2015 – Barry’s twelfth grade

  School reports didn’t shine so bright in Barry Masquevert’s teenage life but, in truth, he didn’t hate school at all. It was a nice place, much simpler than the other places outside of school in his life. Much simpler than home where he was witnessing his father getting involved into shadier and shadier deals and risking to get noticed by the police. Barry wanted so much to use his superpowers to rob a bank, fix his father’s financial troubles, but that was not what his father had raised him to do, so it was a pretty intricate internal conflict in his young person.

  What if he had brought a hundred thousand dollars, pretended it had been some kind of lottery, and saved his dad this way, kept him out of trouble? In the end, this relief would literally be a farce, a theft. It was all going back to the nanosecond where Mr Masquevert had finally located his baby boy, about to be registered into social services, and had claimed his son. He had not done so and worked so hard and taken so much shit and he was not struggling so immensely at the moment to encourage his boy to rob a bank and take money from people who were just as innocent as he or in similar predicaments as his. Barry cursed his father for the complicated message his upbringing created.

  Consequently, school was pretty nice. It was also nicer than those lonely nights when he sat on top of a building in the cold, dressed all in black, wearing a ski mask, waiting for sounds and electricity to reach him from the city. Sometimes, there would be something he could do to make sure a very bad thing didn’t happen to an unfortunate individual, distracted before crossing a street, about to fall to their death because they didn’t see there was a big hole next. He saved some lives, but no one knew it. He was alone, cold, sleepy, tired, not doing his homework. He hated it.

  And then, when he was finally recruited by the Team, met Hobbes and Marlene and George and all the clique, school had also been a simpler place than the mesmerizing superhero cave Alphonse had carved out of a massive rock and cliff towering the main artificial lake of the suburbs, filling it with high tech toys and an overall feeling of imminent danger.

  His peers were easier to interact with than those other mutants, some of them being a hundred years old or more, a group within which he felt a bit out of place for a long time. They seemed to have everything figured out but he couldn’t trust them, not yet.

  At school, all one had to do was really the bare minimum. He liked to do just that, aim at passing whatever classes he had, win at not getting caught falling asleep during a lesson, and the rest of the time, he enjoyed the normal high school backstage stuff: hanging out, joking around, jumping around, trespassing, doing drugs under the football field bleachers, hitting on girls, vandalizing property, driving teachers crazy when he was having a bad day and looking for someone to pay.

  Barry loved to attract attention to himself, which, he saw, was not too bonkers to decode, in the position that was his. He didn’t just love it, he needed it preciously. Yes, he was doing all these things, secretly improving the life quality of the citizens of his town and the city M nearby, but it was all a secret. No one knew. And it was really out of the kindness of his heart, out of the values his father had made sprout inside of him, that he was doing so, because he would have a hundred times better enjoyed playing video games or watching porn after school than dressing like a ninja and pacing the streets to prevent crime. He felt like his powers deserved to be used for good.

  So, when at school, he would be noticed, and because he was not a gifted scholar, the noticing would have to be about whatever else he could project. Mostly bad. At the bottom of his heart, Barry was aware teachers didn’t hate him, and no one from the staff was stupid enough to think he was a bad kid but, in the end, teachers, Principal, assistants, janitors, guards, secretaries would all agree he was simply and banally a little shit and a pain in the ass. It was good enough.

  The thing he was most looking forward to when waking up too late and sleep deprived every morning was, number one: that girl or that other girl who he would meet in the restroom or under the staircase, and make out with. There were just so many of them, all of them drop-dead gorgeous, their bodies a playground of delights every time, and they fainted like flies in front of him, effortlessly! The way they looked at him, masticated on their bubble gums in front of him, bent their waists in front of him, everything was the Call of the Wild. Barry remembered that he had read a book with that very title before, for English Literature class, and that the story had nothing to do with being a horny teenager in front of a crowd of temptations, but he liked that name a lot.

  Number two: his buddies, but he had to rethink that. He mostly liked James, who was always bringing the pills from his parents’ cabinet and brought up the most improbable topics to discuss while he was high or just sleepy. Otherwise, his schoolmates were pretty boring, and navigating lives that were so different from his that he didn’t easily feel connected to them. Robortor, George, would be his first friend, with time, but, at school, he hung out with some boys, some girls, especially the ones who had some recreational resources up their sleeves, innate or stolen, or both.

