Chương 7: Too Hot for School

Gran's apartment was overly bright when I arrived home, the curtains unusually pulled to the side and every window flung open. She called this "airing out"; I called it "ushering the escape of noxious fumes from burning dinner."

"Still can't get that pork chop recipe to work, can you?" I asked, shrugging off my backpack.

"I just know you like 'em extra crispy." She was perched on the end of her recliner, watching one of those daytime court shows where people sue each other over broken microwaves and the hogging of time shares. Her eyes flicked up over her glasses at me.

"You're late."

"Yeah, some of the kids were really slow when going home today." I couldn't help the grin that overtook my face. She squinted, wrinkled lips pursed.

"What happened? You actually look happy." Trust Gran to find it alarming because I'm not sneering for once. I held up my hands, heading for the kitchen.

"It was a pretty normal high school day: Academia mixed with both the yearning and shunning of social approval with an overabundance of fart jokes. There was even a food fight at lunch; I thought for a second I was in a John Hughes movie."

"You wish." She sighed.

"Everything went to crap after the '80s." I dug around the fridge, finding a soda past what might have been a cucumber in another life. The can hissed as I opened it, angry at being rescued.

"You know, one of these days, all of the old food in the fridge is going to go zombie and kill us all in our sleep," I muttered.

"It's either that or my cookin'. You choose which one you want to die from." I leaned against the counter, trying to look casual. My hands still tingled though, like they were itching to remind me what they'd done earlier. Slowing the world down, saving a kid before he turned into pavement art. Gran clicked off the TV.

"You're hiding something."

"Me?" I pointed to myself.

"The poster child for transparency and good decisions? Never." She snorted.

"Don't play cute. You've got that look. The same one your mother used to get before she set fire to the neighbor's hedge just to see if it'd burn faster than ours!" I rolled my eyes, retreating back to my room.

"Relax, Gran. The neighbors are safe from me as long as I continue to avoid any and all human contact. And I swear to you I will." I heard her response muffled through the door.

"That don't comfort me!" —-- Christmas came and went in a blur of Family Dollar presents and dry stuffing- just like always. On the last day of the year, Gran fell asleep at nine and I made my best New Years resolutions ever. When the first day of school rolled around, I walked with only three hours of sleep under my belt, but plenty of plans in my head. Step one: pretend nothing happened. Step two: keep pretending until the day I die.

Step three: Get used to the crispy burning of hell for telling a lie my whole life. Easy. Nobody would suspect the girl who barely talked right? I was halfway through the parking lot when I heard the shouting. It looked like the whole school was standing on the lawn, staring at a black armored van parked at the curb and a group of men wearing navy jackets. Looked like the police finally caught up with Lenny Holt's "painkiller" side hustle. But one of the men turned and I read 'ACADEMY' stamped across his back.

Derek Rudd stood in the middle of the kumbaya circle. Only a sophomore yet captain of the JV basketball team, he was famous for using gel that made his hair as shiny and hard as a helmet and for that time his burp broke the utter silence of a school assembly. He wasn't burping now- he was glowing. Literally. His arms lit up red like a burner on a stove. Sweat dripped down the men surrounding him, their faces pink, mouths huffing. I could feel the heat all the way from twenty feet back. Derek was a human coal pit.

Oh man. Lava Boy. Fuego. Inferno. Hot Pocket. The name options were endless and embarrassing. A couple of the Academy guys were talking into their radios. One had a hand on Derek's shoulder, "guiding" him toward the van. Derek wasn't exactly resisting, but his face looked like Christmas got replaced with Arbor Day.

"I just… I just want to show my friends a little more."

"You've got more important people to show now, bud." The officer clenched his mitted hand a little more tightly on Derek's shoulder. The kid tried to turn his head back.

"Hey Adam, tell Coach I'll still be there for practice tonight." Adam looked doubtful. A teacher clapped her hands.

"Alright everyone! Move along, nothing to see here." There went Derek -sweating, glowing, trying not to cry- being pushed into the van that closed him in with a hydraulic hiss. The jacket men piled into an SUV and they all drove off. The students were not quiet with their commentary.

"He doesn't have a choice?"

"He has to go with them?"

"Poor Derek- I knew him well!" One of these weirdos actually read Shakespeare. Then I saw his beret and knew it had to be a theater kid. The bell rang for school to start and the swarm of teenagers slowly moved into the hive.

