The classroom was quiet. The teacher walked between the rows of seats, handing out test papers. Her heels made a clack noise as they hit the floor.
Clark looked at the paper that had just plopped down onto his desk. He resisted the urge to sigh. He'd always done well in school, but chemistry was his weAkness. Every weekend he revised and did practice papers for hours, and he still struggled to get any higher than a B+.
'It's only a hundred marks.' Clark comforted himself silently.
After the final paper was handed out, the teacher sat back down at her desk. She scanned the room for any evidence of cheating.
"You may begin." She announced sternly.
Clark picked up his pen. He wrote his name and class number on the front of the paper. Then he turned to the first page.
The first question was easy. He'd come across it a dozen times in different practice papers. The first twenty or so were all simple ones, they hardly required any thinking.
The twenty third question was the first real hurdle he faced. Electrodes, copper sulfate; he couldn't understand why this information would ever be relevant to his life. He wanted to be an engineer, not a chemist.
Clark shook his head and looked up to the clock. It had only been ten minutes, he still had plenty of time.
'Fuck!'
A sudden sharp pain lanced through his head, but the potential embarassment of shouting out in the middle of an exam, outweighed his urge to scream.
He gritted his teeth and shut his eyes tightly. When the pain vanished a few seconds later, he sighed in relief.
Clark opened his eyes again. He was immediately met with the teacher's suspicious gaze boring a hole into his skull. He swallowed nervously and hurriedly looked down at his paper.
The pain had come on out of nowhere. All he'd been doing was staring idly at the back of the student in front of him. He remembered someone calling the student's name in the corridor, Mark, he was pretty sure.
Then, suddenly, his head felt like it was about to explode.
The headache had gone now, but he had an uncanny feeling that it had left something behind. There was something, some kind of energy or idea, hiding in a corner of his brain. If he concentrated, he felt that he might be able to reach out and touch it.
Clark forced himself to refocus on the paper. Billions of people got headaches every day, after an hour or two he'd forget all about the strange feeling and stop being insane and paranoid that something had been left behind in his head.
He already struggled to maintain a B average in chemistry. He didn't need to drop down to a C just because he got distracted by a headache.
Tests had a unique way of making people lose track of time. It wasn't long until Clark forgot about the headache and was immersed in answering the questions.
When the timer went off to signal the end of the test, he sighed with relief and put his pen down on the desk. The questions hadn't been easy, but he felt 70-80% sure that he'd gotten at least a B.
"Remain in your seats until I have collected your papers. Do not discuss the answers with anyone not in this class, some of your peers will not be sitting the test until tomorrow." The teacher announced sternly.
She rose up from her desk and unhurriedly collected in the papers. She could see that some of the students were almost shaking from their eagerness to leave, but she refused to rush.
Once the final paper was collected in, she declared, "You may all leave. Quietly."
The last bit of her sentence was almost entirely ignored. Students rushed out from their chairs and grabbed their bags from the back of the room. Phones were hastily switched off silent and powered on.
Clark felt relaxed in a way that only followed something extremely stressful. The feeling wouldn't last, but he would enjoy it while it did.
He didn't race out of the classroom like some of his peers who were already crafting texts discussing the test. His phone didn't have the same hold over him as it did most of his class.
He'd talk about how the test had gone with his friends before class tomorrrow, and his parents were guaranteed to ask him about it over dinner.
Clark slung his backpack over his shoulder. As he walked out of the classroom, he caught sight of the jacket belonging to the student sat in front of him, dissapear around the corner.
Clark headed through the hallways. He checked the time on his phone, the bus wasn't arriving for another twenty minutes.
'Huh?'
Now that he was no longer battling his way through questions, Clark could allow his thoughts to wander freely. He'd been walking for less than a minute when his thoughts wandered back to the strange headache.
Even stranger, the feeling that something was left behind in his head, hadn't gone away. If anything, it felt more tangible than it had before.
It was right there. He could percieve its existence in the same way that he knew where his nose was on his face.
'Fuck, I hope it's not a tumour or something!' Clark thought to himself worriedly.
He arrived to the bus stop and sat down. He barely remembered the walk from his classroom to where he was now. His head was a mess of jumbled theories about what the hell was going on inside his skull.
English was his best subject, but he'd always done decently in biology. He knew that there were a thousand different ways that the brain could go wrong. A tiny tumour, just the size of a pea, could potentially be fatal.
If he was already starting to experience side effects, then the tumour had obviously grown large enough to start causing damage. Brain surgery was unimaginably complex, a single error could leave him paralysed for life or breathing through a tube.
"Stop it!" Clark said suddenly. He was already on the bus.
A few heads turned and looked at him weirdly. After a few seconds, they went back to looking at their phones or out the window.
Clark took a deep breath. He checked the time on his phone again. Without realising, he'd spent an entire half-hour catastrophising wildly.
He wasn't a doctor, or a brain surgeon, he currently had no idea what was going on his head. For all he knew, it could just be a simple migraine.
'Such an idiot.' Clark thought to himself. He almost couldn't believe how quickly he'd begun to panic.
