Chapter Eight
After the New Year, Jessica returned to school, and several of her friends noticed the change in her height. She had grown at least two full inches over Christmas break, but she didn't measure it. She wore a full length black, Gothic dress that she had hanging in the back of her closet. The dress went down to the top of her ankles. Her leather black boots went all the way up to her knees. She wore black rings on her fingers with her hair braided in neatly organized braids. She had a black beret on her head that gave her a level of sophistication. She carried a leather bound book with her that had "Glove of Darkness" stitched across the top. She had read the book several times, and knew exactly what she needed to do to retrieve the glove. According to the text, she had to take a boat to the center of a large body of water, say a few magical lines, and the glove would appear in the lake. All she needed to do was reach for it, and it would magically appear on her right hand.
The cars and snow removal machines had done an excellent job of ridding the streets of the white fluffy stuff, and she walked past the manhole on Fifth Street. She saw a few kids crawl out of the manhole, place the lid back on it, and hop into a very expensive black sedan. Amazingly, the kids didn't have much for clothing, when it came to the frigid temperatures. The two boys wore nothing more than a t-shirt, tattered jeans, and holey shoes. She had seen that scenario a million times in the past, but never equated it with prostitution. The adult ladies roamed through the sordid streets at night, and propositioned stray men without retribution from the cops, but the kids worked surreptitiously. They moved under the radar of the cops, and went undetected through the city. In fact, the majority of the kids underneath the city hadn't enrolled in school, and nobody knew they existed or cared to know if they existed.
Another kid poked her head from the manhole, and then placed the cover back. She was an Asian girl approximately thirteen or fourteen years old, and she stood on the side of the road. She wore a multicolored sweater with green pants, and white shoes. She had an effervescent walk, and darted down the street until she came to a red Ferrari. She hopped inside of the menacing looking vehicle, and it drove out of sight. She wanted to crawl into the sewer, and see what the people in that hovel looked like. She pictured them as a grotesque group of miscreants; but then again, she felt like a pompous turd with an elitist attitude. The last thing she wanted to do was pontificate her beliefs to a bunch of survivalists. Besides, what duty was it of hers to correct the wrongs of society? She struggled with finding the middle ground on the issue of the sex trade happening beneath the surface of Gotham. But at the same time, she knew with the degradation of family values infecting the city, somebody had to speak up for the kids before time ran out. The same kids prostituting now we'll be the pimps tomorrow.
A loud roar—the red Ferrari raced around the corner—startled Jessica. The vehicle tried to come to a screeching halt, but hit a patch of ice, and sped around like a twirly top. The butt of the vehicle flew into Jessica, and she stopped it when she gripped the bumper of the car. She slowly stopped the vehicle from spinning; but in the process, she crushed the entire rear end of the car, completely destroying it. She didn't know the amount of strength that she had flowing through her veins, but the ability to stop that kind of out-of-control force impressed her. The Asian child exited the wreck, and said, "Thank you."
"What the hell did you do to my car?" the man asked with a grimace on his face. "Don't you know I'm James Garrett?"
"You nearly hit me, James," she snapped.
"So, what if I did?" He asked.
She stopped for a moment in disbelief that the man didn't have any respect for human life. He stood in front of her with his pants partially zipped, and stuck out his chest to Jessica. She knew what the man and the littler girl had done, and it disgusted her. In the back of her mind, she could easily ripped the man into pieces, but that wouldn't win the war against child trafficking. The old geezer had on one of those turtle neck sweaters with black, racing gloves. It was the first time in her entire life that somebody wanted to fight her, and she didn't have a contingency plan for such matters. She didn't know how to talk a man off a ledge or making a mistake with provoking a person with superpowers. She looked over at the Asian kid, and asked, "What's your name?"
"Vivian," the teenager said, "Vivian Lo."
"You don't want to be here, Vivian. Go home."
"Yes, ma'am," Vivian said.
Jessica watched as the young lady ran to the sewer. She used a little latch handle to lift up the manhole, and disappeared underneath the street. The man walked around to Jessica who stood patiently to the rear of the vehicle. Even though he experienced what she did to his car, he didn't seem to care that she had more power than any normal person on the planet. He berated Jessica incessantly about how the lower income blacks ruined the city of Gotham, but she didn't pay him any attention. He continued to chide her even though she gingerly walked away from the man.
