Post by thecurtain on Nov 23, 2011 23:53:21 GMT -5
From his first day in his new school, Mac could tell that public schools and private schools were quite different. It wasn’t that the people here were more accepting, or more understanding. No, his very first day promised entirely otherwise; it was far too close to his last school for the students here not to know what he was, and Mac quickly became aware that his presence was somewhat of a well-known anomaly in the area.
“Hey, check it.” They didn’t even wait until his bike came to a stop. Mac tried to take advantage of this by picking up speed again, but these guys were huge--were they really seventh graders?!--and it took only one of them to lift him bodily from his seat. The bike stayed standing in a brilliant display of impossible balance, even as he was plucked from it.
“Yeah, knew it!” one of them exclaimed, sounding proud of himself. “It’s that new kid. Magnet boy.”
“No shit!” The guy holding him by the shoulders lifted him so their eyes met. “So this is what a freak NEXT looks like up close, huh?”
“Put me down,” ground out Mac, feeling his face heat up just as acutely as he started picking up points of metal, everywhere. Public schools had no uniforms, and everyone pinged differently, at different strengths.
“Yeah, sure! I’ll put you down!” The guy dropped him, hard, on his rear. Mac winced as the vibrations of the impact with the concrete sidewalk below him traveled up through his torso.
“Probably thought you were hot shit at your other schools, huh? Got everyone afraid of you?”
He opened his mouth to protest but no words came out, he was too baffled. Was that really what everyone thought he was trying to do...?
“You just remember, Freak-o, ain’t no one gonna be scared of you here.”
“Round here we fight with fists. Yer wimpy little magic tricks ain’t doin’ shit! Hahaha!”
Bewildered, Mac watched the three of them laugh--and leave him there. He’d barely stood and begun to dust himself off by the time they had walked a short distance away to accost some other kid, a scrawny, black-haired boy with glasses. “Hey! Poindexter! You got our homework?”
Mac avoided the kid’s gaze and hurried to chain up his bike and get to class. It was almost too cliche, these guys were just picking on everyone. Not that he was going to complain. The more kids they bullied, the less time they’d have for him.
His conclusion fell flat the instant he stepped into the hallways. Public schools were indeed very different than the prestigious private ones his parents had until now been trying to keep him in, he realized. The hallways reverberated with cries of “Faggot!” and “Whore!” and “Kike!” and tons of other slurs he didn’t even recognize, not to mention the vibrations he felt more than heard of things slamming into metal lockers--mostly bodies. The bell for homeroom rang before he could even find his locker in this mess, and the teachers slowly filed out into the halls from their classrooms, wearily and unconvincingly shouting for the students to get to class. But either no one heard, above the din of oppression, or no one bothered to listen.
Mac squeezed himself as small as he could, trying to get by, but a kid mistaking him for a locker fell on him, jabbing a sharp elbow into his gut. His field slipped out of control with his surprise, and by their zippers and snaps and loose change and weapons and god knew what else, the other students were suddenly shoved back, outside of his field’s reach. The hallway went dead quiet as everyone, the teachers included, turned to stare at him.
Oh jesus fuck.
“Hey.” The word came from a guy pushing through the crowd towards him. Until now Mac never could have imagined any kid his age bigger than the ones who had accosted him outside. “Hey. You the NEXT freak, huh? We heard you was comin’ today.”
Swallowing, Mac pressed himself against the wall of lockers behind him, back arching into the hemispherical groove dented into them by the edge of his field. Kids either made way for the big guy or were removed forcibly from his path as he approached. Mac’s mind was spinning too hard with fear to wonder why the teachers watching from their doorways didn’t do anything to stop him.
“So you think you can just push this school around just ‘cuz you got special magic powers?” the big guy demanded, his last words, rising high into a mocking squeak of tone. “Lemme tell ya somethin’, Magnet Boy. Ain’t no one ‘round here that pushes me around.” He was right in Mac’s face, now, small blue eyes glaring from his large round face. “You got that, shithead?”
Mac bit the inside of his lip to keep it from trembling and reached up to grab hold of his hair.
“HEY!” The big guy grabbed his wrist before it could get to its destination, squeezing hard. “You answer me when I ask you a question, freak!”
The pulse of Mac’s field threw the big guy off his feet, but his grip on the smaller boy’s wrist was too determined, and Mac found himself flying forward a few yards to land in a heap on top of the other student’s bulk.
“The hell!? What the hell?!!” Mac barely heard anything through the sudden clamor of students around him and had no time to recover before the bully had regained his feet and dumped him unceremoniously on the floor.