The scenery outside the window suddenly became immensely familiar. Clark leaped to his feet and raced to the front of the bus. The driver rolled his eyes and pressed a button to re-open the doors that had just shut.
"Thank you!" Clark called out. He recieved a low grunt from the driver in response.
It wasn't far to his house, he completed the journey at a fast walk.
Both of Clark's parents were still at work. He was the only one in the house. Normally he'd open the cupboards and find a snack, but the strange lingering sensation from the headache stole his appetite.
There couldn't possibly be anything inside his head. It was a delusion, or a symptom of a disease or tumour. The worst thing he could possibly do for an imaginary sensation was to feed it with more attention.
Clark knew all of this, but he couldn't stop himself. It just felt so real!
He closed his eyes. The sensation was hiding on some metaphysical boundary. When he focused, it became clearer. He kept focusing, drawing it out from the corner of his mind and into the forefront.
All of a sudden, Clark knew that he'd succeeded. He just knew it, inexplicably. The sensation had crossed over from being just a thought and become something real in the material world.
"What the fuck?"
Clark caught sight of his reflection in the fridge. Standing in his house, by the countertop was a complete stranger. Or not quite, it was the boy who'd been sat in front of him in chemistry class.
Clark gawked at his reflection. He turned around several times, staring at himself from every angle.
He was about as tall as Mark, but slightly chubbier. His clothes fit looser than before. After hesitating for a moment, he pulled his trousers forwards and looked down.
'Huh, about the same.' Clark thought to himself.
"This is so-"
Clark froze mid sentence. He'd went to open the refrigerator, like he'd done a million times before. But instead of opening the door, he'd crushed the handle completely.
He let go awkwardly. Broken shards of metal sprinkled over the floor.
He hadn't used any more force than normal, he hadn't tried to break anything, but somehow he'd crumpled metal with his bare hands.
'Mark has superpowers?' The thought struck him suddenly.
A moment later, another thought struck him with even greater intensity.
'I have superpowers?!'
Clark took a deep breath for what felt like the hundredth time of the day. The casuallness with which he'd destroyed the fridge door handle showed that the normal-looking Mark clearly wasn't so normal.
He had no idea how a sudden headache could lead to superpowers, but somehow, it had. The only other option was that he was having the most vivid dream of his entire life.
'This isn't the right place to do this. I can't keep destroying the kitchen.' Clark thought to himself.
When he'd focused, the sensation in his head had emerged into reality. Since he could take it out, then surely he could put it back in as well.
Clark focused all his attention on the sensation. Now that he'd drawn it out into the real world, he felt it far more acutely. To his relief, he was able to slowly push it back into where it had flowed out from.
He looked at his reflection in the fridge again. He was back to being regular Clark. He was immensely relieved that he could turn back, it would've been hellish to spend his entire life looking like a completely different person.
The clock on the wall showed 6pm. In a half hour, his parents would get home from work.
Clark wasn't going to keep something like superpowers secret from his parents. They'd always told him that they would love him no matter what. He believed it. They'd probably never expected that they'd have to one day talk to him about superpowers.
It probably would've been easier for them if he'd told them he wanted to become a goth or get a face tattoo.
'This is my chance!'
Clark opened the fridge using what remained of the door handle. He grabbed a sports drink. Then, he rushed out the door.
There was a forest a ten minute walk from the house. If he ran it would only take 5.
Clark breathed heavily. He wasn't unfit, he went for a run a few times a week, but he wasn't used to sprinting at full pace. It only took him three minutes to make it to the edge of the forest.
Clark took a swig from the sports drink. The artificial orange flavour somehow made him feel immediately refreshed.
"Okay, try it again." He whispered to himself.
He concentrated on the sensation. This time, it responded instantly. He turned over his forearm, staring wide-eyed at the change in its appearance. He held up the screen of his phone to his face. Once again, he was Mark.
Clark decided to start with something easy. He slowly reached out to the trunk of the tree in front of him. He just wanted to press on it lightly. If he could crumple metal, he could surely leave a small imprint in wood.
Bang!
His hand burst out through the other side of the tree.
A moment later, the tree began to creak violently. The trunk above where Clark had shattered started to fall. The birds that were resting on the branches screeched noisily in protest.
'Shit!' Clark thought to himself.
Without thinking, he leaped into the air to catch the falling tree. No one usually came to the forest, but he still didn't want anyone to come looking when they heard a tree fall.
Clark caught the tree steadily in his arms. He sighed with relief.
Then, his eyes bulged. His feet weren't on the floor. He was floating. There was a whole two, maybe three feet, between him and the ground.
"What the fuck?" He whispered.
He hadn't meant to fly. He could feel that there was strange non-physical quality that came out when he assumed Mark's form, but he hadn't realised that it was flight.
He was like a stranger in a new body. The body could still do everything it always could, but he had no idea how to use it.
Clark tugged on the metaphysical muscle that had propelled him into the air. At a speed faster than any human could see, he flew down back towards earth. He didn't manage to stop himself until he was buried up to his waist in the dirt.
"I've got to get better at this." He mumbled to himself.