by A. E. Clarke
As he walked towards the bathroom—back slowly straightening out, regaining his normal composure—I called out to him, “Oh, and grab yourself a sandwich or something on the way out. You won’t have time to get one before school. Tell them I’ll pay for it.”
He smiled hesitantly, and I smiled back. I don’t know if I can properly trust you anymore…but I think we can get through this.
If it was really just this once.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Jesse
I hung up the phone on the cradle. I had called in sick for the day, though I still planned on heading in after lunch; I’d make up my French test the next day during lunch or something. The entire phone call, I was standing there turning the flame in my hand on, then off. On, then off. I flipped open my phone and typed a text message to Brent.
Jesse: Something weird came up, I’ll tell you later. Missing the morning.
I stood there, leaning against the kitchen counter, for about five minutes, flicking my hand on and off, waiting for some sort of response from Brent. My pocket buzzed, and I almost reached into it with my hand aflame before I realized and put it out with a small wave, halfway to my pocket.
Brent: K… You okay?
Jesse: Yeah, I’m okay. I’ll tell you later.
I left my phone on the counter and went up to my room. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I let myself be consumed by the flames, since they didn’t burn me at all. I pulled off my shirt, and let the flames grow up my arm and over my chest. It was definitely warm, and looking in the full-length mirror, it looked pretty interesting.
There was no burning sensation at all, almost like the flames were tickling me, licking upwards from wherever I was letting them get to—they were going from the bottom up—but they only reached a few inches in height, so I still looked humanoid even though my face was covered in flame. I could sort of manipulate the flames, too, so I wasn’t really blocked, sight-wise, most of the time.
That’s something to work on, I thought, and then stopped myself. Okay, is that something to work on? Should I be working on these powers?
Fire seemed a lot more dangerous than electricity—and like it could much more easily get out of hand. It also worried me that, for whatever reason, I had the ability to raze most of a town if I wanted to…probably.
I guess I do need to work on this. If I had that sort of power, I needed to learn to control it. The question was how to do that safely.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Holly
“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” I said as I walked out of the bakery. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone, hit 1 and paused, my thumb above the call button.
I wanted to call him, but at the same time, I didn’t want to talk to him. Come on, Hol, you can do this.
I forced myself to press down on the button and waited for it to connect. He answered after only two rings and sounded out of breath.
“Hello?”
“Hey, babe.”
“Oh, good, it is you.”
“Can we talk?”
“O-of course.”
“I mean, like…in person. Are you able to do that?” I need to be sure I can trust you.
“Of course. Sure. Are you home yet?”
“No, I just left work. I took my car today—do you want me to come over and pick you up on the way?”
“I can head over myself. We’re about the same time from your house. I’ll let myself in the garage if you’re not home—that okay?”
“Of course. Talk to—err, see you soon.”
“Holly?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“You, too.” I sighed as I closed my phone. I was pretty sure we’d get over this, but I’d decided in the middle of the phone call that I wanted to talk to him about something potentially worse than his cheating. I needed to tell him about my powers, but first I needed to make sure I could trust him properly.
I held up my hand and let the electricity come out. It shocked its way up my fingers, a blue arc playing up the air between my outstretched fingers from base to tip. I clenched my fist, and there was a soft zzmft! as the energy fizzled. It was something I would need to show him. And the video, probably, too.
I stepped into my car, forcing the rampant energy back underneath my skin. I could feel it again, as if it were crawling on the underside. It was a very, very uncomfortable feeling, but I didn’t want to force the energy any deeper. I didn’t know what it would do to me if I tried to banish it forever. I also wasn’t sure I really wanted to.
I sighed, then stuck my key in the ignition. The car started up, and I set off for home, driving past Alex’s house to make sure his car had already left the driveway. He lived fairly close to the bakery, but the way I drove, I managed to get to my house just as he was flipping up the plastic cover to the alarm in the garage. He smiled when he saw me—a little frantic and nervous—and flipped down the casing, walking towards my car.
“Hey, hon.”
“Hey, babe.” I leaned over to accept his kiss, but he pulled back, like we’d just started going out. “Let’s talk inside,” I said and slammed my car door shut, locking it with the wireless key as we walked towards the house, hand in hand, as if nothing had ever happened between us to make us worry about the future of our relationship.
You need to be able to trust him, Holly, or else why should you continue to be together? If Jesse can already trust Brent with stuff like this…
I disentangled my hand from his to dig in my pocket for my house key.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“You…you keep sighing.” For a second, he looked like he was sixteen again, the shy teenager he’d been the first time I’d met him.
I grabbed his hand again. “Listen, I don’t want to break up. We still need to talk, but that’s not what I want to talk about, so you don’t need to worry, okay?”
At least, not about that. Maybe about me showing off and accidentally killing you. That’s a possibility.
I squeezed his hand, looking into his eyes until he nodded. He looked like he’d been crying all morning, his eyes bloodshot to the extent that he was wearing his glasses instead of his contacts—something I very rarely saw him do.
