Gifted

Chapter Three

“Your powers are what you always have with you. It’s one piece of knowledge we all share here. No matter how many dossiers the government keeps on you, no matter what data your enemies have collected, no one knows your powers the way you do. Everyone has seen them on TV. For everyone else, it’s a momentary fantasy. They don’t have to take them into the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. Or wake up in the night in flames, or sweep up shattered glass in their apartment, or show up late for work with a black eye. No one else knows where they itch or bruise you, or has tried the things you’ve tried with them when you were bored or desperate. No one else falls asleep with them and finds them still there in the morning, a dream that won’t disperse upon waking.”

― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

. . . .

Mina

Running through the forest right now. It’s nighttime, but with not a star in the sky—not that that bothers my eyes in the slightest right now. The feeling of my large, strong muscles pushing and pulling as I bound over rocks and fallen trees is a comforting, almost normal feeling.

The only ‘normal’ thing in my not-so-normal life. Running. It helps keep me sane; even if the rest of the world says it now accepts us, does that extend to how I feel for myself?

My family is made up of what are called, in these days, anyway, “enhanced humans.” In layman’s terms, my siblings and I, along with our parents, all have superpowers—Jake has the abilities of teleportation, psychokinesis, and telepathy; Liza has manifestation: she can make things just appear out of thin air by simply thinking of something she wants, and she can fly too; and I can shape-shift into any living thing that I have seen before.

Both Lauren and Diana (Jake’s, Liza’s, and my father and mother) are gifted as well. Lauren possesses the abilities of extreme speed and agility, which suits him quite well as a police officer; he hasn’t lost a suspect yet. And Diana is able to view the future to a limited degree—usually only events that personally affect her or us, although she can’t pick what she sees. She currently works as a social worker.

Oh, and all of us are gifted with advanced healing—what my dad calls the healing factor—and so it is very, very difficult to injure or, god forbid, kill one of us. I guess that really is a good thing out of all this:

I’ve regrown my right leg to the knee, a couple of fingers, and my right ear. Jake broke his leg in third grade, playing on the swing-set in our backyard, and was fine in about seven minutes. And Liza had both her legs and her pelvis broken and her spine snapped when she was ten and trying to learn how to fly—fell about eighty feet onto a concrete sidewalk—and she was fully healed about thirty minutes later (her spine took twenty-five minutes to reconnect properly, nearly gave Lauren a heart attack 'cause it was taking so long). And we’ve all dealt with the usual cuts and bruises and things, which heal in seconds, usually.

Apparently they’re now offering a class devoted to this very topic at school—about super-powered people and how these things work, I mean—but I wasn’t interested at the time it came around, this August. It’s a year-long class. Silly me. Kind of wish I’d signed up now. Maybe I’d learn something useful. Liza and Katie are both taking it, though, and for the two weeks they’ve been there, it sounds fascinating.

I stop beside a river and dip my head to take a drink. One of the benefits of being in animal form is not having to worry about the pesky little germs that so often make humans sick. A wolf, for example, has no problem tucking into a meal of raw deer or something like that. And yes, I’ve eaten my share of such things; it’s not too bad, if you don’t think about what you are eating. At least it keeps my extremely fast metabolism running smoothly.