=== KARI ===

I was seven the first time I saw him. The shy boy sitting out on his porch. I was on the street on my bike. I had biked past where I was really supposed to. My neighborhood had such even streets. These streets down here had bumpier roads, which were always more fun to ride on. Even from the street, I could hear them screaming; his parents were really going at it. He looked up; his eyes were blue. His face, at the moment, was red. He must’ve been mortified that I knew. He knows I could hear them. How could I not? He broke the gaze and stared down at a few little pieces of cardboard. I rode my bike over his lawn, and he backed away some. I closed the distance between us and smiled at him. “Hi, I’m Kari! What’s your name?”

  “C-Curtis,” he said, looking down. I sat down next to him, and he curled into himself a little more. I put his parents’ screaming out of my head and looked down at the cards he had. They were weird. Not like sports cards or anything.

  “What’re these?” I asked, trying to get him to focus on anything but his parents. I picked one up. It had a dragon painted on it. “They’re gorgeous. This one is a Draken Guard?”

  “They’re Sorcerer’s Cards. It’s just a dumb game that one of my mom’s friends taught me,” he said dismissively. But he did come out of his self-imposed cocoon. We went through the cards together.

  From that day on, we were inseparable. We went to the same school. He had gotten some kind of grant to get there, but I was just there because my parents paid for it. His parents couldn’t afford it. Especially after they split up. Some of the kids picked on him because he was poor. His jeans were always ripped, and he wore a broken pair of glasses that would only break further when they threw him to the ground. But I chased them off like a warthog bursting through a bunch of vultures.

  During the summer, his parents got him a hand-me-down bike, and we rode everywhere. We found bike trails, we did jumps, and we would stop off for ice at different shops. I was given an allowance, and we would spend it renting movies we shouldn’t have. Scary movies, romance movies, more Sorcerer’s Cards. He taught me how to play, and I got good at it. Good enough to beat him. We found little competitions and played together. He was good at finding decks that were cheap and strategic and won a few tournaments. I got all of the giant creatures together and won through brute force!

  When we were ten, and in middle school, we would always get paired together in everything. Lab, shop, home economics, everything. Everyone thought we were dating, but we weren’t. We were just friends. Just friends; who hung out every day; who would just lay across one another; who could finish each other’s sentences. Okay. We were dating a little. As we grew up, I got taller and taller. He didn’t get as tall, but that’s okay. He would go through stages of growing his hair out and cutting it all off. When it was long, he’d use it to hide his eyes. People always mentioned his eyes. They always said that they were older than they should have been. I don’t know about any of that. I just know that when he looked at me, my heart jumped. They were always so piercing. So intense. Whenever we talked, I could tell he focused his full attention on me. He did this with everyone. Most of my other friends kept their distance when he was around.

=== CURT ===

Kari stuck around me all the time. She’d split her lunch with me when my parents . . . forgot to pack mine. She’d stand up to bullies and make sure I was always invited to anything she was invited to. And she was invited to everything. People really liked her. Which made her attachment to me all the more confusing. Despite being in the same grade, she always acted like my bigger sister. When we got to middle school, everyone thought we were dating. If one of her friends refused to invite me to something, she wouldn’t go. Which must’ve made her life hard. Usually, if I knew she wanted to go to something and the person hosting didn’t want me around, I’d make an excuse to not go. Her friends didn’t really like me. Which was fair. I also didn’t really like me.

  In eighth grade, there was this Sadie Hawkins Dance. You know, the kind where the girls ask out the boys. I never really understood why that was so important. Couldn’t the girls ask the boys out to a regular dance? Anyway, It was a big deal, apparently. The biggest deal of all of eighth grade. The few friends I had outside of Kari were all obsessed. They spent weeks trying to get a girl, any girl, to ask them. One of my friends, Bryan, bribed a girl to do it, promising to do all of her homework through freshman year. I hear they got married last June.

