That Strange Blonde Girl Part 1

    There was a young blonde girl named Lara who liked to keep her hair long.  It wasn’t all that unusual, except perhaps in her reasoning, which she kept secret.  She knew from a very young age that she could play with electricity - from electrical outlets, batteries, and even static electricity from all around her - without being harmed.  The long hair made it more spectacular in a darkened room.

    Most children would play with flashlights under the bed covers at night.  She would too - except she would take out the batteries and drain them by making them arc with each other.  Her parents often wondered why all the batteries in the house were dead, however, so she changed course to avoid suspicion.

    Which meant that next, she graduated to playing with lightbulbs, and small electrical appliances.  Occasionally she would burn out a bulb or a hair dryer, but she mastered it quickly enough that it attracted far less suspicion than the batteries.

    She couldn’t harness that much power, so it was more of a toy to her than anything harmful.  She never managed to round up enough to cause any damage.  As she later learned, it was because she didn’t really try.  She felt her unnatural talent was wrong somehow, something to be muted and hidden.

    What first prompted her to explore her unnatural talent further was her entry into high school.  She suddenly felt the need to differentiate herself instead of blending in.  So she started to experiment in her back yard.

    Her first attempt was both lucky and unlucky.  Lucky because she discovered that she had access to immense power.  Unlucky because the entire neighborhood heard the explosive expansion of heat and light associated with a sudden surge of electricity.  Immediately after, she ran and hid inside as police, firefighters, and power company workers searched for the phantom source of an explosion two-thirds of the neighborhood reported.

    But that instilled her with a new confidence.  She reinvented herself during the next two days, changing her clothing and look.  She started going to school in rock and roll tee-shirts, jeans, and boots, partly because she liked the look, and partly because she knew it scared away a lot of the people who might try to talk to her.

    She has no illusions about not being different.  Her strange abilities, while fun to play with, reminded her constantly that she was an outcast.  Her worst fear was being discovered.  Yet still, there was a certain amount of loneliness that came with being so different.  

    It made very little difference that she kept to herself in school, because even that left her the target of taunts and jokes.  She didn’t feel at home there at all, but her one refuge - at home - was about to be shaken as well.

    Around the same time, something began happening with her parents.  It used to be she was part of a typical family, or so she thought.  But as she grew into a teenager, they began fighting with each other - a lot.  She gathered from their arguments that the event which sparked it was a combination of something that just recently happened, and something that happened long ago, while she was still a little girl.  Only she began to understand that back then, when the first event happened, they kept their fights secret, and quieter.

    One evening, while she listened to her parents yelling downstairs, she was in her room playing with bolts of electricity which buzzed and crackled between her fingers, from hand to hand and finger to finger.  She was beginning to master fine control of it, so that she could regulate the power of it pretty accurately.  She wore jeans and a rock band tee-shirt from school earlier in the day, but the boots were lying on the floor, and she was in socks,

    That’s the moment she realized the power she had.  Whether overtly or not, she was stronger than the situation she was in.  She didn’t have to meekly listen to her parents argue, or put up with being picked on in school.

    Sometimes when a person becomes tired of the status quo and suddenly changes behavior and personality, people say they ‘snapped’.  But Lara believed, looking back upon this day, that it was the moment she achieved perfect clarity.  She put behind her denial, and fear, and though she was not yet ready for the world to know her secret, she didn’t have to keep herself under wraps anymore as well.

    Still in socks, Lara stormed downstairs, only the effect was rather muted on wall-to-wall carpet.  She headed into the living room where her parents, Nicolas and Violet were both yelling at once.  Her dark-haired father’s voice was loud, but her blonde mother’s soft voice cracked as she tried to force it beyond its normal soft limits.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Shut up!”  Lara finally yelled in her high but strong mid-teen voice.  It was enough to get their attention, because she hadn’t ever yelled at them before.  Or even barely talked to them while they were silently fuming.  “Shut...up!”, she repeated again in case they were thinking of continuing.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Lara, go back upstairs!  We’ll handle this.”  Violet angrily said.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No!”  she angrily replied.  Then she fired directly back at her mom.  “You go upstairs!  Dad, you go to the kitchen!  I’m going to talk to dad, and then I’m going to talk to you.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Lara--”  her dad tried to stop her.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Go!”  Lara yelled, this time her voice cracking.

    There was something in the girl’s wild eyes that left Violet shaken.  She quietly walked upstairs, stunned, with eyes wide.

