by Proehl, Bob
“My name is Darren Helms, and I’m a spiteful little shit,” he says. His voice is even, affectless, as if he’s reading off a teleprompter rather than processing the words he says. “Other than the occasional unlucky medical professional, the only person who will ever touch my sad micropenis is me.”
Carrie has to stuff her fist in her mouth to keep from laughing. Even Maya and Jovan laugh, if only to hide how mortified they are. Carrie’s a little horrified by the class’s willingness to turn on their own, to pivot at the scent of fresh blood in the water. Darren’s body shakes like he’s come up from a bracing swim. Sarah’s eyes return to their normal green. Darren drops to his knees, clutching his head in both hands.
“You can’t do that!” Darren shrieks. “There are rules against—”
“You want to cite rules as soon as you think they’ll protect you?” Sarah towers over him, and Carrie regrets ever thinking of her as a priss. “Here are the rules. What a person can do to you is limited by their ability and constrained by their ethics. If I were you, I would pray the people you meet have a higher moral code than yours, which is a fairly low bar to set.”
“I’ll report you,” he says. “I’ll go right to the headmaster.”
“Report yourself while you’re there,” says Sarah. “Get out of my classroom.”
He brushes by Carrie as he gathers his things from his desk, stomping the whole way. On his way out the door, he nearly knocks over Emmeline, who’s returning from the bathroom with Cortex behind her. She looks around at the faces in the room as if to ask what she’s missed. Avi gathers her up protectively.
“Please don’t put this in your article,” Sarah says to Avi. Avi shies away from her, pushing Emmeline farther back. Carrie knows what he’s afraid of and why this is exactly what they wanted to keep hidden from him. They’re all towing the line of look how normal we are, but now they’ve given him a glimpse of how powerful some of them are.
Carrie smiles. If she was writing about Resonants, introducing them to the world of normal people, that’s the first story she’d tell. You don’t have to worry, she’d say. Sure, a couple of us are total dicks. But we police our own. We won’t let people like Darren Helms hurt anybody.
Things get shuffled, changes in a schedule Avi isn’t privy to. After the debacle in Sarah’s class, they sit in on a high school English lecture that’s indiscernible from any other high school English class in America. The same picking apart of themes and symbolism. The same vacant, sleepy looks on half the students’ faces as the other half passionately discuss the relevance of Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind. They want me to see all this as normal, he thinks. They want to lull me into forgetting what they are.
At lunch in the teachers’ lounge, Sarah embarrassedly recounts the incident with Darren Helms to the engrossed faculty, all of whom agree that Darren Helms is the worst. There’s debate whether he is the worst currently or the worst ever, with older teachers reaching back in their memories to find truly abhorrent alumni. Whenever Avi tries to ask a question, he’s put off: The headmaster will go over that with you or Mister Bishop will want to discuss that directly. They’ve been media trained, and they’re hewing to it.
Sarah hands them off to Kimani, whose door appears next to the vending machine in the teachers’ lounge. Emmeline looks happy to see a familiar face.
“Have they had you sitting around classrooms all day?” Kimani asks Emmeline.
“It wasn’t too bad,” says Emmeline. “Everyone was nice. Except the boy that wasn’t. I helped play a song in everyone’s heads.” She looks at Avi apologetically.
She’s handling all of it so well, he thinks. So much better than I am.
“Kids your age can’t be cooped up all day,” says Kimani. “You need time to run around. Blow the stink off, my mom used to say. You like gym class at school?”
“Not really.”
“Maybe you’ll like it here. It’s a nice day out for it.”
“It’s snowy,” says Emmeline.
“Well, it must be a nice day somewhere,” Kimani says. She opens the door, looking down from the top of a hill onto a deep field of green. The air that comes through isn’t warm, but it’s nowhere near the chill of December in New York. Kimani hunkers down next to Emmeline and points upward. “Look, up in the sky.”
Two teenagers fly overhead, swooping in a double helix pattern across an expanse of blue. Leaving Avi and Kimani behind, Emmeline chases after them like they’re a flock of pigeons, waving her arms in the air as if she could take flight. As he steps out into the field, Avi wonders what keeps Emmeline on the ground.
At the bottom of the hill, there’s a boy skinned in pale birch bark, talking to a flower. Avi can’t hear the conversation, but the flower begins to grow, spiraling around the boy’s body like an affable snake. Caught in its coil, he laughs like a little kid, an unselfconscious sound that’s strange coming out of a teenager. Nearby, a girl holds rocks the size of basketballs in each hand. She hurls them at the head of a boy in a Beastie Boys tee shirt. Avi is about to scream, but the rocks shatter and the boy grins, unharmed, brushing chunks of stone off his shoulders.
“This is the only place they can do this,” Patrick says, coming up behind Avi. At their first meeting, Avi hadn’t noticed his lankiness. It’s as if his body, once stretched, has never pulled back into its correct shape. It gives him the look of a convincingly animated scarecrow. “I’d love it if we had a training facility on campus, but there just isn’t space.”
“This isn’t the first-year class, Patrick,” Kimani calls from the doorway.
“I thought this would be more enlightening,” Patrick says. “Show Mr. Hirsch the full scope of what we are.”