“That the way you wanna play, punk?” The tiny blue eyes were jeering down at him at the center of that sea of stares. “Good. I’m gonna make your damn worthless life miserable.”
“Miles, please,” a nearby teacher said, sounding almost pleading, “that’s enough. Get to class, please? All of you!”
Miles kept his gaze trained on Mac for one last, long second, before finally turning and trundling down the corridor.
The hallways began to clear almost casually, as though the students had been intending to do so around now anyway, but Mac stayed frozen, staring up at the place where those eyes had just been.
“Hey! Did you hear me?”
Startled, Mac lost control of his field for another split second, long enough to rattle the bell earrings in the teacher’s ears. They chimed, impossibly tinny, yet to Mac they sounded like church bells ringing at a funeral. Her eyes closed, as if she were preparing for a long bout of shouting, but instead she just sighed.
“Well,” she said, voice tinged with...boredom? as she took a step back, “your first day is as good a time as any to meet the principal.” She scribbled something onto a green slip of paper and pointed down the hall. “Get going.”
“But I--”
“That’s one day’s suspension for starting a fight, do you want another for talking back?” she interrupted. Her expression seemed tired, as if she were sick of counting the times over the course of her career that she’d had to do this. “Anything else you’d like to add before you go?”
Her dark eyes watched him flatly as she again offered Mac the slip. One shaking hand took it while the other clenched in his blonde locks, and without another word he lowered his head and made his way down the hall.
---
Mac’s birthdays had gone largely unnoticed since he’d gained his NEXT powers, and while it bothered him to a point, he never felt the need to complain about it. After all, he had no friends, so a party would have been pointless. If the day went off without too much of a hitch, Mac usually considered it his birthday present, in addition to the grilled cheese sandwiches his mother served for dinner every year, and he was appropriately grateful for it. Most other days had enough excitement, only augmented recently with the daily troubles he dealt with in his new school, that a calm day was all he could hope for.
The day after his fourteenth birthday would be his last day at his junior high school, though Mac didn’t know this at the time. Graduation was three weeks away, and too far off to be a distraction from the unusually heavy way his mother set down his dinner plate, piled with three sandwiches.
He stared at them for a moment, then at the plate, then up to her. She and his father were watching him, carefully, from the other side of their small round dinner table. Their faces were set very seriously as they seemed to be trying to gauge him. The sandwiches went untouched for the moment while he blinked up at them, his hand slipping unconsciously into his hair.
His father cleared his throat, and sat. His mother followed suit.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, in a small voice. Their behavior around him had seemed a little more touchy lately, though Mac assumed it to be the consequence of a particularly bad fight he’d gotten himself caught up in over a week ago. He’d been in the hospital for two days, but things had returned to normal after that. Maybe it was something else...?
But, “No,” his mother told him, looking down at her plate piled with a more conventional evening meal. “Eat your dinner, Macbeth.”
It bothered him all night, even as he tried to concentrate on his homework (geez, fuck algebra, though). His parents had been acting different since around that last hospital visit, he was sure of it. It wasn’t unusual for his mother to become more and more harried after such events, but normally his father just focused more on his writing; instead, Mac hadn’t seen him go into his office since. He had been cooking dinner more often, too.
Something was wrong, but what? And why lie about it? It had his nerves on edge and his imagination on overdrive. What was the big secret? Algebra was hard enough to focus on without all this weirdness. The problems never got done, but really that was nothing new.
---
“Hey superfreak!” It was practically his alarm clock, when he got off the bus every morning. The kids here were never really very imaginative with their disparaging nicknames, but Mac just wasn’t in the mood for this today. Alarm clocks were ever more annoying the less sleep you got, and he’d been kept up all night thinking. His patience stores were dangerously thin.
“Fuck off,” he muttered, trying to slip past Miles and out of the parking lot. They knew his quirk of pulling at his hair and what it meant, and he refused to show Miles was getting under his skin, so he kept his hands clenched tightly in the front pocket of his thin hoodie.
“Hey hey, what’s all that!” Miles’s voice had a particularly nasty quality to it today, and Mac really didn’t feel like sticking around to find out what it meant. “I got a special present for you today, Magnet Boy! Heard it was your birthday yesterday. I felt so bad that no one knew! HEY!” One big, meaty hand reached down to clench the front of Mac’s shirt as he tried to continue walking towards the building. “You ain’t ignoring me, are you? I told you I got you a birthday present! It’s ‘cuz I’m such a sweetheart, Farrow! Ain’t I the nicest, boys?”
