The words went in in the upper left part of my chest and this time I really was winded. The air got knocked out of my lungs and passed out of my mouth and nostrils. I thought that my heart might break and that I might start crying right there and then. That would really make me look like a weakling.

Ali looked at me. When she saw the effect her words had had on me, she took a step backwards.

“I’m sorry, Gonzalo.” She whispered, but I heard it.

Then she ran away.

Her shoes slapped on the grass as she went.

She ran down the garden, into the house, and then presumably through that too, disappearing from me again, leaving me standing stunned like a bereaved zombie.

Was she ashamed that she had betrayed me? Or was she just embarrassed that the first ever time she had spoken up publicly in front of half the school had been to defend a poor little nerdy kid with mental health problems?

The crowd and the team looked in silence from Bill to me, waiting to see how he would respond.

“Maybe we should stop, Bill,” one of the football team said after a while. “Maybe that girl was right...”

“Aw, shuddup,” Bill said after a moment. “She’s pretty hot, I’ll give you that, but she needs to mind her own goddamn business. Weakling here disrespected me in my girl’s own house, and for that he needs to be taught a lesson.” He turned to me. “How the fuck are you still standing, weakling? Finish what you started, boys!”

The emperor jock had given the signal: thumb down, slay the remaining gladiator.

One of them ran at me and kicked me in the arm, hard. I didn’t even notice who it was and I was only dimly aware of the sound of his shin splintering as my arm took the full force of his kick with no recoil, and returned it, breaking his bones into pieces. Somewhere, he screamed. It was distant to me in my bubble of shock.

How could Ali say that about me? Is that what she really thinks of me?

Another of them had already committed and laid the sole of his boot between my ribs in a full-length karate kick. Only it should have been full-length and his leg should have extended completely as I was knocked back from the kick, but instead on impact his leg bent the wrong way around the pivot of his knee and snapped. He fell to the floor as well, writhing and blubbering. I barely noticed.

A hot liquid sensation spread from my stomach, right where the boys had been punching me. Ali thought that I was pathetic and a weakling too. She pitied me and she hadn’t ever believed me about my powers. She wasn’t even my friend. How dare she let me think that I was her friend, when all the while she just felt sorry for me? How could she?!

I looked at the remaining football players, stood with open mouths, staring at me and the two boys I had dropped, or who had dropped themselves against me.

Donny, Rob, and two more were left.

The hot liquid was bubbling up from my stomach and leaking into my mouth. I could taste acid on the back of my tongue. Everything was quiet.

“Come on then, you dickheads!” I shouted at them. “Give me your best shot!”

I don’t know what fuelled them. It could have been outrage for their fallen comrades (I doubted it), or fight-or-flight adrenaline, or not wanting to look like they were being beaten up by a poor little nerdy kid with mental health problems, but they rushed me all at once.

Donny arrived first, his knuckles driving into my jaw and shattering just like Bill’s had those weeks ago. He wailed and clutched them. I took his crumpled hand in mine and then twisted his arm around so that he fell to his knees as he squealed and begged like a little girl—that’s how he would have described it, anyway. Then I kicked him in the chest, giving him a taste of his own medicine. He slammed right through Rob’s legs, knocking him over too, bounced across the grass, opening up a gap in the crowd, then lay still by the fence at the bottom of the garden.

I turned around. Light touches had started to register on my back, like insects landing on it. The other two jocks had circled round behind me and started pounding on my back, now my chest and head. They hit me with the undersides of their closed fists, which didn’t seem to do them as much damage, but I could see from their frenzied eyes they were terrified that their blows were having no effect.

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I caught one of their hands—Brett, the lineman. I squeezed his fingers until they crunched, one by one. Crack. His scream was blood-curdling. Crack. Crack. Crack. Then I took hold of his forearm and dragged him forcefully from side to side, using him like a human club to smack the other jock who had been hitting me onto the ground. When he didn’t get up, I let go and gave Brett a gentle push on his chest. He stumbled backwards, tripped over his own feet and crashed to the ground where he lay rolling around holding his broken hand and moaning.

