The Fire In My Eyes

by Christopher Nelson

  All three of them were wearing swimsuits underneath.

  The girls, though just as drenched as we were, grinned proudly. Drew grumbled. We all congregated at the picnic table where our cooler and supplies were, but before formal negotiations could begin, there was a rumble from high above. Dark clouds were sweeping in, unnoticed during the great water war. “Shit, I didn't think it was supposed to rain today!” Max said. “This was supposed to be a great day for a picnic!”

  “It's getting cold too,” Lisa said, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “Let's get back to the dorm,” Drew said. “We can always come back, right?”

  We gathered the buckets and water guns and all the food and loaded Max's car back up. Rain was already starting to shower down on us, huge warm drops soaking our already-wet clothes. Max let the girls into his car after insisting they take their wet shirts off, then took off, leaving Drew, Andreas, and me to walk back to the dorm. We jogged most of the way, cursing Max with every breath.

  By the time we got back to the dorm, the rain had started in earnest. Thunder boomed overhead. Drew and Andreas wasted no time rushing inside, but I hung back. This was the perfect time to try to find Nikki. If she hadn't come to the picnic with Kaitlyn, she'd be either in her room, or nearby. I'd take advantage of Kaitlyn's absence.

  I ducked around the corner, out of the line of sight of the road passing by the dorm, then called up my psionic Sight. All around me, the threads started to appear, shimmering and echoing with the rain. Each raindrop seemed to freeze in midair, a jewel of light tethered to an infinite number of similar jewels. I focused quickly, concentrating on Nikki. The number of threads swiftly dwindled, finally resolving to a single thread that snaked around toward the back of the building. What was she doing back there?

  I peeked around the corner. She stood in the courtyard where we had both stood on Valentine's Day, alone in the rain. I ducked back and cut my power off, then waited a moment for my eyes to fade. Once I was sure that no trace remained, I turned the corner and walked toward her. She didn't seem to notice my approach. I was certain that she wasn't able to hear me, not through the downpour.

  As I got closer, I saw that she was completely drenched. Her tank top clung to her and her jeans were a dark, wet blue. Her brown hair was a little shorter than I remembered, hanging in lank wet tendrils at the back of her neck. She was facing away from me, looking up at the sky. I cleared my throat, but she didn't seem to hear me. “Nikki?”

  She flinched, but didn't turn around. “Kevin?”

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I took the long way around the building. Our picnic got rained out.”

  “I see.” She lowered her head, but still didn't turn to look at me. “It's cold. Like me.”

  “I don't think you're cold,” I said. “I've been looking for you. I wanted to talk.”

  “I know,” she said, barely audible over the rain. Anything else she said was lost in a distant roll of thunder. If she knew I had been looking for her, then Kaitlyn actually had been passing the messages along. I had pegged her as more spiteful than that.

  “Why have you been avoiding me, then?” I asked. “Was it something I did?” The sheer hypocrisy of that question made it painful to ask.

  “You didn't do anything,” she said.

  “Then what happened?” I asked. She didn't reply, simply seemed to sag forward, hunching over like she was in pain. I took a step toward her. I wanted to help her, but I didn't know what I could do. She turned, finally, and looked at me over her shoulder. Brown eyes, large and sad, glanced over my face, then down at my feet.

  “We broke up.”

  Those words made me want to cheer, made me want to sweep her off her feet, made me want to immediately make a move. I held back. “With your boyfriend?”

  She smiled slightly, the barest shadow of her dimples appearing. “No, with my brother. Yes, my boyfriend. It wasn't working out. Some things just don't work.”

  “I don't know if I could handle it either,” I said.

  She laughed. “It's almost funny. He found someone else. Someone there.”

  “What about you?” I asked, when it was clear she wasn't going to add anything more.

  “Me?” She glanced back up at me, then back down. “I was lonely here. I am lonely here. My old friends are all far away and I have a hard time making new friends. When I did finally make a new friend, a good friend, something happened. He started avoiding me.”

  I winced. “I'm sorry.”

  “Don't be. I put you in a weird situation.” She laughed again. “Of course it was weird. You were here. He wasn't. What was I supposed to feel?”

  “I don't think it's a question of how you're supposed to feel,” I said. “I think it's just a question of how you do feel.”

  She turned away so quickly I thought I had offended her. Instead of replying, she walked over toward a bench and sat down, then drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. I followed her to the bench and sat next to her. “I do like you,” she said to her knees. I had to strain to hear her. “I really do. But you have to understand how I feel about this. I feel like I betrayed him. Neither of us were happy. We had to move on. But I don't know if it was the right thing to do.”

  “I don't think it was wrong,” I said.

  “Of course you wouldn't,” she said. “I don't think it is either, but I still feel guilty. Am I making any sense?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Do you?” She turned her head and looked sideways at me. “Let's be open with each other, Kev. Let's stop hiding things. How did you know I was back here?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Her question hung between the raindrops. How specific a question was this? “I thought I'd walk around the building and saw you back here,” I lied.

  “You weren't surprised to find me. You came right here,” she said. “Right to me.”