Miles’s usual thugs had shown their ugly faces, now, and they had him surrounded in a nodding, sniggering semi-circle. Oh for christ’s sake.
“Ain’t you curious?” he continued, in that high, mocking tone he had. “Don’tchu wanna know what it is?”
Mac’s first instinct was to run, but Miles had already grabbed him, and besides, there were only diminishing spaces amongst the thugs through which he could squeeze. He had to play along, at least for now, while he waited for an opening. “Yeah,” he agreed, as levelly as possible. “Sure. What is it?”
Miles answered him with a laugh, and Mac squeezed his eyes shut, biting down on a groan. He really didn’t have the patience for this today.
“I think you gotta guess! Just put your little magnety feelers out and tell me what I got for you!”
Mac’s eyebrows furrowed. What the hell was this, these morons were asking him to use his powers?
“I can’t guess what metal shit you got on you, dumbass!” he shot back, losing what little composure he’d held onto thus far. “That’s stupid!”
Miles’s mocking, shit-eating grin twisted into a scowl in less than a moment. “Ooh, he’s impatient today, boys!” rumbled the big guy, shaking Mac a little. “Well, lucky for you, freakfeelers, so am I! I wanna give this to you right away!”
Mac didn’t know what he expected, but a weird surge of terrifying memories was definitely not it. The sun glanced off the object Miles pulled from his bag, temporarily blinding him, and distantly, like echoes, he could hear the sounds of shattering glass, and he could feel the dull, phantom pain just inside his left shoulder blade.
“FUCK!” Mac shouted, his voice cracking as he struggled to break free. “What the hell?!”
“Y’don’t like it?” Miles sneered, nastily, his grip strengthening. “But I brought it in just for you, birthday boy! Thought it might look good on you!”
“Or in you!” one of the thugs corrected, squealing with laughter.
“Shut it, Harvey! Listen, he’s so grateful he can’t even make words!” Mac had no idea what kinds of sounds were filtering out of his throat, but he knew they were loud and he knew they were scared, and he knew no one in the parking lot was going to do anything about either. Nearly a year and a half had gone by for him in this school, and in that time not one teacher had broken up a fight before someone got hurt--and that someone was usually him. Even though now there was a weapon involved, he didn’t really expect that to change. Miles ran this school, and teacher and student alike were either too scared or too nonchalant to stop him.
The knife shuddered in his hand, and Miles nodded his head at one of his thugs. A lithe, twitchy boy stepped forward and took a good handful of Mac’s hair, yanking hard.
“Gaah!” he cried out breathlessly, and the knife stilled as Mac’s focus shifted violently. “Urgh! No! No!”
“There we are, there we are!” Gleeful, Miles drew the knife blade closer to Mac’s neck, and he began babbling, too terrified to properly beg them to stop. “Don’t worry, freakshow, I ain’t gonna kill ya! Just gonna mark ya up a bit, so’s you always remember me. Don’t want you to graduate and forget all about us, huh?”
“Yeah yeah!” echoed a voice in the crowd, loud, over Mac’s garbled pleading.
“Just a little reminder!”
The tugging on his hair got harder, coyly drawing his attention away from the tip of the small knife that was ready to draw right behind Mac’s ear. “Just a little ‘M,’ he chuckled quietly, darkly. “Just the little ‘M’ we share. So you don’t forget.”
The tip of the knife touched his skin, and Mac howled brokenly. Before it could even draw blood, the knife shot away, the ring of assailants surrounding him followed suit, and there rose a cacophony of surprise and anger and vengeance. Mac’s scalp burned but his hair was free, and he staggered back, trying to get away from the ring of delinquents before they could recover.
“Grab him!” Miles shouted, furiously rubbing where his hard head had hit a parked car. Mac’s head cleared of thought as he scrambled to get away, but the speed of the group was faster than his own. Hands reattached to his limbs, holding him still while Miles cast around for his knife. “Where’d you put it, you little shit? “ he murmured, attention trained on the ground. “Where is it...?”
Finding the knife before Miles was suddenly of the utmost importance, and Mac’s eyes widened as he cast out for it, the strong, sharp feel of metal--it resonated just a bit differently--was it--there!
“HEY! I said grab him!” The voice raged, but it was tinged with fear. Even as hands pulled at his hair, Mac had the knife suspended before Miles’s face, shaking, but focused. “Little freak! You use that on me and I’ll kill you! You hear me?!”
Mac heard, but he was too focused to care. Miles reached up for the knife and it reached back, shaking his hand with its sharp edge. A cry of pain, awkwardly and agonizingly high, struck Mac’s ears and split the activity in the parking lot. Finally, people took notice.
