Jack Power in…

POWER FOLLOWS POWER

By Hunter Lambright

My life is shot to hell. I just wanted to, you know, state that for the record before we begin.

You know what? Most days, that would be enough information, but my English teacher is always bitching at me to substantiate my claims or whatever, so I’ll qualify it however you like. Um, let me see. When did it all start?

I was, what? Seven years old? God, that was a long time ago. Almost ten years now, if nine counts as almost ten. Or is that what my math teacher’s always talking about as a misleading statistic? You’ll have to get over the constant teacher mentions. With my pathetic grades in school, that’s all I ever hear about from Mom and Dad anymore, so it kinda gets in my head sometimes.

Where was I? Right, nine years ago. That was when Aelfyre Whitemane showed up. Stupid alien. Looking back on it, man, what a stupid thing that was, wasn’t it? “Hi, kids. I’m dying. Want superpowers?”

What the fuck, right?

Yech. In that rush to prove that my life is screwed up, I kinda left out the whole backstory, didn’t it? The kids in the story? They’re my older brother Alex, my older sister Julie, and my younger sister Katie. Two years in between all of us. When Whitey showed up at the door, we were 11, 9, 7, and 5. God. What was he thinking, anyway? If he wanted people’s help, why didn’t he go to adults? Why us? I mean, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I feel bad for Katie. What the hell were we getting her into? Shouldn’t Alex have known better? He was the oldest. He should have been in control.

By the way, I’m Jack. Jack Power. I have the power to control my body’s density from the range of a cloudlike form to a super-dense one. I used to call myself Mass Master.

Wow, it sounds even worse when you write it like this. Can you blame me? I hadn’t even reached double digits yet. I mean, really, what was I going to name myself? Cloud Boy?

So yeah, we did what Whitey wanted us to. We fought off his mortal enemies every once in awhile, saved some Morlocks once, started an anti-sexual-harassment campaign with Spider-Man, and did some cool stuff. I’ll admit that. For a seven-year-old, I was having the time of my life. It was what happened as time went on that I realized what had happened.

You see, when you give someone powers, you kinda change their whole point of view on things. You look at people like Spider-Man, and he’s joking all the time because that’s the only way he can cope with the sheer horror or all the things that he’s seen and all the responsibility on his shoulders. But when you’re seven years old, the world is black and white. The bad guy is the bad guy. You stop him. End of story. It’s not until later that you begin to realize that the world is full of a bunch of sick fucks.

Look at Alex. He’s twenty years old. He did a stint with that lame-ass New Warriors team and then washed out back at home. We live in Oregon now, mind you. We’ve moved around a lot. Not too many super-villains in Oregon. So instead of doing the responsible thing and putting super-heroism on the back-burner, Alex did something stupid. He struck out on his own. Last I heard, he was taking out Z-listers in Colorado while attending community college.

Julie was pretty nonchalant about the whole deal, though. I mean, how can you not be? She was just happy that he was going to college somehow. I looked up to Julie a lot, though I’d never tell her it. She seemed to keep her cool, even when Alex had stolen all of our powers from us for that short time, or when we were facing down certain death before all of our adult teeth had grown in. But instead of reacting like Alex did, she had something else in mind.

The second Julie turned eighteen (or at least that’s how it seemed), she walked out the door. She always wanted to be an actress. Los Angeles was calling her name or something like that. I couldn’t see the appeal, really. She had a nice special effect with the rainbow powers and all, but her acting skills were iffy. Maybe she’d work out her kinks and get a gig. I dunno. The point is, she ran off, too, just like Alex. It follows an old pattern my history teacher told me about. Power follows power. What it means is, when something happens because of someone powerful, the same thing will probably happen to another person with that kind of power in a similar situation. I guess it’s a less trite way of saying that history repeats itself.

For Katie, it was different. I mean, she was the youngest of us. I think it was easier for her to adjust or something by the time we got out of the life, so to speak. I mean, she had friends, for Christ’s sake. That has to count for something. We had spent so long together as a family, it felt like we automatically had to alienate everyone else. It wasn’t a conscious effort. It just happened. She was lucky. In fact, after Alex stole our powers, Katie stopped using them even after he gave them back. I don’t know why. She turned into a completely different person than the person that she was when we were kids. She wanted to start a revolution without having to destroy anything in the process. I mean, I guess I can respect that, but that’s not necessarily what I had in mind. She could go green and hug some trees, but me? I was stuck in that little state of mind where every problem could be solved with my fists.