"We knew him! We knew him before he was a super!"

"I'm going to post all of his old yearbook photos online. You should see his seventh grade one. It's gonna kill him."

"I hear the Academy's like a prison."

"Yeah but just like the prisons for rich people. So, more like a country club."

"Should I start a Derek fan account? Like, strike while he's hot- literally." I watched the black van as it rounded the corner, taking the once captain of the basketball team away forever. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. It looked more like a hearse. —--- By third period, Derek Rudd was already a legend. The school Wi-Fi strained under the pressure of so many grainy, zoomed-in videos of him glowing like a radioactive toaster.

Someone had already made a meme: Derek with his blazing arms cooking eggs and bacon on them. People's phones kept dinging with notifications for news articles about it:"Local hero recruited by Academy""Future Defender Of The Nation?"

"Teenage Boy is Hot" Meanwhile the math teacher was drawing sad triangles on the board, pretending thirty kids weren't secretly refreshing feeds under their desks. I doodled in the corner of my notebook. Nothing worthy of an art house, just a stick figure in a box labeled Academy Zoo. The figure wasn't Derek. It was me. Not the first time we'd seen a kid picked up by the Academy. In third grade, Persimmon Taylor fell off a tall slide, laying unconscious on pavement for five minutes, and then finally woke up.

At the nurse's office, she was found surrounded by frost-covered toys and the nurse stiff as a popsicle. The Academy came and picked her up. She'd cried like she thought she was in trouble for doing something wrong, but what eight year old wouldn't? It didn't seem scary to me at the time. Probably because I was sure that that would never happen to me. It still wouldn't. The Academy wouldn't take me. No need to recruit someone whose powers are fun-sized. People say it's for protection- for everyone.

If you've got powers, especially as a kid, you need time to make it safe. You can't do that around normal people. They'll do clips for news channels every now and then; a teacher puts on a documentary about it when they don't feel like teaching that day. Smiling kids in matching uniforms, practicing their powers under the watchful eye of government-approved heroes. All so that you can feel like they've got it all under control. They're getting everyone with the big powers, they're training them.

Anyone else you don't have to worry about, they'll be too small to matter. For most of the smaller people, it's enough to just do it as a party trick. To make a crowd go "ooh!" But occasionally, they want to prove something. Like Voice Crack. The Academy wasn't interested in someone who could cause mild irritation or make some glass jars break. That's why he had to prove how "dangerous" it could be. You know, with the added bonus of a gun. We'd have to see if Hover Guy eventually went on a rampage.

Terrorizing citizens with his invisible chair. Maybe cause some heart attacks in the elderly. And I get it, I doubt that the supers were chained to walls, force fed gruel like in a nineteenth century asylum. I'm sure the Academy was like a country club where a lot of time was spent sitting around, sipping drinks while you watch friends play super amplified tennis. But, you don't get a choice. You're there whether you like it or not. The Academy would tell you what to do and maybe they're nice about it.

They probably took into account your thoughts and feelings. But they got to decide. Interestingly enough, in those documentaries they play at school, they never show what happens to the supers that decide they don't want to do what the Academy tells them. I didn't doubt that they existed, but I had no idea where they were. Or if they were alive. —---- At lunch, everyone was still high with superhero fever.

Words bounced off of the cafeteria walls until they conglomerated into an incomprehensible blare, but you still got the occasional escapee.

"What do you think Derek's doing right now?"

"I'd be getting any and all superhero signatures I could."

"What if they don't let you design your own costume? What if they made me wear orange?!"

"Wonder if we'll ever see him again." We wouldn't- at least, not Derek Rudd. We'd see him in his super form: winking at us from TV screens, selling us some fast food that would give us colon cancer, or some bit on a morning show where he hilariously gives the weather report in his fighting costume. Someone whose family was rich had already ordered up t-shirts with Derek's face that said I knew him before he got hot. They were selling for forty bucks and they were almost out. At least it wasn't going to drugs.

Might be where these kids were getting all that money to pay for it though. I was steps away from receiving the culinary indulgence that was corn dogs with tots when we all heard a scream.

"Cass- help me!" My head spun around to see Marcus Green theatrically hanging off of the edge of a lunch table with one finger. Brandon sat on one side, grinning at me. Great, they hadn't forgotten.