The knife fell, leaving Miles holding his deeply cut hand and staring at it as if it belonged on someone else’s body. In a haze, Mac watched Miles, felt more than saw the knife clatter to the ground, streaked with red. There were shouts, and hands on him, restraining him even though he was frozen. He did that. He did that. His field had not merely repelled the knife, it directed it, countering Miles’s strength with his own.
And he had won.
But he never saw Miles, nor the teachers who held him down, nor the kids who stared at him in unabashed shock and fear, ever again.
The day that should have been his graduation day, Mac was studying for makeup exams, face screwed up in difficult concentration. The phone rang, as it had done many times in the past month, but Mac didn’t notice it until his mother came into his room to give him the receiver with a grim face and a trembling hand.
---
It took two weeks for the school to determine the outcome of his exams, and even then he was banned from the school’s premises, so they mailed him the results, in an official-looking white envelope.
“Looks like I passed,” he mumbled, his eyes scanning over the grades while his parents both watched him silently from the door. Barely, but he passed. Scraping by was all he could ever hope for, given how frequently he missed class; Mac counted himself lucky they’d given him a chance to finish from home at all.
“How long do you think you can keep this up, Macbeth?” his father intoned, voice almost whisper-quiet. Mac glanced up, his eyebrows raised with anxious anticipation. He knew when his parents were getting at something; that tone of his father’s practically threatened it.
“This needs to stop,” his mother said, her voice thin and high and trembling, just as Mac could always remember it being when she spoke to him.
“...What does?” he asked carefully, not sure where her train of thought was going.
“This!” she cried, stabbing an index finger through the air at the envelope in his lap. “This...this...”
“You’ve been this way for eight years,” his father cut in, squeezing her upper arm gently though his voice was hard. “Eight years and yet you still recklessly get into fights, break things, hurt people.”
Mac’s eyes grew wide. “I--”
“Sometimes I think you’ve gotten worse!”
“You don’t even try to control yourself!”
Feeling weak, Mac nevertheless climbed to his feet, his heart pounding faster. Fingers gripping his hair, trying to keep the pipes from shaking, keep the bed frame steady, don’t let them see how the wire on his notebooks trembled, stop, steady! “That’s not true,” he breathed, his voice even harder to control than his field. “I am trying! I just...” His shoulders slouched, collapsing into his collarbones. “I just get so--”
“How many people have you put in the hospital?” His mother’s voice grew shrill, and she had taken a step back from him when he got to his feet. “How much have you broken?!” He shook his head swiftly, more trying to get her to stop than in response to her questions. “You’re a danger!” she continued, her fingers gripping his father’s arm. Mac just kept shaking his head; why were they doing this now? Why now?
His head kept turning back and forth, feeling breathless as if her words had balled into a fist and punched him in the stomach. “I ca--...I can’t...” Did they really think he wasn’t trying?!
“You’ll have to,” his father boomed, his voice so unusually loud that it shocked tears from Mac’s eyes, sending them down his cheeks.
“W-why...”
“Your mother is pregnant.”
Mac’s breath caught in his throat. How...for how long? He hadn’t noticed, but peering closer at his mother, he realized how long he hadn’t been paying attention. It must have been months. And it never occurred to him.
“This is your last chance, Macbeth!” His mother’s wide blue eyes matched his own, fear filling both pairs.
“We’ve found a high school that will take you.” His father’s volume had returned to its more usual level, but somehow that made it all the worse. “But it’s time I did something I should have done a long time ago. If you get into one more fight, hurt one more person, or cause any more damage--”
“Dad--!”
“If you,” he continued, “cannot control yourself, I have inquired into other options. There’s a home for troubled youth down in North Bronze.” Mac felt sick, even as his father continued. “They have openings. They will take you, and you will go.”
His desk lamp near the door rattled just once. His knuckles turned white with how hard he gripped his hair as his father steered his gasping mother quickly from the doorway. Mac stayed still, barely breathing, hoping the less he moved the more his powers would behave.
For a long time, he and his father watched each other, silently, Mac fearing what else he would have to say. But after a while the man simply turned, without another word, and left Mac alone.
He stayed still, pulling at his hair with both hands until he calmed down, until he was sure his powers had gone dormant. It felt like it took hours, and even then he was afraid to move, his mind still racing with his parents’ threat. No--promise. No fights? No damage? How was he expected to avoid fights if he never started them...?
It wasn’t going to be enough, he realized, to just reign in his powers. Fear and anger and frustration were too strong masters to allow him respite. He had a summer ahead of him, a summer in which he could avoid everyone--but once school started, he would be at the mercy of his teachers and classmates.
