How is she considered pre-teen? She's an adult reporter for Channel 6 news. And she has her own apartment and an adult boyfriend Casey Jones.
... Actually, I googled it, just to be safe. In all versions of the character, whether she's a computer programmer, a newspaper reporter, or some android drawn by her father (I don't know, but it's apparently an astro-boy/pygmalion sort of backstory sort of thing) she's always a decade older than the mutated animals.