Fiction Friday!!!! Sorry for missing last week see Busy Busy Busy for reasons why.
Chapter 2
Kent stood in a shadowed doorway and watched four more people enter the room. He worried that the others would have abilities that were useful, that they would see his as truly worthless. He was afraid that he wouldn’t fit in with the last group of people that he could possibly even stand a chance of fitting in with.
He took a breath, raised his chin, and did what he had done every day of his high school experience. He walked into a room and pretended like he wouldn’t care what anyone said or did to him. He opened the door and the seven people seated in chairs all turned to him.
DJ smiled. “Would you like to join us?”
The others in the room looked perfectly normal, a little timid maybe. A person with exciting enhanced abilities always walked with a confidant glint in their eye and a spring in their step. People like Kent tended to look at the ground more and try to blend in with the background. There were three women and four men besides Kent. They were average, the poster person for every man and every woman. Some looked young, barely twenty, and others like DJ looked closer to forty.
Kent took a seat between DJ and another man.
DJ looked at the group and took a drink of his coffee. “As you can see, we have a new member. I know it’s hard to come here, so I hope you can all feel a sense of home here. Let’s go around the circle and introduce ourselves.” He paused. “I’ll start. My name is DJ, it doesn’t really stand for anything, my parents just named me two letters. I have to line my hat with tinfoil otherwise I’ll pick up every radio station on this planet.” He closed his eyes and removed his hat for a moment to show the tinfoil inside. His face registered intense concentration until he put the hat back on.
The woman to the other side of DJ, was one of the younger ones, small in stature and light hair and eyes. “I’m Claire. I can turn invisible, but only about ten percent of me at one time. Like one hand, or my nose and an ear, or one shin.” She sighed. “Completely obnoxious when I was a kid and couldn’t control it.” She shrugged with a half smile.
“I’m Elmer.” He was somewhere in his forties and a little on the heavier side, there was a sock stuck to the leg of his pants. “I experience constant static cling.” His hair was a little wild, like he had an encounter with balloons wild.
Claire leaned over and pulled off the sock with a sympathetic smile. She handed it to him.
“Thanks.” He tried to shove it into his pocket, but only succeeded in getting it halfway in without it sticking to his hands.
The woman directly across from Kent looked to be about his age. She had a pair of headphones hanging around her neck, the cord disappeared to an ipod in her pocket. Her hair was dark and her eyes vibrant green. “I’m Violet. I can communicate with plants. All plants. They kind of never shut up.” She met Kent’s gaze. “Trees tend to think they’re the best, a lot of flowers are egocentric, house plants gossip, and grass screams when you cut it...” She sort of trailed off, like she hadn’t quite meant to say that last part.
Kent felt immensely guilty for working in a greenhouse now, though he did wonder what was being said around him.
The woman next to Violet was a little older and had black hair. “I’m Eve. I can tell you the exact time, down to the second, without looking at a clock or the position of the sun or anything. I could be in a completely silent, pitch black room and tell you the exact time, in any time zone.”
The next man stared into his coffee cup before he looked up. He had a faint Scottish accent. “I’m Glen.” He let out a slow breath. “You know how some people can like, blend in with their background? Like a chameleon? Or they can turn other colors? I can turn any color of plaid you could think of, which is only helpful if like, I find myself in a fabric store or the Scots invade.” He took a drink of coffee and looked to the man next to him.
“I’m Seamus.” He had intense eyes, like a police detective, and a presence to match. “Anything sticky; tape, glue, band-aids, gum…it won’t stick to me.” He shrugged.
Kent realized everyone was now looking at him, waiting to know. His palms were sweating and his mouth was dry. He glanced over at DJ.
Violet smiled at him. “It’s all right. We’re all here for the same reason.”
He nodded and took a slow breath. “I’m Kent.” He focused on the floor as he spoke. “I can, well it’s a little hard to explain. You know how fireflies sort of glow at one end?” He never had to explain this before, usually people didn’t know or they found out by accident. “I can do that, but only at one end.”
Seamus chewed his coffee straw. “So, your butt glows.”
“Yeah.” Kent could feel himself blush.
“I knew a guy whose nose glowed like Rudolph. At least you can wear pants to cover it up.” Seamus shrugged and took a drink of coffee.
Kent sighed, the relief of actually telling someone rather than them finding out was sort of nice.
The rest of the meeting was mostly just hanging out and talking about jobs and bad dates they went on and ways they have found to either blend in or find some sort of use for their ability. There was also a bit of conversation about being envious of those with enhanced abilities that were more “useful”.
“How’d you hear about this group, Kent?” Glen asked towards the end of the meeting.
He smiled a little. “A friend told me about it. She’s dating a guy who knows a lot of things, and he knew about this.”
DJ turned to Kent. “The Encyclopedia?”
“You’re friends with him?” Claire watched him carefully.
Kent hated attention focused on him. “Well, no. His girlfriend, Imogene, we’re friends. She told me about the meeting.”
“Did she make you go?” Elmer asked in the tone of voice usually reserved for conversations that involved the phrase “tell me where the man touched you”.
“No. We’ve been friends since we were kids. She doesn’t make me do things.” He felt like he had done something wrong. “She never has.”
The thing was, people like Imogene and Dex were sort of held in different social circles because they could actually do things that people needed. They were asked to help by people like the police and the mayor and on rare cases, the president. So there was a bit of a social caste system among the enhanced ability population. Most people had heard of Imogene and Dex through the news headlines and interviews on morning talk shows. Imogene could influence people’s decisions and put thoughts or images into their heads and Dex literally knew everything. It wasn’t that people like Kent couldn’t be friends with people like Imogene, it was just that it didn’t happen very often and it didn’t work out very well in the long run.
“I think it’s great, that you’re friends first and everything else after that.” Violet said. She smiled at Kent. “I think that’s how it should be.”
For the first time in Kent’s entire life, he finally felt like he had a place, like he was understood, like he was a person and not just something he could do. Unfortunately that feeling mostly only existed on Tuesday nights in the room after the women finished talking about their weight watching.
To be continued.
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