Chapter 1

I shook my head. "No, all I'm saying is that Quicksilver wouldn't be able to punch things at that kind of speed without breaking his arms and hands, so he must be invincible. That's why it doesn't make sense that he can get hurt."

Eric threw up his hands in frustration. "Of all the plot holes and inconsistencies in Age of Ultron, that's the one you care most about?"

I thought for a second. "Pretty much. Super speed without invincibility would suck, so yeah."

"Hey, that's our turn." Eric pointed up ahead.

I flipped the signal on and tried to calm myself; I felt strangely nervous. "Ready for high school?" I grinned.

Eric puffed out his cheeks and let out a breath. "Guess so."

Suddenly, a car flew through the stop sign on their side, turning in front of me and cutting me off. I had to slam on the brakes. Jeez, I'd only been driving for a few months and I'd already nearly gotten into two accidents. Maybe I should've waited to get my license, like everyone else. I'd had to stretch the truth quite a bit to the DMV people, saying how difficult it was to get to my soccer practices and to school on time without being able to drive myself, in order for them to grant me an early provisional license. Strictly speaking, I also wasn't exactly supposed to be driving Eric around, as he wasn't an adult, but what's life without a little risk?

"Kinda looks like a prison after the renovation." I noted as the school came into view. The Crofton Park school board had designated over a hundred million dollars for CPHS's renovation, replacing all the old concrete walls with what looked like corrugated steel and adding miles of windows covered by fixed metal blinds.

"Bet it's gonna feel like one too," Eric groaned, "You sure it's not too late to skip school and drive to Canada?"

Ignoring Eric, I found my designated parking spot and maneuvered my car into it with some difficulty. I had only recently started driving -- I had been allowed to get my license early so I could drive myself to school and soccer practice -- so I wasn't very experienced at parking yet.

Getting out of the car, I stretched and yawned. The drive wasn't too long: only 20 minutes or so from my house, including the stop to pick up Eric from his house. I craned down to check my reflection on the mirror and make sure I hadn't gotten uglier during my commute.

Yup, my hazel eyes looked back at me while I straightened my shirt, a little small on my tall frame, and I pulled my belt tighter before checking the time on my phone. There was a text from my mom.

Have a great first day of school, honey! Tell Eric I said hi. Love, mom.

I typed out a quick reply and started walking toward the school.

"Yo, Chris!" Eric laughed. "Forgetting something?" He held out the duffel bag that contained all my soccer stuff. "You'd think that with your memory, you wouldn't forget stuff like this."

I snatched it from his hand, laughing. "You know it doesn't work like that, dude. My mom says 'hi', by the way."

He was referring to my near-perfect recall. For as long as I could remember, I've been able to remember everything I put my mind to and nearly everything else, too. Last year, Eric liked to test me by having me memorize twenty-digit strings of numbers, which got kind of annoying after a while. He also had a tendency to call me various obscenities in Spanish, something that I'd picked up from him over the years. Eric himself was from Crofton Park, but his dad was from Valencia and his mom was from Barcelona, so he'd had a very cultured upbringing. Both of his parents taught in the language department at the local University.

I don't know where this ability to effortlessly remember things came from --my parents don't have it and neither does my brother-- but it's really come in handy in school: I've never studied for a test. I don't have to. I remember everything the teacher says. I mostly use my memory to remember stupid stuff, though, like the fact that hippo milk is pink, or that Will Ferrell is from Irvine, California, or that the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. But hey, I kick ass at Trivial Pursuit!

Anyway, Eric and I ambled up the hill to school, falling in rank with the rest of the students dragging themselves onward. CPHS has about 2000 students, which may seem like a lot for a college town of about 75,000 people, but it's the only high school in town. I guess Crofton Park was just short of having enough people to warrant building another high school. It would probably feel more crowded if the school weren't massive: its three floors on each of three buildings took took up over half a million square feet.

"Holy shit!" I exclaimed a little too loudly. "Is that Sara Ingram?" I pointed ahead, slightly to our right, at an attractive buxom girl with dirty-blonde hair who was standing near the doors to the school.

"Yeah," Eric said.

"She looks, um, different." I remarked, surprised.