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  Number three: there was his Geography teacher, Ms White. He was starting to really be into her, second year of high school. He opened his eyes to his alarm clock and she was the first thing he thought about, although that feeling in itself gave him cause for wonder. The strident ring of the alarm would slowly enter his ears, the light of day from the window sliding through his eyelids, and then he would think: Ms White. She wasn’t motivation enough for him to arrive in class on time every day, no, she was more than that. She was the reason he just plainly got out of bed and went to school, period. For that reason, she should really have held the first position on his list of School Fun Things.

  Yes, number one, there were the hot girls, cheerleaders, even the timid girls from band who were not wearing underwear under their uniform, but they always behaved the same. And his friends, yes, they were amusing, they were a nice group of pirates, troublemakers, but he could always feel the distance between them when he couldn’t attend such or such party, such session of driving around drinking cheap bear and doing donuts on parking lots because he had his duties. He was fond of his friends but he wished he could have shared his secrets with them, made true connections with them.

  They had jokes, prescription medication misplaced from their family bathrooms, but they were always the same pleasantries and the same drugs. Skipping a day of school or a month or a year and returning after a long absence, of bolting through time with speed approaching the sacred number of light enough –which he began to suspect was possible early enough, just before he found his Team, and which filled his heart with dark dread— changing the velocity time spent itself, he would have found the same environment the next day, the next decade, or the one before. Nothing truly missed, he would have only had to pretend to teachers he cared about catching up on lessons.

  But with Ms White, it was different : who knew what the day would bring? Every day, content was unique, revealed, rare, radiating. Unpredictable.

  For that reason, he rolled himself out of bed, showered, almost never, brushed his teeth, most of the time, and drove his car to school every day. What was he going to do to her today? He didn’t know, and it was a wonderful feeling. She could appear at anytime, in the corridor, he could bump into her in the hall, and he would certainly make sure he was ditching Ethics to sit on the lunch bench with her. She was unpredictable but, most importantly, he felt unpredictable when she was around. Something she triggered in him always fascinated him : a surprise, every new day. An improvisation, a rush, an opportunity. She was his muse.

  And, for the first three years of his high school life, he had also sat in her class, every day but Wednesday. The thought shook his neurons into place in the morning, running late, gathering some clothes, cursing the clock on the wall, grabbing a toast or just drinking milk from the bottle as breakfast before leaving the house. Sometimes, his father was back, from his night shift, and had made the effort to stay up an extra hour so they would have a small chat before it was school time for Barry and sleepy time for Mr Masquevert.

  Handing him the milk carton, his father did his best to make some chat happen those days, but it was quite difficult for Barry, as all the roles he was juggling in his life left him unsure about how to be a son to this mysterious complex man who had raised him alone. “You’re in love or something?” Dennis Masquevert asked one morning.

  “Dad! Why do you ask that?” Barry brushed him off, gulping some milk, grabbing a Capri Sun juice pocket for his lunch.

  “You are in love with a girl at school!” his dad exclaimed, sitting at the table and smoking, a glass of water in front of him, “otherwise, why would you rise” he looked down at his watch, “almost on time and be so…. Giddied up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I gather from meeting with your teachers you are not very invested in academics, Barry” Barry shrugged, doing his best to act as a normal teenager, knowing all his dad would have to say would be: “just keep up as best you can with English, Math, History, Geography, that’s all I ask of you, okay?”

  He replaced the cap on the milk carton, “I’m not in love with anyone, dad. Everyone at school is so boring”

  “Right. You know when I say a girl, I don‘t mind if you’re into a guy either, you understand? Love is love”

  “DAD!” Barry shouted, flailing to his car

  His father watched him from the doorstep, the glass of water in his hands, a cute smile on his face: “you are bleeding love, my son! It is a Leona Lewis song, you know that?”

  “What the f—” he waved exaggeratedly at his dad, put the car in reverse, tires screeching against the pavement as he fled the house to a safer destination where constant interrogation wasn’t taking place. Bleeding Love? Who the fuck was Leona Lewis.

  Was he in love with Ms White? The question would haunt him, delightfully, every day even beyond graduation. He didn’t care what it was, he just loved it. Wasn’t he allowed to just bask in something nice, for once, something uncomplicated, innocent, just that one time? Yield into some harmless fun? Yes, you are allowed, motherfucker, he would tell himself while driving down the road, parking his car on the student’s lot, you are allowed. He looked at his reflection in the rear view mirror: a bit tired looking, greasy hair, but a fucking movie star, that’s what he was. He walked into school, late, like a conqueror. And sat in the middle of the Geography class with immense joy in his heart.