“Aw, come on, guys. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Arizon Flush! His rifts are topping the charts daily. He is truly solid, a revolutionary!” Cole was smiling and moving his shoulders to the rhythm.
“Are we still talking about the music?” Alik’s brow was furrowed in confusion.
“We should try to give this genre a chance. Maybe it takes awhile before we can appreciate it.” Evan was so diplomatic, it made me sick.
Or maybe I was feeling sick from the SUV ride. Or, and this was a stretch, it could have been the seven packages of powdered donuts I just inhaled. Maybe I’ll just lean my head back, close my eyes and take a nap.
I took a deep breath, relaxed my shoulders and tried to think of nothing. But wouldn’t you know, the moment I try to think of nothing, images of my mom flash in my mind. Mom tied up and being beaten. Her dark hair matted with blood. In my imagination there were voices yelling at her demanding information, threatening her with more pain if she didn’t give them what they wanted. And what did they want? Us. They wanted Alik, Evan and me.
I moaned. My poor mom. All she ever wanted was to help and protect, and now these monsters had her and wanted to use her to get to us. Well, they’re going to regret it, because when I get my hands on them they’re going to see the true meaning of “metahumans.” I was seething with anger just thinking about what I wanted to do to the swine holding my mom. Evan’s calm voice responded to my thoughts as if I’d spoken them out loud.
“We’ll find mom, Meg. We’ll find her and make it so that Williams guy never hurts her again. She must have known this day was coming all these years. That’s why she trained us to fight. She had been keeping track of each of our unique developments so she could help us hone our skills even more.
“Remember in her documents she chronicled how strong we were? How we didn’t injure like normal children. How much faster we healed than normal children.
“And as we each got older mom would play those games with us. She wrote about how she would test our intellectual quotients periodically and found we were way above average kids. She knew from the start we were different, but she never made us feel like freaks. She wanted us to develop free from fear of what society would think of or do to us.
“She had all those entries on each of us. Meg, she knew you had a heightened ability to feel and sense emotions. Your interpersonal skills were past intuitive, almost to the point of mind-reading. But because of the nature of your specific talent, you could get too caught up in the emotions of the moment to interpret clearly. That’s why you have a hard time coping when you’re upset. Your emotions are like a superconductor, processing and receiving at an astronomical rate.”
I was staring at Evan now and remembering what we had read in mom’s journals as clearly as if they were in front of me now. The rest of the SUV was quiet as we listened and applied Evan’s interpretation of mom’s notes to our own understanding of the situation.
“And you Evan,” Alik spoke up now. “She played those test games with you too and you blew them all out of the water. Your quantitative and qualitative scores were off the charts. Even those adaptive assessments, those without a ceiling, couldn’t give mom an accurate score because you found its ‘nonexistent’ ceiling. Your ability to learn and relate that knowledge to countless applications was like a plant’s ability to absorb sunlight and turn it in to food.
“Your only problem was that mom found your sheer logic somewhat robotic. You feel emotions, but your logical mind would override emotional reactions. You are the exact opposite of Meg.”
I was amazed at my brothers’ interpretations. They had summarized in two minutes what took us hours to read.
“Alik, mom said it took you longer to open up when she first brought us home.” It was my turn to speak. I had been looking at Alik with new eyes since first reading mom’s entries about him.
“You were so traumatized by The Institute and their ‘treatments,’ you would just curl up in a corner and cover your head with blankets for hours at a time. But once you started to trust mom, you would come out and be with us. You would play mom’s assessment games too though you didn’t speak much. She discovered through the nonverbal tests that your memory was phenomenal. Maybe that was why it took you so much longer to open up; because your memory of the traumas was so acute. You could remember every detail of what happened since you were given your first dose of the serum. Your recollection of the facility, the scientists, the smells, sounds, pain was as clear in your memory as if it had just happened.