Recalling the way his focus had driven Miles’s knife towards an intended goal, Mac slowly relaxed his muscles, released his hair. If there were no cure to this “sickness,” maybe he could find a way to make it manageable. A way to focus. Control.
He had a summer, before his time ran out. He was going to have to learn.
“Hey, check it.” They didn’t even wait until his bike came to a stop. Mac tried to take advantage of this by picking up speed again, but these guys were huge--were they really seventh graders?!--and it took only one of them to lift him bodily from his seat. The bike stayed standing in a brilliant display of impossible balance, even as he was plucked from it.
“Yeah, knew it!” one of them exclaimed, sounding proud of himself. “It’s that new kid. Magnet boy.”
“No shit!” The guy holding him by the shoulders lifted him so their eyes met. “So this is what a freak NEXT looks like up close, huh?”
“Put me down,” ground out Mac, feeling his face heat up just as acutely as he started picking up points of metal, everywhere. Public schools had no uniforms, and everyone pinged differently, at different strengths.
“Yeah, sure! I’ll put you down!” The guy dropped him, hard, on his rear. Mac winced as the vibrations of the impact with the concrete sidewalk below him traveled up through his torso.
“Probably thought you were hot shit at your other schools, huh? Got everyone afraid of you?”
He opened his mouth to protest but no words came out, he was too baffled. Was that really what everyone thought he was trying to do...?
“You just remember, Freak-o, ain’t no one gonna be scared of you here.”
“Round here we fight with fists. Yer wimpy little magic tricks ain’t doin’ shit! Hahaha!”
Bewildered, Mac watched the three of them laugh--and leave him there. He’d barely stood and begun to dust himself off by the time they had walked a short distance away to accost some other kid, a scrawny, black-haired boy with glasses. “Hey! Poindexter! You got our homework?”
Mac avoided the kid’s gaze and hurried to chain up his bike and get to class. It was almost too cliche, these guys were just picking on everyone. Not that he was going to complain. The more kids they bullied, the less time they’d have for him.
His conclusion fell flat the instant he stepped into the hallways. Public schools were indeed very different than the prestigious private ones his parents had until now been trying to keep him in, he realized. The hallways reverberated with cries of “Faggot!” and “Whore!” and “Kike!” and tons of other slurs he didn’t even recognize, not to mention the vibrations he felt more than heard of things slamming into metal lockers--mostly bodies. The bell for homeroom rang before he could even find his locker in this mess, and the teachers slowly filed out into the halls from their classrooms, wearily and unconvincingly shouting for the students to get to class. But either no one heard, above the din of oppression, or no one bothered to listen.
Mac squeezed himself as small as he could, trying to get by, but a kid mistaking him for a locker fell on him, jabbing a sharp elbow into his gut. His field slipped out of control with his surprise, and by their zippers and snaps and loose change and weapons and god knew what else, the other students were suddenly shoved back, outside of his field’s reach. The hallway went dead quiet as everyone, the teachers included, turned to stare at him.
Oh jesus fuck.
“Hey.” The word came from a guy pushing through the crowd towards him. Until now Mac never could have imagined any kid his age bigger than the ones who had accosted him outside. “Hey. You the NEXT freak, huh? We heard you was comin’ today.”
Swallowing, Mac pressed himself against the wall of lockers behind him, back arching into the hemispherical groove dented into them by the edge of his field. Kids either made way for the big guy or were removed forcibly from his path as he approached. Mac’s mind was spinning too hard with fear to wonder why the teachers watching from their doorways didn’t do anything to stop him.
“So you think you can just push this school around just ‘cuz you got special magic powers?” the big guy demanded, his last words, rising high into a mocking squeak of tone. “Lemme tell ya somethin’, Magnet Boy. Ain’t no one ‘round here that pushes me around.” He was right in Mac’s face, now, small blue eyes glaring from his large round face. “You got that, shithead?”
Mac bit the inside of his lip to keep it from trembling and reached up to grab hold of his hair.
“HEY!” The big guy grabbed his wrist before it could get to its destination, squeezing hard. “You answer me when I ask you a question, freak!”
The pulse of Mac’s field threw the big guy off his feet, but his grip on the smaller boy’s wrist was too determined, and Mac found himself flying forward a few yards to land in a heap on top of the other student’s bulk.
“The hell!? What the hell?!!” Mac barely heard anything through the sudden clamor of students around him and had no time to recover before the bully had regained his feet and dumped him unceremoniously on the floor.
