8

            The walk to the elevators, waiting in the elevators, and the walk to our hotel room took ages, especially for Lizzie. Every single second we spent away from our private quarters Lizzie spent gathering so much anticipation and energy that when I finally inserted the key card into our door, it felt like she was about to straight-up burst. She slammed the door behind her and turned to face me. I don’t think I’d ever seen a wider smile. “Well, well, my superhero!”

            “We’re finally alone,” I said. I was shaking, with a mix of excitement and nerves. My future as an electricity-wielding wizard was ahead of me, and with that came all the nerve-wracking implications about what that meant for me. I took a small breath to calm myself. We didn’t have to have this conversation now. “Complete privacy.”

            “A couple hours ago, that would’ve meant something else,” she giggled, looking beyond me. “Hold on.” She ran over to the window curtains and quickly closed them, blocking any unlikely onlookers. She looked like a little kid the way she rushed past me toward the window. I smirked. I felt a little giddy myself, with more childlike curiosity than I’d felt in a long time. “Alright mister, we’ve got work to do.”

            “What do you mean?” I asked, sitting on the bed. As excited as I was, part of me was starting to get nervous all over again.

            She laughed and took my hands to sit next to me. “We’ve got to explore your powers, obviously. Telepathy is cool and all, but there’s got to be more to it.”

            I chuckled, her energy was so infectious. “What are you-”

            “Ah, ah!” Lizzie cut in, raising our conjoined hands in the air, raising one to her head and extending an index finger pointing to her forehead. “Think it, don’t speak it.”

            I gave her a “Really?” expression, and she just nodded. I sighed with an eyeroll. “You’re such a kid.”

            She giggled. “You’re getting the hang of it though, I can practically hear your inflections in my head.”

            “No kidding?” I thought with a head tilt.

            “Really. Although, your body language might be giving me some clues as well,” she said, reaching out and booping me on the nose playfully. “Come on, keep going.”

            Keep going? What do I say? I had already run out of witty comments, and my mind was racing too fast to come up with any new ones. Slowing down my thoughts, I searched for a new banter topic. With the plethora of questions running through my head, I figured sharing one would make for a good conversation. I settled on one that had been running through my mind for a while.“Why do you think I have this ability? Wouldn’t it make more sense if I had electrical powers from surviving the generator’s strikes?”

            Her eyebrows raised in remembrance. “Oh yeah, I had a theory about that. I think it is electrical. Because, and I might be remembering wrong, but aren’t the signals that your brain sends to your body electrical in nature? Like tiny electrical signals that go through your nerves to make your muscles react?”

            I took a moment to think about it, feeling like I’d heard something similar. Then I realized that, somehow intrinsically, I already knew she was right. I didn’t need to verify, because each time I sent a thought her way, I felt the pulses flow through my body. They felt alive, under my control, and very electrical in nature. I could order these pulses around, and they’d willingly follow my every command. I couldn’t explain how I knew they were electrical signals. They just were. “So your theory is…”

            “That the thoughts in your head get sent to me via electrical command somehow, and then get transferred and pushed into my own head. Anything you want me to hear, I’ll hear.”

            “Wow… Spooky,” was my only response.

            “Crazy,” she agreed. “Ok, now try a picture.”

            “Try a what now?” I said aloud, forgetting myself.

            “Again, I’m just kind of spit balling ideas. If you can push thoughts into my head as though I thought them myself, could you do so with your mental pictures as well? So, like… try to imagine something with your head and send that to me the same way.”

            “Where are you even getting these ideas? Are you secretly an expert on magic powers?” I teased.

            She just gave me a cheeky grin. “It’s just a guess. And hey, you never know until you try,” she teased back.

            I watched her face, briefly baffled by the incredible shine it took on, wondering what it was that was making her so damn excited over this whole thing. Here I was, stressed out by my powers. Meanwhile she sat merrily as though Christmas had come early. I suppose she was just living out here fantastical dreams. To her I was like a real-life superhero.

