Chapter 2 "Abilities"
We all want to be good at something. It's a natural desire, to strive for greatness, in any way. Some talents we have are natural and others we learn. Of course, some talents - talents that are supposed to be impossible - show up out of nowhere.
- Michael Mules, Journal Entry
He ran without paying any attention to anything, as fast as he could to further the distance from him and the scene of his - well he didn't know what to call it. Michael raced with all his might to the railroad crossing and beat the long and slow-moving train by seconds.
When he jumped into the next crosswalk, he hadn't noticed that the signal lights were changing or a police car approaching, and the car stopped mere inches from a now frozen Michael. The officer driving poked his head out of the driver's window looking like he lost a long breath.
"Whoa, you should be more careful," he officer told him. "The sign changed before you even got off the sidewalk."
"Sorry, I was trying to beat it."
The police officer looked over his shoulder at the approaching traffic. "Just be more careful from now on."
"Gotcha." Michael ran to the other side of the street and breathed in relief. Dodging a second bullet, that was lucky, especially sense he didn't jump fifteen feet into the air this time, where there would be a street full of witnesses.
The rest of his run home had no holdups. Michael closed the door behind him and he dropped back against it with his lungs pounding at full capacity. Only now did he wonder about that girl - Wendy and her not spilling to her friends about his shocking escape. He put the thought aside and went into the kitchen, threw his jacket and backpack onto the table, and grabbed a cold bottle of water from the refrigerator.
Leaning against the counter, he noticed the answering machine had one new message and pressed the play button.
⌠Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Mules, I am Doctor Chandra Suresh," said the voice of an Indian man. "I'm calling to you about your son, Michael. You see I am a geneticist who is studying the genetic marker of a certain group of people."
Why in the world was this person calling them because of that? Unless, Michael thought, he might be talking about -
"You see, through the blood sample your son donated last year in a blood drive, I discovered that he is part of that certain group to have this rare genetic marker," the man - Chandra - continued. "If you would like to learn more about this marker, I can leave you my number -"
Michael quickly grabbed a pencil and paper from his backpack and wrote down the number as the man said it. When the message was finished, he erased it from the machine, not wanting anybody to hear it. Until he got an explanation about this for himself, he thought it to be too strange to share with anybody.
Whatever this was, he hoped it was good.
That night, he was in the privacy of his own bedroom and Michael finally got the courage to call this Dr. Suresh on his cell phone; his parents didn't need to know about a call to the other side of the country being made on the house phone.
"Hello," answered the same man from the machine. "This is Chandra Suresh, can I help you."
Breathing steadily, Michael started speaking. "Doctor Suresh, my name is Michael Mules, you called my house earlier. I wanted to talk to you about this - genetic marker that I have. You see, something's up with my body that I don't understand; it's something not normal."
"Mr. Mules, I'm glad you called." That was clear, from the sound of the doctor's excited voice. "What are these changes you are speaking of?"
He hesitated and looked to his bedroom door, thinking someone might be listening from the other side, then he shook the paranoia off. "You see, today at school there was this - I was being chased around by these punks, and I'm just going to jump onto this crate, then I shoot into the air and land on the roof of a building I must have gone sixteen, fifteen feet. That is not supposed to be possible, even for the best gymnasts in the world, right?"
"Yes, that is supposed to be physically impossible," Dr. Suresh answered, sounding even more interested by the minute. "Is that it?"
"Well, after thinking about today more, there was this thing about my nose nearly blowing out of me when a guy breathed a puff of smoke on me," he told him. "It felt more strong and awful than it should have. I literally wanted to rip my nostrils off of my face."
There was a short pause before Dr. Suresh replied back. "Michael, you seem to be displaying enhanced body functions," he told him.
"How is this happening?" Michael asked. "I haven't been exposed to radiation or been bitten by a radioactive animal."
Over the receiver, he thought he heard the older man laughing very lightly. ⌠It would take too long for me to explain it all over the phone, but I have a book that I wrote on all of this. It has a chapter on increased physical attributes. Do not worry, it isn't written in a - how you say - nerd language. It explains everything quite well."
"Alright, I'll check it out." Michael wrote the name of the book down and sighed in uncertainty. It looked like there wouldn't be a simple answer to this.
"What am I supposed to do?" he asked into the phone.
"Just know that you have a special calling in the world, Michael," Doctor Suresh told him, sounding very caring and kind. "I cannot tell you what to do with these knew found abilities; you must choose for yourself how to put them to use."
Great, so the doctor was the type of person who let the confused learners figure things out for themselves. What would he have to do, go to New York to get some better guidance from this man?
"Just know that I am always here for you to contact," Doctor Suresh told him. "I have made it my life's mission to find people like you and to help discover your potential."
All right, now he was being more guiding. "Okay then. I'll get your book. Then I'll call when I've read everything. If you want to reach me, use this number. I can't have my family find out about this - at least not yet."
"Understood, we will speak again soon, I hope." With an exchange of goodbyes, they both hung up and Michael stayed lying down on his bed for a long time, not sleeping, just pondering in his mind of what was to come next.
So that weekend, Michael bought the Dr. Suresh's Activating Evolution at a Borders store and began reading on the bus ride home, then continuing to do so secretly in his bedroom during. Ordinarily, he was one to read fantasy books, like Star Wars and Harry Potter; his family would mock him for only being into unrealistic writing like that. But Chandra Suresh's book made those pieces of fiction seem not so far out there.