“That the way you wanna play, punk?” The tiny blue eyes were jeering down at him at the center of that sea of stares. “Good. I’m gonna make your damn worthless life miserable.”
“Miles, please,” a nearby teacher said, sounding almost pleading, “that’s enough. Get to class, please? All of you!”
Miles kept his gaze trained on Mac for one last, long second, before finally turning and trundling down the corridor.
The hallways began to clear almost casually, as though the students had been intending to do so around now anyway, but Mac stayed frozen, staring up at the place where those eyes had just been.
“Hey! Did you hear me?”
Startled, Mac lost control of his field for another split second, long enough to rattle the bell earrings in the teacher’s ears. They chimed, impossibly tinny, yet to Mac they sounded like church bells ringing at a funeral. Her eyes closed, as if she were preparing for a long bout of shouting, but instead she just sighed.
“Well,” she said, voice tinged with...boredom? as she took a step back, “your first day is as good a time as any to meet the principal.” She scribbled something onto a green slip of paper and pointed down the hall. “Get going.”
“But I--”
“That’s one day’s suspension for starting a fight, do you want another for talking back?” she interrupted. Her expression seemed tired, as if she were sick of counting the times over the course of her career that she’d had to do this. “Anything else you’d like to add before you go?”
Her dark eyes watched him flatly as she again offered Mac the slip. One shaking hand took it while the other clenched in his blonde locks, and without another word he lowered his head and made his way down the hall.
---
Mac’s birthdays had gone largely unnoticed since he’d gained his NEXT powers, and while it bothered him to a point, he never felt the need to complain about it. After all, he had no friends, so a party would have been pointless. If the day went off without too much of a hitch, Mac usually considered it his birthday present, in addition to the grilled cheese sandwiches his mother served for dinner every year, and he was appropriately grateful for it. Most other days had enough excitement, only augmented recently with the daily troubles he dealt with in his new school, that a calm day was all he could hope for.
The day after his fourteenth birthday would be his last day at his junior high school, though Mac didn’t know this at the time. Graduation was three weeks away, and too far off to be a distraction from the unusually heavy way his mother set down his dinner plate, piled with three sandwiches.
He stared at them for a moment, then at the plate, then up to her. She and his father were watching him, carefully, from the other side of their small round dinner table. Their faces were set very seriously as they seemed to be trying to gauge him. The sandwiches went untouched for the moment while he blinked up at them, his hand slipping unconsciously into his hair.
His father cleared his throat, and sat. His mother followed suit.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, in a small voice. Their behavior around him had seemed a little more touchy lately, though Mac assumed it to be the consequence of a particularly bad fight he’d gotten himself caught up in over a week ago. He’d been in the hospital for two days, but things had returned to normal after that. Maybe it was something else...?
But, “No,” his mother told him, looking down at her plate piled with a more conventional evening meal. “Eat your dinner, Macbeth.”
It bothered him all night, even as he tried to concentrate on his homework (
Something was wrong, but what? And why lie about it? It had his nerves on edge and his imagination on overdrive. What was the big secret? Algebra was hard enough to focus on without all this weirdness. The problems never got done, but really that was nothing new.
---
“Hey superfreak!” It was practically his alarm clock, when he got off the bus every morning. The kids here were never really very imaginative with their disparaging nicknames, but Mac just wasn’t in the mood for this today. Alarm clocks were ever more annoying the less sleep you got, and he’d been kept up all night thinking. His patience stores were dangerously thin.
“Fuck off,” he muttered, trying to slip past Miles and out of the parking lot. They knew his quirk of pulling at his hair and what it meant, and he refused to show Miles was getting under his skin, so he kept his hands clenched tightly in the front pocket of his thin hoodie.
“Hey hey, what’s all that!” Miles’s voice had a particularly nasty quality to it today, and Mac really didn’t feel like sticking around to find out what it meant. “I got a special present for you today, Magnet Boy! Heard it was your birthday yesterday. I felt so bad that no one knew! HEY!” One big, meaty hand reached down to clench the front of Mac’s shirt as he tried to continue walking towards the building. “You ain’t ignoring me, are you? I told you I got you a birthday present! It’s ‘cuz I’m such a sweetheart, Farrow! Ain’t I the nicest, boys?”
Miles’s usual thugs had shown their ugly faces, now, and they had him surrounded in a nodding, sniggering semi-circle. Oh for christ’s sake.
“Ain’t you curious?” he continued, in that high, mocking tone he had. “Don’tchu wanna know what it is?”
Mac’s first instinct was to run, but Miles had already grabbed him, and besides, there were only diminishing spaces amongst the thugs through which he could squeeze. He had to play along, at least for now, while he waited for an opening. “Yeah,” he agreed, as levelly as possible. “Sure. What is it?”
