Just Another Casualty of Life
Disclaimer: I own my character not the universe
Warnings for violence or at least mention of violence and some other stuff I'm not sure about yet.
Rated just to be safe.
Soul Reader
Dawn broke and I was already awake.
I was inevitably lost in my count of threads in my pillow case when my mother came to get me out of bed. She knew I would be awake and only whispered through the door at me what time it was.
The day could delay no longer so it found me rolling out of bed to pull on some clean clothes and heading for my horde of poptarts, hidden from the greedy hands of my brothers in the back of my underwear drawer. I had long ago learned that to be the only place they wouldn't look for my stash of food mom wouldn't get them. Apparently touching something that had been that close to my body gave them nightmares.
What whimps.
Sometimes I wished that I could give them my nightmares just so they could have something real to complain about, but then I would remember that they were my brothers and I did indeed love them for some strange reason that escaped me most days.
So started my day for a new school I wasn't sure if I should like.
I made it through the bus ride by wedging myself in the short seat in the very back and ostentatiously refusing to let anyone out me from it.
Somehow, after that, everyone seemed to want to leave me alone so I was thankful. There would be no memories for me this morning as my fingers busied themselves in the task of pulling fibers out of the hole in my jeans then picking those fibers fastidiously apart.
My brutal decapitation of my jeans halted as a twin set of seatbelts wound around my chest and I was left counting the threads holding them together with such studious fascination that not even the sensation of my stomachs dropping away from my body could distract me from them.
This is what I get for going out in public places. Fear of touch left me feeling antisocial and skittish around those I did not know. Unfortunately this left me with the only thing that distracted me from my troubles, the counting.
The school, this Sky High, was a floating monstrosity that I only glimpsed as I stepped from the bus well behind the row of people that preceded me.
Why anyone would want a floating school was far beyond my grasp so I let the question slide from my mind as I focused on the people milling in the yard.
There were a lot of people. I was sure I stopped breathing for a moment as I took in how many exactly there were standing between me and the front door. Too many. I really didn't want to touch anyone today.
"What can you do?"
I stared at the man dispassionately through pale, dead blue eyes, contemplating just exactly what I might say.
"I read souls" the whispered words passed my lips as if pushing something like this between them might be torture. It just might have been, I wasn't sure yet, but I had never told anyone what I could do. Words like those were foreign on my tongue and had a strange thickness that I wasn't sure I liked.
The man snorted obviously not impressed, I wouldn't be either if I were him. It's not something nearly as impressive as starting a windstorm, shooting lazers out of your eyes or shapeshifting into the tiger the boy before me had.
Unfortunately for me he wanted a demonstration.
My left hand snaked out, against my better judgement, to briefly rest upon the bare hand he held a clipboard in. Flashes of his life filtered across my mind before my heart could beat twice and I had more that enough. My hand was snatched away as if from a hot stove and held protectively to my chest in an absent minded sort of way as my eyes lost their focus while my mind tried to process what I had seen.
"You still live with your mother?" slipped out through my lips before I even registered the thought and my eyes regained some of their focus at the whisper that seemed loud in the now silent gym.
"Alright, SideKick!" the man paled slightly while trying to shoo me off the platform with the aforementioned clipboard and another student was called up after me. I didn't pay them any attention, I was lost to the slightly disturbing image of a grown man gleefully devouring a stack of pancakes with a whipped cream face that his mother had made him.
