Gestation 1.1

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For most of the semester, I had been looking forward to the part of Mr. Gladly’s World Issues class where he would talk about capes.  Now that it had finally arrived, I couldn’t focus.  My eyes drifted to the clock above the door, then back to Mr. Gladly and back to the clock.  I wasn’t picking up enough of his lesson to follow along.  11:40.  Class ended in five minutes.

An hour was too long for lunch.

Mr.  Gladly was animated, clearly excited about what he was talking about, and for once, the class was listening.  He was the kind of teacher who tried to be your friend, who went by “Mr. G”, and he looked the part.  He was young for a teacher, stood shorter than some of the girls in the class, myself included, and was casually dressed in a long sleeved shirt and jeans.  He liked to end class a little earlier than usual and chat with us, gave lots of group work so people could hang out with their friends in class, and had ‘fun’ assignments like mock trials.  He struck me as one of the ‘cool kids’ who had become a teacher.  Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

I glanced over my shoulder.  Two rows to my left, two seats back, was Madison Clements.  She smirked at me.  I looked away and lowered my eyes to my notebook.  I tried to ignore that ugly, sour feeling of trepidation that nagged at me just beneath my ribcage.  I glanced at the clock.  11:43.

“Let me wrap up here,” Mr. Gladly said, “Sorry, guys, but there is homework for the weekend.  Think about capes and how they’ve impacted the world around you.  Make a list if you want, but no pressure.  On Monday we’ll break up into groups of four and see what group has the best list.  The members of the winning group each get a treat from the vending machine.”

The classroom quickly became loud with the sounds of binders, textbooks and notebooks being closed, chairs screeching on the floor and a half dozen conversations with everyone trying to speak loud enough to be heard over everyone else.  A bunch of the guys gathered around Mr. Gladly to chat.

Me?  I just put my books away and kept quiet.  My notebook had less notes on what Mr. Gladly had said than it had little doodles and lists of numbers in the margins where I had counted down the minutes to lunch as though I were keeping track of the timer on a bomb.

Madison was talking with her friends.  She was one of the popular girls.  She wasn’t gorgeous in the way popular girls on TV were, more ‘cute’ – petite, with curly brown hair cut to shoulder length and sky blue pins in her hair.  She was wearing a strapless top and denim skirt, which seemed absolutely daft to me given the fact that it was spring, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to criticize her.  Unlike me, she had a large circle of friends and guys were very much into her.  I think guys liked her because she was appealing without being intimidating.

If they only knew what a shrew she really was.

The bell rang with a lilting ding-dong, and I was the first one out the door.  I didn’t run, but I moved at a decent clip as I headed up to the stairwell to the third floor and made my way to the girl’s washroom.  There were a half dozen girls there already, so I had to wait for a stall to open up.  Once there was an opening, I let myself in and locked the door before leaning against the wall of the stall and exhaling slowly.  It wasn’t quite a sigh of relief.  Relief implied you felt better.  I just felt less uneasy.

It took maybe five minutes before the washroom emptied.  I sat on the lid of the toilet and, after taking a moment to double check nobody was around, got my brown bag lunch and began eating.  Lunch in the toilet stall was routine now.  Every school day, I would finish eating, then maybe do homework or read a book until lunch hour was over. Today, I was thinking I would spend as long as I could on Mr. Gladly’s assignment before reading, since I wasn’t really enjoying the book.  It was called ‘Triumvirate’ and was supposedly the combined biographies of the leading three members of the Protectorate, but I wasn’t buying it.

Whatever my plan, I didn’t even have a chance to finish my pita wrap.  The door of the bathroom banged open, and I froze.  I didn’t want to rustle the bag and clue anyone into what I was doing, so I kept still and listened.

The noise of the conversation was obscured by giggling and the sound of water from the sinks.  There was a knock on the door, making me jump.  I ignored it, but the person on the other side just repeated the knock.

“Occupied,” I called out, hesitantly.

“Oh my god, you were right, it’s Taylor!” one of the girls on the outside exclaimed with glee, then in response to something another girl whispered, I barely heard her add, “Yeah, go!”

I stood up abruptly, letting the brown bag with the last mouthful of my lunch fall to the tile.  Rushing for the door, I popped the lock and pushed.  The door didn’t budge.

There were noises from the stalls on either side of me, then a sound above me.  I looked up to see what it was, and I got doused in the face.  The liquid was bitter, blurring up my glasses and and stinging my eyes.  Cranberry juice.  They didn’t end it with that, either.  I managed to pull my glasses off just in time to see Madison and her friend Sophia leaning over the top of the stall, a bottle of juice or soda in each of their hands.  I cringed, just before they emptied the rest of the bottles over me.

It ran down the back of my neck, soaked my clothes, fizzed as it ran through my hair.  I pushed against the door again, but the girl on the other side was leaning against it.

If the girls pouring juice and soda on me were Madison and Sophia, that meant the girl on the other side of the door was Emma, the worst of them.  Angrily, I shoved on the door, the full weight of my body slamming against it, but my shoes lost traction on the juice-slick floor and I fell to my knees.

Empty plastic bottles with labels for grape and cranberry juice fell to the ground around me.  A bottle of orange soda bounced off my shoulder to splash into the puddle before rolling under the partition and into the next stall.  The smell was sickly sweet and almost cloying.