  No one asked me. Not that I minded. I can’t dance. I thought that Kari would ask me, though. She hadn’t, which wasn’t like her. She always took every opportunity to get me involved in social stuff. I usually didn’t mind. She made it fun. But this wasn’t really my scene, so it was okay that she hadn’t asked me. My friends didn’t believe me when I told them. “No way, bro. She’s crazy about you.”

  “We’re just friends,” I responded absently, shaking my head. They were convinced that Kari had a thing for me. Which was ridiculous. “And it’s fine. I don’t want to go anyway.”

  “What do you mean that you don’t want to go? This is the biggest event of middle school! A capstone! If you’re not there, you’re going to be a social pariah for . . . like, ever.”

  “Ah. Well, that would really hurt my social standing. I would lose my four friends. Because I didn’t go to a dance.”

  The day before the dance, Kari and I were hanging out between periods. “My dress is so cute! I can’t wait for everyone to see us. What’re you wearing?”

  “I’m not going,” I said simply, pushing my lunch around.

  “What d’ya mean that you’re not going? I’m not going alone!”

  “What are you talking about? You never invited me.” I watched the gears turn in her head for a moment. She was going through every moment.

  “No, no, that can’t be right. I definitely asked you. I told my mom that we were going, she helped me pick out a dress, and she’s going to do my hair. And I . . .” She froze, her mouth agape. I stared at her, waiting. “I . . . I never asked you.”

  “God, you’re thick-headed sometimes, Kar.”

  “Oh . . . Oh no! But you have to come. Besides, of course, I want to go with you! We always do stuff like this together.”

  “This is our first dance, Kar,” I interjected. “It’s a boy-girl thing. Or, I guess, a girl-girl thing. How do gay guys participate in this?”

  “What? I mean . . . That’s actually a good question, but it’s totally beside the point,” Kari said, rolling her eyes. “What does it matter if it’s a boy-girl thing or whatever? I want to go with you.”

  “Kar, people already think we’re dating. There are a lot of guys who would love to go out with you. Take one of them.”

  “Nah. I wanna go with you. You’re coming,” Kari said with an air of finality. I swear to god, she could sit down with any world leader and get them back down. “You better get yourself something cute to wear. Something that goes well with mauve.”

  “What’s mauve?”

  “Kind of like pale purple.”

  “Then why didn’t you say purple?”

  “Because they’re different. Duh!”

  When I got home later that day, I hesitantly walked up to my mother’s room. Mother and father slept in separate beds most nights. Thankfully. When they didn’t, it got loud. In many ways, I don’t care to think about. Some people think that divorce is the worst thing to happen to an unhappy family. It’s not. I knocked on the door. I heard a crash and the sound of a bottle breaking. I sighed and grabbed the broom and dustpan, and opened the door.

  “Curt! Curtish. Come clean this messh up.”

  “I’m coming, mom,” I said, chest deflating. I came into her room and started sweeping up the glass.

  “Thash a good boy,” she slurred. I had gotten good at telling the differences between her favored alcohols. She reeked of cinnamon whiskey. She had a much different taste than my father, who liked cheap Vodka and cocktail waitresses.

  “Hey, mom. Um . . .” I hesitated. I hated asking for things. But it wasn’t like I had anyone else I could ask.

  “What ish it? Spit it out, boy,” she said impatiently.

  “C-could I get some money for some clothes? I-”

  “Clothes!?” She demanded. “You have plenty of clothes, boy.”

  “No . . . Well, yes, bu-”

  “Fucking ungrateful, little bastard!” She screamed. I had to interject before this went too far.

  “I don’t have any . . . formal clothes. For . . . a dance,” I said, just barely loud enough for her to hear.

  “A dance? You’re going to a dance?” She looked flabbergasted. “With who? Who would want you? You’re. . . It’s that little rich bitch, isn’t it?”