I was stuck back at home. Mom and Dad had a strict no-powers-in-the-house rule. I don’t remember if this was for a good reason or not, but part of me seems to remember Katie accidentally charging her powers by using them to destroy household items that she didn’t think we needed so that she could use that energy to cause her energy explosions. The time she used the grill was the last straw for Dad.

I started getting into fights in junior high school. It wasn’t that I was naturally aggressive or looking for fights. It was that the fights seemed to pick me. Justice was something that I craved, and sometimes I felt I could only deal it with my bare hands. I know that I’m only hitting you over the head with the point (did I just pun? I punned, didn’t I?), but, well, that’s the idea. The point is that, no matter what I do, I can’t get away from it. Did you know that there was, like, a zero percent super-crime rate in Oregon before we moved here? Zero. And when Alex started going out in patrol, that percent rose to thirteen.

You say, hey, what’s thirteen percent? I say, it means that thirteen percent of all criminal activity is done by someone with super powers. I hate it. I wish I could forget about it all. This shit follows us.

Look at this. I’m, like, twelve-hundred words into my “running away from home” note, and you’ve only gotten a brief overview.

See, we’re not even at the impetus (that’s a word, right?) for my wanting to get out of here. That’s, like, the biggest, most important part of the story, right there. Too bad it’s going to take awhile to get there.

A couple of days ago, I was at school. Gym class was brutal for me. As far as things go, I wasn’t allowed to use my powers in school. It was against Mom and Dad’s rules, and that’s just how things went. So, without my powers, I was just a scrawny sixteen year old, not good for much other than getting picked in the lower tiers of choosing teams.

The game was wiffleball. Our teacher, Mr. Sams, had changed to wiffleball from baseball after a few of the bigger guys decided to see how fast they could smack a baseball into the poor guy who got stuck out in right field. Don’t ask me why they did it. For some reason, high schoolers can be evil, go figure. Sometimes there were days that I wish I could put on a mask and just pull some good ol’ vigilante justice, but Katie’s a tattletale. And yeah, I know that’s Franklin’s old name, but I don’t care.

Despite us choosing every other person, somehow the jocks all ended up on the same team, while a few decent athletes and the rest of us ended up on the other team. It was when we were fielding that things started to get nasty. Jim Saltares was our team captain and had taken to the pitcher’s mound. He’d put me on third base. The bad news was that Drake Simon was up to bat. Drake was nothing but bad news for me, ever since I’d moved here. He somehow kept his spot on the varsity basketball and baseball teams even though it was a well-known fact that he did drugs. The tattoo of a blue serpent snaked down his left arm out of his sleeve. He stood at the plate and winked at Saltares, whispering, “Bring it.”

Jim was a second-stringer on the baseball team and an all-around good guy. He tossed Drake a fair pitch, and the ball bounced straight through our short-stop’s legs and into left field. The ball came to me to hold Drake at second base. I tossed the ball back to Jim so he could pitch to Ron Heiman, Drake’s co-conspirator/addict.

Ron took a strike on the first pitch and then, on the second, he popped a fly ball over third base. Drake must have been counting on me to not catch it because he didn’t bother with the tag. He came barreling my way.

I focused on the wiffleball, knowing that what I was doing was against the rules and not caring. Drake had thrown my head against a locker a few too many times for me to let him get away with the arrogance of thinking that I was going to drop the ball. As I looked at the ball, it got denser. The arc that would’ve sent it toward the left fielder changed as it gained weight. To the others on the field, or anyone who paid enough attention to notice, it appeared to defy the laws of physics. I knew what was happening, though. I wanted the ball to drop straight into my hands.

The ball dropped into my hands and I immediately let go of my control over its density. Then, just as Drake’s foot was about to touch third base, I whipped my arm around and tagged him with the ball. His eyes bugged out as he realized that he was headed back to the bench, but he didn’t do anything right then.

The rest of the game continued like everyone expected. My team got the crap beaten out of us. That wasn’t unusual. That was normal. Normalcy was good. Normalcy kept us in line. I guess that’s how people thought about it at least.

Mr. Sams blew the whistle for us to head to the lockers. I slouched toward the back of the group of kids that headed inside. I hated locker rooms. They reminded me of prisons. I took off my gym clothes and used the shirt to wipe away the sweat. I could shower later at home. The showers seemed like a place for the jocks to pretend not to size each other up.