            Maybe Frank was onto something about what we were going to do tonight.

            We closed our eyes, as I tried to work out how to send a picture over to her telepathically. I settled on trying to recall the visual image of a location and giving her access to that visual. The problem was that I was not very good at observing and memorizing key details, so anything I came up with felt very empty. I needed to think of a place that I was very familiar with. The first thing that came to mind was the room I grew up in, so I started to recall as many details as I could. I saw the baby blue walls plastered with posters of the sports teams I liked, wacky motivational sayings, and award plaques from my random adventures in after school activities. I saw my bed, trying to remember the pattern of the night stars on the comforter on top, and how messy the sheets usually were most of the day. I saw a cluttered writing desk in another corner from the bed, with a very old wooden chair fashioned with neatly knitted plush coverings from my great grandmother. I worried that with each new focus I was losing the picture of the other items I had already tried picturing, so I mentally took a step back and tried to imagine the entire scene at once. I wasn’t sure I did the best job, but it was the best I could do. Taking that picture, I gave a mental push. The flow of electricity through my nerves was familiar at this point, and satisfyingly slid through my arms with a comforting internal massage-like feel, before escaping my grasp and into the still held palms of my girlfriend.

            She chuckled and we both opened our eyes. “Well, we’ll work on it, but I did see something.”

            “Huh…” I said, a little surprised it had worked. “What did you see?”

            “I don’t really know, it looked a bit like a bedroom I haven’t seen before. But like, the whole thing was foggy and it just kinda felt like it was floating in space.”

            “Yeah, that’s my Indiana home bedroom. Recalling it was harder than I thought.”

            “How have I never seen this bedroom yet?” she asked. “I feel like I’ve seen a lot of pictures of you growing up, but none of your bedroom.”

            “To be fair, you haven’t been to my house yet. We’ll need to fix that at some point by the way.”

            She winked, and then clapped her hands together. “What next?”

            I shrugged. “You’ve had good ideas so far, got any others Magneto?”

            “That’s not… never mind,” she said, shaking her head in mock disappointment. I laughed, having a blast so far. “Ok, can you like… shoot lightning from your fingertips?”

            I blinked. “I don’t know, and I don’t know if that’s a safe thing to even test.”

            “I know, I’m just thinking, if you were able to safely, do you think you could?”

            I shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know. Why, do you think I could?”

            She crossed her arms with a mocking scowl. “If not, you got absolutely stiffed. Not that I ever expect you to use such a power, but it would certainly be the coolest power you could get.” Her hazel eyes lit up suddenly. “Ooh, what if you just send a spark between your hands?”

            “A spark between my hands…” I repeated, holding up my hands palms up in confusion. “Like the generator or something?” At her nod, I moved my hands to have the palms face each other. As I thought about it, my mind began to picture what she was probably trying to conjure. Concentrating, I send some electricity over to my left hand and had it wait there. The electricity obeyed, the buzzing through my arm sending chills through my body, and I had to fight to not moan. It felt so good travelling through my body. I then looked toward my right hand and imagined it as some form of receiver, sucking in any electricity that would be sent its way. With a nudge, I released some of the charge in my left hand and with an audible clap, a beautiful bolt of electricity emerged from my left hand and shot with literal lightning speed toward my right hand, which painlessly absorbed the bolt. We both recoiled in surprise, but quickly replaced that with excitement.

            “Holy shit, that was cool,” Lizzie awed.

            It was my turn to get curious. With more electricity in my left hand, I held out my palms toward each other again, and released toward my right. The bolt came back, but this time I concentrated on the bolt and tried to control its motion. I focused and did everything I could to slow the bolt so that it would stay visible for a couple seconds. The result was a shakier bolt that admittedly went slower but had far less control and only just barely hit my right hand before getting absorbed. Lizzie bit her lip in concern, but I lowered my eyebrows. It was risky, but… I think I could tell what I did wrong.

