The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

got that impression,” he says. “Reminded me of when kids used to call me a kike at school.”

“No one ever called me anything but Muslim,” she says. “Sometimes the name of a thing is bad enough. But yeah, Damp is of that proud tradition. Standard exonym. Some of the kids think having baseliners around dampens their abilities.”

“And you’re saying it does?”

She shrugs. “I’m saying Kevin Bishop is a smart man, and there has to be some reason he put a school packed with 500 very powerful teenagers in the middle of a city of 20 million people.” Avi thinks of dynamite sticks packed in boxes of hay. In the movies, when one character assures another it’s safe, the audience knows the explosion’s coming. He pushes the image away.

“So,” Fahima says after a pause, “have you figured out what Owen can do?”

Avi remembers the smooth edges of the blast radius, the lack of debris. He sees the little girl running through the pews of Salem Baptist.

“He negates matter,” he says. “Destroys it outright.”

“He nulls it,” Fahima says. “That’s the kid’s favorite word other than cattle and maybe fuck. Except you can’t negate matter. It’s a basic law of physics. In any closed system, the amount of mass and energy is conserved. At first I thought he was moving it somewhere. But from what I can find, no one’s reported a mall food court showing up in their backyard.”

“What if he teleports it out into space?” Avi asks.

“That’s not bad,” Fahima says, nodding. “But via what medium? Even an Einstein-Rosen bridge requires an extra dimension. And as much as I hate to believe it, this is what I have come to conclude. That there is an extra dimension out there. And resonating is us connecting to that.”

“So you’re getting your powers from the fourth dimension?” he asks. He can’t keep the skepticism out of his voice.

“We don’t say powers,” Fahima says. “We say abilities. You have to think of them that way. Extensions of what humans can do. That’s all they are. Otherwise you start thinking of us as something other than human.”

“You call yourselves something other than human,” he says.

“It’s our endonym; we get to decide. But it’s a bullshit position to be in. Deciding what you want to be called. If I call myself a Muslim American, I’m marginalized. I call myself an American and I erase my heritage. I call myself a Muslim and I’m labeling myself as a threat. All the choices fucking suck.”

“Resonant Americans,” Avi says. He tests the words out. He sees them in 48-point type on the cover of the Trib.

“Most Americans,” Fahima continues, “the first Muslim they ever heard of was Osama bin Laden. But the first openly queer person they encountered was on Will & Grace. That’s what we need. One of us to show up on a sitcom. We need to be the wacky neighbor or the sassy best friend. Before they meet people like Owen Curry.”

“You think there are more like him?” Avi asks.

“He’s not the first,” she says. “Bishop’s usually better at finding them before they cause trouble. I think that’s what’s got him shaken. Like someone was hiding the kid.”

The flying duo swoops down close enough to ruffle Avi’s hair and flap the ends of Fahima’s hijab. Emmeline, giving chase, stops near Avi and Fahima. She’s out of breath from laughing and running.

“Daddy, they can fly,” she says.

“I know, Leener,” he says. “It’s pretty amazing.”

“Do you think I’ll be able to fly?” she asks Fahima. Avi leans forward, hoping for a definite answer even if it only winnows down the options. Of all of them, Fahima seems like the only one who’s telling him anything.

“I think whatever your ability is, it’s going to be fucking amazing,” says Fahima.

“Fucking amazing,” Emmeline says. She laughs and sprints off after the flying kids.

“Thanks a lot for that,” says Avi.

“Swearing’s the least of your problems,” Fahima says. “Can I ask?”

“Ask what?”

“What happened to your leg?”

“Lost it.”

“You check under the couch?” Fahima asks. “Sometimes when I lose something, it’s under the couch.”

“I checked,” he says. He’s grateful to her for the joke. It makes him feel a little more normal.

“I could build you a better one,” Fahima says.

“This one’s all right.”

“Bullshit,” she says. “I bet it chafes something awful. And how does it respond when you don’t have your full body weight on it, when you’re pressing from the knee? Like on stairs? For shit, right?” Avi shrugs. These are downsides he’s come to accept. “I swear I could build you a better one,” Fahima says. “That’s what I do, by the way. I build things. If that hasn’t been obvious. I could splice the wires into your existing nerve endings. It could have intercoordinated muscle groups.”

He’s not sure what some of the things she’s saying even mean. Nothing like that ever comes up in the forums he visits. There’s something scary about it, like the early parts of a science fiction story. A robot leg that slowly takes over the amputee’s whole body. “Maybe some other time,” he says.

“Whatever you say,” Fahima says. “It’s your fucking leg. But listen, this shit is only as strange as you let yourself think it is. Telling yourself it isn’t real, that this isn’t your life, it’ll fuck you up. You and the kid both.”

At the bottom of the hill, Emmeline lies in the grass, arms folded across her chest. Bryce, the tree kid, kneels down next to her. He whispers to the ground, and flowers begin to sprout and blossom underneath her. It reminds Avi of the time-lapse nature films they used to watch in school in which a dead raccoon putrefied in seconds. The stems of the flowers grow thick. Collectively, pushed by Bryce’s will, or his words, or his fourth-dimensional energy, they lift Emmeline a few inches toward the sky.

The bell rings for the end of ninth period, and Carrie knows she’s missed her