The Powers: Mental--Chapter 1

I’m in my middle school gym talking to Katie Bernard after running laps and stealing covert glances at Sam Hennessey from the corner of my eye. He’s the cutest boy at Sorhill Middle School and I’m not the first to look at him like this, and I won’t be the last.

I had just peeked at his rumpled hair and his braced mouth again when suddenly there’s a tug at my gym shorts and a breeze between my thighs. The whole gym class is laughing at me, staring, pointing, saying things like “I see London, I see France; I see Kiri’s underpants!” And my face is burning. I yank my shorts up on instinct and I turn slowly with tears in my eyes to stare into the face of evil: Brittany Johnson. She taunts and sneers, flipping her brittle ponytail every few seconds and I hate her with everything in me. I tell her to shut up, I tell her I hate her, to go away, but she won’t stop talking. So I say it, doing everything I can to not break down in front of everyone.

“Go kill yourself.” And she looks at me, her eyes glazed over all of a sudden. Everyone gets really quiet and we all watch her as she walks over to her purse. My breaths are ragged and fast, I’m so angry I could kill her myself. But she calmly pulls out a pencil, a sharp wooden one, and drags it in a slow, jerky motion down first her right wrist, then her left. There’s blood everywhere and all the kids are screaming at me as Brittany slumps over and bleeds out on the shiny gym floor before our eyes.

I wake with a start, my heart nearly jumping out of my chest. I don’t know why I’m so shocked at the dream; it’s the same one I’ve been having for six years. Six years. I’ve been trapped in a blank, square room for six years.

It’s almost disgusting, the monotony of my life here. I dream the same dream every night, think the same thing afterward. It’s no surprise anymore. It’s like watching a movie so much that you know the script back and forth, every plot twist and change of scenery, except it’s an awful movie that you wish you’d never watched in the first place and everything is exactly the same all the time. All I have is the dream, though. There is nothing in my mind besides that dream and the past six years.

The bed creaks under my weight as I flop back into the pillow. It’s damp with sweat or tears, or maybe both. The fluorescent lights overhead fade on, bathing me in their artificial glow. I force myself to lie still until I can breathe normally again and then I get up and stretch. My joints pop and crack in protest but I love the feeling. A small pleasure. The cool, smooth cement floor feels good against the soles of my feet as I walk around for a few minutes, and good against the palms of my hands when I do some pushups. It’s all about the routine.

I sit back down on my bed and wait patiently. I can feel their eyes on me like they always are from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. If I wait long enough, they show up.

After a few minutes of stillness and silence a man walks in. He’s got on the standard gear: black Crocs, a lab coat, a pair of glasses. They all look the same. I’d like to think this one is familiar but I honestly have no clue. I stopped paying attention a long time ago. He sets a tray of food down on the table with a clatter and I cross the room, sliding into the cold metal chair. After the first week I was here and I nearly starved myself, I’d figured out the food was safe and actually, not that bad.

The labcoat settles into the chair across from me. “How’re you feeling today, Kiriana?” he asks. This is a game we play. I eye him calculatingly before I turn my attention to the warm blueberry waffles on my plate. The labcoat sighs and ticks something on his clipboard. I eat in silence while he watches me like always.

“Do you know what today is?” he says after a minute or so of me ignoring him. “Today, Kiriana, is your birthday.” My head snaps up. I’m nineteen today. I should be out buying lottery tickets or voting or going to a strip club, but nope. Not me. I don’t even get a fucking cake. The news shocks me, and a thin smile tugs at the corners of the labcoat’s mouth. I’ve lost today; the object of the game is to not show any emotion.

I want to say something back but I can’t. The absence of my tongue prevents me from speaking and even though I’ve been coping with it for as long as I can remember the awareness stings me again, making me hate the labcoat more than ever. I consider stabbing him with the fork, then stabbing myself with the fork, then decide to stab another bite of waffle with the fork. Touch him—or myself, I’d venture to say—and they’d gas us for sure. He scribbles a few notes on that damned clipboard, the sound of the pen against paper annoyingly loud, and signals to an unseeable something outside of my box. He stands. The door wooshes open—which is actually an entirely undetectable part of wall—and closes the moment the labcoat is out, leaving me still at the table staring at the spot he’d just been.

I’ve gotten accustomed to keeping my own time here since there were no clocks in sight, no telltale indicators of the world passing around us. I finish my food. I pace from one wall to the other, I attempt my knockoff version of yoga, I take a nap, I eat lunch. Then after about seven monotonous hours—by my count, at least—the wall slides open again. I choose to ignore the labcoat’s presence. It is likely just an observer, staring at me while I lay here like a rock. He stands a few feet away from me, staring at me staring at the ceiling and it’s getting unnerving. I risk a glance from the corner of my eye and I’m immediately up off the thin mattress.

He doesn’t have a clipboard or glasses or Crocs. Crocs are standard labcoat attire. He’s not one of them, which leaves room for both better and worse. The man's skin begins to ripple and roll beneath the nondescript dark jacket and pants he has on. My jaw drops and I try to say something—scream for help, even—but nothing comes out. I stare at him, wide-eyed. I can’t deny that I’m a little afraid as slowly but surely, the man—who isn’t a labcoat at all obviously—changes into someone else that I can't quite make out. I swing between elation and fear.

