Superhero Initiative Programme

I

prompt one : write a scene in which a character meets someone with a secret identity

Cora doesn’t really have to be baking and delivering cookies to her new across-the-road-and-down-the-street-six-houses neighbours. In fact, she doesn’t really want to. But her mum asked her to, and seeing as her mum is too preoccupied with her three-month-old younger sister, Cora’s kind of happy just to take things off of her plate.

Cora’s mum is that type of mum. The kind who bakes cookies for new neighbours and ferries her brothers to and from football practice and lets all the neighbourhood kids water fight through their house. But since Alex arrived, it’s kind of been hard for her to be that mum. So now it’s kind of Cora’s job to do those things. Besides, it does go along with her whole superhero-initiative programme.

Generally when Cora says stuff like that, people roll their eyes. People in this case being her best friends Ruth and Daniel, her younger brothers, her parents, that guy on the cashier desk in Morrison’s…the list goes on.

But she refuses to be deterred. Which is why she is completely fine with baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies (well technically Betty Crocker baked them, but what her new neighbours don’t know won’t kill them – unlike Cora’s cooking) and delivering them to the O’Connor’s house.

Until the door opens and she discovers the O’Connor’s have a hot teenage son.

“Hello?” The boy says, looking her up and down the way that girls in teen movies do. Cora gulps.

“Hi,” She finally squeaks. She holds out the basket. “Betty Crocker made cookies,”

“Who?” The boy asks, his eyes widening fractionally. Cora kicks herself – only mentally though, of course. She doesn’t want to look like even more of an idiot in front of this impossibly gorgeous boy with his hopelessly blue eyes and messy blonde hair and – wait, what was she talking about again?

“She’s uh – my aunt,” Cora manages, and the boy smiles.

“Well, thanks,” He takes the basket from her and sticks it on the radiator cover next to him, before turning back to fix his eyes on her. Cora kind of wished he wouldn’t do that: she’s not wearing an exceptional amount of make-up, the most she can say about her hair is that it’s brushed, and she’s wearing a ratty old flannel shirt that she’s pretty sure has chocolate stains on. Quick Cora, think of something to say that’s not stupid.

“Uh, I’m Cora. Short for Coraline,” She says awkwardly. The boy nods.

“I’m- I’m Asher,” The boy replies, and she can’t help but notice the way he hesitates before he says his name.  “Nice to meet you,”

“You too,” She says, and then the conversation dies a slow and uncomfortable death. “So, what brings you to Warrshire?”

“Uh, my dad got a new job,” Asher says, and then his eyes zero in on her t-shirt she’s wearing under the checks and widen comically. “Is that Mystique?”

“You like X-Men?” Cora asks, her interest piquing.

“Along with half of the world,” He grins.

“You should try convincing my friends of that,” Cora replies with a laugh, thinking of Ruth and Daniel and their universal all-round aversion to action films in general: especially superhero films.

“But they’re not realistic,” They would always say, to which Cora would roll her eyes and say: “That’s the point.”

“You should try convincing my brother of that,” Asher joked in reply, and immediately Cora’s head started spinning. “Hold up, I think I can hear him in the kitchen – hey, get over here, it’s one of our neighbours,”