"Tetas grandes." Eric confirmed, extending his hands in to fondle imaginary tits and closing his eyes for a moment.

I laughed. "Man, I expected that she would've changed, but not that much." I had gone to a private school called Redwood Preparatory School from preschool up to this year, and Sara had gone to the same school until seventh grade, when she left to go to public middle school. Eric had done the same, but I managed to keep in touch with him, unlike with Sara.

We walked to homeroom and sat through announcements and then Mrs. Armstrong reading a long list of school rules before we were dismissed to go to first period. Eric and I grabbed our stuff and checked our complimentary first-week maps to find out where Ms. Myers's classroom was before stepping out into the hall.

Then, a voice came from behind us. "Chris! Eric!"

We turned to find the Gray brothers waving at us. For identical twins, they couldn't have been more different. Marty was laid-back, the closest person you could find to a surfer dude in Crofton Park, his wild hair held in place by a skinny white headband, his usual combo of a worn t-shirt and longboard shorts both loose-fitting. Daniel had a very professional-looking crew cut that matched his slightly anal attitude about school. He wore khaki shorts and a button-down shirt, both neatly pressed. For all their differences, the two did have some similarities: they were both cross country fanatics and loved outdoor activities like hunting and fishing. Being from the deep south, they had gotten a lot of time outdoors before moving here.

"Where y'all headed?" Marty drawled, greeting Eric and I with high fives.

"History with Myers." I answered, cringing at the prospect. Cynthia Myers was well-known around Crofton Park for being one of the toughest, but most effective teachers at CPHS.

"Hey, same." Daniel smiled. "Looks like we can all cheat off of Chris this year!"

"Whatever." I retorted lazily, marching off to class.

We arrived a minute or two before the bell rang for the beginning of first period. There were post-it notes with our names on them on the desks, and as I looked for mine, Eric motioned toward the front. "Edwards should be up there, Chris." He sat down at "Rivera" and took out a pencil.

"Edwards?" Ms. Myers asked. "As in Andrew Edwards?"

"Um, yeah." I said. "He's my brother."

"Mm." She nodded knowingly. "You look like him. Is he still playing baseball?"

"Yeah, he's at UCLA now." I answered.

"Well, let's hope you pay closer attention in class than he did." She said sternly, but with a tinge of humor.

"Yes, ma'am." I agreed seriously. Andrew had been captain of the baseball team and prom king, but hadn't had the same success in academics, probably due to his penchant for partying.

When the bell rang, Ms. Myers walked to the front of her room, where she had a beat-up wooden podium.

"I assume you all did the summer assignment," she began. We certainly had. That damn thing took me a whole week to finish: we had to take notes on everything that happened in the U.S. from the migration of ancient peoples across the Bering Strait to the beginning of the colonial period. The actual course material started at the end of that period, but apparently Myers wanted us to know a lot of background information. "So," she continued, "take out a piece of paper and number it from one to twenty."

A quiz. She was giving a quiz on the first day. The rumors were true: she was a bitch.

The room echoed with the groans of about thirty students (Myers's classes were always packed for some reason that no one had been able to explain to me) and backpacks being unzipped. I slammed a piece of paper on my desk and dropped a pencil on top of it. I wasn't actually worried about the quiz, as I remembered all the material, but I was still incensed that she would put all the other students through this.

"Question one: what is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the U.S.?"

I scrawled "St. Augustine" on my paper and waited for the next question. While I waited, I looked around the room. As I had suspected, my fellow students were in varying states of distress, particularly Sara, who was sitting two seats to my right and twisting her hair tensely. I met Eric's eyes as he looked forward from the back of the room and he raised his eyebrows, mouthing "Help me!" and clutching at his heart. I grinned and looked back at my paper before Ms. Myers noticed me.

The remaining questions weren't much harder and we were done before too long. Foolishly, I thought that that might be the end of serious work for the day, but Ms. Myers made us take out our notebooks before launching into a lecture about early Americans.

My pencil was a blur for the next thirty minutes as I furiously took notes. I ordinarily wouldn't bother, but I'd heard that Ms. Myers checked notebooks to make sure students were keeping up with work.

