How to Date a Superhero

by Cristina Fernandez

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance; YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

A romantic coming-of-age story about growing up, falling in love, and surviving life—all set in the world of superheroes—from debut author Cristina Fernandez, proving that you don’t need a superpower to be the hero of your own origin story, perfect for fans of The Rest of Us Just Live Here and Renegades.

Falling for a superhero is dangerous. You have to trust that they’ll catch you.

Astrid isn’t a superhero, not like the ones she sees on the news, but she has something she thinks of as a small superpower: She has a perfect sense of time. And she’s not going to waste a single second.

Her plan for college is clear—friends, classes, and extra-curriculars all carefully selected to get her into medical school.

Until Max Martin, a nerdy boy from high school, crashes back into her life. Things with Max were never simple, and he doesn’t keep to her schedule. He disappears in the middle of dates and cancels last-minute with stupid excuses.

When a supervillain breaks into her bedroom one night, Astrid has to face the facts: Her boyfriend, Max Martin, is a superhero. Double-majoring as a pre-med was hard, but now Astrid will have to balance a double-life. This wasn’t part of her plan.

Release date: August 2, 2022

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 416

Sample

Sophomore Spring

WEEK ONE

M

T   Cell Bio Lab Safety Quiz

W   BioChem Syllabus Quiz; Orgo 2 Syllabus Quiz

Th   BioChem Lab Safety Quiz

F   Physics Syllabus Quiz

ASTRID HAS A SUPERPOWER.

Nothing exciting, not caused in any usual way by lab accident or genetic mutation, but for as long as she can remember she’s had a perfect sense of time.

She knows it’s exactly 5:34 in the afternoon when she sits down at her desk and begins to work on the master schedule for her semester.

She doesn’t have any fantastical, magic powers that let her play with reality like an Etch A Sketch like the heroes she sees in the skies on a weekly basis, but she has her schedules. Big schedules and small schedules, rough outlines for the next five years framed above her desk, and meticulous to-the-minute plans for her evening scribbled on Post-it notes. She has sprawling flow charts and stacks of bullet journals, and a carefully maintained Google calendar synced to computer, phone, tablet, watch. An endless detailing of her reality in spreadsheets and lists.

For a moment, she takes it all in: her small planner directly in front of her, the thin stack of the four syllabi she’s picked up so far this week, the colored markers at her right hand, colored pencils behind them, and highlighters behind them. At her left, the cup of cart coffee Max had grabbed for her slowly cools. In front of this sea of syllabi and schedules, her computer open, her sleep tracker on her phone, her five-year plan in the corner, her ten-year plan behind it, she feels completely at ease, on top of the world, untouchably powerful.

It’s 5:36 when she takes a deep breath and dives in.

She can’t fly like Captain Jericho or even jump really high like Kid Comet, but she can take this leap, feel like she’s soaring just a little as she flips open to a fresh page in a new journal. It’s not superspeed, but she can know in an instant that Sunday morning has never 

been a productive time, so she should get her BioChem homework done Saturday night between reading for Orgo 2 and grabbing dinner with her roommate, David.

She blocks in classes first in thick Sharpie highlighter lines, makes little dotted lines on either side of them for her walking times. Office hours in colored pencils, club meetings in thin markers, then volunteer hours at the hospital, her commute to and from. Her English class has mostly small and thin books, easy to commute with. She draws a careful pink line along the green commute. She uses a yellow pencil to sketch out hours for pre-labs.

Her eyes trace over the page and this is where her powers thrum beneath her skin, as she feels it out with her eyes, poking around until she can find that one little gap of time where her Orgo 2 homework can slip right in. Her fingers fiddle with the orange highlighter, letting it thrum in the air like a plucked violin string, until the marker itself can find its place on the page.

Monday looks good as is, feels right. Tuesday is packed tightly, barely room to budge or shift without knocking things over. Wednesday looks complete, but . . . Wednesday nights, technically early Thursdays . . .

She smiles and lets the highlighter skate over the page.

“You’re so fucking weird,” David says from where he’s sprawled across his bed, and through some contortion of his arm he manages to throw a pillow at the back of her head.

She bats it away wildly; it nearly takes out the coffee cup before flopping to the floor. Max, where he’s sitting on her bed, laptop in his lap, hides his laugh behind his hand.

“I think it’s cute,” he says, which he is required to think as her boyfriend. She blushes at it anyway, busies herself with tossing the pillow back to David—who mimes gagging at their flirting.

“What are we doing for dinner?” she asks, mostly Max, and mostly for show because it’s Tuesday and approaching 6:00, which is on her schedule in a neat little box: dinner with Max and David at the nicer dining hall across campus.

