January. The life-saving trick of opening up about your weird traumas p.3

Lightning walked down the hallway whistling, and was nearly at the other end before he noticed anything was wrong. "Why's…? Where's the TNT?"

Dick, Raven and Vic were crouched around the hallway.

"You sure you can take the big guy?" Dick asked Victor.

"I told you, yes, now let me go let Kori and Gar out," answered Vic.

"And you're sure you know the garden shed has a hose?" Dick asked Raven.

"Positive," answered Raven.

Dick nodded. "Okay, wait till I have him."

He stood in the hallway where the boy could see him. "Hey. Sparky. Someone told me you wanted to start the school term with a bang."

"Ooh, he went with a whole one-liner," commented Raven from around the corner.

"Gar would've loved to be here," Vic whispered back.

Lightning's eyes bulged. "More of you? Who are you people?"

Dick debated it for a moment, then said it. "We're the Project Club. And you are going down."

Lightninglunged at him. Dick waited until the last moment to duck out of the boy's reach, then kicked his legs from under him and quickly held him to the ground. Vic and Raven kind of wished they could stick around to watch.

But Dick looked back and told Victor and Raven, "Now. Run."

They came out of hiding and ran—Vic into the school towards the pool, Raven outside to the yard. Lightning saw them run past and briefly stopped struggling. "How many of you are there?"

"Ready?" Gar asked Kori.

Kori nodded.

They approached the door and Gar tapped on the window. "Hey."

"Nothing you say will make me free you," Thunder warned them, with his back turned to them.

"We only wish to know why you are doing this," said Kori. "What are you hoping to achieve by this destroying of the school?"

Gar replaced Kori in the window. "Yeah, I mean, I hate Mondays too, but not this much."

"We don't care about your school," Thunder snapped, glowering at them. "It's just a means to an end. We just want to go back home. This will make father listen."

"Where is home?" Kori asked him.

"Oklahoma," he replied, very fondly.

Gar had really expected something way further off, with the way these brothers spoke. "Okay, but you'll destroy an entire school just to stick it to your dad?" Gar surmised.

Thunder seemed to hesitate. "Tavis—my brother, says it will not be so bad. Buildings can be rebuilt."

"Look, I'm sure you guys really wanna go home," Gar told him. "But do you really want it this much? Enough to leave a lot of kids without school for years, probably? To leave teachers out of their jobs? When you could just stay here and do your thing in our school! We're pretty cool once you get to know us. You like destroying things, right? Take up wood work!"

Thunder said, "I like the sounds things make when they explode. My brother likes to watch fire."

"Okay," Gar started, wondering if he should be more concerned about that.

"There is a pyrotechnics club," offered Kori.

"Really?" Thunder smiled. Then doubt replaced the smile. "But, Tavis says we'll never fit in here."

"That is a lie," said Kori. "I myself am from the country of Tamaran. And I have found myself very welcome here." She smiled at Gar as she said this, found his hand and squeezed it.

"He would never agree to this," said Thunder.

"What do you want?" answered Gar.

They saw Thunder's hesitant face a moment longer; then it disappeared. Then they heard the bar being pulled from the door handles.

Kori and Gar followed Thunder –whose real name was Gan- through the school. He opened the door to a storage closet, and there was the big bomb. To Gar it looked like an elaborate watch, but big. It even had a counter.

"This was to detonate the TNT," Gan explained. "We need to hurry and get to my brother."

"Why?" asked Gar.

"Because he has the…" as Gan spoke, the artifact came to life, and the timer started counting down. "…Oh no."

Dick stared stunned at the other boy. "What did you just do?"

"Ha! Fuck you! I did what I wanted anyway!" he mocked, and Dick realized for the first time the two brothers' formal inflection was entirely affected. "If I were you, I'd get my friends and get out of your beloved school, for it's about to…" he trailed off as he focused behind him. "…Brother?"

Dick looked behind them too. He blanched. He didn't have time to wonder why the fat brother was next to Kori and Gar, or where Victor was, because Kori was holding the bomb. He let go of his adversary and ran to her.

"This thing is on?" he demanded as he took it from her hands, because he thought panic allowed him one stupid question.

"Yes!" Kori dutifully replied. Then she waited—Dick had taken the bomb from her so quickly she'd thought he had a plan, but once he had it he just stood there, hesitant. "Dick?"

Dick bolted down the hallway like he'd been electrocuted. After their surprise subdued, Kori and Gar ran after him.

Outside the school, they didn't see Dick.

Soon Vic ran up to them instead. "The pool was empty!" he demanded at them.

