by A. E. Clarke
I was watching him, amazed at how easily he sank into looking like he was asleep, except for still talking. This is the same guy who was throwing things at windows a few years ago, I marvelled. Clearly, he learned a lot in those classes.
“Okay, so there are really three parts to breathing.”
“Three?”
He opened an eye, and I shut my mouth again, fighting a smirk. I could see him trying to hold back an answering smirk.
That was more like the brother I knew.
“Yes. Three.” He closed his eye again, going almost immediately back to looking like he was talking in his sleep. “First, you breathe in, last, you breathe out, but in the middle, there’s a moment when you hold your breath in. Try to make all three parts the same length—everyone has a different number count that they’re most comfortable with. I use six, but my instructor used seven. I know a few people who use five, and I think one uses eight—basically…” He coughed, moving his arms back to his sides.
Okay, maybe he’s still my brother, if he can’t hold his arms still. I tried not to react in case he was looking.
“Basically, you should play with it a bit and try to figure out the largest number you can use for your breathing and still be comfortable. If you try something too small, it’ll mean you aren’t really doing much of anything, and if you try to go for something too large, then it’ll be too difficult and you’ll end up gasping for air, which—” He shrugged, eyes still shut. “—kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise.”
I nodded, even though his eyes were closed, and tried to match his position, legs crossed with hands resting on my knees. It was a lot more comfortable than it looked, although I didn’t know how he managed to keep his back so straight if the point of the exercise was to relax.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe in to the count of four but miscounted and hit five, so I held for five and breathed out for five.
“Make it more silent.”
I cracked open an eye. “Huh?”
“Breathe quieter. I can hear you, which means you’re using your vocal cords, which is something you don’t need to use.”
I rolled my eyes. “Seriously, Jesse? You can hear my breathing so I’m doing it wrong?”
“Can you hear mine?” He settled back into the position and breathed in, held, breathed out.
“Fine.” I closed my eyes again and breathed in. When I heard him sigh, I groaned. “How do I breathe quietly, then?”
“Think of it as sipping air through a straw. Put your mouth like you’re saying ‘ooh,’ and then…uh, don’t actually say it.”
I tried, to show I’d understood properly, and he nodded.
“Yeah, like that.”
I closed my eyes once more, and we sat there in silence for a few minutes, breathing in and out. I could feel my heart slowing down, but I couldn’t figure out exactly why we needed to be doing this—or, more accurately, why I needed to do this.
It made sense that Jesse knew how to do this and was able to sink into it so quickly and easily—he had anger management problems and needed to be able to calm himself down if he was getting angry—but it didn’t really make sense for me.
When we were younger, Jesse was…well, he was two things. First, he was tiny. He had ended up taller than me, but for most of our lives, he was barely my shoulder height. He’d also had a lot of trouble building any sort of muscle. I, on the other hand, had always been tall for my age and had a pretty athletic build without needing to try very hard. For us as kids, that meant he was always picked last for sports, while I was picked first of the girls.
It was funny, looking back. I’d spent most of my childhood trying to be as smart as him—which was a little difficult of a goal to have when I was a couple grades above him—but apparently, he’d spent the same years wishing he could be as strong as his older sister.
I was aware enough of our strength differences that I wouldn’t fight back, though, so he started throwing punches at every possible opportunity, blaming me for “picking on him.” When his punches stopped hurting me and I would stand there, not even flinching as he attacked me, he started using other things.
The incident with the couch was only the last thing that pushed my parents into realizing an intervention of some sort was necessary.
As much as he was still a little ashamed of having to go through the classes, it was probably for the best. We were friends now; if he’d still been an annoying little brat when Mom and Dad had passed, we would have had a much harder time of things. But my problem was that I didn’t have enough energy to do what I wanted to do, not that there was much that I needed to control.
I was about to ask about the differences when Jesse spoke instead.
“Okay, now. Hold up your hand, still breathing properly, and I want you to try to put as much of your energy—as much of your qi, if using a foreign word will help you wrap your head around this weird concept—into the palm of your hand as you can. Make it cover the palm of your hand as brightly as possible.”
As he rambled, I focused, and I felt a little bit of a tingling on my palm.
“Holly, keep it focused on your hand, and then open your eyes.” I could hear the excitement in his voice, despite how controlled he was trying to keep it, and I waited a beat to let myself be excited as well before calming down.
Once my breathing was back to how it was before he’d spoken, I cracked one eye open. It was a lot harder to open my eye than it should have been, since I was so relaxed from the meditation, and what I saw completely ruined any calming effect that the meditation had had on me.
I’d thought that before, there was a lot of energy—electricity, whatever—in one place. Now there was enough that I could actually feel it was there, and it was so bright I could barely look at it. It cast shadows of my hand, even in the daylight.
“Whoa!”
Jesse grinned. “Yep. Told you. This is why I figured that you should do meditation, too, even though you don’t really need to relax as much as I, uh, as I did.”
