Empowered Academy 1985

by Dawn Jansen

  “Come on, Em,” Lizzy said, trying to console me as we went to get our stuff from our table. “Everybody’s first day at a new school is gonna be rough. That wasn’t on you.”

  “Besides, that kid looked like he had issues,” Blink chimed in with a remark that earned him a smack on the arm from Lizzy.

  “Hey, I was trying to cheer her up,” she said crossly.

  “It’s okay, you guys,” I said, trying in vain to take my mind off of Edgar. “Let’s just get to class.”

  Chapter 3

  Edgar

  My mind was a blur as I stormed out of the cafeteria, the jeering and laughter of my peers still audible as the doors closed behind me. Still unfamiliar with the layout of the Academy, I turned a random corner and collapsed against the wall when I saw there was nobody nearby, my body trembling from a mixture of anger, humiliation, and over-stimulation. I forced myself to take deep breaths and stretched out my school vest to wipe the final bits of food off it.

  It was my first day at the Academy. I promised myself that I would turn over a new leaf here. Nobody knew me; nobody knew about my past or my struggles, so I was free to reinvent myself for the first time in nineteen years. And I thought everything was going great when Emily introduced herself to me, but as soon as things turned south, I reverted right back to my old ways; the ways of a coward who only knows how to run and hide from his problems.

  I pounded my fist against the marble floor when I thought of how badly I’d blown it with Emily. She was the nicest anybody had been to me in as long as I could remember. My hand throbbed as I imagined how disappointed she must have been with me. She was willing to stand by my side and face those two bullies with me, and I just disappeared, leaving her on her own against them. Shit! What if she actually did have to fight them? Still sitting against the wall in this random hallway, I considered going back in the cafeteria and making sure Emily was okay, but just as I was contemplating whether or not this would be a smart move, the class bell screamed through the hallway, interrupting my thoughts.

  I quickly got up and ran a hand through my messy hair, still not fully accustomed to this appearance. Though there were only a few dozen students at the Academy at any one time, soon the hallways would be filled with them rushing to their next class, and I didn’t want to be seen slouched against the wall like some weirdo. Being laughed out of the cafeteria was already a pretty terrible start to my first day, but I couldn’t crumble; I had to keep going. After all, this was the one place where I literally couldn’t run away. Even if I could use my power to escape the mansion grounds, now that the government knew about me, I was sure they’d find me again. And I had a pretty good idea what my punishment would be once they caught me.

  I took out my class schedule. The next class was Incognito Training, where they taught us to conceal our identities and powers when we were out on field missions. As the hallway started to fill up with students, I tried to blend in with the crowd as I made my way to the second floor, where my next class was. Even though nobody seemed to be noticing me, my agoraphobia was in full effect. It made me feel like everybody in the hallway remembered me from the cafeteria and they were all silently mocking me. I was sure they’d already thought up some mean nickname for me.

  I tried pushing these thoughts out of my head by thinking of something nice. In fact, there had only been one bright spot to my whole day so far: Emily. Though I wasn’t sure if it was just this appearance that drew her to me, the fact was that she had given me something I hadn’t felt in a very long time: warmth. At first I thought I was just physically attracted to her, and with her elegant, almost elfin features, it was hard not to be. The skirt she had worn today showed off her lithe legs—thin but shapely, with subtle contours that I imagined running my hands over in sensual exploration—and the way her dark brown hair framed her heart-shaped face, with those spirited, gray-blue eyes, made my heart throb in my chest, which in turn threatened to make somewhere else on my body throb as well. But even more so than her incredible beauty, I found myself enthralled by her personality. There was this mixture of compassion, curiosity, and even a challenging mischievousness in her eyes that stirred something within me, pulling me out of my typical withdrawnness.

  But what did she think of me now? Even worse, what would she think of me if she knew the truth?

  ━━━━━ ▣ ━━━━━

  The teacher for Incognito Training was Mr. Ward, a rather jovial and good-natured middle-aged man who greeted me when I came in the door. I was the first one to arrive.

  “Yo, new kid,” he said, and then tossed me a textbook that I clumsily caught. We called them textbooks, but they were actually more like operations manuals—thin, wire-bound booklets no more than a hundred pages each, quite similar to military training manuals. “Let’s see here,” he said, looking over what I imagined was an attendance sheet. “Ah, Edgar Galloway, right?”

  “Y—yes,” I stammered, still shaken from the incident in the cafeteria. I immediately cursed myself for letting my nervous stutter come out in front of a teacher. I had done so much work to try to get rid of it, but apparently it wasn’t enough.

  Mr. Ward eyed me curiously. “First day got you all riled up, huh?” As he said that, I felt something inside my head—some kind of unintelligible whispering, as though an invisible hand had reached into my skull and was rummaging through my neurons—but that feeling passed in a few short seconds. “That’s your seat,” Mr. Ward said decisively, pointing toward a seat by the window, a big grin on his face now.

  “Alright,” I muttered with a nod, still wondering what I’d just felt in my mind.