"Gan let us out," said Gar.

"Who's Gan!?"

Being reminded of them, Gar looked for the two inside the school, to see them fighting it out in the hallways. "Oh no. Kori, we turned two brothers against each other."

Vic said, "Good, let them kill each other! We have other problems!"

Dick ran back to them. "I threw it on the football field," he panted. "I threw the bomb on the football field," he clarified for Victor's sake.

"You're gonna let it explode?" Vic demanded.

"What else you want me to do?" Dick returned.

"Where's Raven?" asked Gar.

"She's coming with the-"

The bomb exploded with the loudest sound any of them had ever heard.

The four checked themselves over reflexively, to find themselves alright but for came out from the side of the school with a hose already turned on. She stopped, counted all four of her friends, and went on to water the burning grass.

When the ringing in their ears subsided, they heard the sirens.

"Firemen?" asked Gar.

"We called them," said Dick. Then he called out, "Raven, leave the hose on the ground, we have to leave."

With smoky clothes and covered in soot, with the sirens booming so loud they thought the firemen should have been stepping on their heels by now, the five ran out of the school parking lot, out the school grounds, along the street, and climbed on Vic's car. Right as they closed the doors, the fire truck rolled by past them in the direction they had come from.

Victor let out a big breath. "Okay. Whose house doesn't currently have any parents in it?"

Gar looked out the massive tenth-story window, city lights twinkling in the distance.

He turned to Kori, who was gently squeezing her hair towel to dry her hair.

"So this whole apartment is all yours?" he asked.

"It is for my use until I graduate," Kori explained.

"That's so cool. You live like a college student."

"Very soon my little brother will start… his school." Kori hesitated. "It… it is a school where he sleeps there?"

"Boarding school," said Dick. Like Gar, he was sitting on the floor, still covered in soot and waiting his turn in the shower. Raven was in Kori's room after her turn. Vic was taking a long time in the shower. Then again, Gar wasn't sure how he showered, and surely it was an arduous process.

"Boarding school," agreed Kori. "And then my k'norfka will come stay with me."

"Your what?" asked Gar.

"It is like… a nanny, I think?"

"You have a nanny?"

"He raised my brother and sister and I. He also took care of my parents' house and ground."

"Oh, so like a nanny-slash-housekeeper," said Gar.

Kori seemed to accept this.

Raven emerged from Kori's room a while later, wearing what was probably Kori's most monochrome clothing: blue leggings and a grey t-shirt with the NASA logo. Kori's apartment was warm; she had cranked the heat way up for them to shower, and Gar thought he'd never seen Raven's bare arms before.

That was the night Gar found out his female friends wore makeup. He'd thought Kori looked off when she'd come out of the shower. When Raven came out, he'd figured it out. In her, the lack of heavy eye makeup was really noticeable. That and the fact that Kori's clothes were a little baggy on her made her look—younger, somewhat vulnerable.

Kori sat on her couch with her phone and discovered a notification for the Titans hashtag. She smiled at the tweet from Lux Piper. It was a selfie from the Titans' gym, captioned 'Out here promoting a dangerous model to the American public'. She wore a grey sports bra, her short black curly hair pulled back, black winged eyeliner contrasting on her fair skin, and a big dimply smile on her pretty heart-shaped face.

Finally, Vic came out of the bathroom, and Gar dashed in.

When Gar came out of the shower, his friends had already made sleeping arrangements and ordered pizza, which they all ate half in dreams. Afterwards, the girls went to Kori's room, Vic slept on the couch, and Dick and Gar shared a mattress on the floor. Gar fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

As agreed, the five went to school early the next day to meet the janitor.

Mr. Duncan paid them a wide-eyed look as he took the keys, having seen the news of the attempt on Murakami High, but he said nothing to the kids.

None of them had known what to expect from the janitor the day after, but it wasn't this. Mr. Duncan wouldn't meet their eyes, and seemed to regret giving them the the five had set out to do this, they hadn't known it would be this dangerous either.

As the rest of the students arrived, the atmosphere grew charged. Someone came up to the unsuitably calm group of five, judged they were obviously out of the loop, and demanded, "You guys didn't hear what happened? Someone tried to blow up the school last night!"

"Really? That's insane," Dick replied, flatly.

The guy gave them an odd look and left them to their inappropriate response. But they couldn't even fake excitement; they were nursing a sort of post-danger hangover.

The five hadn't realized how weird the scene looked while they were fleeing it.