Miles answered him with a laugh, and Mac squeezed his eyes shut, biting down on a groan. He really didn’t have the patience for this today.
“I think you gotta guess! Just put your little magnety feelers out and tell me what I got for you!”
Mac’s eyebrows furrowed. What the hell was this, these morons were asking him to use his powers?
“I can’t guess what metal shit you got on you, dumbass!” he shot back, losing what little composure he’d held onto thus far. “That’s stupid!”
Miles’s mocking, shit-eating grin twisted into a scowl in less than a moment. “Ooh, he’s impatient today, boys!” rumbled the big guy, shaking Mac a little. “Well, lucky for you, freakfeelers, so am I! I wanna give this to you right away!”
Mac didn’t know what he expected, but a weird surge of terrifying memories was definitely not it. The sun glanced off the object Miles pulled from his bag, temporarily blinding him, and distantly, like echoes, he could hear the sounds of shattering glass, and he could feel the dull, phantom pain just inside his left shoulder blade.
“FUCK!” Mac shouted, his voice cracking as he struggled to break free. “What the hell?!”
“Y’don’t like it?” Miles sneered, nastily, his grip strengthening. “But I brought it in just for you, birthday boy! Thought it might look good on you!”
“Or in you!” one of the thugs corrected, squealing with laughter.
“Shut it, Harvey! Listen, he’s so grateful he can’t even make words!” Mac had no idea what kinds of sounds were filtering out of his throat, but he knew they were loud and he knew they were scared, and he knew no one in the parking lot was going to do anything about either. Nearly a year and a half had gone by for him in this school, and in that time not one teacher had broken up a fight before someone got hurt--and that someone was usually him. Even though now there was a weapon involved, he didn’t really expect that to change. Miles ran this school, and teacher and student alike were either too scared or too nonchalant to stop him.
The knife shuddered in his hand, and Miles nodded his head at one of his thugs. A lithe, twitchy boy stepped forward and took a good handful of Mac’s hair, yanking hard.
“Gaah!” he cried out breathlessly, and the knife stilled as Mac’s focus shifted violently. “Urgh! No! No!”
“There we are, there we are!” Gleeful, Miles drew the knife blade closer to Mac’s neck, and he began babbling, too terrified to properly beg them to stop. “Don’t worry, freakshow, I ain’t gonna kill ya! Just gonna mark ya up a bit, so’s you always remember me. Don’t want you to graduate and forget all about us, huh?”
“Yeah yeah!” echoed a voice in the crowd, loud, over Mac’s garbled pleading.
“Just a little reminder!”
The tugging on his hair got harder, coyly drawing his attention away from the tip of the small knife that was ready to draw right behind Mac’s ear. “Just a little ‘M,’ he chuckled quietly, darkly. “Just the little ‘M’ we share. So you don’t forget.”
The tip of the knife touched his skin, and Mac howled brokenly. Before it could even draw blood, the knife shot away, the ring of assailants surrounding him followed suit, and there rose a cacophony of surprise and anger and vengeance. Mac’s scalp burned but his hair was free, and he staggered back, trying to get away from the ring of delinquents before they could recover.
“Grab him!” Miles shouted, furiously rubbing where his hard head had hit a parked car. Mac’s head cleared of thought as he scrambled to get away, but the speed of the group was faster than his own. Hands reattached to his limbs, holding him still while Miles cast around for his knife. “Where’d you put it, you little shit? “ he murmured, attention trained on the ground. “Where is it...?”
Finding the knife before Miles was suddenly of the utmost importance, and Mac’s eyes widened as he cast out for it, the strong, sharp feel of metal--it resonated just a bit differently--was it--there!
“HEY! I said grab him!” The voice raged, but it was tinged with fear. Even as hands pulled at his hair, Mac had the knife suspended before Miles’s face, shaking, but focused. “Little freak! You use that on me and I’ll kill you! You hear me?!”
Mac heard, but he was too focused to care. Miles reached up for the knife and it reached back, shaking his hand with its sharp edge. A cry of pain, awkwardly and agonizingly high, struck Mac’s ears and split the activity in the parking lot. Finally, people took notice.
The knife fell, leaving Miles holding his deeply cut hand and staring at it as if it belonged on someone else’s body. In a haze, Mac watched Miles, felt more than saw the knife clatter to the ground, streaked with red. There were shouts, and hands on him, restraining him even though he was frozen. He did that. He did that. His field had not merely repelled the knife, it directed it, countering Miles’s strength with his own.
