"I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens."
― Woody Allen
SOMETIMES I WISH THAT I WERE THE SPERM CELL THAT LOST, that instead of me swimming to my mother's egg and coming in first place, I would have decided to lag behind a bit or, better yet, turned around and swam in a completely different direction. Because, when it came down to it, I'd much rather still be swimming around in my father's ball sack than sitting in Mrs. Marshall's math SAT preparation course.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and Patricia Marshall stood at the very front of the classroom with her back to the class and her hand moving furiously; she was scribbling formulas on the board with a bright green dry-erase marker. The color was so light and the numbers were so small and slanted that I had to squint in order to read it, even though I probably had the best vision out of everyone in the class. Mrs. Marshall either didn't care or didn't notice, because once she finished writing, she capped the marker and went back to her desk to continue reading her book.
Mrs. Marshall didn't teach, as she'd told us on the very first day of school. She told us that she would simply "refresh our memories" about things that we should have already been taught. Her idea of refreshing our memories, however, was writing down a bunch of formulas and giving us worksheets to complete while she read a new book or finished a crossword puzzle. What pissed me off more than anything, though, was the fact that I genuinely needed to improve my math skills so that I could do better on my next SAT, and this class wasn't helping in the slightest.
"Cameron. What the hell does that even say?" Zoya whispered from the seat next to me, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders. Zoya was a girl that I'd known since the year before, in our Junior year, but didn't get to know until I walked into Mrs. Marshall's class on the first day and realized that she was the only person in the class that I recognized. We definitely weren't the best of friends; she had a slight Jamaican accent that sometimes made it hard to understand everything she said and, more often than not, smelled strongly of a weird mixture of fried plantains and castor oil, but she was friendly. I'd rather have someone to vent to about our teacher than keep it all bottled up until the next period.
"Girl, I don't even remember how to do this shit," I said with a roll of my eyes, "we haven't done this since the eighth grade." The worksheet that lay on my desk had been untouched; I hadn't even written my name at the top, yet. I knew it would probably stay that way until tomorrow night when I would write down a bunch of nonsense and turn it in the following morning for a completion grade. "I don't see how any of this will ever be useful in real life."
"Whatever, I'm just not gonna do it," Zoya said, throwing her pencil down on her desk. I wasn't surprised because Zoya never did her work for any of her classes. Just the other day she'd showed me her grades from her last report card, and I was amazed that she'd even made it to her senior year. "My teachers just get tired of seeing me in their class," she told me, "so they give me a D and move on."
A few more minutes went by before the bell rang, signaling the beginning of B lunch, and all thirteen of us ran out of the door as soon as we could. Zoya and I headed in the opposite direction of the wave of students; we took the long way to the lunchroom so that we could stop at the bathroom on the way. As we walked, Zoya rambled on and on about the homecoming dance that was in a couple of weeks, and I pretended to listen. High school dances weren't really my thing, and Zoya knew it. That didn't stop her from asking for the hundredth time whether or not I was going. I told her that I wasn't and she ask me who I'd voted for homecoming queen.
"Mandy," I said automatically, "Miranda Shifflett." We'd been in the same English classes ever since ninth grade.
"She's guaranteed to win," Zoya said as she dried her hands. "I mean, she's won homecoming princess three times in a row. Why not make it a fourth?" As Zoya spoke, she rolled her eyes and shot her balled up paper towel towards the garbage can, keeping her arms held high in the air, her left wrist bent. The paper towel bounced off the side of the trash can and dropped to the floor, rolling back towards one of the closed bathroom stalls. Zoya just shrugged and headed for the door. She stopped and turned around when I let out a cough.
"What? That's what we have janitors for. They'll pick it up," she said.
"That's really fucking trifling, and you know it," I said with a shake of my head. Instead of arguing with her some more, I got down onto my knees and reached under the stall door for the paper towel. "We're always complaining about how nasty these bathrooms are when we're the ones that are making it this way." I opened my mouth to say more, but froze in place once my fingers touched something odd, something warm and sticky. My hand found the paper towel and pulled it from under the stall. My eyes widened and my nose crinkled in disgust when I was that my fingertips were now covered in blood. I leaned down even further, straining to see all the way inside. My heartbeat quickened as I continued to lean, and probably stopped completely when I saw her.
"Come on, Cammy. What the hell are you looking at? We're gonna miss our lunch period," Zoya said impatiently, but I wasn't really listening to her. My eyes were focused on another pair of deep brown, glazed-over eyes.
She was laying in a weird position: her leg was bent under her body in a way that it definitely wasn't normal, her torso was facing the wall, her head was turned in my direction, and blood was pooled around her head. Her chest was barely moving, like how it's supposed to when you breathe. Was she dead? "Cammy!" Zoya exclaimed once more, and I continued to block her out. All I could do was stare.
"It's Miranda," I said hesitantly, my eyes still locked on hers. "Miranda Shifflett," I said, finally tearing my eyes away from her still body and staring at Zoya incredulously. "I think she's dead."
The girl rushed back in my direction, shoving me out of the way before pushing the stall door wide open. I didn't realize that I had started screaming until a teacher came hurrying inside.
You're a high school student attending a fairly large high school in New York City. You have your own life and your own story, just like everyone else. Maybe you're the popular girl who pretends to have it all, but lives in a trailer park with her abusive father. Maybe you're the loner who has big dreams but little motivation. Or maybe you're the stoner who has repeated their Junior year for the second time and couldn't care less what the future has in store for them. You are your own person, and your entire world is about to be flipped upside down. Everything for you and everyone around you changes when two girls find the half-dead, bloody body of Homecoming Queen Miranda Shifflett in the school bathroom.
One by one, people from your city meet an untimely death, the cause of death for each of them presumed to be some sort of deadly virus. The people begin to freak out almost immediately; parents begin withdrawing their children from school and moving across the country, local business owners pack up and do the same, all while scientists and doctors work day and night to find a cure for the virus. After the virus finally runs its course through the town, the total number of deaths is calculated to be a whopping four hundred thirty-two citizens. Some, however, were lucky enough to survive, a special group of students included. You were one of them.
Basically, we'll be playing a group of teenagers who live in this city and, after they've gotten over the virus, find out that they have extraordinary gifts. What they decide to do with these special gifts are completely up to them. Maybe your character will become the next Black Lightning and use their abilities to fight crime, or maybe they will embrace their inner criminal and use their powers to cause mischief. Perhaps your character will keep everything on the down-low and continue to act as if everything is normal. It's all up to you.
Honestly, I'm kinda stuck on this sudden idea of the school bully developing some kind of power and instead of becoming a criminal like one would expect. He uses it instead to try and do a whole 180 with his life. Going from crook and jerk to somebody people can be proud of. In between using his power to make some quick cash in a legal sense.
