Gifted

Chapter Eighteen

|Monday|

Jacob

“Jacob Katzer, pay attention, I won’t ask again,” Mr. Sonner says, sounding mad.

I look up from my times table, up at the front of the room where colorful posters cover the walls next to Mr. Sonner. MULTIPLICATION IS AWESOME! MATH ROCKS! SCHOOL IS COOL! GRAMMAR IS GREAT! they scream loudly. Ugh, Calculus...blech.

He taps the board again with his chalk. “Ok, good, now, what is the sum of this equation.” He scratches it on the blackboard, making my ears hurt and making me want to hold my hands over them. But I don’t, ‘cause that would look weird.

After puzzling the equation out in my head, I give the unlikely answer. Amazingly, he nods and responds in the affirmative.

“Correct. Now...”

When the lunch bell rings twenty minutes later, I rush outside with everybody else, eager to hit Subway or something. I’m a little too fast, though, and I trip, falling and scraping my hands on the pavement.

“Ow, shit," I say, looking at my hands. The palms are scratched and bloody. Even though I know now it won’t last too long, it still hurts every time.

The pain starts to go away. Gone in a few seconds, at most. Then the now-painless scrapes seal closed, the cut itching a little as it fills in, scabs over, and fades away. I wipe the sticky blood away on my jeans and start to walk toward my best friend, Robby Camson, who’s in his wheelchair, wheeling his way toward me. Before I can go over to meet him, Mr. Sable, the English teacher, comes up to me and motions for me to follow him.

“Come with me, Jacob,” he says.

Once he’s walked me through the door again, he steers me left and down the main hallway. There’s the big red door at the right side--the principal’s office.

“No, no, Mr. Sable,” I plead. “Whatever I did wrong, I’m sorry, I...”

He opens the door and motions for me to go inside. I shuffle in, feeling like I’m one of those criminals you see on TRU TV. The principal, Mrs. Royce, looks up from a pile of papers on her desk.

“Ah, yes, Jacob. Thanks, Tom, you can leave him here,” she says. Mr. Sable leaves the room, shutting the door behind him. Uh oh.

“Please sit down, Jacob,” Mrs. Royce says. I sit down, holding my hands in my lap. The chair creaks loudly: I'm a lot heavier than my peers, since I have more muscle mass as a condition of my ability. “First of all, you’re not in trouble.”

I breathe a sigh of relief.

“Not yet,” she clarifies, and I feel my stomach go cold like ice. I can’t breathe, almost, waiting for her to say something else. “But your behavior on Friday, where you lifted a teacher’s automobile over your head, caused us great alarm."

I frown. It was a tiny smart car, barely 800 pounds. That's at the limit of my strength right now, but it's still impressive.

"You could have been hurt, or someone else could have been hurt. Fortunately, neither of those things happened. But I must impress upon you the seriousness of your actions, Jacob.” She smiles, but it’s a strange, tight smile, like she’s trying too hard. “Have you seen the first Spiderman movie? Where Peter’s Uncle Ben is talking to him in his dream? What does he say, Jacob?”

I try to remember. That was a good movie. “I think...it was something like, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility,’ right?” Oh. My gut clenches with a bit of guilt.

Mrs. Royce nods slowly. “Yes. You have a power within you, Jacob. Because you have it, you need to be careful about what you do with it. You’re so strong that others could be hurt if you weren’t careful,” she says.