  How could she know that? Was she making sure she knew where I was just so she could continue to avoid me? And Shade called me obsessive. “I wouldn't put that way. You know I've been looking for you.”

  She shook her head and her eyes narrowed. “Kevin. Answer me honestly. I didn't tell anyone where I was going. Kaitlyn was with you. She couldn't know where I was. No one knew, but you found me in a place where there was no reason for me to be. So how did you find me?”

  The line was clearly drawn. If I didn't tell her the truth, I'd lose her as a friend, not to mention any relationship potential. If I did tell her the truth, I'd be breaking the rules that Shade had laid out for me early in training. Don't tell anyone. Don't let anyone see you. Notify him immediately if anything happens. He said power was a terrifying thing, especially to those without it. I didn't want to terrify her.

  I also didn't want to tell her because of how she'd react. I knew that inequality of this sort would make things hard for both of us. How could I have a normal relationship with her? Just like legions of fictional superheroes, I wanted to hide my abilities from her so that we could have some semblance of normality together.

  “Well?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I want to tell you. But I don't know if I can.”

  “Why not? Are you going to hide things from me? I know that's hypocritical, but I decided that I wasn't going to hide things from you anymore. I want you to feel the same way. I want you to trust me.”

  I looked down at the ground. Puddles rippled with the incessant downpour. “Can I really trust you? You won't tell anyone?” I asked.

  She leaned over, putting her face in my field of vision. “Promise.”

  I took a deep breath. Damn Shade. Damn Ripley. I'd prove them wrong. Not everyone would be afraid. I stood up and took a few steps away, then turned to face her. She watched me, head tilted slightly as she waited. I tapped into my power. Heat rose in my face as my power surged and rapidly stabilized. I held my hands out in front of
me and concentrated on the rain.

  My previous use of telekinesis was to move simple, solid things. Changing how raindrops moved was more challenging. Even though each one was tiny, there were thousands to deal with. Instead of whirling them around or gathering them to one point like I had originally planned, I just pushed them all away. I pushed too hard.

  Every raindrop within five feet of me abruptly moved. Puddles at my feet splashed away, splattering Nikki with cold water. She shied away, but her expression was more than enough for me. Eyes wide. Skin pale. I had guessed wrong. It was all over. I'd have to tell Shade. All my worst nightmares were coming true. What had I done?

  My loss of confidence shook me. My power surged out of control. My temples throbbed with pain and wind swirled, pulling all the rain around me into a translucent whirling wall of liquid. I was suddenly at the center of a miniature waterspout and I could barely breathe for all the water howling around me. I dropped to my knees and choked. My power surged again and my skull felt as if it was about to shatter. The green glow intensified with my power, the glow from my eyes scattering through the water. While the power would burn out, what if I managed to drown myself first?

  I could barely see Nikki through the wall of water. Her figure was blurry, distorted by the water wall, but I could see her stand up. I could see lighter colors lift from her sides, her hands rising and reaching toward me. She came closer and I could barely make out her mouth moving, a dark gap in the pale oval of her face. Anything she said was lost to the violent storm surrounding me. Lightning flashed, sending blue-white highlights through the green glow of the wall for a single beautiful moment.

  When the lightning cleared, the green glow was twice as bright. Through the wall, I could see two more spots of green. Her hands burst through the wall of water, pressed together and carving a gap in the spray, and then she yanked her hands apart. The whirling wall of water exploded in a spray of green, dissolving back into individual drops of water, each one glowing for just a second before hitting the ground.

  My surprise doubled as Nikki stepped toward me, her eyes glowing green. She leaned down and pressed two fingers to my temples and I felt a strange pulse in my head. The agonizing headache vanished. I seized control of my power and cut the flow off as quickly as I could.

  Nikki fell to her knees and before I could react, she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me hard enough to make my neck creak. “I knew it,” she whispered in my ear. “I knew it! It makes sense! It makes so much sense!”

  “What?” She had psionic powers. She knew how to use them. What part of this made sense?

  She stopped squeezing the life out of me and withdrew, keeping her hands on my shoulders. I could feel her leaning on me. “You idiot. I should have known. We were both in that class, but you never told me until now! Why did you hide it from me?”

  My mouth dropped open and I slapped my forehead. “I can't believe it,” I said. “That's so obvious. How did I miss it? I really am an idiot.”

  She laughed and then sat back, leaning on her hands. “I thought you had figured it out long before now. I hinted at it so many times when we had dinner together. I thought that maybe he had seeded the class with people who weren't psions, just to make sure we didn't assume anything. I hoped that you were, but my mentor wouldn't tell me anything. She just told me that I'd learn what I needed to know when I needed to know it.”

  It did make sense. I couldn't believe I had missed all the signs. “So you were assuming that I wasn't like you, right?”

  She nodded. “I didn't know if we could even be friends if you knew what I could do. It'd be an unequal relationship. I didn't want to put you through that.”

  It was eerily similar to what I had been thinking just a few minutes ago. “That's why you broke up with your boyfriend back home, right?”

  Her gaze dropped to the ground. “Among other reasons.”

  “So where do we go from here?” I asked.

