Lex’s top had ridden up in her sleep, to expose her slim belly, and her new belly-button piercing. Hunter was going to lose it when he found out, forever the mom of our – I couldn’t believe I got to include myself – group.
As carefully as I could manage, I disentangled myself from the girls and made it all the way to the door before realizing that I’d left my phone on the couch...where Greyson had passed out, mid-way through the film.
I debated leaving my phone there, but smartphone addiction won out, so I tiptoed over to him as quietly as I could, so as not to wake the other two people in the room. Sleeping, he looked so peaceful. I hated that I had to ruin that, but...
I poked him on the cheek, and one chestnut eye slid open. “Mmph?”
“You’re sleeping on my phone,” I whispered. “I need it.”
Greyson muttered drowsily. “I’m sleep.”
I resisted the urge to pinch him. “Greyson.”
His other eye opened, and he was too tired to hide the way his eyes slid over my body, causing a pleasant chill to move up my spine. “Short stuff,” he greeted me, voice still thick with sleep. “What’s up?”
Honesty is the best policy. “Woke up. Nightmare. Wanted my phone.”
He frowned. “Why didn’t you wake somebody up?”
I shot him a bland look, and he chuckled. “Besides me?”
I shrugged, but in truth, I hated waking people up and had only woken him for the phone.
“Well, I’m not getting up,” he professed. “So, you’re gonna have to wait ‘till morning, and from the looks of it, you could use some more sleep.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to have to explain that every time I closed my eyes, I was little again and all I could see was Mom, strung out on the couch, only she wasn’t breathing, and I didn’t know how to fix her.
As if he sensed my fear, Greyson pulled his blanket aside, and gestured for me to get in. “Wanna talk about it?”
I don’t know how long I stood there until I slid under the blanket, and molded my body to his, needing the human contact, tears in my eyes. Lack of sleep was doing weird things to me...
“It’s okay,” Greyson whispered, as he held me, rocking us gently, back and forth, back and forth. The movement calmed me, and I found myself being lulled to sleep. “You don’t have to say anything,” he murmured, as he rocked us. “I get them too.”
The last thing he said before sleep took me was, “Maybe one day, right?”
I nodded. Maybe one day.
Tornado sirens blared through the speakers of the dining hall, where Emma, Lex and I had been studying, forcing me to cover my ears. “What the hell?”
“We need to get to the auditorium!” Emma shouted over the sirens. Luckily, the auditorium was in the basement of the building we were in. “Let’s go!”
“What about the others?” I asked, worried. “Weren’t they going swimming today?”
“They just texted me,” whispered Emma, “They’re halfway between D and C.”
Immediately, Lex bolted towards the exit.
Emma grabbed my arm when I moved to follow Lex out the door. “Do not follow us. Promise me you’ll go to the auditorium.”
I shook my head. “I’m not leaving you guys alone, are you kidding me?”
She growled in annoyance, a very un-Emma like thing to do. “Stay here, then. But don’t go outside, okay? Wait for us here.”
Something in her tone left no room for discussion.
Even as the rest of the students and faculty poured into the building, I waited right where she told me to until my Math teacher, Mr. Pell told me he’d better see us all in the auditorium within the next ten minutes, “or so help me!”
When the power went out after a huge clap of thunder, I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer, and went the door to see if I could spot them. Opening it, I stepped outside and was shocked. The rain was so intense that it soaked me right away, and the wind made a mess of my hair in seconds. I could barely see, but after a few minutes, I was able to just make out my friends’ silhouettes as they struggled to run through the downpour.
“You took too long,” I exclaimed when they were within ear shot. “I waited, but...”
“It’s okay,” Emma said when they reached the building. “Thanks. But fair warning, my brother’s gone all alpha male, and he’s pi –”
“Short stuff!” Greyson smacked me on the arm when we got inside, and then pulled me into an unprecedented hug, causing everyone to stare openly at the scene. “You idiot, what if you’d gotten hurt? Do you know how much damage flying debris can do to a girl your size?”
I didn’t miss Gage slipping a very smug looking Lex something that I suspected was cash, muttering something under his breath about female intuition.
Greyson was completely oblivious to everybody around us. “Emma said to stay put and you should have listened. God, you’re gonna give me an aneurism!”
“Greyson, you’re gonna break my ribs. All of them. Like, pronto.”
He didn’t pull away.
“When I saw you standing there in front of the building like a damn fool, your hair flying everywhere like that, I could have killed you.”
“I thought she looked kinda epic,” Emma supplied, and Greyson scoffed.
“Epically stupid, maybe.”
“Air, sorely, lacking. Brain function, shutting down. Need oxygen.”
“What were you planning on doing, huh? Running into the storm to get us like some super hero? I could have handled the storm, short stuff, I could have...” he trailed off, breathing hard. His eyes met mine, and in them I saw equal parts genuine worry and relief.
“You big. Me little. Ribs ow,” I squeaked, and he finally seemed to come back into himself, letting me go. Greyson blinked at me, eyes filled with embarrassment, fear, and something that looked suspiciously like attraction as they flitted over my body to see if he had somehow caused me any real damage
Hunter laughed. “Dude, oh my god, you’ve got it bad.”