A detonated bomb with a turned on hose dousing the grass on fire around it. Through the wide-open back door, two brothers fist-fighting in the middle of the deserted hallway of what would have been a blown-up school. A heap of sticks of TNT in a garbage bag in the sports shed at the opposite end of the school from the football field.

The most creative rumors as to the origin of the attack only lasted through first period. After that, it became known that two new students called Tavis and Gan had gone and confessed everything to Blood.

Everyone was sure they would get expelled. The five, knowing what they had told Gar and Kori about their influential father, knew they would likely only get suspended, if anything.

Halfway through the day, Gar got a text from an unknown number requesting a meet-up.

The five of them met Gan and Tavis in their lunch period, in a tucked away corner outside the school.

"I wanted to apologize," said Gan. "And thank you. You made us better. We were going down the wrong path. I see that now."

"I don't," said Tavis, arms crossed. Then he uncrossed his arms and softened, looking at his brother. "But, we go everywhere together. I'm willing to give this trying to fit in a try."

"Besides the apology, we thought you should know why we were going to blow up the school," said Gan.

"Didn't you say it would make your dad listen and take you home?" Gar asked.

"No, I said that was the end result," said Gan. "Our father wouldn't pay attention to something so little as a school blowing up. The deal was we would be interceded to him if we did it."

"The deal?" Dick echoed. "Someone put you up to this?"

"We don't know who it was," Tavis said. "We got the letter in the mail with the keys to the school."

"Is that how you got all that TNT?" asked Dick. "And that bomb?" That had been gnawing at Dick's mind since the day before. He'd held that bomb in his arms: it was no homemade thing. It was sophisticated. It had a timer, for fuck's sake.

Gan confirmed it. "Everything was in a dumpster for us to pick up when we came in yesterday."

"And you have no idea who contacted you," Raven.

The brothers said no.

After that, the brothers were picked up by a chauffeur. They were being transferred to another school uptown. Gan promised they'd try a pyrotechnics club in their new school, or start one, if there was none.

Before his friends could start theorizing, Victor herded them to the cafeteria, saying they should get some food in them in the lunch time they had left.

Once fixed with food in front of them, Gar broke the silence. "It was someone with access to the keys."

"So every teacher, every admin. And the janitor," said Dick.

"Or anyone who could break into the teacher's lounge," said Raven.

"Can one break into the lounge?" asked Kori.

"Are you saying we're morally obligated to break into the teacher's lounge to see if it can be done by a student?" asked Vic.

There were tired laughs.

"Not today anyway," decided Dick. He sat a bit straighter as something occurred to him. "All that aside… Gar. Tavis threw a trash can at you. Are you okay?"

Gar grinned. "I'm fine, dude! I'm hard-headed!" He knocked on his head for effect.

"Okay, I'm glad," said Dick, cutting off Victor who was about to quip something. "But it got me thinking. I'd thought we could just do this and stay out of sight, not come into contact with people who could hurt us, and it would be fine. But that's clearly not true. So, if we're gonna keep doing this, we have to start training. I have an old gym room at my house we can use, and I can teach you what I know."

"I can contribute," said Kori. "In Tamaran I was trained in… well, fighting disciplines with Tamaranean names you will not understand," she trailed off bashfully. "I also master several types of weapons."

The others stared at her.

"I thought you couldn't fight," said Dick.

She looked confused. "I said I have never been in a fight. I only have been trained."

"Oh. Awesome," breathed Dick.

Two kids walked past them, gossiping about the incident.

"I'm telling you, one of those brothers just had a change of heart. That's why they were fighting when the firemen found them."

"Then why did neither of them say they had called the fire brigade, Sam? There was another person at the scene, clearly."

Dick waited until they were gone before he said, "You know, this task… ended up kind of messy. Maybe we don't tell people this was us."

There were murmurs of tired agreement.

"Next time. Next time's gonna get us the exposure."

Vic didn't say anything. He just shook his head and ate.

End of January.

So in case this isn't obvious by now, my goal with this story is to portray as realistically as possible what would happen if a group of fifteen-year-olds decided to be powerless superheroes—without lab accidents ending up in superpowers, without tragedies leading to established adult superheroes taking them under their wing, but just because they decided to take up the work. Therefore there's gonna be a lot of 'omg we're actually doing, oh shit what do we do now?' involved. They'll get better, with practice—just not quite yet.

I tried to reach a balance between a real kid's sheer bravery and bright intelligence, and their inexperience, insecurity and questionable judgment, and I hope it worked… I don't know. You'll be the judges. Anyhow,

Next up: February. Spooky scary moral dilemmas (aka the introduction of Jinx AND CyxJinx!)