Naturally, all participants in the fight, since it had become public, needed to be reprimanded, punished, and set on the right path.
That’s exactly what the principal did, moving the proceedings from the wrecked cafeteria to his office.
Soon, Jacob Hiesler arrived to find out what had happened to his son.
Instead of defending his kid, as most parents do, even without knowing who was really at fault, he immediately tried to blame him for getting into a fight, just like Debbie.
But surprisingly, the principal showed some sense and suggested they figure things out first before making judgments.
The adults, predictably, ran into a wall of denial and silence when they tried to get the kids to explain the root of the conflict.
I’d seen this many times in both my lives.
Even former “enemies” find some solidarity in clamming up in front of a third party.
And strangely enough, sometimes this, when no one snitches, can be a more effective path to reconciliation than when the beaten kid tells everything and the adult punishes the bully.
Reconciliation definitely won’t happen in that scenario.
But I wasn’t going to join this circle of sullen, silent, misunderstood teenagers.
My goal was to prevent Hiesler Jr.’s suicide, not to build my school reputation.
So I snitched on everyone as soon as the principal asked me again about the cause of the fight.
“I already told you,” I said, under the stunned gazes of the teens and adults alike.
“Those two were fighting over some girl.
Derek and that other guy, I don’t know his name, were going to beat up Richard in the back yard behind the cafeteria.
I stopped them, and they decided to try again inside.
That’s all.”
“You rat!” Derek flared up, only confirming the truth of my words.
“So it’s true, Mr.
Sullivan?” The principal turned his condemning gaze on the jock.
It didn’t work very well.
Plump, with a kind face and perpetually moist eyes, he couldn’t look threatening no matter how hard he tried.
Derek, though he knew denial was useless, still didn’t have the courage to admit what he’d done.
“It’s all lies!” Derek’s friend shouted.
“He beat us up!
Out back, he threw us in the…”
“Shut up!” Sullivan hissed at his talkative friend.
A hostage to his popularity, he couldn’t let everyone find out he’d been dunked headfirst in a dumpster.
The principal looked at me again.
“Yeah,” I shrugged indifferently.
“Like I said, these idiots were beating up Hiesler, so I stepped in.
Ask him yourself.”
“Mr.
Grayson, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use that language,” the principal scolded me.
“Richard, is Mark telling the truth?”
All eyes, Derek’s angry and warning, Hiesler Sr.’s worried and confused, the principal’s expectant, and mine bored, fixed on Richard.
Taking the handkerchief the principal’s secretary had given him away from his swollen nose, Hiesler thought for a second, then finally nodded uncertainly.
Well, there we go.
The only thing the adults never learned about was this Julie and that “terrible” thing that happened to her.
I kept quiet because I was almost certain it wasn’t as Richard had told me.
The girl clearly didn’t look like a victim back in the cafeteria.
She probably had some grievance against Derek, but judging by her behavior, it wasn’t worth all the adventures her poor lovesick friend had endured.
What I did tell Hiesler Sr.
and the principal, privately, not in front of the kids, was that Richard should be watched more carefully, and ideally, the boy should see a therapist.
Though they both said I was exaggerating, at least his father would now think about whether his son needed psychological help.
As for the punishment, it was completely predictable.
First, we were all sent to clean up the mess we’d made in the cafeteria.
Again, I found myself being pedagogically punished for doing a good deed.
Yet if I put on my costume and did essentially the same thing on a much larger scale, those same people would see it as a virtue.
Where’s the logic?
What’s allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to the bull.
Besides that, Derek and his friend, whose name I never learned, were threatened with suspension for a few days if it happened again.
And I was told, privately, that the principal was worried such a good student was getting into questionable situations.
Nothing serious, really.
If this had happened in Russia, my parents would have undoubtedly been called to school, and they’d have to answer for their children’s behavior.
In local schools, if there are no serious concerns about a child’s future, they usually resort to disciplinary punishments like cleaning.
And of course, if the situation repeats, temporary suspension, after which you’re responsible for the material you missed.
And considering such punishments are usually given to kids with poor grades, and it’s much easier to fail a grade here than in Russia, it’s a pretty significant penalty. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
Anyway, we got off pretty easy this time.
Detention for school kids can sometimes last a whole month.
But cleaning up the mess only took us about an hour.
The whole time, the pair of bullies kept throwing contemptuous, angry looks at Richard and me.
And I even made it home in time to avoid raising Mom’s suspicions.
But…
“I barely recognized you without your mask,” a familiar voice said from above as I walked past the sports field on my way home.
“Mark Grayson.”
Eve was sitting on the roof of a two-story building adjacent to the path, legs dangling over the edge, eating an ice cream cone.
Showing off, and quite brazenly.
The kids on the sports field could spot the heroine in her conspicuous pink costume at any moment, flashing her legs so provocatively.
And she’d taken off her mask, making it even easier to connect her two identities.
“Stalking me?” I smirked.
