookworm in the other dimension, a Bookworm this Tom never knew. No, there was no reason to be mad. And there was no reason to start crying. A superhero didn’t cry: she held it together. Tom wiped the tear from Eve’s cheek. That monstrous Bookworm must have wanted to stop being evil, but the evil was so deep that he needed to change the world to change himself, and to stop the evil from ever coming back, he wanted to love the one who he always fought against. To get what he wanted, the Bookworm bent time and space, making it so that people Eve knew for years never knew her at all. To defeat his evil heart, all the Bookworm wanted now was a life with her.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. Eve shook her head and reached to squeeze his hands. She had lost, but she wouldn’t be defeated. She fought for the world, to make it a better place. Out of love. Only she could defeat her own beliefs. And no matter how badly the enemy beat her, she would still have that love. No opponent could take it: only she could take it from herself.
Eve leaned over and kissed him, tears running down her cheeks. Besides, a superhero’s greatest test was trying to live a normal life, and the superhero who couldn’t was more in love with power than with people. Living a normal life and assuring the evil in the Bookworm never returned — that would take everything she had.
III
Eve opened her fingers to release the page she was turning and looked up when she heard the front door open. Tom dropped his laptop bag against the wall.
“Five years.” He walked over loosening his tie and kissed Eve on the head. “Congrats!”
Eve closed her book. When Tom started graduate school at NYU, they moved out of Harlem into Manhattan. Eve stayed home.
“Still up for Asiate?” Tom tossed his sportscoat over a chair. “Two lamb loins would be perfect.” He leaned over for another kiss that Eve interrupted studying her cover of playwrights to accept. “You should wear that white dress, the one that matches your eyes.”
Eve lightly rose and left her book. “I’ll get ready.” She moved to the bedroom watching the floor, carefully deciding where her feet would land with each step.
“Do you want me to drive?”
Eve left the bedroom door open and tossed off her shirt. “I will.” Her black hair brushed her bare hips and shoulder-blades; she slipped on what Tom requested. Thin white straps hung the satin dress from her shoulders down her legs; she reached into her closet for white heels and bent down to tuck her feet through the strappy high vamps. Tom’s eyes walked down her back; she snatched the keys off the dresser. “You ready?”
Tom nodded. At the front door, Eve lifted her arms for Tom to slide on her white stand-collar coat; he walked back for his jacket off the chair. They parked their 1999 Altima in the garage; with an old car, they could afford the parking fee, and Eve didn’t like being at the mercy of a taxi driver. Tom reached to open the driver-side door out of habit for Eve and then slipped around to leap in on the passenger side. Eve stuck the key into the ignition. She looked at Tom. “You know that I love you, right?”
“Eve.”
“Do you?”
“Why do you always ask that?”
The engine started. Most men couldn’t handle being a passenger, Tom thought, but those same liars claimed they’d do anything for their wives. Eve turned to check behind the car and reversed out. “You’ve given me a new lease on life,” she said and turned the wheel to straighten out the car. “It all started with you.”
They determined their dates based on parking, and there was a garage on West 60th. After passing the attendant the keys, they strolled arm-in-arm on the sidewalk under short trees, and Tom pointed up at the skyscrapers. “Did you see that documentary about that guy who walked a tightrope between the Trade Center towers?”
Eve pressed her pointer finger to her lips, then shook her head.
“I liked it,” Tom said. “I always thought it would be neat to fly, rooftop to rooftop.”
Up ahead, a woman wore designer lipstick and a winter jacket; her son was swallowed up by his puffer coat. The child asked to be held; his mother said no.
“Have you ever imagined flying?” Tom asked.
“Imagined it?”
“Be fun, right?” Tom’s footsteps plodded gently on the concrete while her heels clicked. He waved at a stranger. “I’d hate to live far out in the country.”
“Is the country far?”
“You’d miss all the people.”
“Most people are people we’ve never met.”
“Sure, but we’d really miss them on a farm.”
“It would be quieter,” Eve said, which suggested to Tom why Asiate was her favorite restaurant. Located on the 35th floor of a hotel, it only seated ninety. When Tom and Eve stepped out of the elevator and arrived at the entrance, their usual waiter bowed.
“It’s under Eve,” Tom answered. The waiter led them past the circular tables decorated with white orchids, and in the far-right corner he pulled out a cushioned chair.
“Arigatou.” Eve slipped off her coat for him. The Asian gentlemen winked and folded the jacket over his arm as she sat. He bent a finger at Tom.
“Thank you.” Tom passed over his coat before sitting down himself. The waiter left and Tom looked around like he expected stares. Eve smiled.
“There’s nothing wrong with English.”
“No.” Tom chuckled. “I guess not.”
Eve propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm. She looked out the window over Central Park, ignoring clouds with shapes she could guess. “The skyline is lighting up.”
Tom unfolded his silverware from a napkin and looked. Below, the tallest tower was under-construction, surrounded by metal cranes and brick apartments. Central Park was impossible to miss, like the only patch a mother could find one night to fix a blanket her crying daughter couldn’t sleep without. Tom looked back at Eve: New York was a miniature on her pupils.
“Yes,” he said and noticed the waiter returning between the tables. Tom held up two fingers: “the usual.” The waiter nodded and turned back for the kitchen. Tom looked up at the sculpture of white branches hanging from the ceiling and recalled Eve’s comment from a previous date. “It does resemble an earthquake.”
She kept gazing out. “Sky-quake.”
“Right, sky-quake.”
“It starts with the sun breaking through the clouds, and then the world changes.”