"You black bitch," he screamed at the top of his lungs. He had a ferocious grimace on his face, and flipped her off. "I'd like nothing more than to kill all of you."
Jessica stopped in the middle of the street, and she took a large swallow. This was the first time in her entire life that she'd retaliated against some man's verbal abuse. She felt a rage growing inside of her that she didn't have the ability to contain. When she walked back to his vehicle, she grabbed the front of it with a tight grip, and picked the car up for a second, and then dropped it back on the ground. She quickly realized that the car felt lighter than a pebble, and she picked it up with one hand, tossed it half way down the street, and it caught fire when it hit the ground.
"Holy shit," the man screamed with his eyes wide opened. Raking his fingers through his hair in a moment of confusion, he looked at his car as it burned in the middle of the street, and then looked back at Jessica. His face turned pale white when he realized that Jessica had superpowers. She stood in the middle of the street with a blank stare on her face, and she watched the man stumble down the street. She continued to watch the man run until he was nearly a block away from her.
She looked at her hands, and they didn't have a blemish or mark of any type on them. She knew the cocooning had changed her, but she didn't realize the amount of energy that flowed through her body. Amazed, she hopped onto the city bus, and headed to school.
Jessica attended a school called Douglass High with one of the best football teams in the country. Unfortunately, the school did poorly in academics. The school neglected the majority of the pedantic studies in order to ensure the football team had a robust amount of equipment. As long as the football team kept winning, the city of Gotham didn't pay any attention to the school's low test scores. Needless to say, the majority of students in the school were African American, and had a pathway to prison for most of the students who didn't do well in sports. Over the last thirty years, the bulk of students who attended Douglass High ended up committing some kind of heinous crime against the state. Gotham Penitentiary had more residents from Douglass than any school in the country.
Jessica stood quietly in the main hallway of the school, and pulled her books from her locker. Classes had already started, and the kids cleared the hallway after the bell rang, but Jessica's first period was hall monitor. A poster of Martin Luther King stared at her as she pulled her books from her locker, and she felt as if something was wrong. She heard a metallic clicking sound that she tried to ignore at first, but then she saw a white man standing at the end of the hallway tapping his foot incessantly. The sun skewed his appearance for a moment, but then she recognized him. It was Mister Garrett; it was the same man with the smashed Ferrari, and he looked peeved. He looked like a scrawny man, the kind of man who looked more book smart than anything else. She grimaced, stood in the middle of the hallway with her books, and said with a harsh tone, "You shouldn't be here. Don't make me report you."
"You smashed my car, bitch!" He pulled a bottle of violescent pills out of his front jean pockets, and asked, "You know what these are?" He shook the bottle like a baby rattle, and had an awful scowl on his face. It appeared that he had some stubble on his chin, and a thin mustache.
"Don't know. Don't care," she said with a crisp and sharp tone.
"A drug called Pump," he snarled, "You're about to know real pain." Tossing the pills down his throat, the drugs reacted with his DNA almost immediate. Bluish green veins poked out of his forehead, and the hair on his head fell to the ground. He hissed and spit phlegm, but Jessica stood her ground. The left side of his body morphed and became a grotesque site full of callouses and veins. And almost immediately following that change, his right side muscled up, and he looked three times his natural size. He ripped off his tight shirt, threw it on the ground, and flexed his muscles several times.
Out of fear, Jessica ran in the opposite direction, and she could feel the monster tearing through the school chasing after her. She exited the building through a side door, and ran towards Suicide Hill, which was a large hill the football team used for exercise. Effortlessly, she muscled her way up the hill, and the grotesque creature was right behind her. Frightened, she didn't know if she had the skills needed to fend off the larger brute. He pinned her to the ground for only a second, and then something happened to her. She felt a flood of fluid all over her body, and realized that it was blood; and she picked up the lifeless creature, threw it to the ground, and tried to figure out what happen to him. His bloody guts fell out of his body, and Jessica held on to her mouth to keep from throwing up. She tried to walk over to the deformed creature, but realized she was flying. A red, radiant glow encompassed her body. She looked over her shoulder, and saw a set of wings that resembled a wasp's wings, and they were sharp as a razor. She landed on the ground in front of the monster, and her wings disappeared, and the glow dissipated. Confused, she walked quietly down the hill, collected her things, and went to the bathroom to wash up.