    Her dad saw it too.  He looked almost fearful as he faced Lara in the kitchen.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What the hell is this fight about?”  Lara asked, her voice sounding scratchy after all the yelling.  She wasn’t used to it.  There was no answer at first, so she impatiently asked, “Well?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s...it’s adult stuff, Lara, you’re not old enough to understand.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know more than you think.”  she said, arms crossed angrily.  “Tell me the truth.  Because if you and mom divorce, I’m going to find out anyway, and then I’m going to really be angry.”

    There was what felt like an eternity of silence as Lara and her father faced off.  She could see something in his eyes, like a paradigm shift of thought, where he realized she wasn’t a little girl anymore.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I...did something I regret,”  he said, his eyes looking away from her, and toward the floor.  “I guess...I didn’t think.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You didn’t think, or you didn’t think you’d get caught?”  Lara asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A little of both,”  he admitted as he pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table, and sat down.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What did you do?” she asked angrily.  “I’m not going to calm down until you tell me, so you might as well get on with it.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I cheated, okay?”  he finally impatiently replied, only trying not to be loud enough for his wife to hear.  He then leaned forward and dropped his face into his hands.  “I made a horrible mistake.”

    Lara had always been smart, an avid reader, and she spent a lot of time observing people and relationships, especially at school.  She didn’t understand at the time that she was learning a lot that would come in handy at this moment.  Adults behaving badly were so eerily similar to teenagers.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then why are you fighting back?”  she asked.  “If you made a horrible mistake.”

    He looked up then, and his reddened eyes registered shock and surprise.  His sixteen year old daughter was making a lot of sense.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is that all you did, or is there more?”  she asked, almost accusingly.  She leaned over and tried to force eye contact when he didn’t answer right away.

    He rubbed his eyes and replied quietly, “More than once.”

    Lara started to notice that he was so ashamed that he couldn’t keep eye contact with her when he responded.  What she was unsure of was whether he was ashamed of himself, or just of talking to her.  So she went in for the kill.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“How can you have a teenage daughter and not respect women?”  she asked.  “How did you feel when one of your football game friends hit on me?”

    She referred to the two days a year that men from around the neighborhood would come by and visit, eat snacks, and watch a football game on their television.  It was only twice a year because there was a rotation among the group, and they would schedule whose house to watch a game in that week.  By the time scheduling conflicts and volunteer football parties were worked out, it came out to twice a year at Lara’s house.

    There was no answer to that question, but Lara didn’t really expect one.  She was leading into a really embarrassing comment Mr. Lannard from down the street made to her while he was getting more beer from the fridge at one of those meetings.  She dismissed it as both too much beer, and him being a jerk.  But that wasn’t the point.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You remember last year, when you threw Mr. Lannard out of your party for getting drunk and making a lewd comment about me?  Do you want to be like him?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No,”  her dad replied through the hands covering his face.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“While I talk to mom, you should leave,”  Lara told him.

    He looked up, and his eyes turned sad.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You should leave, and wait for her to call you back,”  Lara continued.  “She might not.  But if you wait, you will be showing respect.  And then, beg for her forgiveness.”

    He nodded slowly.  She was making even more sense.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And don’t touch anyone else while you wait,”  the teen angrily warned.

    The next stop for Lara was the bedroom upstairs.  She found her mother lying face down on her bed, sobbing.  Lara approached her, sat on the side of the bed, and squeezed her shoulder.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Mom, stop crying,”  she ordered her mother.  “I talked to dad.  I know what he did.  I told him to leave.”

    Violet stopped sobbing and raised her head, and then she looked shocked.  But she couldn’t find the words to speak.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, mom.  I told him to leave until you ask him to come back.”

    Violet replied quickly, almost babbling, “But what about...how will I pay the bills?  I don’t think I can--”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, mom, grow a spine!”  Lara responded angrily.  “You’re the one who’s a doctor, you make more money than he does.  We’ll survive whether he comes back or not.”

    Violet finally sat up, and then she nodded.  She said nothing, but she nodded.

    Lara felt there wasn’t much left to be said, so she went back downstairs.  Her dad left already, just as she asked.  Suddenly, she felt lonely and sad, so she returned to her room.

    She learned two lessons that day, that would affect her for the rest of her life.  How to be a hero; and that being a hero hurts.


TO BE CONTINUED
    


-- Story written and copyrighted (C) 2012 by Jason Froikin, and may not be 
--    reprinted without permission.  
-- Chronicles of a New World and all characters therein are property of 
--    Strike Two and Jason Froikin.