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

“This is happening,” said Viola Wilkerson. Her Hivebody burned blue at the edges and white at the center like the gas flame on a stove. When she said the words, they didn’t have the argumentative tone they’d had when Carrie had spoken them. They had a sense of wonder. Carrie had asserted that these things were going to happen whether the assembled students liked it or not. Viola said it was magic to be here in the middle of all of it, with change not inevitable but present, a moment threatening to slip by them into the past.

“This is happening,” her classmates agreed. They spoke the words to one another. A pledge.

And the decision was made.

“You should get credit for the motto,” Hayden said to Carrie.

“Doesn’t matter,” Carrie said. All that was left was to pick a day, select a moment, and wait for it to arrive.

When it does, they throng in the lobby. Shen expands to his maximum size, holding them back until the clock hand clicks up to twelve. The doors of Bishop Academy open, and the students spill out onto 57th Street. Carrie holds back a second. She grabs Miquel’s wrist.

“Is it real?” she asks.

He smiles and pulls her forward into the street. They’ve been told all their lives to hide what makes them special. Out in the open for the first time, they fly and glow. They shift fluidly from shape to shape. They puppet elaborate golems made of discarded newspapers and empty coffee cups with their thoughts. They juggle balls of light, launch fireworks from their fingertips, trail streamers of pure energy as they dance. It’s a parade, a coming-out party. For Carrie, whose ability is to hide, it’s enough to walk alongside her friends as they peacock and strut. She catches the cartoonish mental images Waylon throws at the crowd like Mardi Gras beads. She watches Isidra Gonzalez trace a lemniscate of molten silver, weaving it around her body. Hayden and Jonathan peform acoustic covers of what Hayden calls the queer classics, anthems of coming out, along with some post–civil rights movement say-it-loud songs Bryce suggested. Waves of positive emotion pour off Miquel like heat.

Carrie passes Avi Hirsch and his daughter on the sidewalk. They’re tight together until other kids snatch Emmeline away, pulling her into the street to jump, dance. The reporter watches her go. He taps the photographer next to him. “Get a shot of her for me,” he says. The photographer trains his camera on the girl’s back, clicking as she becomes part of the crowd.

The sidewalk is lined with spectators and the press. Those in the back stretch phones as high as they can to get pictures of the students in the street before they notice the show in the air above. They turn their eyes upward, eclipse watchers, UFO seekers. They search the skies for wonders and are rewarded.

Bryce works the edges of the crowd. His head is a crown of calla lilies. His shoulders blossom lilac and hyacinth. A puffy necklace of peony blooms under his chin. On the curb, a little girl, maybe three years old, jumps up and down, struggling to reach one of the flowers on the top of Bryce’s head. Her mother holds her back, whispers in her ear. The girl stops leaping, her face sad and slack. Bryce kneels down in the gutter. He bows to let the girl pluck a lily from his scalp. Behind him, Shane Goss suspends a perfect globe of light in the air in front of him. A knot of people gather to watch as he shapes it. Four thin veins descend from the globe. A bulb develops at one end and becomes a neck, a head. Details come into focus, take shape, and there is a horse the size of a small dog crafted entirely of light. They always do a horse, Carrie thinks, remembering boys in the common room showing off horses made of light, made of metal, to try to impress girls. Like zoetrope images, something about the mechanics of the horse’s movement makes them a showcase for a new medium. The horse gallops in place, legs pedaling, the muscles at its shoulders rippling. Shane’s face twists in concentration. The legs move faster and faster until they’re blurred with speed, and a young boy watching begins to clap, enthusiasm bursting uncontrollably from him. Shane beams at him. Carrie can’t help watching them, intruding on a moment that should be only theirs. She has the sense that all of today’s moments are shared. They belong equally to everyone here, Resonant and baseliner, spectator and spectacle. It’s the last time she’ll ever have this feeling. An echo will come back to her, but never with the surety she has right now.

Someone jostles her, breaks her attention. When she turns, she’s face to face with a boy she doesn’t recognize. He’s sweating even though he doesn’t have a coat and it’s freezing out. He pushes by her and ducks into a walkway. Carrie turns back to find Shane and his assembled audience. Carrie sees the red dot before Shane does, zipping around his face like a mosquito looking for a place to settle. Shane’s eye twitches as the dot skitters across it. He swats at it, then turns toward the source of the light. His happiness at finally being able to share his ability radiates from him as the bullet turns his head into a red mist and the horse disperses into nothing.

Carrie screams as another bullet goes wild and hits the asphalt, spraying macadam at the kids on the curb and the startled student revelers. A third catches Doug Shaw in the meat of his thigh. Carrie reaches out and grabs Emmeline, who happens to be the nearest kid. Carrie folds Emmeline in her arms and forces them both down into invisibility. It’s the first time Carrie’s made someone else invisible with her, and a bright spark