I arrived home in half the time it usually took me. Parking the bike in the public garage, I raked my fingers through my hair after I had removed my helmet. Couldn't go into the apartment looking like death warmed over. My glasses clicked shut as I shoved them in my coat pocket, and I opened the door. I tiptoed up through the hallway in case any neighbors would had heard me squealing the tires on the bike were ready to bash me over the head with a frying pan or something.
I opened the door to the apartment ever so carefully. There was barely a sound. But, of course, I wasn't careful enough. "Where were you?" my mom asked, coming out of her bedroom. She was dressed in an old flannel robe. Her straight, short hair wasn't messed up, showing that she really hadn't been asleep.
"I…was…out," I mumbled. I didn't like not talking to her. I mean, we usually had a really great relationship…well the best that could be hoped for between a mom and her teenage daughter. But, right then, it just wasn't the time.
"Don't lie to me."
"I wasn't doing anything."
"Uh-huh," she muttered with an eye roll. "Whatever, just get to bed, we gotta leave early tomorrow…today."
"Where are we going?" I asked her, laying my keys and cash on the counter as I emptied my pockets so they could go into the wash.
"Look, I'll tell you later," she said, turning away from me.
"Are we going someplace bad?" I yelped. "Why won't you tell me?" I think she started to ignore me at that point. Didn't matter much anyhow.
I walked into my own room and flopped down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Plastered with cheap posters and lined with moss colored carpeting, my room was normal enough. I had friends, whose pictures also were smeared upon my walls. They were certainly normal. School was normal. The apartment was normal. Hell, nearly everything in my life was normal, with the exception of one major factor.
Me.
The story of my life could go onto Oprah. Okay, maybe not Oprah, she's a little bit too calm for me. Jerry Springer, perhaps. I hadn't ever seen a new show, all the old reruns, but the show was amusing nonetheless.
How should I describe a life, my life to be exact, that really never should've come into existence? I could easily make a long story short by saying one simple word about my life: mistake.
In truth, I wasn't exactly a wanted child. My mom and dad were both in this weird experiment with this guy named Lydecker. His first name may have been Donald, but everybody just called him by his last name-Lydecker. My mom still does.
Anyhow, he did some mumbo jumbo to my parents, combined their reproductive cells and guess who was formed? You'd think that would be the end. Whoopee, happy little family of freaks. Not quite.
My mom and dad eventually escaped, but that's a story in itself. I was born sometime later. They left the city they were living in and moved here-California. Nice place, if you ask me.
Anyhow, my parents were both "freaks" to begin with, (and I mean that in a tactfully nice way). So, what happens when you cross two freaks? Their kid is a gigantic freak.
This is where I come into the picture.
I'm not normal in any way, shape or form. My parents have their own abilities, like seeing things at a far distance, levitating themselves for some distance, being really good at fighting…stuff like that. And then there's me.
Sure, I can do all the things they do. It's a simple shrug for me. If the normal human population were Barbie dolls, then my parents were G.I. Joe in that world. And I was G.I. Joe with his super deluxe action packed features.
My abilities? Let's just say they even happen to scare me sometimes. I'm not especially proud of the things I can do. For starters, I can fly. Not exceedingly great distances, perhaps at the very most, a mile. And even then, that's really pushing it, because it leaves me tired and dragged down.
The first time I flew, my dad was standing right there and he turned his back for a second…and whoosh! I was history. He and Mom had to grab her bike and hurry down the street after me. At that time I didn't know how to stop. Still, when I finally fell, yes fell, down on the ground, my mom was close to tears and my dad looked…well…scared. For who? I still don't know.
Yet, the flying is just the tip of 'berg, so to say. I can weakly read people's minds. I learned that when people think, they send out little heat pulses. After much practice with my mom, I soon learned what each heat pulse stood for. Personally, it's not the most efficient way to figure out what someone is thinking, but it does the job of getting the basic summary.
My mom has figured out how to block her thoughts from me. My dad, on the other hand, hasn't. It's amazing what a girl can learn.
Personally, though, trying to read those heat pulses, is just plain boring and way too time-consuming. I only do it when I'm either really bored or have a good excuse, (mostly to see what a person thinks about me-naughty, naughty, I know).
I can run super-fast. It's basically like-you see me, you don't see me. That also comes from having very quick reflexes. Some people could call it telekinetic because I can move so fast that it appears that I haven't moved at all. Truthfully, I've scared this old lady once so bad she had to go the hospital. Seriously.
But with the good genes, came the majorly screwed up ones. My parents, both having feline DNA, also passed some of that onto me. Not to mention the fact that this Lydecker guy added more when I was only a blob of cells. Unfortunately, instead of reacting in a good way like it had with my parents, I got way too much of that DNA. Every morning, I have to shave off my entire body or else by noon, I'll start growing fuzz. In about a week, without any shaving, I have a full-blown cat coat. Not attractive-especially on a human. It's a pain in the rear, really, it is. Yet, there's nothing I can do.
I have seizures too. Although they're not as common as my parents', they're just a lot worse. If I'm lucky, I'll only have about two or three a year. But, when I get them…ouch. I'll sit there and convulse for hours at a time. Nothing can help me. And when the seizures finally do end, all I want to do is sleep from pure exhaustion.
So eighteen years later, here I am. All in all, though, I was probably as happy as a genetically engineered human with two genetically engineered parents could be.