“Uh, nothing,” David says, wiggling his phone in the air. “There’s some super bullshit going on right now by 125th. The dining halls closed early.”

Astrid lets out a deep groan and drops her head to the desktop, cushioned by her thick planner. If only her superpower could predict the real superheroes, the way their nonsense always seemed to hate her specifically. If they wrecked another precariously scheduled Monday . . .

“What, uh . . . what kind of super bullshit?” Max asks.

“Some giant blue beam of light,” David says. “Twitter thinks it might be aliens, but Tumblr is saying it’s an alternate dimension thing.”

She really hopes it’s an alternate dimension thing. Those usually involve weird time shenanigans that put things back exactly as they were, which is a lot more schedule-friendly than the usual alien fare.

“Whatever,” Astrid says, sitting up and closing her planner. She sets it on top of her textbook stack. “We can just have a ramen night.”

David

pumps his fist, tossing the book he’d been “reading” messily to the windowsill and hopping off his bed. “Why do we ever eat anything but ramen?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

“I should probably get going,” Max says, slipping his laptop shut. Astrid frowns. If he leaves now, she’ll have to find another night for them to have dinner this week, since they try to get in at least three, but she’s already booked for every night except tonight and . . .

She really doesn’t want him to leave.

“I mean,” he continues, “if they’re already shutting down the dining halls, they’re probably going to do the dorms next.”

“You can stay the night,” she says quickly. David shoots her a look. His ramen is already in the microwave, even though she didn’t see or hear him get water for it from the bathroom.

“I don’t have pajamas,” Max says.

“You can borrow mine,” Astrid offers. It’s grasping at straws, but worth a shot.

“Yeah, if you’re into ratty sweatpants and band camp T-shirts,” David says.

“Science camp,” she corrects.

Max is already standing by her desk, backpack over both of his shoulders. “As much as I’d love to, I should really head back.” He presses a kiss to her forehead. “Breakfast tomorrow?”

“I have physics at nine,” she says. “So, if you can be up that early.”

He presses a hand to his chest, right over his heart. “For you? Absolutely.”

“He’s not even crossing his fingers behind his back,” David adds helpfully. The microwave beeps and Max heads out, the door swinging shut soundly behind him.

Astrid sighs and leans back into her seat.

“C’mon, nerd,” David says. “Ramen.”

The schedule is already outdated by 7:39 Wednesday night when the email comes in.

She’s in Max’s room, and Max is swinging his legs back and forth off the side of his bed. It makes her think of the first time she let him sit on the twin in her freshman dorm, hands folded neatly in his lap, back stick straight while her heart fluttered like a nervous bird and her fingertips tingled because the sight of him there on her bed was too much, too intimate, too right.

She’s just as nervous now, but not because it’s Max and a bed. She’s used to Max and beds, currently in a very PG-13 way (even if they’ve slowly been testing the limits of the rating). She sits on the edge of his desk chair and clicks on the email.

Max leans forward, still maintaining some space, resolutely not peeking over her shoulder as she opens it.

“I got the interview,” she breathes. She closes her eyes and lets herself feel the victory in every molecule of her body.

“I told you,” Max says, his head falling back against the wall with a solid thump. “I told you. Nothing to worry about because you are a genius and amazing and any lab on this campus

 would be lucky to have you.”

She opens her eyes, smiles without thinking. It feels light and right—she feels light and right—like a kite on a breeze. She shuts her laptop and shoves it away from the edge of his desk.

“Okay, I can take fifteen minutes,” she says, standing and practically floating over to the bed.

“Really?” he says, eyes widening. She nods and his cheeks go pink.

Her heart thumps, her hands reach for his knees without thinking. He’s so beautiful and it makes the room brighter, the world smaller and simpler and breathtakingly whole. Looking at him feels like lying out in the sun on a carefully scheduled day off and basking.

He twists, facing her when she tries and fails to leap up onto his goddamn lofted bed. His nose wrinkles and she wants to die.

Instead, she brushes her thumb along the line of his jaw, pulse dancing painfully when his inhale jerks, when his eyes lock onto hers. There’s a little bruise beneath his chin. And he can make fun of her for failing to get onto his bed all he wants, but she’s not the one who fell down a staircase two days ago. It’s about the only mark left, which she chalks it up to letting him use her vitamin K cream.

“I’m dating the smartest person on this campus,” he whispers, leaning forward, resting his forehead against hers. His hair tickles her skin and her whole body thrums with nerves, like she’s holding a live wire and it might kill her but God, she can’t imagine letting go.

I’m dating the most beautiful person on this campus, the most heartachingly breathtaking person maybe in the entire world.