He scratched at the back of his head, still a little embarrassed by his anger management classes, even though I’d gotten over it years ago. I opened my mouth to say as much, but he shook his head.
“They tell us to try to redirect our qi to our limbs while we’re sparring, to put as much oomph behind a blow as we can,” he said, trying to steer away from the subject.
I raised an eyebrow. “I see.”
He shrugged. “Anyway, now we should probably see what you can do.”
“You have experience with lightning-based superpowers as part of your martial arts training as well, do you?” I struggled to hold back my laughter and almost succeeded.
Almost.
“No, but I read comic books, don’t I? Told you that they’d come in handy one day. I meant I wanted to learn to write or draw comic books or something, but I was still right!” He stuck out his tongue, and boy, did he look younger than he actually was.
“Sure. Anyway…” I prompted.
He shook his head and put his tongue back in his mouth. “Y-yes.”
Jesse wanted to be more mature than he needed to be most of the time. He was probably trying to make up for the way he was when he was a kid. He was usually the one to tell me when something needed doing around the house—and it wasn’t like I didn’t notice, but I tended to leave stuff to the last minute so that I could fit everything else into my day, especially with having to sleep in two chunks.
I wished that Jesse had had more of a childhood. I was sixteen when Mom and Dad died, and I still had to grow up really fast, but Jesse was only twelve, and suddenly, through all the grief of our parents being gone forever, we both had to worry about utilities, bills, budgeting…nothing a pre-teen should need to consider.
I couldn’t imagine how he’d got through it. I’d barely survived. But I guess he always was the smart one.
“Okay, so I know that you can cover your body with electricity—”
“I don�
��t know if I can cover my face with it.”
“Huh?”
“When I was first figuring out what was happening to me, I—”
“No, don’t tell me, show me.”
“Jeez, you sound like something out of an old-school action flick.” I closed my eyes, though, breathing deeply. Instead of focusing the energy on my palm, I focused on trying to shine outwardly from every inch of my skin.
“Okay, that is really, really creepy. Hold on a second.”
I heard him stand up and run into the house, leaving the door open. I could actually feel the electricity coming from inside the walls, and I could distinguish the different areas—the rooms of the house, I supposed—where there was more electricity. There was one downstairs—the water heater or the fuse box, possibly both—and a group of them at ground level. It took a second before I realized that the cable box was always on, and the TV was usually put on standby instead of being turned off.
I couldn’t sense Jesse, though. I’d heard that people have a minor electromagnetic field, and I guess I was hoping either my powers or humans’ electromagnetic fields were stronger than they were.
That being said, I didn’t need superpowers to sense him coming back—he came clomping down the stairs and almost hit the half-open porch door in his excitement.
“This is insane, Holly. It’s even—just keep it the way it is, and then open your eyes and look at yourself.”
I cracked open an eye and looked in the enormous mirror Jesse had brought with him. I could barely make out that I was human. My only real visible feature was my face, which was—sadly—still completely bare of any extra energy.
Everywhere else was just a weird…glow. Even through my clothing, the light glowed from my skin. When I lifted up my hand, I noticed that the “glow” extended about two inches outside my skin, and wiggling my fingers started some ripples in what originally had been just a ball of energy.
I took another deep breath. I don’t know if I can actually do this, but…here goes.
I held my hands together as if I were cupping water and tried to focus the energy into there instead—I could actually feel it moving from elsewhere on my body into my hands.
Well, that was a little inaccurate. What I felt wasn’t the movement of the energy—it was constantly moving, and having it all head in one direction didn’t make much of a difference to the sensation. No, what I felt was the growing hole of it not being there—like I was lying face-down in a tub as someone pulled the drain. The back of my head and my feet “broke air” first, and then Jesse’s jaw dropped. He actually backed away as the lack of energy moved over the crown of my head and he realized what I was doing.
Interestingly, there wasn’t anything special or weird about how my hands felt, and when it was only my arms covered in energy, I looked up at my little brother, whose eyes glinted with excitement like he was the one super-charged with electricity.
“I was kind of hoping I’d have a couple handfuls of lightning, but I guess I’m not Zeus. Damn.”
That was enough to break the tension, and we both started laughing. I don’t think he even noticed when my hands discharged the energy I had gathered. Since they were cupped, they shot it into each other and I reabsorbed it, so nothing really happened. I kept laughing, deciding to ignore it.
I’d have to be careful.
Chapter Twelve: Jesse
I lurched forward as the subway stopped, jerking into the station.
“Now arriving at College. College Station.” The recorded voice announced the stops over top of my music, and I jolted fully awake. I opened my eyes, stood, and dashed out of the subway car, trying to avoid bowling over the small child in my way as I did so.
I almost had the doors shut on me, and I laughed a little bit as I slowed my momentum. I was still kind of riding the wave of the adrenaline high from this afternoon with Holly—and I was riding it right into a high due to going to our three-month celebration dinner with Brent. And, since we were downtown, we were able to show that we were a couple.