“I’ve…got something I want to show you.”
“Why does that sound like the intro to a bad porn flick? Isn’t that my line?”
I unlocked the door and looked over my shoulder at my boyfriend. Boy, do I know how to pick ’em. I laughed and shook my head, not bothering to actually respond to that.
“I didn’t think you felt like you needed something quite as corny as that pick-up line, hon.” He laughed too, and it was as if the tension had been lifted off our shoulders. I’d told him I didn’t want to Talk; it was just a talk—small t. I was a little worried—okay, a lot worried—that he would be terrified of my powers, but I had to trust him. If Jesse could trust Brent enough to tell him about this, I could trust Alex.
We sat on the couch in the living room and just kind of cuddled in silence for a few minutes. I wasn’t relishing telling him, but he was playing with his sleeves, and I knew him well enough to know he was trying to hide his anxiety.
“So—” I began, but he cut me off.
“So, what is this all about?” He spoke quickly, not looking at me.
“I wanted to… Okay, I think it needs a bit of explanation first.” I breathed in and disentangled myself from his arm, draped over my shoulder. “When I woke up after the hydro field incident, the entire world felt a little different. I’ve heard of people saying that after they died—err, after they were resuscitated—but I’d never thought about what it might feel like.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for a while, I thought I was dreaming. There was no way I was actually seeing what I was. I thought it was the painkillers messing with my head a bit.”
“What…what were you seeing, Holly?”
“To put it plainly…I have superpower
s.”
He blinked, then burst out laughing, crying at the same time.
I cleared my throat. “Okay, that wasn’t exactly the reaction I was hoping for, but it could have been worse.”
“Oh my God, all these dramatics for a stupid joke like that?” He shook her head, wiping tears from his eyes. “I knew you were a ham, but nothing like this! You really had me, hon, you really had me.”
“No, Alex, I—wait, you think I’m a ham?”
“Someone who likes the spotlight and attention.”
“I know what a ham is, Alex. I—”
“It’s not a bad thing. It’s who you are.”
“I’m serious!” That completely sucked the humour out of the room. I’d been preparing for another onslaught of laughter, but he was quietly studying my face, trying to figure out what I was thinking.
“You’re serious.”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Okay, I…I have no idea how you…” He shook his head, pressing the heel of his hand into his forehead. “Are you on something?”
I blinked. “Is that a serious question?”
“Well, that makes one whole hell of a lot more sense than you having some sort of fucking superpowers!” He was talking loudly again, and though I knew it meant this was probably escalating into an argument, I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier, and my voice was significantly louder when I shouted back at him.
“I’m telling you that I’m serious, and I don’t know why you can’t just trust me to actually tell the truth!”
“Then why don’t you show me, Holly? Huh? Why don’t you set something on fire, or turn all the lights off with your mind, or whatever the hell you think it is you can do!?” He was standing up now, and I took a step back. I was confident he’d never hit me, but if you’d asked me a week ago, I’d have said the same about him cheating on me. I didn’t know what to think anymore, and unless I used my powers, he would win any physical fight we had. But I was still angry.
“I…can’t.” I nearly screamed the “I,” launching spittle from my mouth, and then paused and said the second word at normal volume.
“Why can’t you? Please, if you’re telling the truth, by all means show me and prove it. Prove to me you’re not hallucinating.”
I held up my hand in a fist, and he backed up.
“I’m not going to hit you! I just want to make sure I don’t accidentally…” Kill you. “Hit you.” Like I did Jesse. I closed my eyes, shaking my head.
“You don’t want to hit me? Holly, I’m not in the mood for these stupid jokes of yours!”
I was doing my best to stay calm and control the energy when he smacked my temple. The sudden attack made me lose my grip. I felt the electricity leave my body the same way it had on the bus, and my heart skipped a beat as I realized Alex was right next to me.
Luckily, I didn’t have as much energy stored up and ready to be used, so the wave didn’t really affect Alex. He shuddered, but that was it.
The large TV in the room, though, fared a little worse.
The sudden surge of power running through its internal wiring overloaded its circuits, and it exploded, spraying glass fragments—tiny, extremely sharp glass fragments—hurtling into the air at high velocity, slicing into my arm and the side of my face.
I yelped in pain, closed my eye and threw up a hand in an attempt to block any more shards from hitting my face and neck. I heard Alex scream, and out of the corner of the eye I didn’t have squeezed shut, I could make out a thick, red streak across his face. One of the larger pieces of the TV screen had flown out at the right angle to slash across his cheek. He ran into the bathroom down the hall and slammed the door shut.
“A…” I looked around, not even finishing his name. There wasn’t really any point. There was the shimmer of glass fragments on the ground, smoke issuing from the TV set and, I noticed, from the surround sound speakers around the room—and I had hurt my boyfriend, all because of these fucking powers.
