Generation Why Bother

The next day was a Sunday, and that day the band was doing an interview for a magazine in New York, leaving Riley and Chuck with the flat for the day. Neither me nor Tegan really wanted to be stuck listening to them argue over dumb things for hours at a time, so we just chilled at home for the day – well, she was chilling at my house.

She was quiet, though. I would have been worried or asking a ton of questions or wondering if something was wrong, but it was what she was doing that made her quiet that let me know she was alright.

Anything loose that was laying around my room, she was working her mind to move it around. She’d fling pencils at my window or put my sketchbooks on the bed with just the flick of her fingers, and the bigger the object, the more her tongue stuck out. (It was pretty adorable to see her so focused like that, and I couldn’t help but smile at her the whole time.)

She did it so wordlessly and so effortlessly over time that it just felt so natural. I knew she had a pretty big mind; she always did her homework and came home with straight A’s no matter how much she’d complain to me about how sucky school was. She may have been tiny, but I had a feeling that she’d be moving mountains at the rate she was going just that day in my room.

I picked up a pen nearby on my desk and called to get her attention. “Let’s see if you can stop something in midair again.”

She nodded, and I tossed it at her; she simply held up a hand and the pen halted, suspended by her energy.

“You’ve already got it so under control,” I gasped, not caring if I was feeding her ego. What she was doing was amazing – it even seemed better than shooting lightning at people.

She sent the pen back to my desk, setting it right back where it sat before. Then she leaned forward on my bed and crossed her legs, propping her elbows up on them. She hadn’t even broken a sweat. “Well, have you tried out your powers some more?”

The question sailed through my heart and instantly triggered Awkward Oshie. “Nah, I don’t want to zap anyone else. I already zapped your ‘alien babe.’” Excuses, excuses. They were true, though. I didn’t want to end up like Anthony and almost end up killing someone accidentally.

“God, don’t remind me of Shira,” Tegan groaned, huddling in her hands. “You’re just reminding me of how I’ll never see her again…”

For a second I felt bad, but when she peeked out from between her fingers and smiled at me, I knew she was over it and didn’t want to talk any further. She pointed to a rubber eraser lying on the floor – one of her first attempts at moving something that failed.

“Hey, why don’t you try hitting that eraser? Rubber doesn’t conduct electricity, does it?” she suggested.

I laughed it off at first, but she was pointing at it and didn’t stop until I rolled my eyes and gave in, sighing. So I focused my lightning energy and held my hand out at the eraser, closing one eye to aim and hoping that I hit it.

I was no Tegan. Nope, the spark I shot out had hit the floor centimeters from the eraser and bounced up and hit the ceiling, making my bedroom light flicker, though ultimately nothing was damaged. I couldn’t catch on very fast, since I didn’t practice very often.

Tegan laughed out loud, told me I needed to practice, and that’s how she spent the rest of that day helping me aim my lightning bolts instead of reading the book we were assigned in our English class. Frankly, I would’ve liked reading more instead of risking lives by practicing such a dangerous power. I did end up getting a little better, though. Not just aim-wise, but intensity control.

I didn’t like revisiting my power. There were a few reasons, and one of the main ones was that since lightning is so unpredictable – look at everyone who got struck by it and became guardians – any bolt I shot off could go anywhere. Like I said before, God knows I didn’t want to be like Anthony and accidentally almost harm someone, possibly killing them. When I tried to hurt Shira, I was lucky she was somehow immune to my powers. Humans were different. Humans could die so easily, and that’s why I built up all that static inside me.

Little by little, though, Tegan helped me control my power, gradually building up the bolts as I improved my aim. She stayed behind me the whole time because I told her to (if the sparks were gonna fly, they were gonna fly in front of us), and she didn’t let me stop until hours had passed and I reached the point where my strongest lightning bolt that I could control had caused a power surge throughout the house. (My dad put an end to it at that point.)

That night, I realized how weird it was that I was the only one who got struck by lightning, ended up with a lightning scar, and ended up controlling lightning. I felt like there were puzzle pieces all coming together in a weird show of favor for me and nobody else, and it just struck me how odd that was. How we were all brought together by electricity, yet only one of us was given the element to control. How lightning itself is a steady stream that branches off in multiple directions, yet has the same source. Maybe that’s why the stars contacted all of us through lightning. We all had our own branches, but we ultimately were on the same track.