  Soon enough, all of the other students came filing into the classroom and took their seats. They were as boisterous as ever, laughing and shoving each other, and I just tried to remain as invisible as possible in my seat near the window, flipping through the pages of my textbook but not really reading any of the words. The pages were filled with campy line drawings of EMPs in different scenarios out in the world that showed how we were supposed to keep our identities hidden. They looked like they had been drawn in the 50s or something.

  I kept my head buried in my book, but when it sounded like basically all of the students had sat down, I looked up and my heart skipped a beat—it was Emily. And she was walking straight toward me.

  We made eye contact immediately. My face froze and I gripped my textbook as panic quickly spread through me, but to my surprise, Emily smiled at me. It was a genuine smile, one that seemed to convey both happiness and concern. What was even more surprising was that her smile actually calmed me down. I marveled for a moment at the image of her walking toward me with that smile on her face. It looked like something out of a movie, or one of my dreams.

  “Hey,” she said quietly as she sat down next to me. Our seats were arranged so every two seats shared a table, effectively making Emily and me lab partners for this class. Now that we were so close to one another, my senses were overwhelmed by her scent and the warmth she exuded. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as the fresh, floral aroma of her hair and skin invaded my every pore. “Sorry about what happened back there,” she said with an easy, reassuring smile. “That’s life at the Academy, I guess. There are a lot of douchebags here, but you’ll get used to it.”

  Wait a minute—she was apologizing to me? This whole time I’d been imagining that Emily was irate because I’d left her to fend off those two bullies by herself. As somebody who solved all of his problems by either hiding or running away, I kind of just expected people to be disappointed in me, so this was something new.

  “Alright, let’s get started on page thirteen,” Mr. Ward said before I had a chance to reply to Emily. The two of us opened our books and flipped to the right page.

  Mr. Ward stood up and took us through today’s material, but the whole time, I couldn’t stop myself from constantly looking at Emily out of the corner of my eye. I watched every movement of her hands intently, studying the graceful posture of her f
ingers as they turned a page or maneuvered her pen across her notebook as she took notes, taking special note of the light pink luster of her delicately painted nails. Each time she moved in her seat, the scent of her hair would waft over to me and I’d try to be as discrete as possible in inhaling that blessed fragrance.

  Despite the distraction by my side—and the very distracting stiffness she was causing in my pants—I knew I still had to pay attention to the lesson given the dangerous nature of the job we were training for. The pages we read with Mr. Ward went over everything from protocol for when a civilian sees you use your power to managing all the documents for our bogus identities. Apparently there was an entire team of specialists we had to call when we were spotted using our powers in public, and they had various “methods” for ensuring people stayed quiet, though the textbook didn’t go into detail about what those methods were. I noticed that Emily took incredibly detailed and organized notes, and I tried to follow her lead so she didn’t think I was a doofus—if she even noticed me at all.

  After about a half-hour, Mr. Ward announced we were to work on the book exercises at the end of the unit with our lab partner. Conversations broke out all throughout the classroom as students started tackling the exercises together. I was surprised by how similar the Academy was to a normal school; even though many of us would graduate and become assassins, spies, or commandos, the students were in many ways much like students anywhere else, eager for any opportunity to socialize and joke around.

  “I’m s—sorry about before,” I said to Emily as soon as everybody started talking so that nobody would overhear me. “I shouldn’t have run away like that, it’s just... I get kind of overwhelmed sometimes. I’ve never been good with confrontation...”

  “Are you kidding me?” she says, widening her eyes. “I should be the one apologizing to you. Dexter and Ray are always picking on me, they probably only targeted you cause they saw us talking.”

  “Why would they do that?” I asked.

  “Ugh,” Emily sighed. I loved how expressive she was when she talked. “It’s because of my dad... He’s a senator and head of the Empowered Bureau.”

  “I—I could see how that would paint a target on your back,” I said, realizing that there was a lot more depth to Emily than I first imagined.

  “What about you?” she asked, twirling her pen deftly between her fingers. “How did you wind up here? What were you doing before the Academy?”

  This made me freeze for a moment, and I felt my shoulders tense up. I was prepared for this question though. I figured other students would often ask each other about this, so I had thought up a decent reply in advance already.

  “They’d been shadowing me for a while,” I said. “I thought I was going crazy at first, seeing black vans parked outside my workplace and all that. But when they finally revealed themselves to me and told me about the Academy, and that I wasn’t the only one with powers, I finally knew I wasn’t schizo.”

  It was half-true, only missing the part where they had picked me up out of jail.

  Emily giggled. “I would’ve gone nuts too! I guess I was lucky, comparatively. My dad told me about EMPs and the Academy when my powers first started manifesting. I was around twelve at the time.”

  “I was twelve when I first learned about my powers too!” I said excitedly, feeling a sense of connection with Emily that I’d never felt with anybody else before.

  “That’s typical of all EMP,” Emily said, not wanting me to get excited for no reason. I felt myself blush with embarrassment—and I hated that even though I could sometimes control my stutter, I was still wholly unable to hide my blushing.

  Emily giggled again. “You’re cute when you blush. And your dimples too.”

  This was a lifetime first for me—being told I was cute—and it only made my cheeks redden even more. I had to think of something to change the subject fast.

