The Explanation (Such As It Was)

Oz looked around the canteen. Three tables away a year seven was loudly explaining something about minecraft. A dinner lady was refilling the salad bar. Nobody was watching them.

They had the conversation behind the sports block, which was where they went for all conversations that could not happen within earshot of other people, and there had been quite a few of those over six years.

Oz pulled the hoodie off. Underneath it he was wearing a blue outfit that could charitably be described as a superhero costume and more accurately described as a blue tracksuit with a lightning bolt drawn on it in silver fabric paint.

Nadia looked at it for a long moment.

"Did you make that yourself?" she asked.

"Yes," Oz said.

"With fabric paint?"

"I did not have a budget," he said defensively.

"The lightning bolt is slightly wonky."

"It is meant to convey speed and dynamism. It does not need to be perfectly straight."

"It looks like it was drawn by someone running," Nadia said.

"I was, a bit," Oz admitted. "I was in a hurry."

Nadia sat down on the low wall behind the sports block and looked at her best friend standing in front of her in his homemade superhero outfit and took a slow breath.

"Start from the beginning," she said. "All of it."

So Oz started from the beginning. The speed had arrived about a month ago, no dramatic origin story, he had just been late for the bus and run for it and arrived at the stop at the same time as the bus despite having started from two streets away. He had assumed it was adrenaline until the next day when he had run the length of the park in four seconds to see if it would happen again and it had.

"Four seconds," Nadia said. "The park is three hundred metres long."

"I know," Oz said. He looked pleased and terrified in equal measure, which was an expression she had never seen on a human face before.

"And you did not tell me," she said.

"I was going to tell you," he said. "I just wanted to understand it first."

"How long does understanding it take?"

"Apparently a month," he said. "Sorry."

She looked at the lightning bolt on his chest. It really was quite wonky. It curved to the left at the bottom in a way that made it look less like a lightning bolt and more like a very ambitious letter J.

"Have you actually helped people?" she asked. "As the Blue Blur?"

"Three times," he said. "A car that was rolling down a hill. A toddler who ran into the road. And a cyclist who was about to go through a red light into oncoming traffic, though she was quite annoyed about me stopping her and did not say thank you."

"Cyclists are like that," Nadia agreed. She was quiet for a moment, thinking it through the way she thought everything through, which was thoroughly and in order. "Okay," she said. "Here is the problem."

"Which one?" Oz said. "There are several."

"The biggest one," she said. "Someone at school has already worked it out. I am not the only one who notices things."

Oz went very still. "Who?"

"Marcus Webb," Nadia said. "He has been watching you all week. I have been watching him watch you. He was in the library yesterday looking up the Blue Blur on the school computers and then he kept looking at you across the room."

"Marcus Webb," Oz repeated. He sat down heavily on the wall next to her. "Marcus Webb who runs the school blog."

"Marcus Webb who runs the school blog," Nadia confirmed.

They both looked at the middle distance.

"That," Oz said, "is a problem."