  I clenched my fists and was going to scream at her for calling Kari a bitch, but she wrapped her hand around my chin and stroked my hair. “You’re a good boy, Curt. Lemme get my stuff. We’ll go get you dressed good for your little dance. My little man going to a dance. So cute.”

  We spent the next four hours picking out clothes. And my mother did something I had never seen before; she fussed over me. It was an off-the-rack suit and tie, but she said I looked handsome. She ended the sentence with “unlike normal”, but I’ll take the win where I can get it. The tie we picked out even would match the off-purple of Kari’s dress.

=== KARI ===

The day of the dance is finally here! Yay! This is going to be so much fun. And Curt is going to have fun, too! I’ll make him. And he was going to dance. My dad drove me down to his parents’ place to pick him up. My father’s face grew stern as we moved into Curt’s neighborhood. He kept complaining about how the streets were cracked, and the lawns were unkempt. But who cares? It’s not about the house; it’s about the person who lives inside. And Curt is great. So, his neighborhood is great. When we got there, his mom was out of bed and wearing more than a dirty bathrobe. She actually looked pretty nice. She and Curt had the same eyes. Sharp and taking in everything. At least right now. When . . . When she drank, it dulled their luster a lot.

  But Curt looked great! They had chosen a black suit and shirt with a mauve tie; he remembered the color! Well, of course, Curt did. He remembers everything. They made us take pictures; I wrapped my arm around Curt’s and grinned through it. It was embarrassing, but it was just what parents did. They both went through and took pictures separately. Which was ridiculous. You could just email the copies. Dad showed me the photos he took, and Curt’s face was incredibly red. The reddest I’d ever seen. Until I looked at him just then, staring at the photo, mortified. This is great. Tonight is the best!

  We finally got to the dance, and everyone was there. One of Curt’s friends came up and said something that I couldn’t hear over the music. Curt responded with, “Shut up, Brian!”

  Brian thought this was really funny and started laughing and laughing until his date came up. Curt found a table and started to sit down until I dragged him out onto the dance floor. “Nope, no, siree. You’re dancing.”

  “But I can’t dance! People will see me.”

  “People will see us having fun. And who cares if they can see you? It can’t possibly be worse than that time you lit the chemistry lab on fire.”

  “I told you, if they had labeled those ingredients right, it would have worked.”

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  “Sure it would have. I’m glad your eyebrows grew back for the pictures, though. You look good.”

  “So do you,” he said, taking a risk and glancing up at my eyes. When we first met, we were about the same height, but now I was taller than him. I hadn’t worn heels for that reason. I didn’t want the difference to be even more stark. We got out onto the dance-floor just as a slow song started. Curt looked like a deer in the headlights. He lifted his hands, which were shaking. I smiled down at him and took his hands, placing one on my hip and taking the other. I had taken dancing lessons. I didn’t get too far because I wanted to do sports, too. We circled the dance-floor and slowly drifted closer until his arm was on my back. As the song ended, our eyes met again. He leaned in. I closed my eyes and did the same.

  Then we were yanked apart. I opened my eyes to see the gym teacher with his hands on Curt and the bio teacher with her hands on my shoulder. The gym teacher barked, “Stay arm’s length apart, Reese.”

  This is so unfair! He was finally going to do something!

=== CURT ===

She was always with me, through thick and thin. When my parents got too . . . involved, I could always go to her. Her parents didn’t seem to mind. They would let me stay for dinner whenever I was around. They would just leave us alone, widely. We usually hung out in her room. She kept the door open, just in case. I was not going to make a move. I did not want to risk losing her. She was always the most important thing. The only stable thing in my life. And a fucking softball game is what took her away. Of all things, a god damn softball game.