She couldn’t have been sitting there the whole hour, waiting for me to walk by.
The kids would have noticed her.
“I thought you’d be done faster,” she complained.
“I’d have been done in a few seconds.”
From the sports field came exclamations of “Wow!” and “Look, there’s a chick on the roof!” Just like I said.
Too conspicuous an outfit to be wandering around on roofs in plain sight.
“Maybe you could come up here and we can fly away from here?” Eve said, wincing at the shouts.
“I’d love to, but a regular guy like me can’t fly.
So you’d better come down.”
“Regular guy,” she said with a smirk.
Then, to the delight of the kids watching and me, she jumped off the roof, flashing everything under her skirt.
Completely by accident, of course.
“Well, let’s go.”
We disappeared from the kids’ view into the alley.
“I see you’re pretty casual about this,” I noted.
“But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make it harder for me to keep my identity secret.”
“Pfft,” she snorted.
“I couldn’t even find you on the internet.
Have you ever even worn your costume on a mission?”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” I agreed calmly.
“And you seemed so confident,” she said with fake disappointment.
She was flirting with me.
Teasing me to provoke some rash action, bragging, or something.
Still, she’d listened to my request.
Without any embarrassment, she transformed her costume into everyday clothes right in front of me.
Nice.
And although the transformation was quite modest, I couldn’t help but recall a certain scene with another redhead who liked to undress with magic.
“Better?” she asked after this.
“To be honest, I liked the previous version better,” I admitted.
A slight hint of a pleased smile appeared on Eve’s lips.
“But near my house, this is better.”
“I don’t get something,” Eve began, turning a bit more serious.
“You’re so secretive.
You’ve got the Guardians of the Planet on speed dial, but no one knows anything about you.
And yet you got involved in that mess with the government.
You saw that old man with the scar?
He really took a liking to you.”
Cecil.
Who else?
He knows how to find talent.
“And if you don’t wear a costume, don’t patrol the streets, don’t listen to police scanners, or anything like that, how did you even end up there?
And why did you decide to help me?”
There it was.
The uncomfortable questions.
Sooner than I expected.
***
If I remembered more, I probably would have told Eve and Cecil everything.
But my knowledge was so pitiful.
I didn’t even remember the events that led to my return to the past.
And everything I wanted to change in that span of my superhero career that I did remember, I could change myself.
So I chose a half-truth.
“Mom was watching the news on the kitchen TV when the report about that terrorist attack came on.
I immediately thought of you when I heard the criminals’ demands,” I answered calmly.
“As for your secret, well, I recognized you as soon as I saw you and Kill Cannon on TV.
Something like that.”
“Hmm.”
“What?
Still suspicious of me?”
“Then why did you confess to me, if you’re so secretive?
I’d never have figured you out on my own!”
Because you became my first and best friend in the super world.
Because I know you from before.
I know I can trust you even in the most difficult situations.
Telling everything truthfully would have been much simpler.
“I’m not as secretive as you think,” I tried to explain.
“I just have reasons for not showing myself.
You should understand that yourself.
I’m sure your father, your real father, warned you about it more than once.”
“Pfft, he was always on about that,” Eve snorted.
“And he was right,” I noted.
“By the way, how did it all end?
With your brothers and sisters and those government creeps?”
“We flew to the Pentagon.
They have a huge secret base underground.
We found Erickson’s lab.
My real mother was there, and all the records of what they did to her and the others.” She shuddered at the memory.
“So those guys are in prison now, at least that’s what the scarred old man said.
The doc, um, Dad, talked with him for a long time.
I don’t know all the details, but he has his own house now, and they let him take the kids.”
Those seemed like good news.
But if you thought about it, Elias was originally the cause of the project’s failure and millions, maybe billions, in losses for the Agency.
Yet at the same time, he was the only one who’d successfully created a child with power as great as Eve’s.
There was no way Cecil wouldn’t try to get such talent back on his side.
And in that light, did Stedman’s generosity mean that Brandywort was working for the Agency again?
What if soon they’d have several more supers with abilities like Eve’s?
I didn’t know whether to be happy or horrified.
“So now you have two families,” I said, not voicing my suspicions about her father’s new job.
Eve winced at the memory of her adoptive family.
“I don’t know,” she said, noticing my confused look.
“Yesterday we had a fight.
Because while I was gone, my father ate my cake, and…
anyway, I told them I wasn’t their real daughter, that I had real parents, and I ran away from home.
I suddenly realized that everything I need, I can make myself.
I’ve been doing that since I was ten.
All the things they buy me, I change to my taste.
I could make myself a house, furniture, food, clothes, literally everything I need, in a few hours.
And it pisses me off when my father starts lecturing me about all those things.
It’s so petty and disgusting.”
Well, shit.
That definitely didn’t happen in my past life.
So with my intervention, on one hand, I’d pushed Eve to save her biological family.
But on the other hand, I’d provoked the destruction of her adoptive one.
There’s your butterfly effect.