“Alex…” I let my head hang, clenching my fist. I really, really need to get a grip on this. I’d hurt my boyfriend, even if he had hit me first. I’d terrified him into hiding from me. Worse than that, I’d killed my younger brother, who’d been trying to help me gain control over these powers that I hated so much. I needed to…I needed to decide if they were worth it.
Ignoring the shards of glass, I sat on the couch and buried my head in my hands.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Jesse
I walked into the Starbucks on the corner near my house after school, hand in hand with my boyfriend. We’d been in there on dates a dozen times before. Hell, our first date together had been sitting at the round table with the chessboard on it in the middle of the room, simultaneously trying to keep and avoid eye contact. This was the first time, though, that by the very nature of holding hands and striding confidently into the coffee shop we had declared we really didn’t care what people thought.
We sat, and I reached for my wallet. I was the one, between us, who had ready access to money—to all-but-unlimited money, in fact—and though it had taken him a while, Brent was becoming accustomed to me paying for almost everything. He never expected it, but he’d finally stopped arguing with it. So I bought our drinks, and as usual, Brent got a much fancier drink than my brewed coffee, which made me snicker, though I secretly absolutely loved he did that.
“Thanks, hon.”
“No problem.” I smiled, and he smiled back, gazing a little too intensely into my eyes. I looked away.
“What’s wrong?” I could hear the worry in his voice. I really did not want to get into this conversation right now, but I couldn’t get out of it. He knew me too well.
“Can I tell you about it on the walk to my place?”
“I s’pose.” He sipped his drink, put it down on the side of the table, taking care not to spill it or block any of the checkered part of the table, and reached into his bag. “I got you a gift,” he said. Flustered, he held out a box out to me.
I raised an eyebrow. “I thought we’d…we agreed we weren’t going to give each other gifts for our ‘monthiversaries.’” I put air quotes around the last so-called word. The concept still confused me a little bit. While I could understand wanting to keep track of how long you’ve been dating, it seemed weird to celebrate having been together for three months. It was a big deal for us both but an arbitrary time to give gifts.
“I know, but it’s a present that I’ll be getting as much use out of, probably, so I figured it would be more fun to wrap it up and have it be yours than for me to buy it for myself.”
I paused, the bow half-undone. “I shouldn’t be unwrapping this on the table in a public coffee shop, should I?”
I looked around. Just by the nature of us being a gay couple, we garnered a lot more attention than your average date. The baristas knew us by now—and had probably gathered that we were together—but some of the general public was openly staring at us.
I looked back to Brent, and he was bright red in the face, clearly embarrassed and trying to hold back his normal peals of heartily amused laughter.
“Oh, no, I want you to open it right now. I actually want to…use it…right now,” he said. “Okay, maybe I should explain. It’s something I didn’t have when I was a kid.” He sighed. “I’m just going to stop speaking and let you open it.”
When he’d finally shut up—after about three explanations more than I needed—I had half the paper off the box, and I smiled when I saw it was a glass chess set. The gift symbolized both our first date and the one we were in the middle of. “You’re too cute,” I said.
He grinned. “That was just about the response I was looking for.”
I opened up the box, scooting my chair back to stuff the wrapping paper into the garbage can behind me, and shimmied out the chessboard that held the glass chess pieces inside it, one side clear, the other frosted, both incredibly beautiful, perfect, and unmarked.
“So which side goes first?” Brent aske
d.
“Let’s say…frosted.” I picked up the king, set to spin it to decide who went first, and cringed at the prospect of scratching it. Instead, I pulled out a pencil.
“Is this okay?” He nodded, and I spun the pencil, smirking as the tip pointed to me. I started setting up the frosted pieces on my end of the table while Brent did the same with the clear pieces, both of us enraptured by the combination of how beautiful they were and the ritual of putting them into place on the table’s board.
“I love you, hon, but…” I moved my pawn and grinned at him. “I’m going to kick your ass again. You realize this, right?”
He shrugged like he didn’t care, though I could see the challenge in his eyes. “We’ll see, won’t we?” He moved his pawn to match mine.
Our first few moves were fairly quick because we’d played a few times and each had our own way of setting up for the game while trying to screw up the other person’s setup. I tended to micromanage my games of chess, setting up so it was impossible for him to take a piece without sacrificing one of his own, but he was surprisingly good at seeming like he was haphazardly attacking, picking off key pieces of my defence as I scrambled to try to replace them around my king.
We didn’t talk very much during the game, though we rarely did. I started off in a very bad position and ended up taking advantage of a hastily made move on his part, and he conceded defeat fairly readily.
“Loser buys the coffee,” I said. He rolled his eyes and ran his hand through his hair, and I laughed, getting up. “You bought the chess set, though, so I’ll grab the coffee.” I leaned over and kissed him before walking up to the counter.
Luckily, the line that had been there a minute or two before was all huddled around the other end of the counter, waiting for their fancy drinks. I was in the middle of ordering the same as last time when Brent murmured next to my ear.
“You wanna head out?” I asked.
He had a strange look in his eyes. “Yeah. I want to know what’s going on, and you said you’d tell me when we were done here, right?”