  We were fourteen. She had joined the girl’s softball team, and she was good. She was tall with strong legs, so she could usually outrun everyone around her. I would have joined too, but I am not a girl. They offered to let me be the mascot, but there are some lines that even I won’t cross! But I went to every game. Even if it meant taking three buses, I was always there. It was the finals; she was up to bat. She brandished the thing so naturally. When I tried to play baseball, I accidentally knocked out the catcher when I hit the ball. I just threw the bat back, hitting him in the head. I did not notice until I passed second base. But not Kari. She had a natural aptitude for everything except for math. But lots of people suck at math. She went up to the home plate. I readied the camera I had bought from a pawn shop. Her parents couldn’t attend the game, but I know they wanted to. The pitcher wound up and threw the ball. She was good. It was a straight shot, but Kari did not swing. The catcher caught it.

  “Strike one!” The umpire shouted. The pitcher threw the next one, and it was almost a mirror for the first, and still, Kari did not swing. I will never know how she missed the point of Casey at the bat. But unlike Casey, on the third pitch, she swung. There was a great crack, and the ball flew. I followed it with my camera to the best of my ability, but by the time I registered it, it was gone. I focused on her again and the bat. Or what was left of it. It had shattered into a million pieces. She took off and got to first, then second in the blink of an eye. The other team was scrambling, trying to find where the ball went. Kari rounded third and charged home. They won that game.

  “Did you see that?! I got my first home run! I feel like I could fly!” She all but screamed, jumping in the air.

  “Yeah, I saw it. Recorded it, too.”

  “You got a recording? I love you!” She yelled again, throwing her arms around me and pulling me into a tight hug. My back cracked from the force; she loosened her grip and hung her arms loosely around my neck. She stared into my eyes. I shuffled my feet, desperately wanting to break eye contact. Her green eyes were a forest I could get lost in forever. She closed her eyes and leaned in a little. She was dirty, smelling like sweat and dust, but it did not matter. I leaned in. Our lips brushed. My first kiss.

=== KARI ===

  Curtis emailed me my first home run. The video and the angle weren’t great, but you could tell it was me. I don’t know why the bat broke when I finally swung. The coach said she’d never seen anything like it. Curt had managed to get the ball flying off. “Your camera isn’t very good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks like smoke is coming off the ball! Come on, tech boy, buy yourself a proper camera,” I said, elbowing him. He pushed back, and we started to wrestle. He usually had the upper hand on this, but I rolled him over and pinned him immediately. He just stared up for a moment and then shrunk away.

  After that, we went to dinner with my parents. I showed them the video. They both looked concerned. They dropped Curt off at his house, which had become even more dilapidated in the last seven years. I wished he could just live with me. It’d be so much easier. And besides, we’d get to practice kissing some more.

  “Kari, dear. Has anything like that ever happened to you before?”

  “What? The home run? Nope! It’s my first one. Pretty awesome. I feel bad about the bat, though. I guess it must’ve been old.” My parents looked at each other, and my mother turned in her seat.

  “Honey, that ball flew really far,” she said. She seemed to be trying very hard to come up with words to not upset me. Don’t know what all that’s all about. She sighed. “Have you ever . . . Lifted anything you shouldn’t have been able to? Or ran faster than you should have?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Probably nothing,” she responded with a smile. “Good job today. Your father and I are really proud.”

  I figured that was the end of it, but I woke up in the middle of the night. Dad had pinned down one of my arms and had a needle roughly twice the size of Texas in his hand. I screamed and struggled. He went flying and hit the back wall; his eyes were wide; he looked terrified. Mom crossed the room and helped him up.

  “What the hell are you doing!?” I demanded.

  “Kari! Watch your language!” My mother spat back.

  “What are you doing in my room? With a needle!” I said, scooting to the other side of the bed, panting.

  “We were just taking a blood sample,” my father responded as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “While I was sleeping? Why?” My mother and father looked at each other, then back to me. They made their way to the bed.

  “We didn’t want to worry you,” mom cooed, sitting on the bed and patting my knee. “We just want to do a test or two to . . . make sure that you’re healthy.”

  “You didn’t want to worry me, as though me waking up in the middle of the night, standing over me with a syringe is going to be calming!” I shrieked. Both of them looked guilty.

