Chương 15: Trials and Intimidation

It took a few days for my body to completely heal, but all the while, my spirits were high enough that I didn't feel like I needed a body at all. Now I walked around school with a small smile on my lips constantly, sparkles likely lighting up my eyes. From the looks of it, everyone interpreted this as the apocalypse occurring. There was an unending sea of confused faces whenever I passed by. You could hardly blame them.

Wednesday Addams skipping down the halls like Cindy Brady overnight was quite the head scratcher. And in a completely expected response, they took no time at all to make fun of it.

"Oh look, Zero's happy. Her cat must've died."

"Nah, she's dating the Grim Reaper. Big bones, you know."

"They came up with a new superpower category. The Do-Nothings- and they asked her to be captain!" All of their words just bounced right off me.

'Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' had never been more true. Also the one about glue. I was the super, not them. I was a chronomancer; they couldn't stop the inevitable march of time that would bring them nothing but a banal, milquetoast life. Maybe they'd never know about my real self- it would be better if they didn't. It was enough for me to know and walk down the school hallways with my head held high and a smile on my lips. Because I had things to do.

I'd spent the last three days sitting in my classes, only hearing half of my teachers' lectures. My brain was instead focused on bringing the world to a halt. In math, two boys in the back were throwing a ball back and forth and in English Ms. Smith twirled her hair while looking at the picture of Ramrod that she had hidden in her desk.

Each time, my eyes were locked on them, annoyance rising until a prickle began behind my forehead, the room went silent, and my targets along with the rest of the class froze in place. It only lasted for half a second, probably because my victims were hardly engaging in criminal behavior. But bringing the entire world around me to a grinding halt was a bit of a power trip and a far more educational way to spend my time recovering from the fight. And now I could use it for bigger and better things.

—-- The final bell rang on my third day back and we all emerged out of the doors like the school itself was spitting us out. The beginning of Febuary was in full effect- the sky gray, sprigs of green emerging from the old tan grass, air cold but no longer freezing, and I for once felt part of that new surging of life. Students stuck around longer with the nicer weather, using the opportunity to hang out with friends without the watchful eyes of either parents or teachers.

A group of kids formed around Brandon Meat Tower, who stood a head taller than most. He held a wooden stick with a smoking flame on one end, waving it around close to the students surrounding him.

"Look, I've got fire powers now!" he yelled out to the crowd and they obligingly laughed and shrieked as he swung it near them. Then he shook his head, his words coming out hard.

"Derek's got nothing, can't believe they wanted him at the Academy. Anyone can roast someone if they want to." I walked closer, still part of the crowd, but now directly behind Brandon's blocky frame. He grabbed a kid by his arm, some sophomore who had worn a long sleeve shirt for the day, and pulled. Brandon brought the stick under the kid's arm, waving it back and forth, but with the flame almost touching the kid's blue cotton sleeve. The boy tried snapping his arm back, but Meat Tower's grip was strong.

"Ow!"

"No, come on, it doesn't hurt!" Brandon's smile grew wider.

"Don't be such a baby." Some heads turned in the crowd to see if any teachers were coming. Someone called out in a nervous voice.

"Come on Bran, don't get us in trouble." Meat Tower pulled the stick away, dropping the boy's arm with a roll of his eyes.

"Fine, fine! I'm just trying to say anyone could do it and it's not that special. Okay look, it's nothing." He brought the flame under his hand. I had been waiting for this. I had plenty of anger to use and from the moment Brandon opened his burger-wolfing mouth, I made plans, just scouting out the right moment. It finally arrived. My eyes zeroed in on the flame, the yellow tip touching Brandon's thick meatloaf hand. He passed it over the fire once. I thought of Brandon pushing Harry Potter into the street.

A second pass. Brandon tripping students in the hallways. Third time. The kid who walked around with his head wet from when Brandon shoved it into a toilet. On the fourth, a hammer started to smash between my eyes, the noise of the group turned into a low hum, everyone stopped moving, and his hand stilled just as the light began to glow on the underside of his fingers. He meant to only pass his hand over it slowly just like the other times, but unfortunately for him, he was going to get a lot longer than that.

I didn't look to see how everyone had been petrified, not the birds hanging in the air above us or the bucket of water the janitor spilled from a window, not even that one kid on my left who was clearly picking her nose. I took one step forward, passed my hand through the flame and it began flickering, no longer frozen. Never taking my eyes from that spark of fire, I stepped backwards back into the crowd. My mouth began to count. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.