            I pictured the bolt coming out of my hand like a yo-yo in a sense. When it left my hand, I kept the bolt locked onto my hand and hold it there like it was taped to my palm. It almost felt like a string hovering in midair. I slowly tried to then extend the end of the bolt by giving it more power ever so slowly. The bolt expanded quickly, but when it hit my right hand, I didn’t absorb it. Instead, I “grabbed” it, holding the bolt between my two palms. The result was a lightning bolt that buzzed loudly, yet stayed perfectly between my two palms, flickering like the bolts in a plasma globe.

            “Wow…” Lizzie whispered. For several seconds, we sat across from each other with empty thoughts, letting the hum of the blinding bolt fill the room and allowing the light cast shadows all around. The mesmerizing feeling already familiar to me, I noticed Lizzie similarly transfixed by the dancing bolt.

            “It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” I sighed pensively. Once again, the alluring nature of the electricity from yesterday’s show resurfaced. Its mysterious pull on me was becoming the norm. As I watched the flickers of movement, I had a strange sensation of understanding, one that I couldn’t really put properly into words. But I trusted Lizzie, and I wanted her to know how I was feeling, so I tried anyways. “You know, something I don’t know if I’ve fully explained is how I felt while in that cage yesterday. Mostly because, I’ve had a hard time understanding just what had happened. When I was up in that cage, seeing the first few bolts strike, I completely forgot I was even a part of a show, I forgot there was an audience, I forgot that I was even in a cage. Yet what I do remember, was the shape and formation of every single bolt. They only existed for a split second, yet each time they emerged, it felt like they were there for ages. I was able to study their designs, their patterns, the brightness, the sound… Something about them just fascinated me. I felt… transfixed. Hypnotized. I heard them call for me.” I turned to meet her eyes, full of wonder. “I thought that I was just imagining it, but I don’t think any of that was a coincidence. Some part of me wonders if I was always destined to get struck, that I was always meant to receive the power somehow. I’m looking at this bolt right now, and I just can’t help feeling like it feels… right. I feel comfortable. I feel safe. I feel happy.”

            It was at that point that I remembered my nightly dreams. Throughout the day, they had been in the back of my mind, ever so slowly starting to make more sense. With Lizzie still actively listening to my words, I felt comfortable enough to pour out my thoughts without any judgement. “Every time I’ve fallen asleep since the accident, I’ve had this dream. I’m in a blank field, with nothing but forest ahead of me. I start walking, without rhyme or reason. It’s like my body’s hypnotized again. It’s like how I felt when I was in the cage and lost control of my body. Anyways, I’m heading toward a storm, I raise my arms to the sky, and get hit by a bolt of lightning. And it just… stays there, attached to my heart. Even while it’s happening, I feel at peace. Like I’m supposed to be there getting shocked. And in the morning, I wake up and feel completely energized. It’s like I was literally charged up like a battery. Admittedly while shocking everyone and anyone around me, but it’s not actually a big deal. As it turns out, I can just will the electricity away anyways.”

            “Wow…” was all she could say. “So the SFE is really just…”

            “Yeah,” I confirmed her thinking. “I think it’s because of the dream. I think when I’m sleeping, it’s my body literally recharging from the day. And when I wake up, I just tell it to rest in my heart, and it goes away.”

            “And you really had no idea until just now?”

            I shrugged. “I only wondered if my strange panic attacks were controlling its disappearances, but no, I had no idea of the powers I’d ultimately find myself capable of.”

            Her head fell, watching the still active bolt between my palms. I realized that I hadn’t even been thinking about it, yet it stayed perfectly within my control. Maybe I had even more control than I thought. “It’s weird,” she said, “but… I think I feel similarly too. Something about seeing you like this just… feels right. I remember seeing your face during the two o’clock presentation, the way you already seemed so invested in the show and the demonstrations. I wonder if even then you were caught by the bolt’s allure. And honestly, I see what you mean about the beauty of the bolt. But I think it’s different for me, because it’s not really the bolt that I’m attracted to.” She raised her head again and gave me an embarrassed smile.

            I returned it. Somehow, I knew what she meant.