And he had won.
But he never saw Miles, nor the teachers who held him down, nor the kids who stared at him in unabashed shock and fear, ever again.
The day that should have been his graduation day, Mac was studying for makeup exams, face screwed up in difficult concentration. The phone rang, as it had done many times in the past month, but Mac didn’t notice it until his mother came into his room to give him the receiver with a grim face and a trembling hand.
---
It took two weeks for the school to determine the outcome of his exams, and even then he was banned from the school’s premises, so they mailed him the results, in an official-looking white envelope.
“Looks like I passed,” he mumbled, his eyes scanning over the grades while his parents both watched him silently from the door. Barely, but he passed. Scraping by was all he could ever hope for, given how frequently he missed class; Mac counted himself lucky they’d given him a chance to finish from home at all.
“How long do you think you can keep this up, Macbeth?” his father intoned, voice almost whisper-quiet. Mac glanced up, his eyebrows raised with anxious anticipation. He knew when his parents were getting at something; that tone of his father’s practically threatened it.
“This needs to stop,” his mother said, her voice thin and high and trembling, just as Mac could always remember it being when she spoke to him.
“...What does?” he asked carefully, not sure where her train of thought was going.
“This!” she cried, stabbing an index finger through the air at the envelope in his lap. “This...this...”
“You’ve been this way for eight years,” his father cut in, squeezing her upper arm gently though his voice was hard. “Eight years and yet you still recklessly get into fights, break things, hurt people.”
Mac’s eyes grew wide. “I--”
“Sometimes I think you’ve gotten worse!”
“You don’t even try to control yourself!”
Feeling weak, Mac nevertheless climbed to his feet, his heart pounding faster. Fingers gripping his hair, trying to keep the pipes from shaking, keep the bed frame steady, don’t let them see how the wire on his notebooks trembled, stop, steady! “That’s not true,” he breathed, his voice even harder to control than his field. “I am trying! I just...” His shoulders slouched, collapsing into his collarbones. “I just get so--”
“How many people have you put in the hospital?” His mother’s voice grew shrill, and she had taken a step back from him when he got to his feet. “How much have you broken?!” He shook his head swiftly, more trying to get her to stop than in response to her questions. “You’re a danger!” she continued, her fingers gripping his father’s arm. Mac just kept shaking his head; why were they doing this now? Why now?
His head kept turning back and forth, feeling breathless as if her words had balled into a fist and punched him in the stomach. “I ca--...I can’t...” Did they really think he wasn’t trying?!
“You’ll have to,” his father boomed, his voice so unusually loud that it shocked tears from Mac’s eyes, sending them down his cheeks.
“W-why...”
“Your mother is pregnant.”
Mac’s breath caught in his throat. How...for how long? He hadn’t noticed, but peering closer at his mother, he realized how long he hadn’t been paying attention. It must have been months. And it never occurred to him.
“This is your last chance, Macbeth!” His mother’s wide blue eyes matched his own, fear filling both pairs.
“We’ve found a high school that will take you.” His father’s volume had returned to its more usual level, but somehow that made it all the worse. “But it’s time I did something I should have done a long time ago. If you get into one more fight, hurt one more person, or cause any more damage--”
“Dad--!”
“If you,” he continued, “cannot control yourself, I have inquired into other options. There’s a home for troubled youth down in North Bronze.” Mac felt sick, even as his father continued. “They have openings. They will take you, and you will go.”
His desk lamp near the door rattled just once. His knuckles turned white with how hard he gripped his hair as his father steered his gasping mother quickly from the doorway. Mac stayed still, barely breathing, hoping the less he moved the more his powers would behave.
For a long time, he and his father watched each other, silently, Mac fearing what else he would have to say. But after a while the man simply turned, without another word, and left Mac alone.
He stayed still, pulling at his hair with both hands until he calmed down, until he was sure his powers had gone dormant. It felt like it took hours, and even then he was afraid to move, his mind still racing with his parents’ threat. No--promise. No fights? No damage? How was he expected to avoid fights if he never started them...?
It wasn’t going to be enough, he realized, to just reign in his powers. Fear and anger and frustration were too strong masters to allow him respite. He had a summer ahead of him, a summer in which he could avoid everyone--but once school started, he would be at the mercy of his teachers and classmates.
Recalling the way his focus had driven Miles’s knife towards an intended goal, Mac slowly relaxed his muscles, released his hair. If there were no cure to this “sickness,” maybe he could find a way to make it manageable. A way to focus. Control.
He had a summer, before his time ran out. He was going to have to learn.