The low hum surged back into a noisy cacophony as people started moving. The birds flew on. Brown soapy water poured from the janitor's tub right onto the school's flowers. Nosegirl inspected the findings of her dig. And Brandon screamed out, throwing the smoking branch away, holding his palm up to his face, and giving us every variation of the F word he could muster. Giggles emerged from the crowd.

"Guess it's not nothing, huh, Brandon?"

"Ooh, even Meat Tower can't take it."

"Shut up!" he yelled, holding his hand with a red mark in the middle, and his eyes ran through the crowd. Maybe it was because everyone else was laughing, pointing their fingers and talking with their friends and I just stood there staring. I wasn't smirking, I wasn't grinning; it felt like my features were fairly composed. But there must have been something in my face because when his eyes met mine, they stayed on me. Stolen novel; please report.

But I was already moving back into the crowd, and there was nothing he could point at to prove I'd done something. So I turned around and kept walking. Class: 0, non-super human burned civilian with fire. System user turned same fire on them, but did not save civilian nor apprehend criminal. No points awarded. Well, guess what, system: it was worth it anyway. No points necessary.

—--- I sat in classrooms with my back straight, head tilted, finally paying attention to what was going on far more than I ever did before. My eyes watched every little movement, ears strained for every word. I could have been the queen bee of gossip or the greatest narc of all time because nothing happened without my noticing it. Timing was everything. In chemistry, I sat two rows over and slightly down from Jada Park. Jada, with her Balenciaga purse and Miu Miu jacket, was whispering to a red-eyed Emmy Jacobson.

"Seriously, did you dress in the dark or are you just blind? Because this-" Jada gestured to Emmy's pom pom knit sweater "-is horrific."

"My mom made it for me," Emmy sniffled.

"OMG, that's so sad. You guys both need your eyesight checked." The bonus points in stats I got from my fights were making my senses sharper, I swear. Not so much that I could hear a pin drop in a noisy room, but definitely enhanced from what it had been before. That's why I could hear Jada trying to bullywhisper even from several seats away. I had a few options here. Five rows across from me and to the left, Demi Wentworth was writing a love letter to Captain Valiant with a set of markers.

I could possibly take several, doodle some rude words on Jada's light yellow jacket, return them and be back in my seat in time. But the spontaneous appearance of strange drawings on someone's jacket that no one can explain would be pretty darn suspicious. On the opposite side of the room, Chris Estrada held a pair of scissors in his hands.

I could take those, make a few strategic cuts to Jada's outfit that would probably be considered quite fashionable on the runway where you can pretty much wear garbage and people insist it's art. But again, kind of an unplausible thing to try to make into an accident. So I just watched and waited. Mr. Hooper carried around a styrofoam cup of Starbucks in his hands just like every day. The man probably had more caffeine pumping through his veins than blood. It made for some very energetic science lessons.

He walked up and down the rows of desks while we worked on a worksheet about types of isomers. I don't think I've ever seen this man sit in a chair. Kind of makes you wonder if there's something else in that cup.

"Just think of all of the ways that we could use this in our daily lives!" Mr. Hooper flung out an arm. He talked fast and his body often flailed around like one of those dancing inflatables at a car dealership.

"Structural isomers have the same atoms, but different connections, whereas optical isomers" Here it was, the moment I'd been waiting for. Mr. Hooper raised up both hands, including the one holding his Starbucks. I looked at Emmy's splotchy red face, her chin still trembling, felt my blood boil as I turned to Jada and that familiar ache in my forehead. The class went still. Mr. Hooper stood next to me, standing like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. I stood up and leaned forward.

Technically, the styrofoam cup was held quite securely in the teacher's hand and facing slightly north of Jada's direction. But it would do. I took the cup, touched the lukewarm liquid with one hand and then flung the cup towards Jada with my other. Then I sat back in my seat, and relaxed as time started again. If only I had some popcorn. I'm not normally the most adept at aiming, but it turned out righteous anger had a way of instantly honing one's skills.

Jada's outfit turned into the most exquisitely horrific outfit ever seen, just a masterpiece of terribleness. Splotches of black coffee trailing from her neck down her yellow jacket front and dribbling onto her matching skirt. Some of it had splashed onto her hair and face, melting mascara and lipstick into a clown's face, which was so en vogue. Just chef's kiss, all the way. She was a living breathing banana chocolate milkshake. The fuming look on her face was the final touch.

Ralph Lauren, call me whenever you want to get some help with your next fashion line.

"MR. HOOPER!!!" Okay, he got in a little trouble with HR for it, but truthfully, it really was just an accident waiting to happen. He got a stern talking to for his coffee addiction, he'll probably sign up for a twelve step program, and chemistry classes will feel a little less like a Richard Simmons' exercise class. There was no pop up message from the system, so apparently it didn't consider someone making people cry a crime. The heartless wretch. I couldn't always get it at the exact right time.