  “So, what are your p—powers?” I blurted out.

  Emily looked a little caught off guard at first, but then a beautiful smile spread across her succulent lips. A glimmer of reflected light sparkled over the tasteful lip gloss she had on, and I had to remind myself not to gawk too obviously at this enticing display.

  “Well, I can show you, but only if you show me yours,” she said with a grin, twirling a lock of silky-smooth hair with her index finger.

  “I asked you first,” I said, thinking it would sound flirty, but then I winced when I realized it was really just childish.

  “But today’s opposite day, so really...” Emily said, which actually made me laugh. She seemed so mature with her meticulous notes and confidence—I didn’t imagine she could be as immature as me when she was playing around. I suddenly felt that maybe the incident in the cafeteria earlier hadn’t been the doomed nail in the coffin I had thought it was.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Are you sure it’s okay in here?”

  “Are you kidding me? Look around you,” Emily said, motioning to the other students. She was right; people were working on the exercises, but they weren’t just sitting down quietly—lots of them were standing up and going through animated gestures as they talked things over. Nobody would probably notice if I used my power, which was pretty discreet anyway.

  If I used my power too much, it would bring up bad memories that sometimes threatened to plunge me into depression, but I thought that using it just this once to show off to Emily would be fine.

  I stood up and noticed Emily taking stock of me from head to toe as I walked over to the nearby wall. I tried not to blush and probably failed, but I couldn’t focus on that now, because I had to make sure that I used my power correctly. Even though I’d known about my power for the past seven years, I had never really mastered it so that I could use it every time on command—not this power, at least.

  As I approached the wall, I slowed my breathing down and remembered what it felt like to use my power successfully. It worked, too—I felt that excitation rising up inside me, starting from my core and spreading throughout every square millimeter of my skin. Soon my skin was hot and felt like it was vibrating, and that’s when I knew it would work; I walked confidently toward the wall and didn’t stop, letting my body pass effortlessly through it. I appeared for a second in the next-door classroom, which was fortunately empty at the moment, before dipping back through the wall again to Mr. Ward’s classroom.

  “No powers during a theory class!” Mr. Ward yelled at me as soon as I phased back into his classroom. “You gotta learn this shit, new kid.”

  I let out a meek “Sorry,” but didn’t have time to feel like I’d messed up because of the way Emily was staring at me when I came back.

  “Whoa!” she said enthusiastically. “That’s wicked!”

  “Really?” I asked, having to wonder for a second if she was being sarcastic or not. “I can’t get it right all the time, though. I have to focus really hard...”

  “Yeah, but once you get a hang of it, that’s probably a tier one power!” Emily said, still radiating with excitement. “You could make short work of Dexter and Ray if you really figure out how to use it right, and then with some combat training, you’ll be ace!”

  Hearing her rattle off these terms and theorizing about my power, combined with her careful note-taking from before, made me realize how important this all was to Emily, which added a new layer of respect to the admiration I already felt for her.

  When I sat down, it seemed like she had found a newfound respect for me as well. She was sitting up energetically in her seat now, her face glowing with excitement, focusing on me with rapt attention. My heart was beating fast; I had never interacted this way with a girl before. We seemed to really be hitting it off.

  I cleared my throat nervously. “W—well?” I asked. “You said you’d show me yours.”

  “Oh yeah,” Emily said. “A deal is a deal, right? You have to let me touch you though,” she added with a grin.

  “W—what?” I said a little too loudly. I thought I might
cream my pants right there if she even laid a finger on me. “I mean, why? Are you sure?”

  Emily just giggled. Apparently, she found my overreaction cute. “I’m not gonna bite you,” she said. “Just one little touch. I promise.”

  I looked around quickly, almost wondering if I was in a dream. I was really thick when it came to girls, and had basically zero experience to speak of, but even I could tell Emily was seriously digging me. “Alright,” I said, trying to steady my breathing, unsure of where she might touch me.

  Without any warning—and while still wearing that mischievous smile—Emily nonchalantly put her hand over mine, which I had placed awkwardly on the desk.

  As soon as we made contact, I let out an audible shudder as some kind of energetic jolt course through my whole body, ending right in my core, where it had always felt like the source of my power lay. This was combined with the strictly physical sensation of Emily’s soft skin pressing gently against mine. I was shocked at how warm and “alive” her touch was, but even more so I found myself overwhelmingly curious at the mysterious energy swimming through me right now. Just what was Emily’s power?

  I was staring at her in dumbstruck awe—almost in a state of bliss, really, caused by her tender caress—when, not more than two seconds after she first laid her hand on mine, she tore it away and gasped.

  This sudden reaction was jarring, and I furrowed my brow as I searched Emily’s shocked expression for an answer. Why had she ripped her hand away from mine?

  “W—what is it?” I asked, but all Emily could do was stare at me as though she’d seen a ghost.

  Chapter 4

  Emily

  “You have two powers?” I finally asked when the astonishment had subsided. I had absorbed lots of other students’ powers since I’d arrived at the Academy, but this was the first time I’d ever encountered somebody with two totally unique powers.