“You did? What—what did you say?”
“I told them you were my friend, and that I wanted to tell you the truth about me. That I wanted to tell you what I’ve been keeping secret, who I am in real life.”
“And?” I was breathless.
“And they said that I can’t. That it’s too dangerous.”
He sighed and turned to me. His eyes were a striking blue. I wanted, more than ever, to know if that was their actual color.
“I knew they’d say no, but I wanted to try. I owed it to you to make sure. I want to tell you everything . . . I needed them to remind me why I can’t. Not yet.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, knowing I wasn’t doing a good job of hiding my disappointment.
“But, Lois, I promise you that someday I will. You’ll be the first person I tell.”
I kicked at the ground with my bare foot, and then started to move forward again. “It seems like you’re making an awful lot of assumptions.”
He caught up with me. “You mean that you’ll still be here, waiting to find out. I shouldn’t assume that. But . . . we are friends, aren’t we, Lois?”
“Yes, we are.” I faced him again. “I meant you’re assuming I won’t figure your secret out on my own first.”
He smiled at me. “Want to go help your friends rebuild?”
“Sure,” I said, and offered him my hand. He took it.
And we walked into the violently beautiful sunset together.
Gwenda Bond is the author of the young adult novels Girl on a Wire, Blackwood, and The Woken Gods. She has also written for Publishers Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and just might have been inspired to get a journalism degree by her childhood love of Lois Lane. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie.
Visit her online at gwendabond.com or @gwenda on Twitter.