People got in the way or the bully was too far or I wouldn't be able to do what I needed to do without my time running out. So when times like that happened, everything was noted, everything remembered, and if there was ever a time when I could get pay back, I did. School hallways, with their raucous noise, tangles of limbs, and Bermuda Triangle levels of chaos, were a far better battleground. All I had to do was walk close enough to my target, then deliver justice.

Like when Pete Farrell's locker smacked him in the face. You see, Pete has this tendency when walking down the hallway to hit anyone's locker door when it's open and they're standing in front of it so that it bounces off the wall and smacks back against the person's face. He finds it hilarious; others not so much. But, one day, his locker decided to get back at him for it. The hallway was pretty quiet as most kids had already left for classes.

Pete does his stuff during the rush hour and then, probably due to fear of retaliation, waits until class has almost started before opening his own locker. There were just a handful of us milling around. The other kids were rushing to put things from their lockers into their bags, looking over their shoulders to see if Pete had finished and was now targeting them. His locker was about six feet down from a drinking fountain, and that's where I stood.

Leaning over, hands up to keep my hair out of the way, pushing the start panel with my hip. All very innocent looking. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him walk up to his locker, shaggy light brown hair hanging to his shoulders, looking like he washed it a month ago. He turned his head to check if anyone was behind him, but there was just a scattering of students at their lockers, at least eight feet away, and little ol' me, merely quenching my thirst.

I kept the water flowing, but locked into memories of Pete's antics. Mary Foote's tears after her hair got caught in the locker door and had to be cut; Troy Billings' red cheek with a thin cut in it that lasted for several days. My forehead began to burn. Turning his head forward again, Pete twisted the dial on the lock and opened the door, letting his hand drop from it.

Water looks crystallized when frozen in time; you can finally see the waving shine and glimmer of the reflecting lights, even in a small stream from the water fountain. The sound of it too, the dribble of running water turns into that single drop of liquid echoing through the air. I ran to Pete and smacked his locker door like I was an Olympic volleyball player going for gold.

It hit the metal wall behind him with a sharp crack, then bounced straight back into his frozen face with a muffled but deeply satisfying crunch. And then, because I am a deep believer in the scientific method, I went for a second trial of the same experiment. My hypothesis: Just how hard could I hit that locker door? I rushed back to the fountain. But the water spurted and flowed again, then abruptly stopped, just before I reached it.

My hand reached out to catch the metal side to steady myself and I leaned down to drink again, heart pumping fast in my chest. My eyes stayed on the smooth silver of the fountain basin, watching the water cascading around and spinning into the drain. But I heard his reaction.

"WHAT THE-" I glanced up at that point. When someone screams out like that in the middle of a hallway, it would be suspicious not to look. Pete held a hand to his cheek, his entire face red, but particularly on his right side. I'd guess the only thing he could hear was a loud ringing reverberating in his bleeding ear. His eyes looked over at me, being the closest to him. I pointed to my own ear.

"Are you okay, there's blood..." Pete brought his hand up to his ear and looked down to see that it came away red. His thick eyebrows came down and you could see his brain struggling to figure out what might be going on. It was hard to tell if that was from the possible concussion he was experiencing or just a general lack of brain cells.

"Yeah well, your nose is bleeding," he said, as if that were a comparable insult. I had already felt the warm liquid starting to dribble down and pushed a ready tissue from my pocket to stop the flow.

"Thanks," I replied in that nasally voice you get when plugging your nose.

"Guess we both belong in the blood club." Pete stalked off, muttering about a "weirdo". Word has it, he was sent home later that day with explicit instructions from the school nurse to see a psychiatrist. The system once again was unmoved: System user enacted revenge on non-super human bully. No innocent civilian was harmed and none saved. Target was not innocent yet not actively hurting others. User's act was neither heroic nor villainous. No points awarded.

This pretentious system could withhold all of the points it wanted; I hadn't done them for the numbers. Would my acts stop those jerks from continuing their horrible ways? Of course not, only an eventual cell in prison or a lifetime of bad choices would. But today, they got a taste of their own medicine. They didn't know where it came from, who had done it, or even what exactly had happened. That was enough. They weren't the ones in power in that second and they'd known it.

They couldn't turn around to bully something they didn't fully understand. That was the biggest revenge of all. If my life was a movie, this was where there'd be a montage of all of my newfound successes while Hall & Oates' You Make My Dreams Come True played in the background. It felt like nothing could go wrong. Which of course meant that it had to.