The Spectrum of Love
an excerpt

Miranda Thawne wasn’t normal for a girl her age. Early on, teachers had tried to get her diagnosed with ADHD, being that she could neither sit still or appear to pay attention in class. Her parents, knowing the true cause of this penchant for activity, fought the diagnosis, using the fact that her marks never suffered because of her short attention span. In fact, her marks were near the top of the class. Still, most teachers and professionals who had to deal with Miranda without knowing her full story believed her to be ADHD, and then be surprised and sometimes shocked at how much information she could retain from apparently not paying any attention.

Miranda, however, was very secure in her knowledge that she was not ADHD. Given that her mother had a naturally short attention span, coupled with the ability to split her attention, and her father was a speedster, Miranda knew that she had inherited her mother’s lack of ability to appear to pay attention, and her father’s speed, which sometimes made it extremely difficult to sit still or stay on topic. In short, it made her a female version of her Uncle Bart, although she was better at matching the speed of the rest of the world than he’d ever been, and probably than he would ever be.

This being said, when Miranda did face problems in everyday conversations. When she saw no reason to pay any attention to what someone was saying, she would turn her full mental attention to following her thoughts, which had a habit of jumping all over the place. She would also blurt out the most recent of those thoughts whenever someone would call her attention while she was zoned out.

So it was that Miranda tended to stay away from the extra feminine type of girls who liked nothing more than to gossip about their favourite celebrities. After all, they were less likely to laugh off something silly she said than most boys, or the less gender role following girls, were.

But for whatever reason, the people Miranda was hanging out with today were those girly girls. And, as per usual, they were talking about their celebrity crushes. Honestly, Miranda couldn’t care less if Zac Efron was still hot even though he was old, or if Kal-El Cage was way cooler than his parents, even if he needed to go out and get a name change. So Miranda started thinking.

Kal-El Cage reminded her of Kal-El the superhero, and that reminded her of how he had been cloned. Miranda’s father was a clone of her Uncle Bart. Her Uncle Bart was Deirdre’s father, and Deirdre was dating Noel, who was her god-brother. Noel had a twin sister, Lucia, who was a hairdresser. She liked to dye her hair funny colours. Once she had dyed her hair green and orange, and Miranda remembered her mom laughing because Noel told Lucia that it looked like Nickelodeon had puked on her head. Miranda didn’t know what Nickeloden was, but she knew that green and orange didn’t go well together. In fact, Orange didn’t go well with anything except white and black, like on her Uncle Thom’s costume.

“What do you think, Miranda?”

“I think orange and eggplant is a terrible mix of colours.”

The other girls all gave her blank looks.

“What? Would you ever mix orange with eggplant?”

One of the girls frowned. “I would never wear either eggplant *or* orange.”

“Um, right,” Miranda said. “What were you asking me anyway?”

“Do you think Thomas West-Wayne is hot?”

Miranda thought for a second, then decided upon her opinion of Thomas West-Wayne. “Nah, he’s too much of a jerk that his looks just don’t balance it out. Lane thinks he’s hot, though.”

Oh, yeah. That was another reason Miranda didn’t hang out with girly girls much. She would invariably reassure someone’s celebrity crush by regaling her gay older brother’s tastes in men. It weirded the other girls out a bit.

“Um, we totally didn’t need to know that,” one of the girls said, the weirded out look on her face matching that of the other girls’. Except for the one girl who looked interested.

But she wasn’t interested in Lane’s taste in men, she was interested in Miranda’s opinion of Thomas West-Wayne. “You think he’s a jerk? Really? I mean, sure, all the magazines say he’s a bit aloof, but that’s part of the image. He’s so pretty when he scowls!”

“No, he’s definitely a pompous jerkface,” Miranda replied.

“You don’t even read the magazines. How do you know so certainly?”

Miranda stopped. She wasn’t supposed to know Thomas West-Wayne. Then she remembered that the real reason she didn’t like Thomas was because of what he’d done to Lucia a few months earlier. It was a plausible explanation, since none of these girls knew her god-sister.

“Well, he was a jerk and his version of asking my god-sister out was to tell her that day that he’d be picking her up at 8. Like she wasn’t even worth having an opinion on whether she wanted to go to whatever stupid thing he told her he was taking her to.”

The weirded out and confused looks on the other girls’ faces were replaced with looks of wonder bordering on disbelief.

“Wait, your god-sister knows Thomas West-Wayne?”

“Have you met him?”

“Can you get me his autograph?”

Miranda facepalmed. “Guys, I’ve never met him. And it’s not like my god-sister ever talked to him since that incident. And also, he’s a jerkface! Why would you even want his autograph?”

“Because he’s hot!”

“Oi vey.”

There was one thing Miranda knew for certain, she wasn’t going to catch herself hanging out with these girls for a while. At least Lane could understand that Thomas West-Wayne was a jerk.