This is an excerpt from Cristina Fernandez's novel, How to Date a Superhero (And Not Die Trying).
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Sophomore Spring, Week One
M
T Cell Bio Lab Safety Quiz
W BioChem Syllabus Quiz; Orgo 2 Syllabus Quiz
Th BioChem Lab Safety Quiz
F Physics Syllabus Quiz
Astrid has a superpower.
Nothing exciting, not caused in any usual way by lab accident or genetic mutation, but for as long as she can remember she's had a perfect sense of time.
She knows it's exactly 5:34 in the afternoon when she sits down at her desk and begins to work on the master schedule for her semester.
She doesn't have any fantastical, magic powers that let her play with reality like an Etch A Sketch like the heroes she sees in the skies on a weekly basis, but she has her schedules. Big schedules and small schedules, rough outlines for the next five years framed above her desk, and meticulous to-the-minute plans for her evening scribbled on Post-it notes. She has sprawling flow charts and stacks of bullet journals, and a carefully maintained Google calendar synced to computer, phone, tablet, watch. An endless detailing of her reality in spreadsheets and lists.
For a moment, she takes it all in: her small planner directly in front of her, the thin stack of the four syllabi she's picked up so far this week, the colored markers at her right hand, colored pencils behind them, and highlighters behind them. At her left, the cup of cart coffee Max had grabbed for her slowly cools. In front of this sea of syllabi and schedules, her computer open, her sleep tracker on her phone, her five-year plan in the corner, her ten-year plan behind it, she feels completely at ease, on top of the world, untouchably powerful.
It's 5:36 when she takes a deep breath and dives in.
She can't fly like Captain Jericho or even jump really high like Kid Comet, but she can take this leap, feel like she's soaring just a little as she flips open to a fresh page in a new journal.
It's not superspeed, but she can know in an instant that Sunday morning has never been a productive time, so she should get her Bio Chem homework done Saturday night between reading for Orgo 2 and grabbing dinner with her roommate, David.
She blocks in classes first in thick Sharpie highlighter lines, makes little dotted lines on either side of them for her walking times. Office hours in colored pencils, club meetings in thin markers, then volunteer hours at the hospital, her commute to and from. Her English class has mostly small and thin books, easy to commute with. She draws a careful pink line along the green commute. She uses a yellow pencil to sketch out hours for pre-labs.
Her eyes trace over the page and this is where her powers thrum beneath her skin, as she feels it out with her eyes, poking around until she can find that one little gap of time where her Orgo 2 homework can slip right in. Her fingers fid-de with the orange highlighter, letting it thrum in the air like a plucked violin string, until the marker itself can find its place on the page.
Monday looks good as is, feels right. Tuesday is packed tightly, barely room to budge or shift without knocking things over. Wednesday looks complete, but . . . Wednesday nights, technically early Thursdays . . .
She smiles and lets the highlighter skate over the page.
"You're so fucking weird," David says from where he's sprawled across his bed, and through some contortion of his arm he manages to throw a pillow at the back of her head.
She bats it away wildly; it nearly takes out the coffee cup before flopping to the floor. Max, where he's sitting on her bed, laptop in his lap, hides his laugh behind his hand.
"I think it's cute," he says, which he is required to think as her boyfriend. She blushes at it anyway, busies herself with tossing the pillow back to David, who mimes gagging at their flirting.
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Reprinted with permission from Katherine Tegen Books. You can learn more about Cristina and her writing here.