Author's note: Alright. I'm not too sure about this chapter. It may change soon. What do you think?
Chapter Two
Lily Blame it on the Weatherman
I hear the manly roar of a scream before the building beings shaking with the vibrations of his voice. My mother reaches over and grabs my hand as if I’m the one needing the support here. Here, another doctor’s office where they will tell her the same thing. But only because I ask them to.
A nurse opens the large, and boringly plain, metal door and calls out my name. I stand, leaving my mother behind, and follow the nurse into an exam room. She tells me to stay here while she fetches the doctor. I sit on the exam table and it takes less than thirty seconds before I’m ready to begin some screaming of my own. There is nothing on the walls. There are no colorful posters or even step by step instructions on how to cover your nose properly when sneezing. That’s probably because no one really gets sick anymore. Besides cancer, everything else is basically curable or you can get vaccinated. A metal stool kept my attention for a while. Why was everything metal these days? Just because we’re in the city doesn’t mean we can’t use some wood here and there. There were shiny cupboards with large locks on them. The only other thing in the room was a counter and a sink with a dispenser for gloves and soap.
After a long while of staring off into space, the door opens and my new doctor emerges. She smiles at me and takes a seat on the silver stool.
“Sorry about the wait. A man came in with burns on his entire body. Although his body is almost ninety-seven percent water, his skin is highly sensitive to the rain. It is things like that that keep me going to work every morning.” That explains the intense screaming.
“It’s fine.”
She smiles again. Her teeth are perfectly straight and white. Her hair is brown but has a few blonde streaks perfectly placed in her twisted bun. She’s perfect. Too perfect. It’s abnormal to look so clean cut. My guess is she’s probably a shape shifter.
She has me scan my wrist on a scanner on the exam table and a screen pops up on the wall with my picture on it. She reads what other doctors have written next to my face. “So, you’re file says you do not carry the mutated gene. There is nothing about you that is abnormal.”
I smile inside. Not having the mutated gene and being normal is abnormal.
“I’d love to do some tests with you if you’re up for it. There is so much we are losing with your kind dyeing out.” She continues on about blood work and examining pieces of my skin but I can’t get past what was already said.
My kind?
“No,” I say.
She waits a moment, as if she expected this. “Now, Lily, I know this must be tough for you but you of all people should understand that unless we can get a better understanding of why it is that your gene has become almost extinct we’ll never save it.”
I shake my head. “No tests.”
She looks back at the screen. There is a lot of button pressing on the colorful screen before she turns back to me. “It says you’ve always been a little difficult for testing. Can you tell me why that is?”
I shrug. “Needles gross me out.”
Dr. Perfect just laughs. Knowing that she cannot do any tests without my authorization, she continues with the button pressing. Whoever is in charge of the city of New York has yet to make it mandatory for ‘my kind’ to indulge in these crazy doctors’ testing. “Alright then, how about we take a look at those scars? I’m not sure why you haven’t already had laser surgery to remove them. Your family can surly afford such a surgery.”
I sigh, having to explain it for the millionth time. “They are a part of who I am. I don’t need them to be erased for me to feel secure in life. It won’t help me be like everyone else. My scars make me different if not the same as everyone else.”
This seems to baffle the perfect doctor. “Do you feel pretty with them?”
“Can you promise that I’ll feel pretty without them?”
She opens her mouth then reconsiders what she wants to say. “How did you get these scars? Your file doesn’t say.”
She’s right. It’s doesn’t. The only people that really know are me, my father and Mark. “They happened the first day of kindergarten.”
Her eyes widened. “Someone attacked you?”
I shake my head. “Another student at my school is a fire starter. It was his turn to show it to the school board and students. But I guess he couldn’t take the heat.” I laugh. When she doesn’t, I continue. “I remember the spark in his palm. He stared at it like he was willing for it to ignite. But spark after spark just dulled out into a small stream of smoke coming from his hand. For some reason it couldn’t catch.” I could feel the tears beginning to form in my eye. I didn’t want to cry. If Mark hadn’t upset me earlier in the day, I probably wouldn’t even have mentioned it to someone who means absolutely nothing to me. Maybe that’s why it is easier for me to just let the words pour from my mouth. She means nothing to me and she makes no real impact on my life. Why should I care what it is she thinks of me or my story?
