an early chapter
Chrys’s dad, brother, and she were renting a house close to the school. They had just moved in, and there were still plenty of boxes to be unpacked all over the place. She dropped her bags the second she got inside the main room. Her dad always yells at her for doing that, but she did it anyway. Mostly to mess with him, because she’d move them as soon as he told her to or gave her that look.
Her dad ran into the room right after they thudded on the floor. He swung through the doorway from the kitchen wearing a blue spotted apron and wielding a spatula. “Ha!” he yelled, jabbing his weapon at her bags. “Not today!”
“Dammit,” she said with a laugh, shoving her key into her pocket and heaving her two-ton backpack back onto her shoulders to take to her room.
“Watch your language.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. What are you doing with a spatula?”
He smiled. “Pancakes.”
“At 3:30 in the afternoon?” Chrys raised an eyebrow. “It’s not even time for a meal.”
He waved the spatula again in a scolding manner. “Don’t judge me. I provide your food and
your clothes and the roof over your head; so what if I want to make pancakes at 3:30?”
“Good thing school lunch is free now,” Chrys mumbled as he made his way back into the kitchen. He tried his hardest, but his cooking was always subpar at best. Most of the time she and her brother just got fast food.
“What was that?” he called back.
“Nothing, nothing,” she replied, running to her room. She dropped her bags again, this time on her bed, and flopped down beside them. If that style of banter wasn’t how her dad and she normally communicated, she would have felt horrible. Her dad had been through a lot.
He says that when he saw her, he knew she was perfect. In the old pictures scattered around the rental house, she had long, dark hair and equally dark, beautiful eyes. Chrys wished she had inherited her eyes, but she was stuck with her dad’s. Her mom had a contagious smile. She still does, she thought, looking at the picture on the table by her bed.
Chrys’s dad didn’t have a great job, since his ability was barely even telekinesis. On good days, he could move a coffee mug from the table to the sink. On bad days, he couldn’t make a pencil roll across a sheet of paper. He got stuck with a desk job, punching numbers into computers and other boring stuff. With a job like that, he was paid relatively well, but he didn’t think he was her type. Chrys’s mom was an activist. She was always leading protests fighting discrimination against “mutants” and organizing peaceful demonstrations in the big cities. She even got a lot of Scientist support after a while, which was incredible.
Chrys’s dad said he had a massive crush on her since the moment he saw her. Well, that’s not exactly how he worded it, but it’s what he meant. He finally got the nerve to ask her out on a date, and for some reason, she agreed. Chrys forgot the details because they always bored her as a kid, but they ended up getting married pretty soon after, like less than a year. They did almost everything together, but he was never really involved in her “revolutionary activities” because honestly, he was a bit of a coward. He prefered to stay in the shadows and help where he was needed, mostly. He didn’t want to be part of a war, but that wasn’t ever a part of her mom’s plans, anyway.
They had the perfect life, a small apartment, good jobs, cute newborn twins-- until one morning, a group of armed Scientists broke into one of her peaceful protest rallies. They left one hundred and forty people dead in their wake. One was her mother.
Her dad had stayed home that day because he had been up all night working and wanted to sleep in. He woke up earlier than he wanted because she and her brother had started screaming, like newborns do. It was only when he turned on the news like he did every other morning while he drank his coffee that he found out she had been murdered. The shooting was broadcast live on the air. He still hasn’t forgiven himself.
He told them all the time, “Even if you think someone may be on your side, even if they stand by you sometimes, that doesn’t mean they won’t turn against you when you least expect it. It’s always the ones you trust who hit you the hardest.”
Chrys’s phone buzzed with a text from Tony to Logan and her asking if they could come to her house after school on Friday for a little while before the three of them left to go camping. Her parents would drop them off at the campground and pick them up the next day.
She huffed and pulled herself up off the bed. “Hey Dad,” she yelled as she walked back down the stairs. No way was she running again. “My friend Tony wants us to come over to her house on Friday.”
“Who’s Tony?” He didn’t look up even after she walked in the kitchen. “Who’s ‘us’?”
“You don’t have to be so protective of me,” she whined. There were two plates on the counter next to the stove: one with two edible-looking pancakes, and one with about six badly burned ones. “I have a friend, isn’t that good? Actually, I have two friends! Tony and Logan.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Are they boys?”
She laughed, maybe too much. “No, of course not.”
“Good,” he nodded, turning back to his pancakes.
There was silence while he fiddled with the spatula. “So….can I go?”
He sighed dramatically and looked up at the ceiling in mock exasperation. “I suppose, since you finally managed to find some friends, I should let you do normal kid stuff that normal kids do with their friends.”
Chrys punched his shoulder lightly. He grabbed a piece of a burnt pancake and threw it at her, and she shrieked.
“So mature!” she shouted, also grabbing another piece of the sacrificial pancake.
Her brother walked in to their improvisational food fight, and backed himself right back out before anyone could say anything. They grabbed the entire plate of burnt pancakes and chased him down, pelting him with rock solid pieces of what once could have been edible. He went down quickly under the dual attack, collapsing into the couch with his hands raised above his head. It was funny, because her brother’s abilities were the strongest out of the three of them, quite literally. His ability was strength, and he could have picked them both up and thrown us with one hand, if he had wanted to. Thankfully, he didn’t.
After they exhausted their ammunition, they sat for a minute and laughed together. They didn’t get to do that a whole lot. It didn’t last very long before her dad remembered he was still making pancakes and had burned another one. She thought that might have been the fastest she’d ever seen him run.
She followed him into the kitchen again. He was cursing softly, trying to pry the burnt mess out of the pan. She was thankful he was making them one at a time, instead of several at once like some people do.
“Uh….that’s a yes, right?” she asked. She stole one of the edible pancakes from the plate without him noticing, since he was intensely chipping at the pan with the rubber spatula.
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Chrys, you can go.”
She grinned. As she was going back up the stairs to return to her room, she called back to tease him, “This pancake isn’t terrible! Could use some syrup, or chocolate, or anything we usually put on pancakes…Oh yeah, and we’re spending the night too!”
“WHAT?!"