“Shut up,” Greyson growled, his cheeks completely on fire. “I don’t.”
I smirked. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you actually liked me. But that’s crazy, right?”
He shook his head. “Crazy, short stuff.” Liar.
I smiled. “So, you don’t care about me at all? Not even a little bit? Thought we were friends.”
His cheeks were Gage’s hair colour by then, and he opened his mouth to say something just as Mr. Pell shouted, “Into the auditorium, now! We’ll be having no more teenage drama in the middle of a hurricane!”
The spell broken, Greyson winked at me and then flashed me a peace sign, before trotting after the math teacher like his life depended on it, shouting, “I plead the fifth!” Hunter, Lex and Gage trailed him at a much slower pace, all chuckling when Mr. Pell turned to Greyson and said, “Son, your friend Hunter was onto something.”
Greyson nearly bowled the older man over to get away, shouting, “Can’t get any privacy in this place!”
“He’s so difficult,” Emma said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You should know by now that he cares, though.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
She smiled softly. “He’s just scared you’ll leave, you know.”
I frowned. “I’m not going to,” I told her, “I’m here till college.”
Emma shook her head. “He’s not afraid you’re going to transfer out. He’s just waiting for you to get sick of us, move on, forget about us. To stop caring.” Under her breath, she muttered, “People have before, I mean. Stopped caring. Or never really cared at all.”
I placed my hand on her shoulder. “I’m not like that.”
She nodded. “I know. And he knows too.” Then she rolled her eyes. “He probably writes in his diary about how cute his short stuff is. I bet he has your kids names picked out already.” Emma made exaggerated gagging noises.
I giggled. “You’re awful. It’s not like that. I mean, yeah sure
there’s an attraction, but we’re not...we’re so different.”
Looking so much like her brother, Emma winked at me and began to head towards the auditorium. “Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
Most of the student body was either in the storm shelter or in the gym, which is where Greyson, Gage and Hunter had been just before the tornado warning was in place. They’d been on their way to join us in the Dining Hall when the sirens went off. In total there were only thirty students in our building and eight faculty members, since it was the weekend. After a few hours, the warning was lifted, and the power came back on, so we were ordered to head to the dorms, since it was getting late.
The rain had slowed down to a drizzle, and it felt nice on my hot skin when we all stepped outside – the auditorium had been sort of stuffy, because they’d made us all sit close together, breathing each other’s air. We moved at our own pace, choosing to walk instead of running like most of the other students.
It was only when we finally reached the dorms that I realized Greyson had lagged behind by about ten feet. I’d been so busy talking with Hunter and Gage about something, that I hadn’t noticed. Other people walked by him, but he took no notice, his face upturned towards the sky, eyes closed.
“He’ll come in eventually,” Emma said, nodding towards her brother. “Don’t worry. You know his obsession with...precipitation.”
I nodded, but even as my friends made their way to Emma’s, I stood there, watching him bask in the rainwater until we were the only two people left outside, and I couldn’t stand the distance between us. I had to talk to him.
As if he could read my thoughts, Greyson’s eyes opened, and met mine. We simultaneously started walking towards the other until we were nearly toe to toe, and I had to look up to maintain eye contact.
“Calliope,” he said. “You should go inside. You’ll get sick if you stay out for too long.”
“What about you?” I probed.
He shrugged. “What about me?”
I made an annoyed noise in the back of my throat. “You’re not immune to the common cold, dumbass.”
Greyson smiled at me. “Oh? And how do you know that?”
“Nobody is.”
He grinned. “You’re right, but I can’t help it. I like to get wet. And I have a really strong immune system, so I’ll be fine. But, you’re not like me; most aren’t. Unless...”
He searched my face for something, and he appeared really vulnerable, almost hopeful for just a moment, before schooling his expression. Shoving it down. I knew what he was doing because I’d done it a million times myself. He was about to deflect.
“Never mind,” he deflected. I’m ashamed to admit that I mentally high fived myself. After that, I mentally slapped myself in the face for being such an ass.
“Fine,” I said, backing up. “But you’re raising more questions that will need answers one day with your behaviour.”
He shook his head and smiled a half-smile. “Maybe one day I’ll answer them.”
~*~
I didn’t think that I’d fall victim to bullying, but those two girls I met at the beginning of the year, bitchy and albino had decided to pick on the girl who can’t swim – they’d seen my swimming lessons with Greyson one time and I hadn’t heard the end of it.
Greyson had told me to laugh it off, that Shel and Kendra shouldn’t get to me.
But they did get to me; I was pissed.
Like, all the time, pissed.
It tripped everyone out, because when I was pissed I tended to mutter to myself.
I still do, but that’s not the point.
This is the past, and about how my anger changed my world forever.
~*~
Five months into the year, the bullying had spread as rumours about me. I was supposedly a dumb hick who was fucking Greyson for free swimming lessons – because apparently that was the only way people could possibly see us together.
I wished I was a dumb hick, because the rumours wouldn’t have made me so angry if I’d been dumb.
