Prism: Origins
I
“You're a mutant?”
“It's not a big deal.”
“Not a – you’re glowing in the dark!”
“Yes.”
“Are you dangerous?” That caught her off guard. “No.” She spoke sincerely, but the question had her mind racing – am I? Could I be?
“So your power is – what? You’re a lightbulb?”
“Among other things.” Aimee stared. She was still standing uncomfortably far away, frozen, tense. Jordan thought it looked like she had come face to face with a mountain lion and resolved not to make any sudden movements.
“But this hasn’t happened before.” Jordan sighed again, impatiently this time. Her powers, for the most part, didn’t bother her, but having to explain them over and over again to faces painted with hatred or terror or both was always a nuisance.
“My body stores energy. Unless I let it out, I turn into a glow stick. Today I forgot. It’s sort of like how you bloat and fart all night every time we order pizza.”
“I do not—“ Aimee began, but she scoffed, grinning and loosening up slightly when she caught Jordan’s smirk. “Show me.” Jordan shrugged, raised her left hand and snapped her fingers, releasing a brilliant flash of white light. She still glowed slightly afterwards, just enough so the two could see each other in the dark. She stared at her roommate with a hardened expression, anticipating a freakout, but, shockingly, Aimee was nonplussed.
“That’s it?”
“What did you think I was going to do, explode?”
“Well, yeah. There’s a girl two floors down who was breathing fire in her sleep. Her roommate woke up with her eyebrows singed off.”
“That’s how that happened? I thought she just shaved them!” Aimee was laughing now and Jordan wondered if they were back to normal, if she could move yet.
“So how long have you known?”
“I was twelve the first time. It really didn’t bother me as much as it probably should have. Mostly just useful for reading in the dark.” Aimee was watching her curiously but remained silent. Jokes didn’t seem to be working, so Jordan went for earnestness instead. “Hey, could you not tell anyone? I’m not embarrassed, but you know how some of the girls can be…” At this, Aimee broke into a weak, but reassuring smile. “Of course I won’t. Just promise I can keep my eyebrows.”
“Stay out of my Lucky Charms and we have a deal.” With another closed smile, Aimee turned and got back into her bed. Jordan followed suit, but lay down wide awake, staring at the wall. Once Aimee was out, she let panic overwhelm her and sat up hugging her knees for a while, too shaken and terrified to sleep.
II
“Hey.” Jordan closed her dormitory’s door behind her and set her bag and keys down on the hall table, inhaling and exhaling slowly, experiencing the sinking feeling that her roommate and her friends had just finished talking about her. She sat her on bed and turned towards them, their faces confirming her fear, but she tried to appear unfazed.
“I fell asleep in class again. Luckily the professor has a wandering eye so I get a free pass,” she joked, gesturing at her almost unacceptably low-cut top. Silence. It wasn’t difficult to guess exactly what their conversation had been about and she decided to attack it head-on.
“You told them.” Silence, again, but tenser this time. Jordan thought to herself what a fool she’d been to think this would ever end well and felt the paralyzing fear creep up over her again – this time tinted with righteous indignation.
“So that’s why the girl next to me got up and moved when I sat by her? Exactly how many people have you told? What the fuck, Aimee?” At this, Aimee finally spoke.
“I had to tell someone, you could be dangerous!” Jordan noted her friends looking at her as if she were a puddle of vomit,, but didn’t have a thought to spare for them at the moment.
“I told you I wasn’t. I also asked you to keep it between us.” She made sure her voice was icy and incisive, determined to hide her emotions and deal as much damage as possible. Yet again, silence, but this time Jordan wasn’t annoyed – rather, the guilty looks on her friends faces gave her a savage sort of satisfaction as she realized that she was now in control.
“I wasn’t lying when I told you I wasn’t dangerous. But now you’ve outed me and probably put me in danger. Now you have an enemy.” Jordan didn’t bother sticking around to gauge their reactions – she could guess. She stood up, grabbed her stuff and walked out, holding her tears back and her head high.
