‘So what was it you were so desperate to show me?’ I ask, trying my hardest to push back a yawn.
Erica comes towards me, still not letting her feet touch the ground. She pulls off her mask and hairband so that I can see her face clearly, and I put them safely in the rucksack I’m carrying around that contains all her stuff. Her eyes are intense and excited, and the edges of her mouth tip upwards in a mischievous curl.
‘OK, so, you know how I heat up?’ she starts.
‘Yep …’
‘Well, it got me thinking about how far I could push that. I’m not talking about the fire or the flames, but just the heat.’
‘Right …’
‘So, OK, watch this!’
She reaches for a stick near my feet and hands it to me to hold for her. Then she rubs her right thumb against her middle and forefingers – just that slight friction is enough to conjure a flame. Erica plays with it for a bit, as if captivated by her own magic, working the flame so that it grows brighter and hotter. She reaches out her burning hand and sets fire to the stick. It’s only a small flame, but still, I’m not the superhuman one, so I hold it out from me at a safe distance.
‘Be careful, and let me know if you start to get too hot, OK?’ Erica warns as she hovers upwards and back to the far side of the tunnel. She holds out her hands towards the stick, towards me.
The strangest thing happens. I can feel a wave of heat flowing towards me, and then another, and another, steady as a heartbeat. The heat is pouring off Erica, and as she focuses, the flaming stick in my hands flares hotter and brighter.
‘Woah! That’s new!’ I exclaim, dropping the stick to the ground when it gets too hot for me to hold onto any more.
Erica brings her hands back down, turning off the pulse, and the flare dies down until the stick is just smouldering in the dirt. I stamp it out with my boot.
‘So it feels a little unfocused at the moment,’ Erica says, a little out of breath from the exertion.
‘Yeah, it was like a heat tsunami coming right at me! What do we call this? A heat wave?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s definitely cool, right? But it’s like I reach a certain distance, and my focus goes. I want it to be like a concentrated laser-heat-beam thing. Point, focus and BOOM! Once I train myself to get more specific I could do all sorts of things, like I could warm up your tea while you’re holding it, or I could totally fry what’s left of Mr Scott’s hair from the back of the classroom!’
‘That’s right, Flamegirl, think big!’ I chide. ‘But also, what about the more practical stuff? Like burning away ice from roads and pavements?’
‘Or overheating Lisa Broom’s car when she parks it in the teachers’ section instead of the sixth-form car park?’
‘Or burning away clouds during a rain storm?’
‘Or heating my uncle’s outdoor pool?’
‘Erica, this is awesome,’ I say, biting my tongue rather than pointing out that she’s thinking a little shallow, because I know that she’s only having fun. I think being trivial and funny about her powers is her way of not having to think about all the big and important stuff. I also suspect she does it to wind me up.
‘I knew you’d be impressed! Now let’s go home.’
I reach into the rucksack and pull out Erica’s coat, a light one that she doesn’t need for warmth, but more to cover up her costume as we walk back out of the park. As she gets herself back in order I wander towards the tunnel mouth, peering out into the suburban quiet. I still can’t shake the feeling that somebody is watching us. If there was anyone out in the field, they would have had a clear line of sight into the tunnel, which Erica has just lit up like a Christmas tree. I concentrate, trying to hear past the whistling breeze. Nothing. But … I suppose it could just be the urban foxes in the bushes. I mean, who would even know to follow us all the way out here?
‘Still hearing things?’ Erica asks me.
‘Not exactly. I just have this feeling.’
‘Stop stressing. We’re not being watched. Now let’s get you home, missy! Fancy a lift over the field?’
She comes up behind me and hooks me up under the arms, so that I’m dangling as she flies.
‘Erica!’ I yell. ‘Put me down!’
‘Nope! Not until you stop calling me that!’
‘But you’re the one that just said that there’s nobody here! And anyway, you’re not even technically in costume any more!’
