He said, “Her superpower is the ability to sleep through anything. Origin story: she tragically pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. What’s with the fairy tales and kids’ books, Bunnatine? Rapunzel’s got lots of hair that she can turn into a hairy ladder. Not so hot. Who else? The girl in Rumpelstiltskin. She spins straw into gold.”

She missed these conversations when he wasn’t around. Nobody else in town talked like this. The mutants were sweet, but they were more into music. They didn’t talk much. It wasn’t like talking with him. He always had a comeback, a wisecrack, a double entendre, some cheesy sleazy pickup line that cracked her up, that she fell for every time. It was probably all that witty banter during the big fights. She’d probably get confused. Banter when she was supposed to POW! POW! when she was meant to banter.

She said, “You’ve got it backward. Rumpelstiltskin spins the straw into gold. She just uses the poor freak and then she hires somebody to go spy on him to find out his name.”

“Cool.”

She said, “No, it’s not cool. She cheats.”

“So what? Was she supposed to give up her kid to some little guy who spins gold?”

“Why not? I mean, she probably wasn’t the world’s best parent or anything. Her kid didn’t grow up to be anyone special. There aren’t any fairy tales about that kid.”

“Your mom.”

She said, “What?”

“Your mom! C’mon, Bunnatine. She was a superhero.”

“My mom? Ha ha.”

He said, “I’m not joking. I’ve been thinking about this for a few years. Being a waitress? Just her disguise.”

She made a face and then unmade it. It was what she’d always thought: he’d had a crush on her mom. “So what’s her superpower?”

He gnawed on a fingernail with those big square teeth. “I don’t know. I don’t know her secret identity. It’s secret. So you don’t pry. It’s bad form, even if you’re archenemies. But I was at the restaurant once when we were in high school and she was carrying eight plates at once. One was a bowl of soup, I think. Three on each arm, one between her teeth, and one on top of her head. Because somebody at the restaurant bet her she couldn’t.”

“Yeah, I remember that. She dropped everything. And she chipped a tooth.”

“Only because that fuckhead Robert Potter tripped her,” he pointed out.

“It was an accident.”