She doesn’t say as much because it wouldn’t feel real if she said it, it would just feel like some easily parroted line, to go along with his.

She kisses him instead, feeling triumphant, untethered in a storm, unbelievably breathless.

“Wow,” Max says against her lips. Her heart is going to explode. She’s going to die before the semester even really begins, halfway standing-sitting on his bed. His hand tangles itself in the hair at the back of her neck.

“I think we’re getting better at this,” she offers in agreement.

He laughs, eyes crinkling, chest shaking. In a move almost too incomprehensibly smooth, his arm wraps around her waist and he lifts her right up onto the bed.

She pushes him down to the mattress, straddling his lower waist at a careful position that is still certainly PG-13, but the kind of PG-13 that’s weird to watch with your parents.

She likes being on top. This surprises no one.

His hands run along her back and he tugs her down gently, craning his neck up to kiss her again and again and again. Astrid can feel the countdown of those twelve remaining minutes, but goddamnit, they’re going to make those twelve minutes count. The hand she has against his chest shakes a little—but it’s not the bad sort of overwhelming everything else is.

Because

everything else is. She really has to get back to her physics pre-lab readings. And she should add some extra time into tonight’s plans to put the interview in this week’s schedule, which is a terrifying thirty-nine hours away. Not to mention some hours for practice questions and re-researching everything Dr. Vaughn has ever done in between then and now, looking for spaces in her schedule to potentially fit ten to twelve lab hours a week in her schedule, if she somehow manages to get the position.

But she can spare a little more time for this. For Max. For another eleven minutes.

It’s 3:04 on Thursday and she’s back at her desk, a little sweaty from walking in her thick winter coat from her first Orgo 2 section.

It’s week one work. Recaps and setting baselines and warming up. She can do these kinds of chemistry problems in her sleep. She can eat them for breakfast.

David stumbles his way into the dorm room, big, clunky headphones blasting eighties rock so loud she can hear it from her desk. She rolls her eyes at the sight of him, toeing his shoes off and banging his head around.

“It’s freaking freezing out there,” he announces, yanking his hoodie off over his head.

She knows he thinks he’s the coolest thing since sliced bread, since rock ’n’ roll, since Ferris Bueller.

“What?” he asks loudly, when he’s finally standing and looking back at her. She rolls her eyes again because he is that cool. He came in hot this semester, back from vacationing over winter break with his warm brown skin glowing like he’d captured some of the tropical sun deep inside.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asks. She’s perfected the exact intonation on the question, so she doesn’t sound like her mother. Extra emphasis on the where and you.

“Out,” David says, throwing himself down across his bed, spread eagle.

“I haven’t seen you in like two days, dude,” she says, spinning her chair around.

“Really?” He frowns, pulls his wrist up like there’s a watch there. There isn’t. “Hmm. Guess so. How you been, nerd?”

She kicks her feet up onto the foot of her bed.

“Fine,” she says.

“Ah,” David says, snapping his fingers at her. “Syllabus week. You’re having the time of your life, aren’t you? Getting all horny for your schedules?”

“We’ve done this how many times, David,” she says, sighing. “Four? I can’t make my official schedule until next week when I have an accurate read on the time requirements for each course. Right now, I have a preliminary—stop smiling like that.”

“Like what?” He has the audacity to tilt his head. She rolls her eyes.

“Smarmy,” she says. “You’re smiling all smarmy because you think I’m being ridiculous.”

“You are being ridiculous,” he says. “Just a little. In a very endearing and quirky way.”

She glances around her desk for something to throw at him. Everything is too valuable to risk losing right now.

“Get out of my room.”

“It’s our room now, darling,” he says. The bed creaks and squeaks as he sits up, scooting until his back is against the wall.

It is their room. She takes a second to marvel at it. Two years ago, she shuddered so hard at the thought of having a roommate that she went through every step she could to ensure a single for freshman year. Yet here is David in their room, with his neon-green bedspread that actively clashes with her gray one, with his messy desk and concerningly cluttered drawers, his overflowing laundry basket and his collection of old takeout boxes arranged on the floor like a postmodern art installment.

It’s unfair that he just waltzed into her life last year like the brother she never had, her freaking platonic soul mate in the form of the most annoying person she’s ever met.

“How’s Max?” David asks, hoisting his ankle up onto his knee.

“Good,” she says, shrugging.

“Y’all cuddle last night while I was gone?”

“Nope,” she says. “Because you were supposed to be back by ten thirty.” And because Max canceled last minute on dinner with a twenty-four-hour stomach bug. She feels bad that she was relieved, just a little bit—more time for interview prep.