‘You’ve got to get into the habit. Right now I’m Flamegirl! Get used to it!’
Despite all her capabilities, Erica doesn’t have super-strength. She heaves me upwards as she flies higher, painfully yanking my arms half out of their sockets. If she drops me now I’ll be nothing but a bobble-hatted splat on the grass.
‘Put me down! It hurts!’
‘Call me Flamegirl first.’
‘Seriously? Put me down, Flamegirl!’
‘Say please.’
‘PLEASE!’
She huffs as she lowers me, finally letting go just as my feet meet the ground. We’re nearly on the other side of the field, close to where it opens up to the playground and the tennis courts. We have to go through the park; although the main gates will be closed by now, there’s a gap in the fence that we’ve been using for years that comes out really close to Erica’s house. I roll my shoulders, adjusting the rucksack, and massage my arms as they ease back into their natural positions.
‘You’re so grumpy tonight,’ Erica moans. ‘It’s no fun.’
‘Well, I just don’t appreciate being armpitted without any warning, thank you very much.’
‘Please, you weren’t even two metres off the ground.’
‘How was I meant to know that? It’s dark!’
We walk in silence towards the park gates. I hate it when she goes into Excited-Child Mode. It’s as if she forgets that anyone else has feelings. I mean, of course I’m excited for her, discovering a new side to her powers. It’s amazing, fantastic even, but then she just doesn’t calm down about it. It’s like she gets an adrenaline-pumped energy high, a sudden need to do something big and daring, and sometimes (especially on cold October evenings when there is homework still outstanding) I’m just not up for playing.
By the time we reach the gap in the fence I’m feeling rotten, like I’ve ruined her birthday party. I turn towards her to say something, but can’t think of anything that would melt this frostiness.
Erica crawls through the gap first, then holds it back for me (she won’t fly over the fence in case she’s spotted by any passers-by). The whole time there’s still that sensation, like an itch between my shoulder blades, that we’re not alone. It’s not a pleasant feeling. I turn round one more time before I exit the park, expecting to see someone there. But there’s nobody. I catch Erica’s raised eyebrow as she waits for me to crawl through and I wonder if she’s in a mature enough place right now to notice if anything’s wrong or out of place. Probably not.
‘Jay has a bike like that,’ Erica comments, nodding her head over to where a motorbike is parked across the road.
I was hoping that we might have been able to get through this evening without a single Jay mention, but apparently not. We’re at the stage in her infatuation where everything reminds her of him: songs, films and now, apparently, random vehicles in the street.
‘He’ll text me soon, right?’ she asks me.
‘Of course he will.’ My voice is on autopilot. Frequent affirmations of Jay’s imagined intentions have become rather routine lately. ‘Come on, Flamegirl, let’s go home.’
I hate it when we argue. It’s not like we have huge bust-ups, but it’s times like these, when she’s in Excited-Child Mode and I can’t seem to suppress my Sensible Voice, that I think about why it’s getting harder and harder for us to click the way we used to. Maybe it’s just a part of growing up, but we seem to disagree more than we agree, and because she’s the one with the superpowers, I’m always the one who ends up backing down. She finds ways to make
it up to me, like when she spent a science lesson making me a bouquet of twisted-up melted biros (she claimed she used the Bunsen burner, but I know better), or when she burnt out a clump of Annabel Hopkin’s hair after she was mean to me. Erica went in with her fingers after saying that she thought Annabel’s hair was really pretty and wanted to feel how soft it was, and then just one quick-burn flash was enough for her to bring away a substantial lock. Erica suggested that she get new straighteners, and Annabel ran to the toilets in tears, after we both categorically denied that we could smell burning.
And yet it seems like it’s getting harder and harder to feel the fun.