  “You’re right; I’m sorry, sweetie,” dad said in a calming voice. He sat down on the bed. “We still need to take your blood and do a couple of tests.”

  “Why? What is going on? I feel great. Outside of the heart attack I just had.”

  “Your mom has some genetic disorders that kick in around your age in her family. We just want to make sure that nothing’s going on.” I searched his face. It was carved in stone; I couldn’t get a read on him at all; that wasn’t like him. He usually wore his emotions on his face. I could always tell when he was stressed or annoyed or pretending to be exasperated with me for telling him a long story.

  “Well, if I don’t let you do it, you’ll just come in when I’m asleep again.” I grabbed a teddy bear that Curt had won me last year and looked away, offering my arm. I hate needles. I felt something press into my arm, and then there was a snap, and the pressure was gone. I looked at my father and the needle in his hand; it had broken. He was staring at it despondently. I searched mom’s face, but it had also become stony and impossible to read.

  The next week was a whirlwind. Mom and dad decided we needed to move out of the blue. They were going to take me somewhere where they could figure out why I broke the needle. And how I hit a softball. As though it wasn’t obvious. The answer was with a bat. Duh.

=== CURT ===

Kari moved away. She left me behind. She said that she had some medical condition and then just disappeared. I tried to visit, but her parents would not let me see her. I tried emailing her, but she gave no response to that either. I was alone. Again. My girlfriend . . . My best friend was gone. With nothing else to do, I receded into my hobbies. I liberated some money from my mom’s purse and bought myself a soldering iron. She wouldn’t miss it. Or at least, she wouldn’t realize that she hadn’t already spent it. Money was always tight, but that was mostly because mother was always spending it on drugs.

  I started building things. Just little gadgets here and there. It was nothing compared to Bion, the tech hero. He was a new hero making waves. His real name was Andrew Wan, a billionaire who discovered he was dying. All of his muscles were weakening. He built himself a suit to help sustain his withering body. He had made the suit stronger than he had intended. And when someone tried to kidnap him, he threw the crook through the wall. The following week, when there was an invasion from a nation I had never heard of before, he volunteered his services. They were armed with laser cannons, plasma bombs, and one especially devoted guy had a sword; Bion managed to fight back the forces, but the damage was extensive. Cars were crushed, buildings were destroyed, and people died. Lots of people.

  After Bion saved the day, he just skated away and left the damage behind him. He could fire lasers from his palms and throw cars but didn’t use it to help the people whose lives were in shambles now. He had more money than he could ever spend, and yet, he just let people suffer. He . . . He had a suit that kept him alive, and he did not give this technology to everyone. He had made an advance in medical science never seen before, yet he just let people die.

  It might be because, with Kari and her family gone, I was stuck eating at home, which meant I’d go hungry every other day. When I did eat, it was just spaghetti and, if I was lucky, meat. Spaghetti is fine, but it gets old when it’s all you eat. I started to resent Bion. There were lots of superheroes that seemed to be rich. They had the money to just go through and build weapons of mass destruction, use them, create said destruction, and fly off to the sunset. Leaving regular people to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Assholes.

=== KARI ===

My parents took me to some weird lab and eventually got a needle that could get my blood. They also ran a bunch of other tests on me. They managed to track down that softball that I had hit. They said it was in orbit, circling the planet. When they told me that, I fell over laughing. “That’s impossible! You’re nuts.”

  “No, sweetie,” my father began. “You’re a little bit different than us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, when you were born, it was right in the middle of the Grignau’s Invasion.”

  “Duh, everyone knows about it. They were super strong aliens that almost took over the planet. There were a couple of heroes that stopped them, though. And a small nuke. Everyone knows that.

  “Yes, well. Your mother and I were tasked with studying their genetic makeup. In the hopes of finding a weakness. We . . . We didn’t find one. But we did come up with another plan. After we fully sequenced their genome, we started doing some experiments. We found that we could insert their genes into other things, and they would change. We did some plants, rabbits, lab mice . . . If the subject was young, just born, it would change rapidly. Get stronger. Incredibly strong. And fast. If we did it to anything that was past adolescence . . . Well, they may not survive. And it could cripple them.”