I pulled on my jeans and was sliding my belt through the loops when a cold hand grabbed my bare shoulder and turned me around. It was Drake. He stood there in just his gym shorts. I could see now that the blue serpent not only encircled his arm, but around his back and onto the other shoulder.

“What was that about out there, freak?” he asked, pushing his hand off my shoulder and sending me crashing into my open locker.

I held up my hands. “It was nothing, Drake. I don’t want to fight you.”

“Because you’re a puss who knows he would lose,” Drake replied with a sneer. At that moment, I really didn’t care who he was. I didn’t care about any rules. I just wanted him to shut the fuck up and leave me alone.

And then my mind jumped to something cruel. I looked Drake in the eyes, but my concentration was on something that was probably a little more important to him. If I thought his eyes were bugged out before, they doubled their performance as he realized that his testicles were getting denser and denser. The look in his eyes wasn’t rage, but terror. He fell first to his knees, and then face-first, in an attempt to lessen the pain by giving his balls something to stop their drop.

Then I shook my head and everything became clearer. I let go of my power and Drake, after a minute, stood up. “What the fuck did you do to me?” he demanded, equal parts fear and raw anger. His hand went around my neck.

I couldn’t answer him. He shoved me by my neck against the locker three times and I felt each blow, but I did nothing to stop him. Blood trickled through my hair down the side of my face, and I let Drake throw me to the ground. The skin of my back formed goose bumps as it hit the cold concrete floor. That was where Mr. Sams found me sometime later. I was just frozen with the thought that, for a minute, I was the villain.

I didn’t like that feeling at all.

I spent the rest of the school day in the principal’s office holding different pieces of gauze to the side of my head, but I never told her who did it. I knew that I deserved every blow I had taken, and I wondered what Alex would think.

Mom and Dad let me stay home from school the next day. I had a massive headache, but my brain was working on overdrive. I spent the whole day on the internet, searching for stories about heroes who became villains. It scared me, what I’d done. I didn’t want to talk to any of my family about it because I knew that they would judge me. Forget the idea of thinking of family first. They were heroes, through and through. They wouldn’t accept that what I’d done was in the heat of the moment. They would only be able to think about the idea that, maybe, if I’d done it this once, what would stop me from doing it again?

And I really couldn’t blame them for that either, because I was wondering the same thing.

After diagnosing myself with what the latest researchers were calling Havok Syndrome (formerly known as the Scarlet Witch Syndrome, but they had to change it when she became a good guy again), I closed my curtains and stripped down to my flannel pajama pants, but all I could do was lay on the covers. I wanted to sleep just to hide away from all of this, but there was just too much flying through my head.

“Jack.”

See what I mean? I was going completely insane.

“Jack Power. Please…”

Okay, maybe not. I sat up and looked around the room, but there was no one there. I leaned back and shivered, but the room hadn’t gotten any colder. I was just a little freaked out instead.

Then I saw it move. It was on my wall, shifting. The form of a girl was there, her mouth open as if she were begging. One arm beckoned for me. The other one was raised in fear, as if someone was about to strike her. She stared me in the eye. “Jack…follow.”

“Follow what?” I asked, but then she faded into the wall and disappeared. The sad thing was that this wasn’t the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me.

I redressed because I knew I couldn’t sleep after that. I’m sure you can understand that. Would you be able to sleep after a ghost girl told you to follow something?

Don’t give me crap about fighting evil mutant clones in the sewers or traveling to an alien planet. Ghosts still give me nightmares.

There’s something powerful about the sky. I mean, they tell us that it’s a reflective illusion, etc. etc., but that doesn’t bother me all that much when I’m flying. I shifted my density into low-mode and watched my skin blur into a cloudy consistency. Then, I let myself go into the air.

My neighborhood disappeared below me as the wind carried me up into the air. The sun shone through my body. I had to say, the feeling was liberating. It was the highest I had flown since Alex had stolen all of our powers a few years ago. I had been chronically afraid falling from such a height ever since, worried that I’d find myself powerless a mile in the air. That wasn’t something that I really wanted to deal with on a daily basis. Besides, Mom and Dad had their “no powers” rule.

That made this one of the best flights I could remember. I soared up until the tops of the houses in my neighborhood were way too small for me to differentiate, until they were covered by the clouds.