From one end of the ceiling to the next, Tom’s eyes walked along a white branch, leaping over gaps like an explorer over ravines. “You really should write science fiction.”
“Fiction.” Eve judged the flavor of the word on her tongue. Tom’s eyes dropped back down to the table and noticed the wine — a bottle waiting for them. He popped off the cork, poured two glasses, and lifted one.
“To world changing,” he said. Like watercolors, when she turned to face him, the skyscrapers in Eve’s eyes transformed into Tom’s brown hair and limestone skin. She reached for a glass and clicked it with his.
“Incredible.” Tom tipped the wine into his mouth. “It feels like our marriage just started.”
“It’s been years.”
“We should take a walk after this.”
“I said that yesterday.”
Tom smiled. “Right.” His face blended back into skyscrapers and stars when Eve glanced through the window over the cars in Columbus Circle. Tourists called over pedestrians for advice.
“I hope everyone’s okay,” she said.
“Your parents?”
“Everyone,” Eve said, “with life and all.”
“It’s great with the right person.”
Eve turned her head, and the tiny city upon her eyes turned into Tom again. He reached across the table and rested his arm where she could squeeze his hand. Eve saw her eyes in the center of his gold wedding ring, returning her look. It was a gaze she could break.
Parking didn’t run out for another hour. Outside, approaching Columbus Circle, Eve wrapped her arm around Tom’s, their breaths departing as thin clouds which vanished before taking shape. Ahead, a stone angel leaned against the midpoint of a monument with eyes downcast upon a globe. Above her, on the top of a column, an explorer rested a hand on his hip. A breeze broke across Eve’s stand-collar coat.
“The earth is his,” she said, then looked at the lifeless angel surrounded by protestor signs demanding its removal.
“She’s holding it though,” Tom replied. Another puff escaped Eve’s mouth; she tugged on his arm.
“Tom.”
“Yes?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Anything.”
Eve motioned him across the road; they walked through the headlights idling at the stoplight into Central Park. The concrete path, which usually bustled with runners, was empty.
“I meant it,” Tom said, “you don’t have to be afraid.”
The slides in Heckscher Playground reflected moonlight; gray bridges connected three fortresses shaped like molehills. Tom remembered watching teams of elementary schoolers play capture the flag. Back then, with each bite of his sandwich, another child was crying about his scrapped knee. Tom’s instinct was to scoop up the little boy and hold him, but none of the children were his. Eve stopped and pointed up Umpire Rock, and Tom pulled away from the child in his mind.
“Really?” he said. “How many years has it been?”
Eve released his arm and led him up the rocks in her heels. At the top, they found a smooth clearing. Tom let his eyes rise above the surrounding tree line and walk between each rooftop.
“You said we should come here more often.” He reminisced.
Eve took a step away and faced him. The crescent moon hung overhead, the sounds of tires muffled and quieted by the branches and leaves.
“Tom,” she said, “can you tell me something?”
“My thoughts are yours.”
Eve brushed the black hair out of her eyes. The moonlight struggled to color New York, the streets and buildings always layered with electric oranges and yellows, but in the park, the blue in Eve’s eyes glistened silver like her skin. “Do you know what I’m about to say?”
“It’s why I’m here.”
Eve smiled, but her lips couldn’t bear the weight for long. She stepped toward Tom and wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her head.
“What’s wrong?”
“Will you understand?” she asked.
“Anything.”
“Anything?”
“You mean the world to me.”
Eve stepped free from his embrace and looked up into his eyes. “I know I don’t always do a good job expressing it,” she said, “but without you, I’d be someone else.”
Tom pulled Eve back into his embrace.
“It was all because of you,” she said, “everything.”
“I love you,” he said, and a knife thrust into his back.
Eve pushed Tom away.
Tom’s head fell to the side. A figure, a monster. There. Tom landed on his back and saw Eve leap out of her coat and heels. Tom closed his eyes. Screaming. Silence. His coat was dragged off. His shirt was unbuttoned. He shook and opened his eyes.
“I can fix this.” Eve used a knife to cut a satin strip off from her blood-stained dress. “I can fix this!”
Eve dropped the blade; it slid off Tom’s chest. She wrapped the strip around his body and covered the wound, but the strip was too short. The red puddle surrounding Tom inched out.
“Go,” he said. “Please.”
Eve dropped the satin and reached behind him to clog the wound. The blood leaked through her fingertips; the life drained out of the face filling her wet eyes. “I can fix this!”
Tom reached up and touched her neck.
His fingers fell away.
Eve pulled her red hands out from behind his back. His blood dripped over Eve’s wedding ring, the diamond he picked out because it was blue like his world — her eyes — inside which his eyes closed. “Help.” Eve looked around as the word tried to free itself again from Eve’s closing throat. Tom didn’t force his lips into a smile. “Help!”
Silence. The leaves and branches rustled over her voice. Though the Bookworm had changed himself into a normal person when he bent time and space, maybe she was still special. Though killing him might not change the world back to the way it had been, maybe if she killed the last superhero — maybe everything would be alright. Alive. Eve grabbed the knife. Maybe if she died, she’d wake up empowered, ready to throw off her wrinkled sheets and whirl into her school clothes with a big smile. And maybe Tom would wake up as if all this was just a dream, ready to fight her and make life worth fighting for — together. And they would live like that, fighting, living. Maybe she could still make a difference. Maybe she could still change the world.
Eve thrust the knife into her chest and broke her heart over Tom, like the sun splitting through clouds.
All he ever wanted was a life with her.
.
.
.
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