Laser [Wattys 2016]

Chapter 3

The sky is cerulean, and the pizza is scrumptious. I suddenly feel a burning sensation in the skin, as if someone has poured acid all over my body. Agape, I find my skin turning into hard crusts, blood oozing out and drying up at once. My eyes feel itchy and then I realize, I am turning into a monster.

The ear-piercing roar of the alarm clock awoke me with a start, jolting me out of my dreamy sleep. I heaved my hand down on the snooze button as hard as I could and groaned an incoherent lingo which simply meant pissed off in sleep language, as my Mom came to call me.

"Your friends are here, wake up! You slept so early last night that you didn't even take dinner."

Wait, what? Last night...I tried to remember what happened last night but my brain cells weren't out of their trance state yet.

"C'mon honey, your friends are waiting!"

What friends?

It took me a moment to recall that Candace and Tyler were supposed to arrive that day for help in their Physics assignment. I stretched half-heartedly in my bed, already assuming it was a bad idea to have agreed to them coming over. The sun had risen in a pool of crimson and gold, spilling light all over the land and the white clouds. I replaced my crop top with a loose charcoal cardigan, briefly looking out of the window and enjoying the fresh breeze that greeted my nostrils with a scent of lilacs.

I dawdled down the staircase, my stomach croaking like a frog from hunger. Tyler sat on the couch with his head engrossed in my new video game of Street Fighter V, and glanced up at me as I walked in, yawning with my mouth wide open. What a cordial way to greet your new friends.

And as if to mock the irony of my fate, Mom started playing Wide Open Spaces by Dixie Chicks from the kitchen.

She needs wide open spaces

Room to make her big mistakes

She needs new faces

She knows the high stakes

"Good morning sleepyhead," Tyler beamed at me, flashing the gap between his two front teeth. He was wearing a black bomber jacket and trainers, his hair swept over his forehead.

"Had good sleep?" Candace asked me with a formal gesture, to which I replied by smiling slightly and nodding. And as I had promised, the next one hour, we toured Mom's small laboratory at the end of the house, enlightening them about every instrument and asking Mom when necessary. Tyler was genuinely more interested than Candace was, there a slight tilt to her shoulders which only indicated polite absorbance. After everything was over, Mom offered to drop us at Starbucks for brunch on the way to her office.

Starbucks was almost full. I looked around the busy tables. A couple of pre teen girls noisily laughed over some funny joke, a businessman in grey suit eating side by side to a scrawny, young woman. As I looked around, I noticed Veronica and her minions, and my first instance was to run the fuck out of the place.

An eccentric sentiment of vigor and fortitude held me back in my place.

I tagged along with Tyler and Candace and we took the farthest seat in a corner. The aroma was delicious, mostly of coffee and delicious juices, but I could feel a pair of 20 ferocious eyeballs penetrating my back like scorching heat. Candace was jibber-jabbering with Tyler something about Frapuccino when I involuntarily flounced backward and knocked my fist hard into Veronica's stomach, who was actually going to knock me over by kicking my chair.

I heard her body hit the floor with dull thump and she swallowed a sob as the motion sent daggers of pain down her spine.

I don't know why I ever did that.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry!" I blurted out.

Veronica's boyfriend Emmett gazed at me with revulsion in his eyes and came charging towards me. His reach was longer than mine and he knocked me to the ground, pinning me down with his testosterone arms. I howled and smacked his throat forcibly with my forearm, sending him gagging away sideways before gaining my stance and striking Bianca with a backward flip kick as she rushed at me like a cheetah.

To make situations worse, Brandon attacked me by knocking me down with a blow to my waist, but I recovered quickly, and out of sudden rage, I snarled at him to back off, and abruptly, he fell to the floor unable to move. Veronica lifted a chair to thrash against me and it happened in such a spur of the moment, I could not poise myself properly to shield my body, but when it thumped me, it smashed into gazillions of pieces. I looked at myself in utter appall, I didn't feel anything. Not even a single prick.

I heard Candace gasp, it was Brandon she was looking at, and I realized he was burned on left side of the face. 

Author's Rant: Starts the action! I'll sum up what happened when she got exposed to the radiation and how she finds out the mystery about her superpowers in the next two chapters x Hope you liked it and maybe vote and share? And yeah, there's a huge surprise in the upcoming chapters which will get this more interesting. And a male superhero is waiting, but wait, that's not the surprise :)

LOVE LOVE LOVE.