But I’m fucking smart, and I’m a smart-ass.
I was waiting for Greyson, for our swimming lesson. I’d somehow allowed Shel to corner me as she jabbed insults my way, and I was beginning to panic. She was pushing me closer and closer to the pool’s deep end.
“Why’re you so scared?” she taunted.
I was in my ugliest one-piece, and she was just throwing insults at me left right and center while wearing her prettiest little fucking bikini.
I snapped.
There was nobody else around to save me, and my body acted on instinct.
The water in her blood called out to me, and I took hold of it and decided, hmm, I don’t think this should be there.
I leached the water out of her body with my mind and melded it with the water within my own blood, and I materialized it into a beautiful but small orb of liquid in front of both of our shocked eyes, and then shot it straight at her prettily made-up face.
I was so stunned at what I’d done, that I didn’t register the pure horror in Shel’s eyes as she looked at me, face completely soaked from the water, finger pointing at me with her mouth agape.
“You,” she said. “You freak!
I stood there, my own mouth open. “I-I-I-”
“Y-y-you nearly killed me!” she shrieked.
I hadn’t taken that much water. We’re made up of a lot of it, you know, and I had supplied the extra needed to create the orb.
The orb.
I wanted to hide, but Shel was already coming towards me arms out to push me into the deep end –
When Greyson pulled a water bender move and parted the pool as fast as he could, saving me from my fear.
“Anybody that messes with my Short Stuff is somebody that messes with me,” he said through gritted teeth as he concentrated on keeping the water from touching me. I scrambled out of that pool faster than I even thought I could, and ran to him, pulling him away from beating Shel’s ass.
“You wouldn’t beat a girl,” she taunted, “freak.”
“I don’t discriminate based on gender or sexual orientation,” Greyson stated, deadpan. “And if anyone is the freak, it’s you for trying to drown the girl I care about the most besides my own family.”
I was sort of proud of him, until he said that, and then I was embarrassed and pleased all at once.
“She’s the one who used her freaky powers to hurt me and throw water on my face!”
“You had me cornered!” I shouted, exasperated. “It was instinct, I didn’t even know I could do that before today!”
Shel frowned at me and mimed a tear falling down her cheek. “This is your coming of age story? How sweet. You get the boy and he’s the same as you. Makes sense as to why he’s such a stick in the mud when it comes to girls. But what you won’t get is anonymity...unless you tell me what you did to me and explain how you did it.”
Greyson and I looked at each other.
We hadn’t been expecting her to be curious.
“Don’t tell her,” Greyson said.
“I have to,” I said, pride on the line. I’m not a hick and I’m not a freak.
“I took the water from your blood and my own and made that orb thing with my mind. I used my hands to throw it at your face. There’s probably science that explains it but I just learned that I could even do this.”
Greyson nodded. “There is science, sure. None of us would understand it.”
Shel squinted her eyes at me, and she smiled. “Maybe I don’t tell people what you can do. What’s in it for me?”
Greyson and I exchanged glances.
His eyes said we should just run, but I don’t run away.
“I’ll do your homework for the next year and you get to spread all the nasty rumours about me that you want, but you have to leave Greyson out of it. He didn’t know I was like him.”
“I suspected it,” he admitted, and I balked.
> ‘You should have said something! I always believed my father was mentally ill, but now I’m starting to think that he didn’t walk out on us at all. That he really was taken by the government because of what he was. God, my poor Ma.”
Shel looked as if she’d stepped on a landmine. “I don’t want to feel bad for you, but it’s like a teen drama. I’m in. I know about you now, and I want to know everything. I’ve decided that I want you to tell me right now, what you are and where you came from.”
And what was that?
Greyson laughed. “I’m human, but my DNA was altered before birth to be able to ‘bend’ water so to speak.”
Shel jumped up and down, excitedly. “Okay, so you guys are like Avatar.”
She’d obviously never really watched the show, but she had the basic idea as to what elemental ‘bending’ worked because her younger sister had watched it frequently.
Greyson told us that he and his family were here as wards of the government, test subjects under their thumbs.
He had been fearing the moment he got caught, perhaps during his runs in the rain, but he’d never expected me.
A natural born “Elemental”.
That’s what the government called people like us, who had mastery over a specific element.
This is what he told us: Greyson is water, and his sister is air. Hunter is Earth as well as his sister, and Gage is fire, just like his red hair – a happy coincidence. They were all living their lives, terrified that somebody would catch them off guard, and I’d stumbled into their lives.
My father, he told me, was an escaped ward who’d made a small life for himself in the Appalachian mountains. He met a girl, and fell in love, and had me, but the government tracked him down.
My Ma had been right all along, and it stung, deep.
It was a sting of relief.
My fixation with the rain was normal for “my kind”. My fear of deep water was a mystery, but Greyson told me that I had the power to do what he’d done and part the pool. I had that power in my blood.
It made the water a lot less scary.
~*~
Things fell into a sort of lull after that. I helped Kel with her homework, and she started to hang out with us on the low-low, in Emma’s room.
Elementals, #1 Page 4