“There was a mixture of pressures on him. The teacher was giving him urging comments that were a little harsh, in my opinion. I don’t really remember what it is she was saying but I remember thinking that I wouldn’t want to be in his position. There was also me, just standing there, the only one left, waiting to show or not show what I had to offer. After what felt like an hour, the teacher told him to just leave the stage. He looked like he was going to cry. As he turned to leave the stage, his entire hand caught fire. He panicked and looked frantically around to get rid of it. I think he thought he could throw it away from him. And he did. He threw it at me and I caught it.”
“What did that feel like? What were you thinking? I can’t even imagine.”
One tear cascaded down my cheek. This woman may be a doctor, but her social skills could use some work. I scooted off of the exam table losing, my patience of indulging her. “Hot.”
My mother was angry with me for running out on the doctor. She said it was very rude and a waste of good money. She went on and on for the entire ride home in the town car. She should have guessed something like that would have happened. It always does.
At dinner she told my father of what happened but he looked uninterested. He was an in-depth thinker and you could never really tell what was going on in his head. He once created and proved an algorithm while reading me a bedtime story. I don’t resent him for it, but rather I look up to him and love him for it. It takes a large toll on the brain to be an evil scientist and all.
He laughs, hearing my thoughts. “I love you, too, sweetie.”
My mother slammed down her fork on the fine…metal…plate. “I don’t understand why you don’t just strap her to a gurney yourself. You have all the technology to figure her genes out. Not to mention you run the company that does the laser surgery she needs. Yet you do nothing!”
He doesn’t feed her anger or rebuttals in an angry tone. He stays completely calm. “We talked about this before, Alyson. She’s my daughter not a patient. I cannot do it.”
What he says is true and he is sincere about it, but it is not the complete truth. My father knows why I don’t want to be tested on and why I want to keep my scars. With just one simple touch, my father knows everything about a person. He doesn’t always like it. Like how he was talking to a patient and he dropped his pen. The man picked it up and ended up touching my father’s finger when handing it back to him. My father found out that this patient is cheating on his wife with three other women and none of them know. This man is a stock broker and steals from some of his clients to afford the four woman’s materialistic desires. He also steals his internet from one of his neighbors in his apartment building. Sometimes, knowing is too much.
I look at my mother. She was never known to be plain. She was an Omni in high school and head of the clan. She had wide brown eyes, very plump, red lips and long brown hair. The plate in front of her showed some serious damage done by her angry fist. Yes, my dainty mother has incredible strength.
Everyone surrounding my family is completely baffled by me. How could the offspring of a super genius and someone with incredible strength be so powerless?
I place my napkin on my plate and excuse myself. As I head to my bedroom I begin to relax. I love both of my parents. I’m not some spoiled rich kid who hates their parents cause she didn’t get a pony on her sixth birthday. We have a great relationship, especially me and my father, but it’s just difficult to relate to them when they think I’m so much different.
The floor and stairs up to my room are marble. When the designers built the building before the epidemic hi, they must have thought it’d be a modern/futuristic theme. It’s not. It’s cold on my feet in the mornings and very bland. But once in my room, everything looks normal. My bed is made out of white oak with gold trim. I have a matching vanity table and end tables. My carpet is a light pink that I like to squish between my toes.
Being my mother’s daughter, my closet is huge with racks and racks of shoes. I walk in and pick out a pair then grab a simple, black dress on my way out of the closet. I stare at myself in the vanity for a while before I begin applying my makeup. I don’t really have to, but getting ready is a large part of the fun.
The person staring back at me is no longer me. She sighs and whispers, “And so the night begins.”