“Did you clear this?”
“Are you going to report me?”
Kimani shakes her head in the universal sign for I don’t have time for this and recedes from the doorway, which remains at the top of the hill, casting no shadow in any direction.
“So where are we?” Avi asks.
“Oregon,” says Patrick. “There’s a place out here for Resonants who can’t pass as human. They call it the Commune. I’m sure you’ll get the tour before you write your little story.”
“You don’t like this whole idea,” Avi says.
“I don’t like that we’re doing it, and I don’t like that we’re doing it in half measures,” Patrick says. “You must see it. Trying to pass ourselves off like any other school. We’re not. We’re something else entirely.”
“So why participate?”
“I recognize the necessity,” Patrick says. “The world’s too small for us to hide in anymore. Fringe nut jobs have already put together that we exist. People who spout off about UFOs and the New World Order. You just have to be willing to believe in impossible things. We’re the next conspiracy theory.”
“Why not stay that way?” Avi asks. “Those guys are a joke to most people.”
“It’s getting easier to connect the dots,” Patrick says. “An incident here and there. The right search term and they’re linked together.”
“Then what?”
“Then someone reputable figures it out and does a story exposé-style, and it looks like we’re hiding.”
“You are hiding,” Avi says.
Patrick smirks at him. “The week before we had to go hunt down Owen Curry, I was in Powder Basin, Wyoming,” he says. “Ever heard of it?” Avi shakes his head. “There was a family that died there last week. The Guthridges. Lucy, Sam, Paige, Melody, and Jeb. Single mother, four kids. Local newspaper said they died in a house fire.”
“I didn’t hear about it,” Avi says.
“The mom and kids were beaten and stabbed to death before the fire was set,” Patrick says. “The local paper didn’t mention that. We were tracking the oldest boy and the youngest girl. Both energy projectors from what we could te
ll. Sometimes a person’s Hivebody indicates how their ability will manifest. I approached Sam, the older boy, about coming to the school. He said he couldn’t leave his family. Bishop was going to offer financial support for the mother and the other kids. The middle kids were baseliners. Sam’s ability had already manifested, so I was tutoring him in the Hive. After work for both of us, when we could find the time. There’s a disconnect, teaching people to use their abilities there instead of in person. It’s like reading a book on the Maillard reaction without ever putting a steak on the grill.” Avi thinks of Emmeline at the stove cooking eggs. It seems like weeks ago. “A couple days before the fire, he came to me and told me he’d used his ability to dig out of a mine collapse. He was so proud of himself. Scared, too, because all the men he worked with had seen him use it. Those men killed him and his family.”
“They were lynched?” Avi says.
Patrick shrugs. “No charges,” he says. “Police put it down as an accident. Bad wiring, maybe. These things happen.”
Avi’s great-grandfather had come over from Germany before the war started. He said that by the time there were official pogroms, grassroots violence had become commonplace. A mob would burn down a Jewish-owned business on the main street in the middle of the day with half the town watching, and the next day the papers would say it had burned as a result of Missgeschick. Misadventure. As if sometimes cobblers’ shops and tailors simply burst into flames. There was no conspiracy, his grandfather said, but a consensus that the truth was not a thing to be spoken.
“The Hive’s not a perfect way of finding new Resonants,” Patrick says. “It takes time. I’d guess a fifth of the Resonants we pick up have had the shit kicked out of them before we get to them. Usually by someone close. Boyfriends, mothers. A big part of their first months at Bishop is convincing them they aren’t freaks or demons who deserve to die. Some we don’t get to in time. Fahima has numbers on that. She always has numbers.” Avi doesn’t want to see those numbers for fear he’ll imagine Emmeline as one of them. He thinks of every incident she’s had at school in which her behavior or some kid’s reaction to it necessitated a call home, an awkward conversation with a parent who, while apologetic, clearly agreed with his or her kid that the problem wouldn’t have come up if Emmeline had been normal. How long before it escalates? Before Emmeline moves from mixed-race oddity, to superpowered freak, to number?
Patrick cups his hands around his mouth and shouts to one of the fliers. “Eli, keep your ankles pressed together to cut your drag. You look like a goddamn pinwheel.”
“You think coming out is going to get more of you killed,” Avi says.
“Bishop thinks they kill us because they don’t understand us,” Patrick says. “Their kid or their sister starts glowing, and they shriek ‘demon’ and beat them to death with a bat. He thinks if they have a word for us, a concept, we’ll be safer.”
“But not safe,” says Avi.
“I don’t think naming a group of people has ever kept them safe,” Patrick says. Avi’s been thinking the same thing. He wonders if he’s helping create a label that constitutes a target, only to slap it on his daughter.
“Why not quit in protest?”
“Somebody has to teach these kids how to fight,” Patrick says, looking out at the students playing grab-ass in the field.
“Who will they have to fight?” Avi asks. He imagines Emmline on the front lines. Emmeline in a foxhole. Emmeline in a JLTV, lifted in the air by a blast.