III
Jordan Shaw takes a very long time to get ready in the morning. This is something she has long since accepted about herself in spite of it becoming the butt of a few too many jokes for her liking. While trying to pin her bangs back perfectly, she noticed that reapplying her makeup three times had made her late for class; she took a split second to look at herself in the mirror, bobby pin still between her teeth, and reexamine her life choices before shaking the thought out of her mind and getting back to work. The fact, she reflected as she slid the pin into her hair, is that every day is a war against the world – even more so than usual recently – and I fully intend to wear the best armor.
After some final touch-ups, she packed the necessities into her bag – Hermès, naturally – and walked into her bedroom, impossibly high heels clacking, saddened but not entirely surprised to see her roommate was still avoiding eye contact. As much as it stung that none of her friends spoke to her anymore, she was resolute to not let them win, and so she put her best bitch face on and strode out of the room.
On the walk from her typically dull and alienating class to her preferred café, she considered again her unyielding devotion to her appearance. Was there really anyone worth dressing up for anymore? She had stupidly decided to go to an all-girls university, so news traveled fast. Her friends ignored her, other students wouldn’t sit within five feet of her. She’d noted a change in her professors’ attitudes, as well, as hard as they worked to hide it, but she smirked at this thought – no matter how strong their prejudices, they couldn’t mark down her consistently excellent coursework. And she’d even catch lingering, hateful glances or uncomfortable body language from townspeople now and then; Northampton was smaller and more conservative than she was accustomed to. She felt almost as if she’d been blacklisted, been made an outcast, a pariah – then again, she thought, maybe that’s the best reason to keep up appearances.
Jordan paid for her usual complicated latte and sat down at the corner table; even in snow, even in six-inch heels, she always made the trek to what she fondly considered her hideaway. She felt functional, working adults were more her kind of people, and appreciated the respite from what she not-so-fondly considered the barbaric social cesspool that is Smith College. Still, she’d sensed a trace of ice in the barista’s eyes as he handed over her change without a word, and so she decided to keep her head down in a textbook rather than attempt to socialize.
She lost track of the time and her surroundings as she read up on Russian art until she noticed a pair of jeans approach her out of the corner of her eye.
“Hi, ” said a deep, gravely male voice.
“I’m not interested,” she answered almost reflexively, hardly letting him finish. Much to her displeasure, he sat down at her table regardless. She made a point of taking her sweet time to look up at him and intended to glare until he went away, but was even more displeased to find he was incredibly handsome – slightly older than her, tall, fit, with dark, perfectly tousled hair, a jawline that could cut diamond, and the kind of oceanic blue eyes she thought only existed in magazines.. She regained composure as quickly as she could, but still couldn’t help staring.
“Can I help you?”
“Maybe. You’re Jordan Shaw?”
“Maybe,” she replied, folding her arms and crossing her legs. She wanted to scowl, but something in his manner was keeping her off guard. She closed her book and tried to appear closed-off and superior, fighting hard to look at anything but his eyes. “What do you want?” At this, he leaned in closer, smiling slightly.
“I heard about your gifts. And I have a proposition for you.”
IV
“Focus.”
“I am focusing.”
“No, you’re not.”
Jordan opened her mouth, but bit back her retort. She was standing in a small clearing in the woods somewhere – she’d been blindfolded for the drive – with her arms out, hands folded together, and thumbs up and index fingers out, making a pistol shape at a glass bottle a few yards in front of her. Victor stood next to her, a hand on her tense shoulder, and a few others she vaguely recognized from past meetings surrounded them, watching interestedly. She could feel the heat of a large floodlight on her back.