The door swung open, and I glared up at the three girls.  Madison, Sophia and Emma.  Where Madison was petite and cute, Sophia and Emma were the types of girls that made you think ‘prom queen’.  Sophia was dusky and slender, smirking.  Emma was, by contrast, curvy and red headed, a sometime amateur model for the catalogs that the local department stores and malls put out, not the kind of girl most people thought of when they pictured the ringleader for a group of bullies.  They were laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world, but I could barely register the noise over the buzzing in my ears.  I didn’t trust my ability to say something that wouldn’t give them fodder to taunt me with, so I stayed quiet.

I climbed to my feet and turned my back on them to get my backpack off the top of the toilet.  I stared at it for a second.  It had been a khaki green, but now dark purple blotches covered it.  It looked like either Madison or Sophia had emptied most of a bottle of grape juice over it.  I pulled it over my shoulders anyways.  As I turned around, the bathroom door banged shut, cutting off the sounds of their glee.  They were gone.

I approached the sink and stared at myself in the age stained mirror that was bolted above it.  I had inherited a thin lipped, wide, expressive mouth from my mother, but the large eyes (magnified just slightly by my oval-frame glasses) and my gawky figure made me look a lot like my dad.  When I was a kid, my mother’s affectionate nickname for me had been ‘owl’.  As I looked at myself in the mirror, though, I looked more like a drowned rat.  I considered my black curly hair to be one of my most attractive features, and had grown it long, but it was soaked enough that it clung to my scalp, neck and shoulders.  I was wearing a brown hoodie over a green tee, but multicolored blotches of purple, red and orange damp streaked both.  My glasses were beaded with droplets of the red, purple and orange drinks.

Using a dry brown paper towel from the dispenser, I wiped my glasses off and put them on again.  They were still streaked.  I pulled them off, wet the towel, wiped them again, dried them with another towel, and found the streaks were still there.

I screamed, then I kicked the plastic bucket with the toilet brush that was just beneath the sink.  When that didn’t serve to vent my frustration, I pulled off my backpack and threw it against the wall.  I wasn’t using my locker anymore – certain individuals had vandalized or broken into it on four different occasions – so my bag was heavy.  It crunched audibly as it hit the wall.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do!?” I shouted, my voice echoing in the bathroom.  There were tears in the corners of my eyes.  The bathroom had been the closest thing I could find to refuge.  A year and a half of this crap.  Lunch in the bathroom had been undignified, but it had at least kept me off their radar.  I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do that very afternoon.  Our midterm project for art was due, and I couldn’t go to class in this state.  Sophia was in that class, and I could just imagine her glee as I showed up looking like I’d tried and failed to tie-dye every article of clothing I owned.

Besides, I’d just thrown my bag against the wall and I doubted the project was still in one piece.

The buzzing in my ears was getting more intense, and, hands shaking, I let go.  For four months I had suppressed it whenever I was in public.  Right then, though, I didn’t care.  I shut my eyes and felt the buzzing turn into information.  As numerous as stars in the night sky, tiny knots of data filled the area around me.  I could focus on each one in turn, pick out identifying details.  The clusters of data reflexively drifted towards me, but I could make them move almost without thinking about it, so they shifted position according to my will.

I opened my eyes, feeling the rush of the full-strength buzz coupled with the adrenaline of what I was doing.  On every surface of the bathroom were bugs.  Flies, ants, mites, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, earwigs, beetles.  Every moment, more flowed in through the open window and the various openings in the bathroom, moving with surprising speed as they followed my unconscious instructions.  Some crawled in through a gap where the sink drain entered the wall and others emerged from the triangular hole in the ceiling where a section of foam tile had broken off.  They gathered around me, spread out over every available surface, primitive bundles of signals and responses, waiting for further instruction.  My practice sessions, away from prying eyes, had told me that I could control them as though they were extensions of my own body.  I could direct a single insect to move an antennae, or command the gathered horde of them to move in formation.  With a thought, I could single out a particular group, maturity or species from the jumble and direct them as I wished.

It would be so easy, so easy to just go Carrie on the school.  To give the trio their just desserts and make them regret what they had put me through: the vicious e-mails, the trash they’d upended over my desk, the flute – my mother’s flute – they’d stolen from my locker.  It wasn’t just them either.  Other girls and a small handful of boys had joined in, ‘accidentally’ skipping over me when passing out assignment handouts, adding their own voices to the taunts and the flood of nasty emails.

I knew that there were three local teams of superheroes and a half dozen solo heroes in the city so it was a given that I wouldn’t get away with it if I unleashed countless biting, stinging insects on the student body.  I didn’t care.  The idea of my father’s disappointment in me was more daunting, but even that didn’t outweigh the anger and frustration.

With a sigh, I sent an instruction to the gathered swarm.   Disperse.  The word wasn’t as important  as the idea behind it.  They began to exit the room, disappearing into the cracks in the tile and through the open window.  I walked over to the door and stood with my back to it so nobody could walk in before the bugs were all gone.

However much I wanted to, I couldn’t really follow through.  Even as I trembled with humiliation, I managed to convince myself to gather my stuff and head down the hall.  I left the school, ignoring all the stares and giggles from everyone I walked past, and caught the first bus that headed in the general direction of home.  The chill of early spring compounded the discomfort of my soaked clothes, making me shiver.

I was going to be a superhero.  That was the goal I used to calm myself down at moments like these.  It was what I used to make myself get out of bed on a school day.  It was a crazy dream that made things tolerable.  It was something to look forward to, something to work towards.  It made it possible to keep from dwelling on the fact that Emma Barnes, leader of the trio, had once been my best friend.

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