Wick o'Weller's Normal Highschool for Mostly Normal Teens

Waking up felt almost illegal. In the limp hours before the morning, I gingerly touched at my skin for any wires, plug-holes, pulsing motherboards, before shifting away from my sheets and rubbing at the dark veins running down my wrists. I almost expected to feel a tight bundle of copper cables, running from the tips of my silicon fingers and into the chamber of a mechanical heart. I felt nothing of the sort.

I was human. Still human. A relatively normal human, at least on the outside. On the inside, my mind was racing, and my hands itched for a pen as a rabid dog yearned for flesh. Or, perhaps less decorously, as a girl yearned for my testicular regions; both examples are as true as the other.

Because you see, for a lack of a better term, I was cursed. Both figuratively and literally.

Two curses to my name, and I was only a schoolboy of sixteen. Most people who are cursed are usually shambling, old men in crumbling towers, clinging onto theoretical papers for their lives as they equate their ambitions to an equation they'll never put into practice. I was the same—reading was in my blood—but the difference was that I was sixteen and not eighty. I still had a chance.

The point was that I was overly embellished for a kid. And for good reason, too—ever since I could read, I've had visions of another world. Not the same world every time, mind you. Each night brought on an entirely different adventure at the expense of my sanity. The psychologists said my neural pathways were fried—the researchers would marvel at the way I thought. They would ask me questions, place all fifty-two cards in a neat line upon a table and quiz me which was what. I would sort the cards by suit, still face down, and then by type, and then by the order they were printed in. One touch, and I would see an object or being's entire past, present, and future. Everything was laid bare; nothing was a stranger.

As for the gravitational force my gonads seemed to have on women… I'll get to that later.

Today is the first day of my first year at school, and lo and behold, I've been scouted for the prestigious position of… School Librarian.

—

At Wick O'Weller's Normal Highschool for Mostly Normal Teens (WoWNHfMNT for short, or WoW if you're a busy person), everyone had quirks ("Quirks!" my tour guide had emphasised as he twirled to face the group.¹), and everybody was unique, which is to say that nobody was unique at all. Everyone in my homeroom proved more interesting than me—as we played through the usual highschool icebreakers, I met a girl who could deconstruct anything into its core forms², a boy who could split his consciousness and operate two independent lines of thoughts at the same time, and another girl who would not stop staring at my crotch. Needless to say, as a growing sixteen year-old boy who has lived in laboratories for most of his school life and has therefore never seen a girl his age once, I did not catch her quirk.

After that, classes seemed mostly regular. I excelled in the classes where we were assigned used textbooks, as I could simply touch a page and infer the answers from its previous owners. Unsurprisingly, I did the worst in physical education.³

And then, during the second half of my day, I was called to the library.

As I trudged through towering glass archways and past rusting lockers, I realised that the halls were getting older and older. By the time I'd reached the library, the carpet had worn down to the wood, and most of the paint had flaked off to reveal rotting wooden walls.

I tore the librarian's proposal from my bag and read through it again. "Highly prestigious position," kiss my ass. I'd ask them to lick my testicles as well, but they wouldn't require any coercion on that front. I took a deep breath, and walked through the giant double doors.

Inside the library, hidden like a puff of white cotton stuck between the floorboards, sat the cutest girl⁴ that I had ever laid eyes upon.

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Footnotes

¹As he said this, I noticed that he'd managed to conveniently block off a classroom lined with fat, pastel floor puzzles and shape blocks, but when I looked into that same room again later, I found several differentiation exercises scrawled across the building blocks, and a soft-toy "hardcover" rendition of Mrs. Dalloway. I had to leave; the room had a strange effect on my ego, one that I dared not assign a label to.

²I did not catch this girl's name, but she took one glance at me and told me that I had a noisy make, that I was made of too many components to be even considered whole. I asked how so, and then she went on another tirade about the way she categorised each core form. Each method had its own strengths and weaknesses, and she mostly preferred to rely on her own system, Biocynicism, with its chunky forty-six forms and ninety-two sub-forms, but she would often swap to the Kabbalistic forms when needed. I stopped listening to her after she mentioned a third and fourth system. Why bother with niche knowledge that you'll never apply anywhere else? She never answered my question, by the way.

³My second worst class was Business, a mandatory elective that I'd chosen myself. When I went to touch a page, I only saw visions of men screaming vulgar phrases such as "We fucked them in the ass!" and "diamond hands baby!" and occasionally the odd inane equation would splatter itself across my retinas, most of which would be along the lines of "Money + Time = Investment." After asking to swap textbooks with a seatmate, I found the course far more tolerable, but then it was late and the next class had already started.

⁴She had puffy, white hair that she wore around her neck like a scarf, giant pink eyes, and a pair of thick-glassed round spectacles. And that is all that I'll say on the matter.