After about eleven seconds of my slack-jawed staring at the new face in front of me, he speaks. “Kiri,” and I’m taken aback at the casual use of my name as he extends a hand toward me, “I’m here to help you, but we need to go.” I look up at him quizzically. I’m not sure if I prefer remaining rooted to the bed beneath me or leaving with him and I shrink away from his hand. “Now,” he snaps, the shadowed face beneath the hood contorting into something like fear or annoyance. He strides over and grabs my wrist, yanking me up from the only bed I’ve known for the past six years and pulls me with him to the door. Finally, I step outside of my box.

The stranger pulls me, drags me along with him with an ease that I didn’t expect. We fly through the wall-door and I finally get to see where I’ve been for so long. I’m taken aback; it looks like a warehouse. There are giant white cubes like the one I’d come from around the room, at least a dozen of them scattered in the space. We rush past a huge panel with buttons and flashing lights, monitors that crackled and switched views every once in a while. Each screen shows what I guess to be the inside of another cube with a person sitting desolately on his or her bed, waiting for time to pass. Just like me.

I don’t have time to look any closer because my savior—or captor—is speeding us toward a set of sliding doors. He’s moving so fast that for a moment I believe we will collide with them and I try to pull my wrist from his tight grasp. He just holds tighter and then I feel the skin of his hand moving over my own, rippling like waves. He jabs his thumb onto the wide panel and with a hiss it pricks his finger, opening the door to another room that looks vaguely like a mashup between a war tactics room and a scientist’s evil lair. It’s much colder in here and I try not to look around too much but I can’t help catching glimpses of huge tanks filled with liquids, tubes leading into them, and big, gleaming surgical tables. I shudder at the sight, wondering if I could have ended up on one of them.

We hurry up a staircase to the left, me barely keeping up with the man’s long strides. I feel like we’re moving so much faster than normal but I’m almost positive it’s just the adrenaline rushing through my veins, the urgency of the situation fueling my flight. There’s a receptionist’s desk in here but no receptionist. The area looks as if it was abandoned in a hurry. A seed of doubt begins to flower in my mind. Who is this man?

Again, he begins to ripple as we pass through the sliding doors of the facility and into a dimly lit parking lot. It is cold and the wind cuts through my paper-thin clothes, the concrete freezing my bare feet, but we keep walking toward the solitary vehicle parked beneath a flickering streetlamp. Instinctively I resist. My mother—and the rest of the world’s mother—had always warned me to never get into white vans with strange men, despite bribes of candy or lost puppies. Or freedom. I start to panic and I drop my body to the ground, landing awkwardly and hitting my knee pretty hard in the process. The man stops in his tracks and looks down at me, annoyance apparent. He kneels down until I can meet his eyes—a startling blue—and he speaks.

“Kiri, listen very carefully to me.” He speaks slowly as if I’m a child. I choke the urge to scoff. “I’m here to help you, but you have to help me. You need to trust me right now or you’re going back into that box and they will kill you,” he says gravely. Something about his statement rings true in my mind but I’m not swayed. He rolls his eyes. “Goddamn children.” And he picks me up like I weigh less than a feather and tosses me over his shoulder. I try to scream and wriggle free but he has an iron grip; my fists are rendered useless. We reach the van and he yanks the door open, tossing me in beside another girl wearing the same white outfit as me. Her eyes are shut tightly like she’s concentrating, but she's focused on something I can't see. She doesn't matter. On impulse I try to throw myself out of the door but the man shoves me back in roughly and slides it closed before I can make another attempt.

“We ready to roll, Max?” the driver I hadn’t noticed yet asks the man, startling me. I squint to clarify their features but they all seem to be fuzzy and out of focus. Not anything around them, just the people.

Max, the man who’d—for lack of a better word—saved me gets into the passenger seat. “Yeah, go.”

“Hurry up, I can’t hold this much longer,” the girl next to me says, pain in her voice. I looks between the three of them, my confusion swelling.

“You can let it drop,” Max tells the girl. With a huge sigh she opens her eyes—blood red eyes—and seems to pass out. A single red tear drips down her cheek and bleeds into the neck of the white t-shirt. Immediately after, the building that we were leaving in our dust comes alive with lights and sirens. There are men running after us with guns, men getting into vehicles and chasing after our own. I wrinkle my brow and shut my eyes tightly, praying that we will make it out alive. I hadn’t seen anyone else when Max and I were escaping and suddenly they swarm the lot like bugs, murderous bugs that we were rapidly fleeing. Bullets glance off the van sending a jolt through me every time I hear one hit. One lodges itself in the door on my side and I open my eyes to see the bullet rolling by my feet. I kick it away.

The driver floors the gas pedal and we shoot forward, heading directly for a chain-link fence that couldn’t be less than forty feet high. My neck snaps back with the speed and pain radiates up and down my spine but I ignore it. The gate is crawling shut in front of us and the trucks behind us are gaining speed as well, closing us in the lot and sealing our fate. Despite the fear flooding my body I can’t shut my eyes. I swallow the lump in my throat and dig my nails into the seat beneath me, forcing myself to not scream. There’s a horrible scraping of metal and I know we are stuck and we are all over. Max is yelling at the driver to keep going and the tires screech, the engine revs, and in a glorious instant, we slip free onto the road ahead.