I stood still for a moment and surveyed my work, half the school football team lying on the ground in front of me. I had downed them all. I wasn’t sweating. I wasn’t even panting. I had worked with a calm hatred. I didn’t know what had fuelled me. I guess it was the pain of being disowned by Ali; that and the accumulated hatred built up from eleven years of being bullied at school finally bursting forth in an effervescent desire for revenge.

I lifted my gaze to the ring of onlookers. Everyone was very, very still; even Bill. He had let go of Sam, but she stood still too. Generic high school teenager number four opened his mouth like he was about to say something but apparently thought better of it. They all just stood there, rooted to the spot.

Simmering fury compelled me. I took six slow steps up to Bill, till I could smell the beer on his breath again.

To my delight, I could see that he was actually shaking slightly in his sports jacket.

I drew right up close to him, just as he had done with me only moments ago, looking up into his Aryan blue eyes, their pupils dilated to two big black holes.

“Hello Bill,” I said in a whisper, savouring each syllable.

There was a faint trickling sound. I glanced down for a moment and saw a little circle of dampness growing in the grass around Bill’s trainer.

Bill muttered some words. Normally he would have shouted them, but these ones came out in a whisper like mine. They came out like a kind of prayer, in a continuous string of quiet, mumbled liturgy that only I could hear.

“G-g-get out of my face you weakling you’re just a no good darkie puny little weakling nerd dork kid good for nothing not worth anything wimp faggot disrespect my girl you gonna suffer for it you can’t hurt me you can’t touch me what’s this crazy science shit you’re trying to pull you got lucky it was just luck nobody your size knows how to fight like that nobody could take all those hits and get up again…”

He ran out of breath.

I punched him in the stomach.

Despite my rage, I held back just the tiniest bit. Even though I hated Bill, I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to punch his guts out through his back. That would be too kind. I wanted to make him hurt, just like he had made me hurt so many times.

The force of my punch lifted Bill off his feet and sent him backwards through the air, into the fence at the bottom of the garden.

The wooden slats of the fence split with an almighty snap as Bill went through it and the whole thing collapsed inwards and forwards in a mess, some of it falling on Donny who still lay nearby. Bill landed on his back on the grass of the adjacent garden beyond and did not get up.

Sam screamed, adding her voice for a moment to the sounds of the crying and whimpering football players lying bleeding and broken on the grass and the gasps of the onlookers. But her scream was short—I didn’t feel like she had really put her heart into it.

My foes were vanquished.

I looked at the assembled crowd once more, blinking a few times, like a mystic surfacing back to reality from an ecstatic trance.

The generic high school teenagers, my nameless audience. Anonymous witnesses to so many of my beatings in school, and now, for once, the anonymous witnesses to my systematic decimation of half our high school football team.

I expected them to applause me. I expected them to smile and whoop. I expected them to start chanting “Weakling” like it was a cool nickname again, as they had done, so fickle, on that day when I had first stood up to Bill. I expected some kind of affirmative reaction.

Instead, they ran away, like Ali had done.

They just fled. Generic high school teenager number three made a break from the pack first, then they all followed immediately, bolting without words as fast as they could away from me and back towards Sam’s house. Sam ran as well. Why were they running? Did they think that I was going to beat them up as well? Couldn’t they see that I wasn’t going to do that? Couldn’t they see that I had done something wonderful, that retributive justice had been served this day?

I turned to look back round at the football players lying on the ground.

Some of them were still whimpering quietly, others were unconscious.

The acidic anger in my throat rescinded; I had used it all up.

Don’t use your powers again or reveal them to anybody else.

“Oh. Shit.” There goes my college tuition.

I began to walk backwards away from them, then turned and dashed back down the garden towards the house.

Some of the running audience still hadn’t quite made it to the house, and they screamed and ran faster, thinking that I was chasing them. I followed them back through the kitchen, nearly colliding with the munching stoners there. I followed them back into the living room, which turned into an even more chaotic whirlwind of lights and shouts and screams as people called out “Run!” “Get out of here!” “There’s a crazy psycho kid beating people up in the garden!” “What the hell’s going on?” “He’s mad!” “Run for your life!” “Hey, watch where you’re going!” “Call the cops!” “Don’t call the cops!” “Run!”

I overtook some of them in the entry corridor and made it out of the front door.

Once I was out of the door, I turned left, down the darkened suburban street.

Then I ran and ran and ran and ran and ran.