By the end of that weekend, Michael had read the entire book from cover to cover. All of it was both fascinating and jaw dropping.
The chapter, 'Increased Physical Attributes', concerned specifically him. According to Dr. Suresh's studies, Michael's physiology was enhanced to a completely new level that not even the best known of athletes of any kind were in. His agility, reflexes, and senses - they were all enhancing in their capacity. The way Michael saw it, his abilities were a combination of Spider-Man and DareDevil - minus the radar sight, web shooting, and crawling on walls.
He might even posses a strong durability in handling pain better that a normal person. Of course, at the end of the chapter, Doctor Suresh advised careful exercise to better handle these abilities. He stated that the body and mind needed to be trained to handle the use all of these enhancements.
"Okay then. I guess I need to start working out," Michael said to himself after finishing the chapter.
Locked in his room, Michael started to blindfold himself and just lay down on his bed quietly; he figured that if he blocked one sense, another would be able to magnify itself. For the first few days that he tried this method, there was no difference.
Then on the forth night when not only did he have his eyes blindfolded but he was also wearing earplugs, was there a change. First, his nose was inhaled by the usually light smell of the ceiling dust, then there was the distinct scent of his sister, Missy's hairspray from the bathroom down the hall, as she was preparing herself for a date. Then he could smell the gratifying chocolate being warmed in the kitchen.
This new progress earned him a break. He raced over to the kitchen as his mother was pouring the finished pot into several cups.
"Hot chocolate ready, then?" he said grinning for more than what Angela knew about.
"Yeah - Michael are you wearing earplugs?" she asked bemused.
Whoops! Michael removed the earplugs with a red face. "Uh yeah, you know, Q-tips can actually impair your hearing."
His mother said nothing in response to that and just handed him his cup.
Back in his bedroom, he put the earplugs back blindfolded his eyes once again.. Now that he had the cup of hot chocolate with him, the smell was much stronger. There might as well have been trees full of cocoa beans in the room.
Then that warm smell was joined by a scent that was repulsive and all too familiar to Michael. He left his bedroom again and followed the smell to the bathroom, which was locked. Just as he suspected. He knocked on the door, and he thought he heard his sister, Missy curse under her breath.
"Hey, Missy, how long are you going to take in there?" he asked.
"Just a second," she said over the air fresher she was spraying.
The door then opened and his older sister came out in haste.
"It's all yours," she said and walked towards the stairs.
"I'm not going to tell anybody, if you promise to stop," he then said, without leaving the spot where he stood.
"What?" Missy looked back to him.
"You can stop now, Missy, and it will be easy to," he told her. "Don't deny what was going on in there - I've seen you before. I just hope you've so far stuck to just that weed or whatever it is, exactly."
Missy's face went from confusing to angry. "Have you been spying on me?"
"Haven't had to. You're not good with secrets."
"Just but out," she said quietly, but viciously. "You don't know what you're talking about."
Without another word, she turned and went down the stairs. That didn't go as well as Michael had hoped. He would just have to try again with her, later.
That next day during lunch, he stayed in an empty hall, sitting cross-legged at a corner with his eyes closed. He tried to hear all the noise from outside students talking, balls bouncing off the ground repeatedly, the different pairs of feet as they walked across the grounds.
But hardly of that reached his ears, mostly the faded voices of the loudest of people that could be heard by anyone from where he was. This wasn't working.
I just need time, he thought to himself. It would take a while for his abilities to come at his command, but he had to remember that he might not have all the physical powers described in the book. Doctor Suresh wrote that only certain parts of his body might enhance. Still, Michael remembered how he had caught that baseball last week. He knew he had heard the wind so strongly as the ball had closed in.
He just had to keep practicing.
"Hey, there you are," someone said from out of nowhere.
Jumping up to his feet, Michael looked to the direction of the stairway; Wendy was approaching coming from there.
"Hey look I -" he started to blurt out but she cut him off.
"I've been looking for you since last week," she said decisively. "But it looks like you've been hiding. I guess you were expecting me to yell out what I saw you do."
"What you saw me do?" Just need to keep it cool.
"Don't even go to playing dumb," she said with exasperating force. "You jumped from the floor to roof like . . . A frog."
Michael didn't say anything.
"I may not watch the Olympics but I still know that's not normal," she said.
This girl just wouldn't let it go. Michael needed to think, quickly if he was to get her off his case.
"The wind caught me as when I jumped." It actually manages to sound like a he believed.
However, Wendy's decisive stare didn't change. All right the, he liked staring contests. Their gazes met, and Michael didn't break contact with her dark green eyes, which he wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't left her black eye shadow off today, and her lipstick wasn't that heavy, either.
Wendy didn't really look that bad. Her pale complexion even suited her face. She could look pretty if the girl wanted to.
Finally, she blinked.
"Just leave me alone. You don't know what you saw and you can't prove anything if you are thinking of saying something," he pointed out. "They'll just think you're nuts."
Picking up his backpack, Michael headed for the stairway.
"I'm not going to stop bugging you about this," she assured him as he reached the steps.
Great. He would just to avoid her until graduation, then.
What we're capable of will determine much of our lives. To the best of our abilities we strive for meaning in everything we do. There are many types of skills that people can have, and that will bring us a complicated yet exciting life. Maybe a kind of life we weren't expecting.
- Michael Mules, Journal Entry
To Be Continued
Author's Note: Thank you for the reviews and for the advice on my writing. I need to remember not to depend soely on spell check. I'm glad that you like the my story and I hope you keep enjoying it..