“People like you,” Patrick says. “Excuse me.” He strides across the field toward the girl hefting boulders, warning her not to lift from the shoulder. You’re wrong, Avi thinks. I’d fight with you before I’d let her. It’s the sprawling, empty pledge fathers make to keep their children safe against all threats, to swing blindly at the world as it comes for their kids.
Avi wanders down the other side of the hill, half looking for Emmeline. He finds Fahima lying in the grass, massive black bug-eye sunglasses covering most of the exposed parts of her face.
“Patrick give you the doom-and-gloom speech?” she says.
“Something like that,” he says, carefully lowering himself to sit next to her. He stretches his legs out in front of him, relieved to have the weight off.
Fahima waves it away. “He’s a kitten,” she says. “Bishop’s going to be pisssed he went off script and showed you the upperclassmen. We’re supposed to be putting our best faces forward. Whenever he brings his jocks out here, he gets it in his head that we’re training an army.”
“You’re not?” Avi asks. “Training an army?”
“It’d be a pretty scraggly army,” Fahima says. “We’ve got fliers who can’t dunk a basketball. Kids whose strength is usable only when they’re throwing a tantrum. But if we were, these kids would be the front line.”
“Even the tree kid?” Avi asks.
“The tree kid supplies ridiculously potent weed to most of the upperclassmen,” says Fahima.
“No shit,” Avi says.
Fahima nods. “I had to confiscate some once,” she says. “Fucking incredible.”
“You didn’t kick him out?”
“We don’t kick anybody out,” Fahima says. “It’s a sanctuary as much as it’s a school. We keep our people safe for as long as they need to feel safe.”
“So you’re a teacher, too?”
“I’m a lot of things,” says Fahima. “But yeah, I teach.”
“You split your time between the lab and the academy?”
“The lab is in the basement of the academy,” Fahima says, popping a long blade of grass between her teeth and grinning.
“You have Owen Curry around a bunch of kids?” It’s the first threat to Emmeline that’s concrete, and in Avi’s head the worst, the thing he’s been avoiding, happens. He sees Salem Baptist Church in Roseland, Emmeline zigzagging through the pews as Owen Curry makes his way up the center aisle like a bride.
“Owen Curry’s not going anywhere,” Fahima says.
“Because of the lights?”
Fahima makes a gesture between a nod and a shrug. “It’s tough to explain.”
“I’m already tired of that as an excuse,” Avi says.
“I know. I’m trying to throw a lot at you all at once to see what sticks. So far you are the Teflon of reporters.”
“I think I’m doing pretty well.”
“We need you to do better,” Fahima says. “Now that things have started, they are going to move very fast. No one is going to have the time to make sure you’re keeping up. If we don’t do this exactly right, every single one of us is going to be in a box like Owen Curry. Or worse. Even your girl.”
“I’ll do better,” Avi says, resolved. He turns back to watch Patrick’s students hone their abilities. “Are all the kids at the academy like this?”
“These are the physical kids,” she says. “Their abilities tend to be, I don’t know, showy? And these are upper level. Best of the best. But even these ones, when we get them back to Bishop, they’ll be slightly less impressive. That’s why I come out here.” She taps her temple. “Up the ol’ abilities.”
“What changes?”
Fahima lowers her glasses so she can glare at him over the tops. “There’s fewer of you around.”
“Me?” Avi asks.
She scratches an itch high up on her forehead, under her hijab. “Have you heard anyone use the word Damp yet?”
“Darren Helms called me a Damp,” Avi says. “I assumed it meant someone who’s not like you all.”
“Most of us call you guys baseliners,” she says. “Damp is kind of a shitty thing to call someone.”
“I got that impression,” he says. “Reminded me of when kids used to call me a kike at school.”
“No one ever called me anything but Muslim,” she says. “Sometimes the name of a thing is bad enough. Bu
t yeah, Damp is of that proud tradition. Standard exonym. Some of the kids think having baseliners around dampens their abilities.”
“And you’re saying it does?”
She shrugs. “I’m saying Kevin Bishop is a smart man, and there has to be some reason he put a school packed with 500 very powerful teenagers in the middle of a city of 20 million people.” Avi thinks of dynamite sticks packed in boxes of hay. In the movies, when one character assures another it’s safe, the audience knows the explosion’s coming. He pushes the image away.
“So,” Fahima says after a pause, “have you figured out what Owen can do?”
Avi remembers the smooth edges of the blast radius, the lack of debris. He sees the little girl running through the pews of Salem Baptist.
“He negates matter,” he says. “Destroys it outright.”
“He nulls it,” Fahima says. “That’s the kid’s favorite word other than cattle and maybe fuck. Except you can’t negate matter. It’s a basic law of physics. In any closed system, the amount of mass and energy is conserved. At first I thought he was moving it somewhere. But from what I can find, no one’s reported a mall food court showing up in their backyard.”
“What if he teleports it out into space?” Avi asks.
“That’s not bad,” Fahima says, nodding. “But via what medium? Even an Einstein-Rosen bridge requires an extra dimension. And as much as I hate to believe it, this is what I have come to conclude. That there is an extra dimension out there. And resonating is us connecting to that.”
“So you’re getting your powers from the fourth dimension?” he asks. He can’t keep the skepticism out of his voice.