One thing you probably don’t think about from your spot on that warm, sunny ground is how cold it gets up here. I didn’t have a built-in adjustment like some super heroes, and with my reduced density (less mass divided by same volume, right?), that meant I was getting colder faster than normal. I dropped down under the clouds and landed on the roof of one of the super shopping centers in the middle of downtown to warm up. No one would notice me there.

I landed just a ways away from the skylight that they had installed to try to make the inside of the mall less, I don’t know, obviously artificial. From where I stood, I could just barely make out people going about their daily business down below me. It was so weird. I was looking at mothers carting around their toddlers. That—that wasn’t something that happened in the Power house. Mom and Dad were too busy. And it was weird how much that struck me. Freud would have had a field day, you know what I mean? This was something that had already passed in my life. It wasn’t something I was going to get back.

The only place to move was forward.

I launched myself off the roof and into the sky. There were a few weights I had to kick off before I tried to get going on my new start.

The school day was only halfway over by the time I arrived without any books or homework. I waited in the hall until fourth period was over and then made my way to the locker room. No one was in there when I arrived, so I started into the changing routine, like everything was normal.

I didn’t have to wait long for what I expected. A hand spun me around by the shoulder and then I could see Ron’s snarling mug. “Whatcha doing here, Powerless?”

I rolled my eyes at his play on words. “Where’s Drake?” I asked.

“Drake wanted me to deal with you personally,” Ron said. He stupidly flashed his yellowing teeth again, and I wanted to hit him right there.

I smirked. “I guess Drake didn’t tell you how his balls dropped last night?”

“What’s that? Faggot talk?” Ron asked.

“Ask him yourself,” I shot back, but Ron’s attention wasn’t on me. It was on Drake, who stood in the doorway to the locker room, his face beet red.

Ron shook his head, looking disgusted. This miscommunication wasn’t part of what I’d planned on when I came in here, but it worked just fine. As Ron stalked away, Drake came over and slammed me against the lockers by my neck. “What did you tell him?” he demanded.

“Nothing that didn’t happen,” I muttered. I could feel the hot trickle of blood coming together in my hair. I hated that feeling, but I’d felt it way too often in my life.

Drake was near tears now. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him your balls dropped yesterday,” I muttered. Then I realized that the mistake, the miscommunication, had even greater ramifications for Drake. “Ah, jeez.”

“What?” Drake asked, removing his hand from my throat. Surprisingly, the locker room had cleared. I wondered if it had something to do with Ron spreading the word about something that had never happened.

I pushed myself up off the lockers and began to get back into my street clothes. “What happened here was a mistake. I came back because I’m leaving, and because I thought we had unfinished business after yesterday.” I sighed. “I was wrong. Whatever happens for you because of Ron misunderstanding me, I’m sorry. But you can use it. You can have a new start.”

I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched. “Look, you don’t have to be a villain. I know villains. You don’t want to be one.”

Then I lowered my density until I floated and merged into the clouds of steam from the showers, and left my school for good.

When I got home, I began to pack. I knew I’d be gone for awhile. I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to get out of here before you guys noticed, and so I decided you deserved to know what was going on. Whoever’s reading this, I had to do this.

Heroes have a different calling. Heroes don’t do things they want to do. They do the things that they need to do. It’s a totally different perspective, and I hope you understand.

When I started packing a duffel bag of clothing and necessities, I felt that chill at my back. I turned around, and the girl was there on the wall, two-dimensional, her arms spread. “Follow,” she whispered.

I nodded. “I’m following.” Then she disappeared, but whether it was because she liked my answer or because of the effort it took her to stay there, I don’t know.

And so, I guess I’ve danced around this long enough. I’ve told you before that power follows power. I guess that means that Power follows Power. Somewhere in Los Angeles, Julie has found herself a new calling, and I plan to do the same. There’s a paper doll of a girl somewhere in Los Angeles that needs my help. I can feel it. And for some reason she thinks only I can help her.

I’ll be back. I promise you that. But this is something I have to do on my own. Don’t worry about me. Getting powers early forces you to grow up even faster. It happens.

But don’t worry about me, okay? I know you will, but don’t anyway. I’m going to be all right. I’m one of the Power Pack, right? We’re practically immortal.

It’s getting early, and I want to get out of here before you wake up. So just know that I love you guys. I’ll write, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. And thanks. Thanks for everything.

Katie Power finished reading her brother’s letter as the horn rang for the school bus. She wiped the tears from her cheek and, before she ran out the door, slid the printed sheets into the middle of the stack of cluttered paper on Jack’s desk.

The sun was shining.