2

                My apartment wasn’t a typical student dorm, rather a suite with two single bedrooms, one for me and another for my roommate. It was still on-campus and in an apartment complex, but it was big enough to house its own kitchen and living room areas to itself. I’d had to work a full summer to make enough money to convince Mom I could afford to chip in. Thankfully, Mom loves spoiling me, so after working out a plan to pay it back, I landed the apartment without much argument. Sure, she’d nag me more than usual when it came to working off the cost, but it was well worth it for a private bedroom.

                Crossing the relatively furniture-less room, I opened the front door to find a woman who seemed younger than I was anticipating. If she went to the school, she’d have to have been a first year. She was taller than Lizzie, nearly my height, but her face shined with youthfulness. Her eyes shined hazel and her brunette hair went down to her mid-back. She had her hands behind her back shyly. When she realized I was there, she seemed to blush, embarrassed.

                I leaned on the door frame, feeling a bit unnerved. “Can I help you?”

                She stammered over her words. “A-Are you Beck Roland?”

                I raised an eyebrow. How did someone who I didn’t recognize know my name? And why was it so important for her to see me in person? Continuing to feel uneasy, I kept my voice cautious. “Yeah? Do I know you?”

                She raised her eyebrows and quickly shook her head. “Oh, no! I mean, not yet at least. U-Um… I just… I wanted to know… were you… um, are you the same Beck Roland that was in the cage at the Van de Graff Generator in Boston?”

                All at once, everything made sense. I rolled my eyes and groaned. So, she was with the media then. She wanted an inside scoop on what happened when Lizzie and I went to Boston for vacation. That day, I’d met Lizzie’s uncle Frank, who worked at the Museum of Science in Boston, specifically as a host of the lightning show they had. The grand finale of the show was where the host would go into a cage resembling that of a bird cage and stand perfectly safe while electrical bolts from a generator struck the cage all around him. With my connection to Lizzie, Frank set it up so that I could go into the cage as a volunteer. Only things didn’t go as planned, as I lost control of myself during the presentation and reached through the bars and got struck. Somehow, from there, the laws of physics broke, and as I fell backward, bolts somehow managed to weave in between the cage bars and strike me ten times in the heart. When I woke up that night, I had somehow acquired electro-kinesis, as Lizzie called it, the strange ability to produce and control electricity with my mind.

                Lizzie was the first to find out about my powers, even figuring out what was going on before I did. We tried to keep it a secret from anyone else, but a few days later when I tried to propose to Lizzie, her grandfather had a sudden cardiac arrest in front of everyone. I had to expose myself to resuscitate him, and while he survived, nearly everyone from both our families had learned the truth. Her father called me a monster, attacked me, got arrested, and Mom then tried to convince me to come clean to doctors so that I get the powers removed. A fight ensued between us, I left, and I hadn’t picked up a single phone call from her since.

                The incident was all over the local news for multiple reasons, the impossibility of the strikes to my heart being the headlines. Ignoring the fact that they somehow managed to strike my heart specifically ten times in a row, the fact that they’d bypassed the cage bars alone was supposed to be physically impossible. Security video was leaked of the incident online, and despite analysis of the events, physicists weren’t able to come up with a reasonable explanation for what happened. Combined with the fact that I’d reportedly come away from the incident without any injuries, let alone my survival, resulted in a new popular theory; that the entire thing was a hoax, an elaborate prank. Frank was swiftly fired from the museum, and both he and I had been bombarded with journalists trying to get the scoop on what had happened. I’d ignored all calls from unfamiliar numbers and changed my email. Frustratingly, some journalists had uncovered my school email, and despite my many requests to change my school’s email address, I’d been ignored. The only positive was that the incident only really made headlines for about a week before everyone seemingly forgot. I was finally in the clear.

                At least, so I thought.

                I crossed my arms in frustration. “I’m not answering any more questions about that. Especially not to any journalists that snoop around and come to my address,” I said coldly.

                The girl quickly raised her hands defensively. “Oh, no, no, no! That’s not- I didn’t- I’m not here to interrogate you or anything! A-And I’m not a journalist!”

                I wanted to shut the door in her face, but something still gave me pause. Something felt off. She was far too young to be an independent journalist, especially one that’d go as far as to find my address somehow. Besides, if she were that kind of person, I’d highly suspect she’d have more confidence in herself, a perfect person-pleaser, not the shy, stuttering character in front of me. Still though, how she found my address bothered me, so I stayed on high alert. “So, then what are you here for?”

                Raising her eyebrows in realization she’d gotten somewhere she cleared her throat. She was still nervous, but she took a breath. “U-Um… well, I’ve heard that you left Boston, you know, injury-less. A-And I guess I was just wondering… A-Are you experiencing anything… um, weird about yourself now?”

                Anything weird about myself? Experiencing? The phrasing was strange, as was her tone. It felt like she was avoiding specific phrases, dancing around some topic out of… sensitivity? Either way, it bothered me how close to the truth she was getting to. Obviously, my powers fit the bill accurately as “strange” since the incident, but there was no way I’d ever admit that to anyone. There was no way she’d figured that out, right? She couldn’t possibly suspect the supernatural that quick. Perhaps she was a conspiracy theorist? Most likely she was just there to figure out if I’d had any symptoms from the incident, doubting the fact that I’d escaped without injury.

                Still, the fact that she asked the question had put me on edge. Nothing scared me more about having superpowers than the possibility of someone discovering them. Or worse, if the entire public found out. If she somehow had caught on to my abilities, I’d need to do anything I could to squash those rumors. Heart now racing, I quickly tried to assume the role of someone without powers. “I don’t understand the question,” I said as blankly as I could.

                She seemed to get more nervous. “I-I mean, l-like do you… um… can you do things that… um… don’t feel like… or I mean… like, you couldn’t do before?”

                Now I was getting paranoid. That was awfully accurate for someone who shouldn’t have any knowledge of the supernatural. I tried not to panic, tried to figure out any way of hiding my nervousness from her by any means necessary. The easiest thing was to just deny it, but would a normal person do so calmly, or would they continue to be baffled by the question?

                I decided the sooner I ended the conversation the better. It didn’t matter who she was, or how much she knew. Whether she was a conspiracy theorist or not, she still showed up to my school apartment unannounced, asking me about things I blatantly said I wasn’t answering anything further about. I shook my head with frustration. “I’m not talking about this nonsense anymore. Lose my address,” I said, turning swiftly and grabbing the doorknob behind me.

                “W-Wait!” she said, voice growing more desperate. I ignored her, pulling the door behind me. “Y-You’re not alone!” she cried.