"Help me, Zero, you're my only hope!" Marcus held up a hand to his forehead like a maiden of yore. I began piling tots onto my lunch tray.

"Clearly you haven't watched enough Dr. Phil because you're the only one who can save yourself, Marcus." They had no idea who Dr. Phil was. I only knew because Gran watched TV programs from the stone age. He fell, pretending to die on the cafeteria floor, which he probably would because who knew how many diseases lived on there? Students around him pretended to cry, holding a mock funeral.

"Why? Why wouldn't you save him, Cass? Why?!"

"Oh yeah, she can't because she doesn't have any powers."

"She must be so jealous of Derek right now."

"Hey Cass." Brandon stood up from the table.

"Why didn't you use your super speed?" It was a good thing I was still researching the corn dogs to see if they were in fact edible. I needed a moment to control my reaction. When I turned, I had my regular sardonic mask firmly in place.

"What are you talking about?" Brandon stepped over Marcus' prone body, who was probably trying to sneak in a nap now.

"The last day before Christmas Break. We all saw it." He gestured to the group.

"One second you're walking by me and the next you're on the ground with your boyfriend Colin over there." Whoops, Harry Potter turned out to be Colin Creevy, my mistake. Brandon was staring at me, with that affable grin that made people think he was just joking. But his eyes were boring into mine.

"How'd you do it?" The cafeteria had gone quiet now. Social drama fed the soul far more than reconstituted mac and cheese. I shrugged.

"Look, if you need exercise tips from me, you're in big trouble, Meat Tower. Unless it's about mental exercises, then I've got my work cut out for me." There I went, reacting like I was a bull with a red flag waving in front of me when in reality, I was just hamburger meat. Thankfully, most of the time, they understood my comebacks about as well as they comprehended Chaucer. My stand up got a few chuckles, likely from the future engineers table.

Brandon lifted up his hands, looking out at everyone as if he'd somehow become their champion.

"What is she even saying?" The crowd rewarded his witty retort with booming laughter. Someone yelled "MENTAL EXERCISES" in a nasal voice. Another called out, "She speaks nerd fluently!" Meat Tower let the laughter die down before smirking at me again.

"But I think you're just dodging the question, Zero." I stand there, heart pumping so fast, it thumped in my ears. It felt like the crowd was closing in on me, even though I was pretty sure no one had moved.

"Watch out, she's gonna blow!"

"That's enough" A teacher's voice cut through the crowd.

"Mr. Green, off the floor! Brandon, sit down or it's detention for you." A collective groan rang out. I stumbled my way out of the zoo. I was in no mood for food anymore, anyways. Behind me, footsteps smacked against the school's polished concrete floor and I turned to see Mavis huffing for air.

"Cass, wait. Where are you going?"

"I'm trying to avoid getting burned by the angry villagers, what do you think?" I turned around and kept walking. She ran to keep pace at my side.

"What was Brandon even talking about? What happened with you and that Colin guy?" I waved my hand, rolling my eyes.

"It was nothing! I just happened to pull this kid back from a car before Brandon could turn him into roadkill, and he had to get revenge on me for that. I'm sure I revoked some points for his bully membership club, so you know- sorry, not sorry."

"Okay," she said, eyes wide then looking at me with lips pursed.

"Is there a reason for this sudden interest in defending people?" I shoved my fist in my jacket pocket and stumbled as a foot dragged too long on the floor.

"I'm not! I just happened to be there, I reached out and pulled. For all I know, I could have been just sneezing, caught onto Colin's backpack by mistake, and accidentally ended up saving his life. It's. Not. A. Big. Deal!" Mavis held up a hand.

"Look, I get it. You saved your grandma from a guy with a gun at the grocery store- really cool, totally awesome. Then you get the opportunity to save someone at school- and from Meat Tower Brandon! I wish I could have seen it. I just don't think you should go looking for more opportunities for danger!" I shake my head, snapping my fingers.

"Oh darn, you just foiled my dream of going around saving everyone and becoming a superhero! Guess I need to come up with a new five year plan." She stopped walking. I only had time to see her distraught face before I opened the doors to fresh clean air, clear blue sky, and not a single person in sight. But I knew Mavis would be sitting on the hallway floor, tapping her fingers on her knees, unable to say anything. And I just kept walking.