David smiles again. “Still wanna know where I was?”

Well, now she doesn’t.

“No,” she says. “I was curious on Tuesday night. And last night. Did you die? I didn’t know. You know we live in the age of the internet; you could have texted once.”

“Well, obviously I wasn’t dead,” he says. “I tagged you in that thing on Instagram yesterday, the one about . . . the tag which dining hall frozen yogurt are you.” He squints like he’ll remember it better with his eyes almost shut. “Strawberry was like ‘perfectionist, has cried in a Walmart more than once, knows the exact time and place of their own death.’”

“I’ve never cried in a Walmart,” she says.

“I was there, Astrid.”

“That was a CVS.”

“Okay, okay, Tuesday I was at a SigEp mixer,” he says.

“What was her name?” Astrid asks. Now she gets to tilt her head and act all smug.

“Helen,” David says with a lovelorn sigh. “Journalism major. She’s on the dance team, too.”

It’s one of the great David-isms, how he can rattle off facts about each notch on his belt so fondly but can’t pass a science test to save his life.

“Which dance team?” Astrid asks, in the interest of cyber stalking the girl, putting a face to the name even though she has already breezed through David’s life.

“There’s more than one?” David asks, eyebrows scrunching together.

“Aren’t you in the musical? Shouldn’t you know that?”

He shrugs. “I’m dedicated to my craft and my craft alone.”

She’s not sure if he’s talking about theater or girls.

“And how was your ‘craft’ last night?”

“Magnificent. I mean, we’re just setting everything up right now,” he says, so they’re talking about theater, “which is why your untalented ensemble boyfriend didn’t have to come, but it’s looking pretty good.” He smiles, shaking his foot. “That girl who always wears her slippers in the dining hall asked me to hang out after practice.”

She rolls her eyes. “I don’t know how any of you have all this time to hang out on weeknights.”

“I’m sure you and Max could make time,” David taunts. English major. He loves his double entendres twice as much.

“Max and I will not be making time,” she says. “Not with the way my semester is shaping up.”

“Oh my God, you’re gonna schedule losing your virginity in your planner, aren’t you?”

She decides her orange mechanical pencil is a sacrifice she is willing to make. It bounces off David’s knee, and he laughs.

“You wanna grab lunch?” he asks, rolling off the bed in a disastrous flailing of limbs and sheets alike.

“It’s three in the afternoon,” she says.

“And?”

She rolls her eyes and jerks the highlighter in her hand at her schedule. “Have fun.”

He salutes, slips back into his sneakers, and is off again. She probably won’t see him for the next three to five business days.

There’s a strange sort of serenity that passes over her at times like this, in the postmidnight haze of working. David’s out at rehearsal or whatever rehearsal after-party he’s come across, so Max has stayed late, sitting on her bed while she hunkers down at her desk. His breathing is a soothing white noise as the swirling pattern of his laptop’s screensaver splashes color across his shirt.

There’s a rhythm to doing problem sets like this, her pencil scrapping across a page, the pop of a marker cap when she needs to draw something out on her whiteboard, the squeak of the eraser after.

Outside the window, the city is almost quiet.

It’s been exactly forty-three minutes since she started her Orgo 2 problem set when Max jolts out of his spot on her bed by picking that moment to wake up.

“Whoa,” he says, blinking rapidly. He shakes his head out, glancing around her harshly lit dorm room and orienting himself. She lets herself lean back in her desk chair to watch him as he wakes his laptop up as well and winces, running his hand through his tangled curls. “Oh man, when did it become this time?”

“This time” being 2:34 in the barely-even-morning. She raises her eyebrows.

“Do you want me to be pedantic about it?” she asks. He closes his laptop and slides it off his lap.

“Always,” he replies, hopping down from the bed in a movement unexpectedly smooth for her clumsy, accident-prone boyfriend. And then he’s standing behind her chair, elbows on the top of her seat back, making her crane her neck to continue to watch him.

“Well then, it became this time just now,” she says. “And now it’s no longer this time. And now it’s no longer this time, and now—”

“Oh man, it’s too late to get this existential,” he says, pressing his hands over his eyes.

She allows herself to smile now, while he’s not looking.

“Hey, buddy, you knew what you were getting into with me,” she says.

He lets his hands fall and smiles at her, even more disgustingly fond than she’d ever dare to look. Her heart pounds anyway, even at 2:35 in the morning, even months and months into this relationship, even though it’s literally nothing new as he bends down and kisses her chastely and comfortably.

“Yeah, I did,” he says through that smile. He sighs long and belabored, pushing back from her chair and stretching his arms out above his head. “Well, I should go and try to get some real sleep.” He grabs his laptop from her bed and shoves it unceremoniously into his backpack.

