“Enjoy the parade?” Every year, the same thing. Balloons going up and up like they couldn’t wait to leave town and pudding-faced cloggers on pickup trucks and on the curbs teenage girls holding signs. We Love You. I Love You More. I Want To Have Your Super Baby. Teenage girls not wearing bras. Poor little sluts. The big lump never even noticed and too bad for them if he did. She could tell them stories.

He said, “Yeah. It was great. Best parade ever.”

Anyone else would’ve thought he was being one hundred percent sincere. Nobody else knew him like she did. He looked like a sweetheart, but even when he tried to be gentle, he left bruises.

She said, “I liked when they read all the poetry. Big bouncy guy / way up in the lonely sky.”

“Yeah. So whose idea was that?”

She said, “The Daily Catastrophe sponsored it. Mrs. Dooley over at the high school got all her students to write the poems. I saved a copy of the paper. Figured you’d want it for your scrapbook.”

“That’s the best part about saving the world. The poetry. That’s why I do it.” He was throwing rocks at an owl that was hanging out on a tree branch for some reason. It was probably sick. Owls didn’t usually do that. A rock knocked off some leaves. Blam! Took off some bark. Pow! The owl just sat there.

She said, “Don’t be a jerk.”

“Sorry.”

She said, “You look tired.”

“Yeah.”

“Still not sleeping great?”

“Not great.”

“Little Red Riding Hood.”

“No way.” His tone was dismissive. As if, Bunnatine, you dumb bunny. “Sure, she’s got a costume, but she gets eaten. She doesn’t have any superpowers. Baked goods don’t count.”

“Sleeping Beauty?” She thought of a girl in a moldy old tower, asleep for a hundred years. Ants crawling over her. Mice. Some guy’s lips. That girl must have had the world’s worst morning breath. Amazing to think that someone would kiss her. And kissing people when they’re asleep? She didn’t approve. “Or does she not count, because some guy had to come along and save her?”

He had a faraway look in his eyes. As if he were thinking of someone, some girl he’d watched sleeping. She knew he slept around. Grateful women saved from evildoers or obnoxious blind dates. Models and movie stars and transit workers and trapeze artists, too, probably. She read about it in the tabloids. Or maybe he was thinking about being able to sleep in for a hundred years. Even when they were kids, he’d always been too jumpy to sleep through the night. Always coming over to her house and throwing rocks at the window. His face at her window. Wake up, Bunnatine. Wake up. Let’s go fight crime.