The Girl with the Gift

Chapter 1

Macey remembers when she first fell in love with the man who never notices her. Yes, he's her best friend, yes she's done everything short of shouting her love to the heavens so that someone up there would finally do something about it, but Jake just kept obliviously smiling at her with that other-worldly set of white teeth and ask if she's been eating enough lately. "You're too skinny Mace." Why does he care? I'm not a twig and likely to snap, like his "girlfriend" Chelsea. Chelsea this, Chelsea that, of course he talks his head off about her. He had been crazy about Chelsea since high school, just like Macey had always been crazy about him. She enjoyed love triangles in movies like anyone else but for a love triangle to exist in her real life--well that just made her nauseous.

She really shouldn't be mad, though. Jake always loved fragile women, and, well, she wasn't fragile in any way. Not even close. Macey remembers overhearing him in high school years ago and the words he spoke to their mutual friend never quite left her: "Jo?! She's a weightlifter, I'd never date her. I only date women who need me to be the man." Psh, of all the close-minded... but Macey supposes he could afford to be so close-minded. He was, afterall, the hottest guy in school. She accepted this truth like a knife to her fragile young heart and sat there in the Williamsburg High auditorium for the rest of that day with her head on her knees and her hands on her wavy long dark hair, crying. 

As for Macey herself? Well, she was only average. Scratch that, she was only average-looking but with a very bizarre above-average ability. You could call it strong genes. At least that was what her Mother termed it as she tried to explain to her weeping ten-year old daughter why she managed to pry the monkey bars off the welded hinges at the Williamsburg Park playground. It was a bit of a mystery that seemed to plague—or bless depending on how she chose to feel about it on a given day—the women in her family. That's right, this super strong "gene" had been something that was passed down by generations of only women in her matriarchal past. Where the bizarre DNA originated is hardly known, but it was to be kept as a secret of course. Everyone read about what happened when her great-grandmother Edna made a public spectacle of herself breaking chains and fighting lions—she became a circus act! Macey was horrified at the thought of anyone viewing her like a clown, just like her great grandmother. No, no, no. No one, especially and specifically Jake should ever know what a freak she was.

For such a reason Macey never played sports growing up. She tried to throw a ball to her Father once and the ordeal had sent him to the ER with a broken ankle. That was the end of ball-throwing of any sort. Her only true friend in the world, Cassandra, was the sister she never had growing up. She only knew about her strength because of a game of tag they had played around the house as grade schoolers. Macey had pushed her a little too hard and sent poor Cas out the back door and into the grass bank on the other side of the driveway. Luckily there were no ER trips involved in that accident, but it made Macey fear herself and her abilities even more. It's not like she could control it, exactly. It seemed to be an emotional reaction. Whenever she felt excited or in danger, for example. The older she got, the more she hated it, and the more her emotions became harder to control. She remembered watching Frozen's Elsa with Cas when they were seniors in high school. Cas called her Elsa occasionally ever since. She didn't feel like Else though—Elsa was beautiful and her "secret power" was cool. It wasn't something that would make her un-marriageable, like being able to crush your boyfriend to a pulp.

         "Where do you think you're going?!" Cas looked up from her early soup and salad dinner.

         "I have a headache." Macey muttered.

         Cas groaned. "Are you freaking kidding me right now?" She paused "Not Jake again."

         "What? No." Macey wasn't lying this time.