Soul Thought

Falling/Tripping

Falling/Tripping

I tripped into him.

My face was centimetres from the floor and I had to remind myself to breath.

Focus.

I demanded of myself, trying to clear my mind of any recent thoughts about him. I had to be sure I wasn’t just doing my thing and imagining he had appeared out of the blue to save me from face planting into the hard gravel of the school hallway.

The apparition beside me shimmered for a few moments and then disappeared, dropping me rather unceremoniously onto the pavement – causing the skin on the palm of my hand to scrape. I huffed through my nose and rocked back to my feet, grabbing my books and laptop from the ground and swept my weirdly coloured blonde-brunette hair behind my back.

My hair was a weird colour because of all the times my older sister had died it bleach blonde – like seriously ‘why-are-you-so-blonde’ type of bleach blonde. And after finally having enough and forcing her to die it brown, my hair had reached a permanent state of indecision. It didn’t know what colour it wanted to be.

I really must be the most inconspicuous superhero ever. I came from a strictly middle-class family (had been that way for generations). Most superheros had wealth (or brains to get them wealth) and I was just Ella – the girl who could make her thoughts come true.

Sighing deeply I bristled off to class, hoping no one had seen me fall into his arms, only to have him drop me and disappear.  Like it’s not bad enough that they already suspect I’m different, my powers have to continually flaunt themselves in-front of my very normal classmates.

The first time they had happened this year, one of the girls – her name was Haley - had whined about not knowing the answers to the math test – which obviously got me thinking about having some paper with all the answers on it. Bingo presto – during the maths test I found an inconspicuous piece of paper in the back of my notebook with the answers listed.

The teacher saw it; confiscated it and paraded it around the whole class – now most of them thought I was a cheat, or I was holding out on them.

After that, no-one was really interested in befriending me – and I wasn’t sure I blamed them for that.

We live in a world were soul-mates were matched via their DNA right after school finished in their last year. It was instantaneous, but sometimes it was terribly heartbreaking. The DNA test also tested for other things (not that many people knew that) like disease and people who carried certain types of metagenes – like the one were the parents give their children superpowers.

My mother refused to go into how they missed her (or my father, but we don’t talk about him. Ever) all I was ever told is that they got lucky, somehow the scans missed them both, but still paired them together, and even found out that her father was going to die. I didn’t know of what – yet another piece of information someone refused to give to me. All I knew is that my other talent was passed down to me by my father – who died of some practically ancient disease.

But all that didn’t really matter. I was still at least a year from finding out my soul-mate (a question I knew the answer to) and being found out as one of those kids. The ones that were found out – every year at least a dozen kids exited the scanning room with gaunt, faraway looks in their eyes, herding into a black van and taken away.

The school said they were being taken to a school for ‘special’ kids – really, could they not think of a better excuse – but most of us knew better. They were carted off to juvenile prison or something to never been seen again.