She decides she’s allowed a short study break.

“You could stay,” she says, nonchalant, suave, a picture of poise. “You know, since David’s still out.”

Max shrugs his backpack up and turns back to her with a wince.

“I’d love to, but I, uh . . .” He bounces on his toes for a few seconds, panic growing steadily in his eyes. “Uh . . .”

“It’s alright if you don’t want to,” she says quickly, twisting her mechanical pencil between her fingers but not looking away. And look, she’s not going to read into this because she doesn’t have time to do non-class-assigned readings, but this is kinda twice in one week that he’s ducked out of staying over, which is not a novel concept for them. And twice is almost three times, and three times is a pattern. And maybe it has something to do with that time last week shortly after the staircase incident when they were making out and he didn’t want to take his shirt off, which she didn’t think was a Thing but maybe it’s a Thing and they need to talk about it or something.

“I’d love to, really,” he says with all of his Max earnestness, that soothing sweetness to his voice that smooths right over the jumble of panic in her head. “I just . . . I can’t tonight.”

“No worries,” she says, releasing her shoulders. Honestly it might even be better. She’s 14.7 percent more efficient at problem sets when Max isn’t in the room being all cute and Max-like, and she’s not allowed to sleep until she gets this problem set done. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Lunch? After your lab interview?”

She grimaces. “Oh, please don’t remind me.”

His hands shoot up in surrender. “Sorry!”

He sweeps back into her space like he never left, kissing her forehead and tucking some of her flyaways back toward her ponytail.

“I mean, you’re going to do great,” he says as he backs slowly toward the door. “But I can tell you all about that at lunch tomorrow.”

She waves him off and he flashes her one more of those beaming smiles before turning and leaving.

The room feels a little less with him gone, but she gets back to work, break over.

She finishes the problem set at 2:47 and leans back in her chair, glancing over at her bed instinctively, even though Max isn’t there anymore.

She climbs into the bed at 3:14, with the lights off and the room in dark midnight blues and stark pale moonlight from the one little window between her bed and David’s. She closes her eyes.

And then it’s exactly 5:22, and her dorm room window shatters.

She forces her eyes open, squinting into the dark, shoving at her mountain of pillows and blankets until she’s sitting up in the middle of her twin XL. Her brain boots up slowly and fires off concerns as they’re processed.

One: if it’s 5:22, she’s only had two hours of sleep and she was really counting on four and a half to be functional tomorrow.

Two: the other side of the room is dark and quiet. David is still gone, which is potentially A Problem because that means he’s probably at a frat party making more poor life choices.

Three: the room looks different, the moonlight casting through the room at strange angles and shadows because the curtain rod is hanging askew.

Four: the window is shattered. The university doesn’t provide renters insurance.

Five: a bulky form in a bright green spandex suit and black domino mask is climbing through the broken window.

She’s found the most pressing concern.

“I swear my dorm was so much smaller than this,” he says, voice booming in the small space of her room.

She screams.

A signal for someone to do something, maybe contact someone else who professionally handles situations like this.

However, her roommate is out and her neighbors on both sides of the paper-thin walls choose this moment to finally mind their own business. The intruder drags her from her bed by her arm, blankets tangling around her legs, pillows tumbling to the floor.

It’s up to her to take action in this escalating situation, which is ridiculous. She’s wearing a pair of ratty pajama pants that have three holes along the inseam and fuzzy socks with glue

dots on the bottom that she bought to avoid slipping on the hardwood floor.

She’s dragged up and toward the window, still blinking against sleep and the tired headache pounding at the space between her eyes. It’s hard to remember the semester of self-defense she was required to take in high school, mostly because she had Chemistry right after it that year and spent most of the period drilling formulas into her head.

She tries kicking out; she tries going limp. She screams again.

The guy trips over her plushy green area rug, then rams up against her IKEA nightstand. It slams into the wall.

“Careful!” she says, speech slurred from her retainer.

He regains his balance, one arm still wrapped around her, and yanks the dusty curtain rod off the windowsill entirely. She wonders how many of the repairs she could make herself so she won’t owe her goddamn college any more money . . . except she’s being kidnapped from her bed in the middle of the night so who’s to say whether she’ll even make it back to her dorm room ever again. At least if she dies she won’t have to pay back her student loans, but she’s at college for a reason: namely, she wants to be a doctor, so dying right now would be a little counterproductive.

Her brain is on fire, ignited with adrenaline and anxiety. But she’s still so tired; it feels like she’s too deep underwater to actually think of anything useful. The man hoists her out the window and for a moment she thinks that’s it, ...