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September is still hot. September is a return to school despite the heat, and El Paso teenagers return to their air-conditioned high schools with sweat still beading on their weary foreheads.

Summer is not quite over. Jaime Reyes is seventeen. Another school year begins.

The first day is uneventful. He feels like he's sleeping through most of it anyway, half-awake, only stirring himself to write down what he'll need for the school year (a binder, a notebook, black and blue pens) and what his first night homework is. An essay about his summer vacation experience and how it affected him positively? Sure. He can do that.

This summer, I beat up some supervillains, met some superheroes, made out with my hot sorceress girlfriend and ate a lot of junk food. I learned that supervillains are really kind of stupid a lot of the time and that having a girlfriend who's a sorceress magician thing is the best thing ever. Oh, and that eating too many burgers at once can make you hurl in your interplanetary armor.

He knows he'll just end up writing something about how mowing the lawn over the summer taught him diligence. The irony is not lost on him.

If his teacher really wants to learn about diligence, she should talk to the Peacemaker.

**

When he was younger, Jaime wanted to be Superman, like every other kid on his block. Everyone used to fight over who got to be Superman when they played superheroes. Jaime usually hadn't won. Apparently being puny meant making playing Superman impossible.

Sometimes Jaime doesn't remember that he's met Superman until he reads the news or sees something about him on television. And then the awe seeps all over him again, an impossible circumstance turned real. Real is relative now, and he knows it.

**

"If I become an evil killing machine?" He says to Brenda and Paco at lunch, fiddling with the brown paper bag his mother gave him. "I want you to kill me."

"First off, that's not going to happen." Brenda's doing the thing where she's counting off on her fingers to tell him very specifically the number of reasons that he's completely wrong. "Second off, why would we want to kill you?"

"Because I'd be evil."

"As much as this pains me to say, hombre, Brenda's right," Paco says, sipping his slurpie lazily, his feet on the table that they've claimed as their own this first day. "I don't really think Mr. Dentist is going to turn into Mr. Evil Killing Machine.

"Guys. I'm serious." He runs a hand through his hair. "I—"

"—Am overstressed and loco."

"Paco!"

"Jaime," Brenda says, quietly, looking at him from across the table with eyes more adult and serious than they should be, "I think you've proven that evil, whatever the Scarab is, is not what you are. Why should we be worried?"

Because I know what's in my head and you don't, he wants to say, but he lets it go.

**

It shouldn't surprise him that Traci understands so well, he guesses.

She's gotten better at the teleportation thing, although not so much with the informing him about when she's going to be doing the teleportation thing. When he gets home from school, she's standing outside in his backyard, waving at him through the window and he almost has a heart attack.

"You didn't tell me you were coming," he says, leaning in the doorway, crossing his arms, trying to look mad. It fails, and she knows it, and he knows it.

"You weren't around for me to tell," she teases, and suddenly she's in his arms and he holds her close, trying to figure out how the hell he got so lucky.

They sit in the backyard together on the patio and talk for an hour. She's doing things like discovering ancient treasures and battling demons and he's doing things like saving people from giant super villainesses.

She's the best girlfriend he's ever had, and she's a world-class magician, and she likes rock music and has a pet iguana and can speak little pieces of Spanish that he's taught her (so far loco and hombre being the only ones she can remember and pronounce properly).

And she understands him.

And she likes him.

There's something to be said for kisses under the moonlight, and this he learned well this summer.

**

Jaime loves flying.

It's not, like, you know, one of those things he was just born knowing how to do, so it's still novel: he can't ever imagine it being not novel. He used to have those dreams as a little kid about flying like every other little boy did. His parents and his abuela gave him rocket ships and airplane posters. His bedroom walls still have tiny glow in the dark stars stuck on them from years far gone.

The Scarab chatters in his head like a friend when he flies, sounding like his mother, telling him that he's going to get cold so high up in the atmosphere. There is nothing so important for him as this, this feeling of freedom. El Paso glows in the night, winking at him, lights blinking in and out. The Huecos lounge comfortably in the distance and the Scarab informing him of their exact altitude.

This is his city.

The thought is enough to make his shoulders stiffen and his heart swell.

"Shut up," he says to the Scarab, closing his metal-covered eyelids and feeling the wings at his back adjust to hovering.

And he just lets his mind go quiet.

And there's silence, blissful silence: nothing but the wind blowing in his ears. Nothing but himself. For a minute he's able to forget that he is anything but Jaime Reyes, Jaime Reyes who is Paco and Brenda's friend, Jaime Reyes the son, Jaime Reyes the normal. Besides from floating above his hometown at an altitude of 20,000 feet, Jaime Reyes is normal, just for this second.

He misses normal.

Normal was safe. Normal was his parents and his sister and his father's shop and Paco and Brenda bickering and school and homework and video games and movies. Normal was… well, normal. Safe. No Green Lanterns. No aliens. No alien technology in his skin, in his brain, in his cells. Safe.

Flying, flying is cool, and that's true: he opens his eyes and looks at his hands, locked up in the armor, and thinks, Well, it could be worse. I could have a really bad outfit. With tights.

He's still got his friends, and his girlfriend, and his family. Things are crazier, definitely more paranormal, but then again, things could be worse.

He flies home with the wind at his back.

On the nights that he knows he's going to get more than five hours of sleep, he stares at the moon from outside his window and longs for that air, that fills his lungs even through the armor and touches every single limb of his body.

Sometimes he likes to prove to himself that his heart is still beating.

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