Victor moved behind her and lined his arms up with hers, holding her wrists steady and aiming her fingers at her target, close enough that she felt his warm breath on her hair. To her immense surprise, Jordan didn’t even attempt to shake him off; she had never been the type to let a man take charge. Tall, dark, and handsome, she thought to herself. Such a cliché. This time he whispered right into her ear:
“Focus.” And she did. Narrowing her eyes, breathing deep, emptying her mind, she envisioned the heat from the floodlight channeling through her, along her arms and into her fingertips like someone else in the group (Corona? Matchstick? some similarly idiotic name) had demonstrated – and it clicked. She watched with terror and amazement as a blinding pink ball of energy formed around her fingers. Startled, she lost her focus and fired, missing by several feet and soaring into a nearby tree; the force knocked her backwards and she heard whooping and laughing from behind her. She felt herself lifted back onto her feet and saw, through the wisps of brown hair in her eyes, that she had left a sizzling crater the size of a cannonball in the tree trunk. She turned wide-eyed and open-mouthed to Victor, not even bothering to dust herself off first, then broke into a malevolent grin that he flashed back at her.
“How did that feel?”
“Back up. I’m trying again.”
Jordan moved one leg back and grounded herself, leaning slightly forward, and closed her eyes after taking aim at the bottle. Once more she emptied her mind, and once more she visualized the energy from the floodlight seeping into her - she pushed any traces of panic aside and fired, shattering the bottle and igniting the bench beneath it. She realized she must look properly manic, beaming with her hair in her face, and so tried to compose herself, but couldn’t quash the satisfaction and power she felt – until Victor kissed her on the cheek and an entirely new feeling took over. She grinned bemusedly at his impossibly beautiful face before being crowded by the rest of the group who were patting her on the back and saying things she wasn’t quite hearing.
“You’ll be able to do a lot more than that soon enough,” he said, and as always Jordan felt as if he were talking only to her in spite of the dozen people around them. He beckoned for her to sit with him on a fallen trunk.
“Until now I’ve only been using that to turn the lights off.”
“Most of us never discover our potential without someone there to teach us.”
“So why are you only helping me?” He responded only by putting a hand over hers. Jordan reminded herself that in her proper state of mind, the silence would have been suspicious, but she was still too buzzed to think clearly and rather than dwell on it she rest her head on his shoulder, grinning stupidly, until he started to stand up.
“Want to try something else?” She watched, bewildered, as he moved in front of the melting glass bottle.
“What?”
“Try me.”
Jordan blinked. “Are you kidding?”
“You won’t learn if you don’t push yourself.”
“To blow you up?”
Victor smiled. Jordan still couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking. She turned to walk away, but realized their group had formed a semi-circle behind her, blocking her from leaving. She rolled her eyes and tried to push her way through regardless, then --
WHAM.
She was knocked off her feet by a telekinetic blast, not strong enough to really hurt but fast enough to catch her off guard, and broke her fall with her hands. After taking a second to catch her breath she staggered to her feet and glared at Victor.
“You won’t kill me. Just try it.” Jordan laughed mirthlessly, inwardly starting to panic as she realized there was no way out.
“You people are crazy.” Victor looked at her solemnly.
“Five minutes ago you were loving this. You have power, and I know you want to use it.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You don’t know where we are.”
“I don’t care.” To her surprise, the group parted and let her pass. She took made it a few feet before her entire body seized up; she gasped as she felt herself lifted from the ground and turned around towards Victor, whose eyes had turned jet-black and his expression malicious - he was controlling her like a marionette.
“You’ll never know what you’re really capable of from practicing on bottles,” he said. “You need to be challenged.”
Jordan began thrashing around, flailing her legs and struggling ferociously to release herself from his psychic grip; Victor continued to egg her on as her limbs were pinned to her sides. She felt her blood boil with what she thought was rage - until she looked down to see her entire body was glowing faintly. Her vision clouded as she instinctively directed energy towards her eyes, and she barely noticed Victor beaming maniacally at her before she released a dazzling beam that launched him backwards into a tree.
With his concentration broken his hold on her was relinquished and she fell to her hands and knees; she heard the others closing in around her but aimed the beam at their legs, and sickening cracks echoed throughout the clearing as she blasted them away. She finally got to her feet and, still glowing, with tears and smoke in her eyes, surveyed the destruction with a mix of savage pleasure and sheer terror before running back to the car, stuck on one thing:
