AN: I originally wrote a story called Xs and Os with similar themes to this story a few years ago. I wasn't real pleased with the quality of that story, so I'm starting over at a different point in the main character's life and ultimately taking the story in a different direction, focusing more on the themes of an outsider in a school full of mutants and discovering power through unconventional methods. I hope you find the story enjoyable :)
I sat outside Professor Xavier's office. I knew his name and title because there was a large gold plate attached right in the center of the glossy cherry-finished wooden door and it read, 'Professor Xavier, Headmaster.'
Seated on a similarly glossy wooden bench directly across the hallway from the door, I studied the intricate patterns of the solid granite floor, my eyes following the gentle dark swirls as they spun in on themselves tighter and tighter. I didn't know much about flooring, but I knew a floor like that must've cost a fortune. It was heavy-duty and elegant at the same time. If the building still stood, students would walk on this same floor for decades without it showing any wear.
My forearm itched under the cast I wore, and occasionally I tried to scratch at it.
There was a man seated beside me on the bench. He was waiting too, and the way he slouched down with both arms crossed over his chest, cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes, I surmised he'd waited here before and would probably wait here again.
I'd just started to imagine what the granite tiles might feel like under my bare feet. Would they be slightly rough, or perfectly smooth? During the summer maybe I'd find out. As it was, I felt unnaturally cold. I'd grown up in a warm climate, and this was the first time I'd ever been completely surrounded by cold and snow. Even inside the heated school, I burrowed deep into the warm red and white ski coat Ms. Munro had bought for me before we left Louisiana.
She said the school sometimes took day trips to a local ski resort. She said I'd look good skiing down the side of a slope in a nice flashy ski coat once my arm healed. I think she'd been trying to convince me of the up side of moving to New York. It didn't really work. I still felt cold, and lonely.
"You really the Cajun's kid?" the man next to me asked when he finally got bored enough.
"Who told you that?" I answered automatically. During the journey from Louisiana, Ms. Munro had told me gossip traveled fast in the school, but this seemed unbelievably fast. I'd only been sitting there for maybe twenty or thirty minutes.
The scruffy man pushed his hat up on his head with one finger, and then nodded toward the solid wood door. "They're talking about you in there," he said.
I didn't respond. He could actually hear them? There were four people in there: Ms. Munro, Professor Xavier, a woman with red hair and a man with strange ruby-colored glasses. I knew they were talking about me inside that office, but I couldn't hear any voices at all, nevertheless pick up on the gist of the conversation. Were they trying to decide what to do with me? Ms. Munro said they'd keep me until my dad finished with treatment, but what if they changed their minds? We were a long way from the courtroom in Louisiana where I was placed in their custody and I felt so far out of my depth in this mansion I could barely breathe.
"I don't think I belong here," I said suddenly, and the wave of fear and sadness that washed over me made my eyes prick with tears.
The man deftly shifted away from me, like he was afraid someone might come along and blame him for making me cry.
"You got anywhere else to go?" he asked. I hadn't completely melted down, just sat very still and cried silently. There hadn't been any room for tantrums in my life for a long time.
I shook my head. "My dad's sick," I choked, fat tears rolling down my cheeks. "They said they can make him better at that place, but I think they're lying. He doesn't want to get better." When it came to my dad's 'issues' I tended toward bitterness, and petulance. He was all I had and I loved him so much, but he'd let me down over and over again.
For the past two years I'd slept on a mat in a broken down, single bedroom apartment in one of the worst neighborhoods in New Orleans. I'd heard things in neighboring apartments that still showed up in my nightmares. When social services took me away from my father, they'd made me talk to a counselor. She said I showed signs of stress. She also asked me a lot of questions about my dad, and if he'd done things to me. I couldn't make her understand why I was angry with my dad. Not because of anything he'd done to me, but because he was never around. I always got left with his fling of the week, or on my own.
The counselor didn't seem to understand. She thought I was hiding things from her.
"You know what your Pop is, right?" the man asked, one dark eyebrow arched quizzically.
I nodded morosely. My father didn't try very hard to hide his mutation. Sometimes he wore sunglasses to hide his red-on-black eyes, but he always seemed to have a deck of cards or a toothpick at hand. Even a cigarette was a deadly weapon in his fingers.
"Seems to me, if he didn't want to be in rehab, he wouldn't be."
He was absolutely right, but the reassurance didn't make me feel any better about coming to this school. I was tired of being a burden, shuffled around until I didn't have any sense of safety, of home. Ever since my father was arrested and child protective services took me away from him a week ago, I'd been despondent. In a way I was relieved the previous few years were over, likely for good. I wouldn't miss that chapter of my life. On the other hand, what exactly did I have to look forward to? Would my dad get cleaned up and fight to regain custody of me? Or would he quit rehab and leave me with these 'friends' of his? If he didn't prove fit to rejoin the X-Men, would I get sent back into the foster care queue in Louisiana, waiting to be assigned to some random family I didn't know?
My case worker had been skeptical about contacting Xavier's school at my father's request, but the more she'd talked to the woman on the other end of the phone, someone named 'Jean,' the happier she'd seemed, especially when the school extended me a full scholarship and took full costodianship of me, even offering to pay for my father to go to rehab and provide him with a job after he finished.
It was so neat and tidy. The judge my case had gone before jumped all over it, putting me in the custody of Charles Xavier until such time as my father could regain his parental rights. Everyone seemed so hopeful about my case. Everyone but me.
"Why do I feel like this?" I asked, barely whispering to myself. I'd been trying to diagnose the terrible ache in my chest for six days and seven nights. Ms. Munro had bought me ice cream every day of our journey together, and even my favorite flavor was like ash in my mouth.
The gruff man gave me a pat on the back, perhaps a little harder than necessary but I sensed he meant well with the gesture. "It's called heartbreak, kid," he said, rising just as the wooden door swung open. "Don't worry. It's survivable."
He said this like he was an expert on survival, or preventing it.
"This shall be your room," Ms. Munro said softly, placing a comforting hand on my back between my shoulder blades and guiding me forward into the small dorm room in the girls' wing of the mansion. Inside the dorm room there were two bunk beds pushed up against either wall with a circular table in the middle of the room surrounded by bean bag chairs - a place for the girls to sit around together and watch a movie or do their homework.
My two new roommates were the youngest girls at the school, and yet they were at least two years older than me, ten or eleven years old. Most children didn't come to Xavier's school until they developed a mutation, and most didn't develop a mutation until puberty. I was just on the cusp of those years. I'd stretched up several inches in the past year.
"Girls, this is Sadi Lebeau," Ms. Munro introduced me. "Sadi, this is Anette Kombel and Gina Kim. I expect they will make you feel welcome."
One of the girls was blond with blue eyes and freckles, the other was a beautiful Asian girl. They'd stood up to meet me at the door of their room. We all shook hands, although the girls were hesitant. I sensed they weren't sure what to make of my intrusion into their living space. Their room was decorated and comfortable, their things spread on both sides, even on the bunks meant to house two additional roommates. They'd lived together for some time.
After getting me settled, Ms. Munro gave me an encouraging smile and left me with the girls. Before she could gracefully sweep out the door, I thanked her. I'd been quiet through most of her attempts to draw me out over the past few days, but I wanted her to know I'd appreciated her efforts. I'd appreciated everything she'd done for me. I loved my father, but he hadn't brought many kind people into my life recently. Past experience had made me shifty around strangers, almost reclusive. In spite of getting blocked out at every turn, Ms. Munro had been very good to me.
By the way her eyes softened when I thanked her and the solumn nod she gave me, I think Ms. Munro understood what I couldn't put into words. Though I couldn't pin down why, I felt she understood more about what I'd been through the past several years than I did. Perhaps her childhood hadn't been all honey and roses either.
After Ms. Munro left, I sat down on my new bunk, scratching at the edge of my cast. The other two girls sat down in their beanbag chairs, both on their side of the table, on their side of the room. They studied me, looked at each other, whispered with their heads together, and then addressed me.
"What's your mutation?" Anette asked, placing both hands on the table. So haughty and prim, and quick to get down to business.
"I don't have one," I admitted. My eyes were drooping. I was tired and a tickle at the back of my throat let me know I had an oncoming cold to look forward to. I got sick a lot, even though my dad seemed to always be healthy.
The two looked at each other again, all but wrinkling their noses. "So, what're you doing here?" Gina asked, as if my lack of mutation meant I didn't qualify to attend the same school she did.
"My dad's a mutant," I explained, but it was probably too late. I had a feeling my dad could be Brad Pitt, and I'd still never make it into their little circle. Both of these girls, even at such a young age, wore maketup, had neatly styled hair and carefully painted finger nails. They wore designer clothes even though they'd probably grow out of them in six months. They valued appearance, and in my torn jeans and oversized green t-shirt with the logo of a popular New Orleans bar across the chest, I didn't fit in.
"So why'd he send you here if you don't have a mutation?" Anette asked.
Opening my mouth to tell the story, I paused and then closed it again. Did I really want to give these girls something more to sink their teeth into?
"He thought I might develop a mutation soon," I hedged after a moment of thought.
"That doesn't make any sense," Gina informed me severely. "My dad's a geneticist at Yale. He says just because your parent has a mutation doesn't mean you will."
I was beginning to understand why these girls liked each other so much. They were both perpetual know-it-alls. Even worse, they were Ivy League know-it-alls. Which meant they were infallible, like, duh!
"I don't care if I have a mutation or not," I snapped, my temper flaring. "I'd rather be at my old school, but I have to go here for a while. Is that okay with you?" I ladelled on the sarcasm, making a mockery of asking her permission.
It was a lie. I really didn't like my old school much and had no desire to return. It'd been a rough place, even for third graders.
Anette made that hissing cat noise some girls like to use to belittle another girl's anger. I'd noticed that most girls in my age range who used such a tactic typically had older sisters they'd learned it from. "Someone's pissy," she said.
Over the past week I'd broken my arm, gone to the hospital, and spent a night sitting in a police station. I'd been questioned by the police, by a case worker, by a therapist and then traveled from balmy Louisiana to snowy New York with a complete stranger. On top of all that, my dad had spent the past week in a rehabilitation center in Louisiana and even though my case worker had said he'd be able to call me in the evenings once he got settled in, he hadn't. All of that led me to Xavier's school, where clearly I was not wanted. So yes, I was a little pissy.
I wanted very much to fly across the circular table seperating me from Gina and Anette and beat their pretty faces in with my cast-encased fist, but as my grandfather always said: 'Such uncouth behavior is beneath an intelligent and beautiful southern bell such as yourself, Cherie.' Then again, my grandfather was a thief by trade and always struck me as a bit slimy. Perhaps taking his advice was not the wisest course of action. For one thing, he was a liar. He always told me how beautiful I looked, which struck me as just a bald face lie. I was a tom boy, and built like one with broad shoulders for a girl and a plain face. On the few occasions in my life I had worn a dress, I'd felt like a cream puff.
Rising from my seat on my bunk, I pulled my backpack over one shoulder. "I need to use the bathroom," I said. I'd decided I was too tired to do battle with a pair of stupid girls tonight.
They didn't say anything, just watched me walk out of the room and then put their heads together to whisper and giggle once I'd gone. I could hear them, even out in the hallway. They sounded like they were having a great time at my expense, but I didn't care. At the moment, I didn't care about anything.
Down the hall, I found the restroom. It was immaculate, so the mansion must've had a highly paid cleaning staff. The sinks were spotless, the floor tiles showed no sign of wear or mildew, and even the toilets gleamed white. There were six stalls, a row of sinks, lockers and individual shower stalls with curtains. It was completely empty, and quiet.
I cried silently in the shower that night. I had a plastic bag over my cast and I could barely wash my chin-length strawberry blond hair with one hand.
By the time I returned to my dorm room the lights were off. The other two girls were asleep in their bunks. Without making a sound, I stowed my backpack under my bed and slid between the clean flannel sheets.
There was an extra blanket on my bed, and I wondered if Ms. Munro had something to do with it. She'd noticed how much I disliked the cold. In spite of the extra blanket, it took a while for my bed to warm up enough for sleep to find me. I shivered with the comforter pulled up beneath my chin for a long time.
I wondered what school would be like the following day, and if I'd be able to keep up with my classmates. Of course, I wasted a few more tears thinking about how my dad hadn't called. Did he even miss me? I missed him so bad it hurt, a throbbing ache deep in my chest. If he didn't complete rehab, he'd probably never regain custody, and he might have to serve some time in jail.
I might never see him again. A small part of me wanted to not believe it, but when I thought really hard, really asked myself, 'Does he love me enough to keep me?' I had no firm answer. My dad loved me, but I was afraid he only loved me enough to let me go, and not enough to turn himself around. His demons held very real power over him and he might not be strong enough to break free of them. They'd worn him down until he couldn't balance the darker part of his life anymore. It had swallowed him whole, taking him away from me bit by bit over the past few years.
When I finally drifted off, I had nightmares. The same nightmares I'd had all my life, and a few new ones.
AN: Please let me know what you think. I enjoy writing, but it's the discussion with readers that really keeps me motivated. If I can get one thing you liked, or one critique or one question, that's fantastic :) I also enjoy discussing canon and other subjects related to or beyond the story I'm writing.