I could still barely believe it when we held hands or kissed in public.
I spotted a familiar mop of black hair ahead of me, exiting the subway station, and ran up to catch him before we hit Fran’s. I grabbed at his arm and pulled as he swung around. I was kissing him almost before he knew it was me. I could tell that it hadn’t yet sunk in because it took a second or two for him to kiss me back instead of just having our lips touching each other.
“But Jesse, what will my boyfriend think if he sees us?” he asked as he snaked his arm down to hold onto mine.
“Oh, I don’t think he’ll mind.” I leaned into him and pulled down my hood.
He kissed my temple. “Happy three months, babe.”
We got up to the corner. Yonge Street was one of the busiest streets in Canada, but the turmoil wasn’t just from traffic; the streetlight was down.
“Really?” I sighed. Traffic was next to impossible to navigate through at this point.
If only Holly were here. She’d be able to fix this pretty quickly.
“Who would, hon?”
“Shit. I said that out loud?”
“Y-yes…” He raised an eyebrow, looking a little worried. “Thinking about your secret girlfriend, are we?” He smiled, though he looked confused.
“Obviously not secret enough if she crossed my mind while I was out with you.” I hugged his arm. “Sorry. I’ll try to stay focused.”
He didn’t reply to that as we crossed the street at the behest of a crossing guard. I stopped him once we’d hit the sidewalk again.
“You’re not mad at me for that, are you?”
He sighed. “I’m sorry, it—who?”
“Who what?”
“Who would be able to fix this mess?”
“Uhm… I can tell you who, but it’ll confuse you, and I can’t tell you why.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, because you can’t trust me.”
I looked him right in the eyes. “I promise there’s a good reason that I can’t tell you, and it’s Holly, so you don’t need to worry about there being someone else.”
“Holly could fix this situation?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“How?”
I shook my head, grimacing, and he sighed.
“Could we try to ignore it for the night, hon?” I pulled him towards Fran’s, a couple doors down. “I’ll buy you a milkshake, and I promise you that as soon as I can be sure you’ll believe me, I’ll tell you everything.”
“You don’t think I’ll believe you? Hon, I trust you complete—”
“No, honestly, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.”
He shook his head. “Let’s leave this discussion for later, shall we?”
I grabbed his chin and tilted it towards me, leaning in for a kiss. “Thanks.”
“You owe me. I want chocolate.”
I laughed. “Okay, okay.”
Milkshakes and onion rings: perfect, perfect anniversary food.
“…your day, hon?”
I looked up, blinking away my thoughts. “Sorry, what? I was thinking about…uh. About milkshakes and onion rings.” I smiled sheepishly and scratched the back of my head.
“Jeez, you can’t keep your mind on me tonight, can you?”
“Hey, you can’t blame me for this one! Milkshakes! Onion rings!” I said, laughing as we opened the two doors to Fran’s.
We found a table at the back of the restaurant, and our waitress brought us a glass of water each as soon as we’d sat down.
I relaxed a little bit when she was totally unfazed by us holding hands across the table. As much as I absolutely loved being out and about as a couple, it always worried me a little bit.
I had never experienced any sort of homophobia. Brent was my first boyfriend, and I’d gotten more teasing about my first girlfriend than I had about him. Admittedly, the number of people who knew was fairly low and mostly consisted of Alex—who had walk
ed in on us one day—and the few close mutual friends we had who weren’t homophobic.
But I’d heard the stories. We both had.
We’d heard about the guys who were beaten to a pulp.
We’d heard remarks thrown at other gay couples walking down the street, both of them much more confident about it than I would be.
Hell, the gay couple at my high school—“the” gay couple, or, at least, the only out couple—had both been sent home due to being attacked by “unknown bullies” at least once, and everyone knew who it was who did it—the football jocks. The guys Brent and I were around three days a week after school and twice a week during games.
We were doing fairly well this year, considering we hadn’t had a football team in years, and neither of us wanted to see that go away because of something stupid like homophobia.
“You okay, Jesse?”
I shook my head, blinking away the fog. “What?”
“I said, are you okay? You’re zoning out a lot today.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I’m not sure what it is.”
“Mmm.”
“I swear it’s nothing you need to worry about.”
“So, then you do know what it is.”
“Well, I know what part of it is. Part of it is that I got really…good news, I guess, earlier today, and then I kind of rode that wave into this, and this is making it even more amazing, but…let’s just say you’re overloading my brain.”
I smiled warmly, and he smiled back, albeit a little lacking in enthusiasm.
“Would it help if I offered to overload your brain a little later tonight?” I asked, wiggling my eyebrows.
We were probably a bit too loud with our laughter, but I didn’t really care. Fran’s was popular enough, but a lot of people who had grown up in Toronto all their lives had never heard of it, and I had a feeling that most of the clientele would probably not be from North York—or not my end of it.
And hey, even if someone we knew saw us together, they probably wouldn’t see that we were together-together unless they were close enough to see our hands, right?
