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He opened up his bag and took out the sketchbook and began to flip through it. She watched the pages go by, thinking what a thing it must be to be good at something. There were figures and faces, some human, some monstrous, and they had some kind of life and lightness to them, like the person who had drawn them could give them breath if he chose.
    “What’s that?” Hazel said. The last drawing was something she hadn’t seen before, something very different from everything else in the book.

    “Oh. Nothing. I just drew it last night.”
    “Can I see?”
    “Sure.” Jack handed her the sketchbook. “It’s not really anything.”
    Hazel looked at the page. This was a small sketch of a very simple palace—just a square, really, with four thin turrets coming up from each corner. Its edges were rounded a little bit, like it was made of clay or something. But it wasn’t just the palace—he’d drawn a line under it across the paper to signify some kind of landscape. And the drawing of the palace was so small against the landscape, just a gesture in the middle of the page—like he had wanted to make it seem like it existed in the middle of infinite emptiness.
    “You just don’t usually do places.”
    “It’s like a fort. It just kind of appeared there one day in the middle of the snow. And no one knows what it’s for or how it got there. But if you’re inside, no one can ever find you there.”
    “Oh,” said Hazel, regarding the drawing carefully. In her head she began to imagine the story that would go with that place. “But who would want that?”
    “There’s a boy,” Jack said. “He’s just a normal boy. Until one day he wakes up and no one can see him. He’s turned invisible. And he tries everything, but nothing works. So he goes here.”
    “Okay,” said Hazel. She’d read a book once about a girl who turned invisible and a boy who could fly. Hazel knew she would be the invisible one, because she never got to be the one who flew. “Why does he go there?”
    “Because it doesn’t matter that he’s invisible, you know? There’s no one to look at him, and no one will ever come.”
    “Okay,” Hazel said. “So, show me your bad guy.”
    Jack nodded and flipped back a couple of pages. The drawing was of what seemed to be an ordinary man, with a swath of thick black hair. Jack’s heroes were usually muscular, but this one was tall and very thin and wearing an actual suit and tie, like someone you might run into downtown. It was his face where you could see there was something off—the shadows in his cheeks, like he lived on something other than food. And his eyes. Jack had spent a lot of time on his eyes. Hazel could see the life in them, she could see the intelligence behind them, and she knew if you found yourself gazing at these eyes very bad things were going to happen.
    “Creepy,” she said.
    “I know!” Jack said. “He takes people’s souls. Like a Dementor. But he’s not just a monster, he’s a supervillain. He’s a genius.”
    “What does he want?” asked Hazel, thinking of Uncle Martin.
    “Nothing.” Jack said. “He’s just bad for the sake of being bad. That’s the scariest kind of villain, you know?”
    Hazel nodded.
    “And no one can fight against him,” Jack continued. “Because what do you do against the guy who takes your soul? There’s no superpower for that.”
    “But,” said Hazel, feeling all of a sudden the dampness around her. “There’s got to be something.”
    Jack studied his drawing carefully. “But what if there’s not? What if no one can fight him?”
    Hazel shrugged. She didn’t know the answer. But there had to be a way. There was always a way.
    Hazel and Jack spent the rest of the day sitting in the second floor of their house talking about supervillains and the secrets in their villain-y hearts. Jack had brought little packages of sandwich crackers and fruit snacks. This was the sort of thing he usually had now that his dad did all the