  “Okay. But what does this have to do with me?”

  “We . . . You were a premie, hon,” mom said softly. “You were very sick. And the sequence we discovered could fix that. We . . . Never got permission exactly, but we did insert some Grignau genes into your genome. You were still young enough . . . And we kept an eye out to see what would happen.”

  “Y-you experimented on your daughter!? You made me a guinea pig for alien DNA!?” I screamed. “What kind of monsters . . . Why? Why did you do this?”

  “You were sick. You would have died. So we did the only thing we could think of to save you,” My father said, staring at his feet. I took a couple of deep breaths, willing the build-up of anger in my chest to deflate.

  “What does this mean? I’m a Grignau? I’m like those things that invaded? Some kind of monster?”

  “No, not exactly,” mom began. “You are still human. You did inherit some of their abilities. Tougher skin, for instance.”

  “What else?” I asked, considering it.

  “Honestly, we have no idea. That’s why we’re here. We need to figure out what you can do. And what you want to do with whatever you can do.”

  My parents designed some tests for me to do. I worked at it for a long time. Eventually, they couldn’t find a way to make anything weigh enough for me to not just juggle it. They also said that I somehow kept structural integrity with my mind. Dad said if I wasn’t doing that, I would still be able to lift whatever, but because my hands are small, things would break around me still. So, I was grateful for that. I also could run super fast. The lab was too small to really tell how fast. This was kind of a problem, though. My speed came out of nowhere, and the first time it did, I ran through eight walls and a girder, breaking it and almost bringing the parking structure down on top of me. It was tough to control. So was my strength. I broke chairs, tables, beakers, everything.

  The last thing that we figured out was that I could fly. And by figuring it out, I accidentally ran off a building. Flying was sure helpful because it was a pretty tall building. I could fly as fast as I could run, but my parents always wanted me to slow down. When I did go that fast, it shattered windows. It was also really hard to stop. But I practiced constantly; I figured out how the stability thing worked; I could control my strength. At least until something annoyed me. I could control my speed until I got bored.

=== CURT ===

I spent a lot of time helping people clean up the rubble caused by these superhero battles. There was always a lot of damage, whether it be against supervillains, aliens, dinosaurs that madmen reconstituted, or anything else. Broken buildings. Occasionally, I would stumble upon some discarded piece of technology. I would collect it and spend some time figuring out how it worked. It was amazing what they left behind. But I guess if you’re a billionaire on your way to becoming a trillionaire, there’s no need to collect some measly scraps. I did, though, throughout high school and trade school. I learned a lot from those little pieces. Many of them were more versatile than the inventor would have considered. The employee was undoubtedly some poor schlub who would never get credit for his work with Bion or someone else to take it for them. Unfortunately, tinkering doesn’t pay the bills, and I had to get a job to ensure I could survive in the society we decided to craft.

  So, I went into IT. And let me tell you, IT is never going anywhere. Because dear god, are people stupid. Ninety percent of my job is just teaching the same people, week after week, how to log into their email. What Two-Factor Authentication is. Why they shouldn’t buy ten thousand dollars worth of gift cards and send them to the “CEO” with a qmail domain? Whether or not their device is on. How to plug in a mouse.

  But after work, I’d always get to test out some new toys. After combining eighty-seven different pieces, some of which were a little broken, I did make a functional something. I made a very precise global positioning system. Technically, it was using one of Wan’s satellites, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. It was accurate to within a meter.

  After finishing school, I moved to Avalare city and worked for a small firm part-time. I managed to create automated responses for most of the stuff they needed. ‘Have you tried turning it off and on again’ usually solves most of the problems. Eventually, they might be trained to do that before they contact me. Probably not, though.