Katie, Not Kate

Chapter 8: One Nervous Wiccan

"How'd you guess?" he asked with a little wink.

She giggled. "You have motorcycle goop all over!" she informed him, gesturing at his hands before she turned to see that Leslie Ann and Mary Beth were looking at her strangely. "Oooh, Mr. Logan, have you met my new friends?"

"Katie," Leslie Ann said, wrinkling her nose, "that's Wolverine, not Mr. Logan."

Katie shook her head and put a finger to her lips. "Shh!" she said insistently. "Nobody's supposed to know. It's a secret! That's his other name!"

"She's right, girls," Logan told them as he started the water in the kitchen sink, where they had followed him. "That's like calling Scott 'Cyclops' all the time."

Leslie Ann nodded with her eyes wide. "Oh, yeah. We don't do that," she agreed, and Mary Beth nodded enthusiastically beside her.

"Mr. Logan is a superhero," Katie told her new friends proudly. "He's the best."

"Shh, it secwet," Mary Beth said, putting one chubby finger up to her lips the way Katie had done earlier, and Katie giggled and nodded and put her hands over her mouth.

"What are you girls up to?" Logan asked, scrubbing the last of the grease and dirt off his arms.

"Miss Rachel — you know, the one without all the spikey things on her shoulders? — she made sandwiches for lunch!" Katie told him. "They were really yummy, and she cuts off the crusts in a circle."

"Sounds like a neat trick," Logan said with a smirk, watching the girls dance in place. "Now what are you up to?"

"Bobby said he'd have a water fight with us," Katie explained, and Leslie Ann giggled with delight.

"He's my favorite," she told Logan.

"I remember," Logan said with a nod.

"Well, my favorite is Mr. Logan," Katie said in the tone of someone who had argued the point before. "He's the best, and he's really, really cool."

"You just say that because I took you for a ride on the Harley," Logan told her with a little frown.

She shook her head. "Nu-uh," she insisted as she bounced around and tried to grab his hand. "You're my favorite 'cause I said so."

"You got to ride on a motorcycle?" Leslie Ann asked with wide eyes, seemingly unable to wrap her mind around something so cool.

Katie nodded and looked proud of herself. "It was really loud," she told the other girls. "Mr. Nightcrawler had to get earplugs for me."

"Was it scawy?" Mary Beth asked, very quietly.

Kate shook her head. "Only a little bit," she said, very seriously. "But I had Mr. Logan with me."

"That doesn't sound scary at all," Leslie Ann agreed.

"Nope!" Katie giggled. "Mr. Logan isn't scary — at all! He only scares bad guys!"

"So where are you girls headed, or do I need to have Bobby start a snowball fight with you?" Logan asked when the girls had thoroughly concluded that there was nothing to be scared of with him at all.

"Water fight, silly!" Leslie Ann corrected him. "We're gonna get water guns."

"Snowball fights are more fun in the summer," Logan pointed out.

Katie stuck her tongue out at him. "No - snowball fights are for Christmas."

"Not when you have Iceman in the house," Logan told her. "Snowball fights are for any time."