  She looked back up at me, then up at the sky. “Looks like the rain is slowing down.”

  I looked up as well. The sky wasn't as dark as it had been and the downpour from earlier had moved on, leaving only a thin drizzle in its wake. “Well, I'm already soaked to the bone, so there's not much point in going inside now,” I said.

  She laughed. “I guess the picnic didn't go off too well, then.”

  “It was a lot of fun. The girls started a water war.” I told her about how they had ambushed us and how I had been the hero, stealing some balloons and letting us soak the girls back. She giggled all the way through up until I told her how the girls had been wearing swimsuits under their clothes.

  She rolled her eyes and tugged at her tank top. “Sorry, I guess I'm just not as nice a sight as Kaitlyn is.”

  The tank top was still soaked and clinging to her. I had been trying to avoid staring, but couldn't help myself when she drew attention to it. “Kaitlyn's a little too superficial,” I said. “I like the way you look.”

  She glanced at me, then flushed. “Of course you do, when I look like this.”

  “I thought that way long before I ever saw you like this,” I said.

  Her face turned even redder. “Now you're just being a flirt.”

  “You did tell me to be honest.”

  “I did. Don't make me regret it,” she said. “So, how long have you known? About psionics, I mean.”

  It took me a moment to shift my mind back to that topic. “Well, I've had weird things happening since the very day I got here. I never knew exactly what was going on till after we got back from Max's place.”

  “Are you serious?” she asked. “Didn't you start training during the first trimester?”

  I shook my head. “I turned Ripley down at first. They took a normal life away from me and didn't even give me a choice. It took a pretty nasty accident before I realized that I had to learn control of my power and that I had to take the one choice I was offered.”

  “A nasty accident?” she asked.

  I closed my eyes. I could see her broken body again, just as clearly as I had on Valentine's Day. Her closed eyes, sunken face, limp and injured and dying. I forced the image away and opened my eyes again. “I don't feel comfortable talking about it. Not yet,” I added as she looked like she was about to protest. She frowned, but nodded. “It was bad. Ripley had to cut my power off for a while, to make sure that I didn't lose control again. That didn't work out too well.”

  “What happened?”

  I gave her a brief description of the attack at Max's place. She listened to my description and chewed on her lower lip. “And that's what led you to finally accept the training offer?” she asked when I finished.

  I nodded. “What about you?”

  “I took it. Immediately,” she said. “I don't understand why you wouldn't jump at the opportunity. Alistair was harsh about what would happen if I didn't accept the offer, but he was only being honest. But really, Kevin, when you were given the opportunity to be different, to be able to do things that normal people could only dream about, why didn't you take it? I was nearly in tears. It felt like I finally had a reason to be here.”

  I hung my head. She sounded so thrilled, it made me feel bad for being so stubborn about it. “I felt like an outsider for so many years during high school,” I said. “I came up here so I could have a new start. I wanted to have a normal life. I never even got the chance. They took that away from me.”

  She leaned forward and touched my hand. “But don't you want to do something with your life? Don't you want to be something more than just a normal guy, like you said?”

  I looked up at the sky. The rain had faded from a drizzle to just a shower while we spoke. The sun was coming out. “Everyone does. I just wanted to be able to do it myself.”

  “And now you can,” she told me, squeezing my hand. “Look, Kevin! You have power now! You can use that power and do things that most people can't! I have this power and I plan to use it. Don't tell me that you don't feel the same w
ay.”

  Her words sent a chill up my spine, even as the sun broke through the clouds and shone brightly down on the two of us. Power corrupts, a voice whispered in the back of my mind. We held power that was unfathomable. What sort of person would she become due to the power? More importantly, what would I become?

  She might have sensed my sudden tension, because she let go of my hand and then pushed herself to her feet. “Let's sit back down on the bench,” she said. “The ground's too wet for me.”

  “The bench is wet too,” I pointed out.

  She shrugged and her eyes flickered with green light. Water slid off the bench and poured on the ground to the sides of it. “Not anymore,” she said.

  I stood up and we both sat down on the dried bench. “Don't you feel strange using your power to do such trivial things?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” she said. “You used your power to do a trivial thing like find me, didn't you? As long as we use it responsibly, I don't see why we should save it for special occasions. Besides, the more we use it, the easier it gets to use it. Your mentor should have taught you that, right?”

  I nodded. “I've gotten into the habit of using it for silly things too, like picking up the soap or shampoo in the bathroom. Just a few simple things each day. It's a lot easier than it was.”

  “So you do it too, so why complain? In fact, I was out here practicing when you found me. You've gotten to the basic metasensory training, right?” she asked.

  “Just started it Friday,” I said.

  “I was practicing my focus. I could feel your presence when you came around the corner. I'm surprised you didn't notice, but you probably haven't learned what psionic energy traces look like quite yet.” She stretched her arms up over her head. “This sun feels really nice. I wonder if I could dry my clothes out. Seems like a simple thing, but I don't want to set them on fire or anything. Though I bet you wouldn't mind if I burned my clothes off, right?”

  She simply accepted psionics. I wondered if I could ever feel that comfortable about it. “I don't know if I'd bother,” I said.