When this whole thing started it felt like we were forming our own secret club, just like the kind we used to invent when we were back in primary school, complete with special codes and secret handshakes. Only then we were in Year Eight, nearly thirteen, and it had been a while since we had spent any real time together. I don’t like to dwell on it too much, but after we got to secondary school it seemed like I didn’t really matter to Erica any more. She found new friends, friends with fashion sense, who were interested in boys and hanging out at the shopping centre for absolutely no reason. I found my people too, but really they were just people to sit with in class and talk with at breaktime. When I saw her laughing with her new friends, I knew that what I had wasn’t the same.
Then all of a sudden we had a shared secret, and things were back to how I remembered them.
We had barely spoken in more than a year. One evening, she came round to my house. It was dark and raining. I remember the rain because it was sizzling and evaporating off Erica’s super-heated skin, frizzing her hair and creating a fuzzy aura around her. It was my mum who opened the door. She must have presumed that Erica had had another bustup with her mum (this wasn’t long after Erica’s dad had left, and she and Liza had started arguing a lot), so she didn’t ask any questions. Mum was oblivious to our growing distance in secondary school, so she just let Erica go straight up to my room.
When she got there, she slammed my door closed behind her, rocking my window pane. She froze, looking at me with her mouth just moving, as if she was trying to figure out what to say and losing the words before they could form. Her breathing was fast and ragged, and for a long moment I was frozen too, watching her with my pen in my hand (because obviously I was doing homework at the time).
Drops of moisture were being toasted away by the heat from her skin, and it soon became so humid in my room that I had to open my window, even though it was raining, for some fresh air.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
Right there, away from the social rules of secondary school, we were like sisters again. There was no need for formalities, no time for me to get excited by the fact that she had come to me in her time of need and not one of her new, silly schoolfriends. In my room we were as we’d always been.
‘Something’s happening to me,’ Erica whimpered. ‘I don’t understand it.’
I stared at her. Something was definitely happening, and I wanted to reassure her in my most sensible voice that it was just a part of growing up, and that maybe puberty was just taking a particularly horrible toll. But the frightened glisten in her eyes told me that whatever was going on involved far more than temperamental hormones.
‘Do you need me to come with you to the hospital?’ I asked, and suddenly felt very stupid for asking. Why would she be here with me if the hospital was even an option?
‘Look!’ Erica held out her palm, and the steam rose from her fingertips like tiny ghosts. ‘I’m hot. I’m hot all over, and it’s like this burning is happening really deep inside and I don’t know how to make it stop!’
‘When did it start?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. It’s been going on a while, but it’s getting worse. I mean, I’ve heard about old ladies getting hot flushes and stuff and at first I just thought it was like that. I even booked a doctor’s appointment, but that’s another week and a half away. And anyway, it’s different now. I know it’s not a hot flush. I’m sure of it. It’s like my whole body is actually making the heat, not just feeling hot. What’s happening to me?’
I stepped towards her, cautious as though I was approaching a skittish animal, and reached out and took hold of one of her hands. It was boiling, so hot that I couldn’t even keep hold of it for more than a few moments. I thought about getting the thermometer from the bathroom, but that might make Erica feel like she was a science experiment or something. Besides, it would only confirm what was already abundantly clear: Erica was really, really hot right now.
‘See?’ Erica cried, then hushed herself, probably scared that my mum would come in. ‘What’s going on? What is this?’
We needed to cool her down right away. I ran a bath, switching the cold tap all the way up. I didn’t even touch the hot tap. Then I ran downstairs, told my mum that Erica was staying the night and that her mum had said that it was OK (I knew that my mum wouldn’t check – she preferred to avoid contact with Liza as much as possible), then snuck into the kitchen and grabbed all the bags of frozen veg. I figured, as long as the bags weren’t open, I could sneak them back in the freezer again afterwards.