Eventually, the bell rang --well, I say rang: it was an electronic bell that sounded like the "fasten your seat belts" alert on an airplane-- and everyone eagerly left. Mutters of indignance and frustration about the quiz filled the air, growing louder as people distanced themselves from the classroom.

"Hey, see you guys at lunch." I said as Marty and I split off from the group to begin our short walk to Spanish. "How was that hunting trip, Marty?" I asked.

"Pretty good," he answered, "It was offseason, so we were going for feral pigs. I got a six-foot male."

"Six feet!?" I exclaimed. "Jesus Christ, that's huge!"

"It's about average," he dismissed modestly. "Hey, isn't there a new Spanish teacher?"

"That's what I heard," I confirmed, "Ms. Soto. She's from Colombia."

"Is that her?" Marty asked incredulously, stopping in the doorway of the classroom.

"I hope so." I said fervently.

The woman in question was a gorgeous twenty-something Latina in an above-the-knee pencil skirt, sitting on her desk with her long legs crossed and talking quietly to some students in the front row.

"Bienvenidos!" She greeted us with a slight accent. "Come, sit." She waved a hand at some empty seats.

We scanned the room for people we knew and found no one; like some of our friends, Marty and I had started Spanish a year earlier than most students do, so our class was made up mostly of sophomores and a few juniors.

I took a seat next to a frat boy wannabe, who acknowledged me with a subtle upward nod of his head and turned back to talk to the girl next to him.

As soon as the bell rang, Ms. Soto walked to the front of the room and introduced herself in Spanish that she had clearly dumbed down for us. "Hola, estudiantes, me llamo Señorita Soto. Soy de Colombia y este año es mi primer año de la enseñanza, así que estoy muy emocionado!"

For the rest of the class, Ms. Soto reviewed what we should've learned last year while Marty stared dreamily at her. She was definitely pretty hot --she looked like a fitness model or something-- but Marty was really starting to look weird. I hit him discreetly, and when he realized what he had been doing for the past forty minutes, he sat back in his chair in an attempt to look chill and blasé. To be fair, he wasn't the only one staring: most of the boys and even a couple girls had their eyes trained almost unblinkingly on Ms. Soto.

I mean, I was still thinking lewd thoughts about Sara, but at least I hid it well. That outfit she was wearing was amazing: short Nike shorts that showed off her long legs with a tank top and sweatshirt combo that revealed way too much cleavage to be school-appropriate. I shook my head as if that would clear my mind of my obscene thoughts and tried my best to focus on Spanish.

The next periods, English and my shop class, took up the time until lunch. Not much happened in either class, except for me finding out that I didn't know anyone in either.

I walked over to the picnic tables in a courtyard just outside the school to meet my friends. At CPHS, only seniors were allowed to leave campus for lunch, so I had brought one. They used to allow everyone to leave for lunch, but I'm pretty sure that they ended that as soon as possible after realizing that people were just leaving campus to smoke weed.

I spotted my recently-made friends --Eric had introduced me to his friends last year, gregarious guy that he was, so that I would know some people when I came to CPHS-- sitting at a large square purple picnic table. Eric, Marty, and Daniel were already there, and with them were the other members of our group: Jonathan, a tough but friendly kid from inner-city Chicago, and Alex, a huge sports fan, nerd, and party animal. A smile lit up my face when I saw everyone; it had only been about a week since we last hung out, but it was nice seeing everyone at school.

"What's up, fuckers?" I grinned.

There was a chorus of greetings and profanity in response as I sat at the table. After some discussion of our classes and the events of the day, Alex remembered that he wanted to tell us something.

"Sho..." He swallowed a gigantic bite of ham sandwich and continued, "so, there's a party this Friday at Theresa Butler's house for freshmen only, and I think we should all go."

Theresa Butler was one of the popular girls in our grade, maybe the most popular. CPHS wasn't like any high school I'd ever read about or seen on TV or in movies: according to Eric, there was no girl who was cheer captain and dated the quarterback. We had popular girls and hot girls, but no particular girl stood out as the most popular or prettiest. However, if I had to guess as to who was the most popular girl, my money would be on Theresa. Other than that, I didn't know much about her.