Erica was waiting in the bathroom when I got back upstairs, every inch of her flaming red. Forgetting our teenage awkwardness in the face of an obvious emergency, I took her clothes from her as she finished getting undressed and then held her hand as she got into the bath. She yelped as she stepped in, and as she settled I sat myself back against the bathroom door in case my parents decided that they wanted to come in (the lock had been broken for years. Still is, in fact). I told Erica to breathe as she relaxed into the cold water. I tried to think of something else, anything else, that I could do. At this point neither of us had any real clue about what was actually going on. I wondered whether I should call an ambulance.
The icy-cold water, along with the floating bags of frozen vegetables, seemed to be calming her. Her skin was returning to its usual Erica-colour and I decided that an ambulance wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe this was all a bizarre one-off.
‘There have been dreams as well,’ Erica said. ‘Dreams about heat and fire and burning buildings. I’m running through the buildings, or sometimes flying. In fact, a lot of flying. Flying through corridors, flying up staircases, flying down the middle bit in stairwells, with flames all around me. It’s like, every night.’
‘Are you particularly stressed out about anything right now?’ I remember instantly biting my tongue after I asked that, remembering her parents’ split, which had happened only the summer before.
‘Loads of kids go through divorce. It’s not a big deal,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I mean, my mum and I aren’t getting along right now, but so what? Doesn’t mean that I should be heating up. But there is other stuff too. There’s this guy, Duncan, but Heather also likes him, and she’s throwing this party next weekend and they’re blatantly going to get together. He doesn’t even notice me.’
‘Still doesn’t sound like anything more than usual-person stress.’ Usual-Erica stress, I added mentally.
We chatted for about an hour as she cooled down in my bath. To be honest, she did most of the talking. I found out so much about her friends and all their ways and quirks, which was cool, because they were pretty much the celebrities of our school and I was never going to hear this stuff from anybody else. She never asked me about my friends, but I wouldn’t have had much to tell. Listening to Erica rattle on, and then go off on bizarre tangents about music and fashion, was surprisingly fun – it was as if a world that had been silent for ages suddenly had all this colourful noise.
Eventually, when we figured that she had cooled down enough, Erica got out of the bath. Then she took a look in my mirror. ‘Oh my God – my hair!’
Instead of hair, she pretty much had a halo of blonde frizz. I couldn’t help it, I laughed, and after the initial horror, Erica started laughing too. I let her lie on my bed in my fluffiest and therefore most comfortable
dressing gown while I took what would soon become my usual position at my desk.
‘Do you remember how we first became friends?’ Erica asked me. She wanted to tell the story. She loves it like it’s our very own creation myth.
It had been years since I last heard it. We were actually born just days apart – I was early, she was late – but we were both due on the same day, 4 May. If the universe had gone to plan, our mothers would have met in the maternity ward and we would have been friends since the moment we were born. As it happens, we ended up meeting at nursery, and were inseparable from the outset.
‘We should have been twin sisters,’ Erica said wistfully, as if recalling the Happily Ever After of a fairy tale.
It wasn’t long after that we figured out what was really going on. Erica kept having the ‘flushes’, but every time I suggested going to the doctor she would refuse. Thank goodness for her embarrassment, because if she had presented to a doctor and they had realised what was happening before we did, then things would have turned out a lot differently. I don’t suppose doctor-patient confidentiality extends to superpowers. And then there’s always the crazy fear that some person with bad intentions could discover you before the good guys do, or that your secret identity could get exposed too soon. It’s perfectly fine for the really well-known superheroes to reveal their true identities. All their sponsorship means they can afford the security for their friends and family. But for a newbie it can be a career-ending catastrophe, as well as dangerous for the superhero and the people around them. But we didn’t have everything figured out back then. Maybe I had an inkling, more like a wild hope, and maybe Erica did too, but we never spoke about it.
Erica would come over to my house nearly every day after school. I asked if her schoolfriends minded, and she said that she was having a massive argument with Heather anyway and couldn’t be bothered to hang out with them at the moment. Inside I was glowing. I suspected it wasn’t just because of Heather that Erica was choosing me. She could trust me in a way that she couldn’t trust them. We were like sisters.
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