Free Zapped by Sherwood Smith Page A

games, trying to fly or turn invisible or shoot laser beams out of their eyes. So I decided to keep it to myself. It wasn’t hurting anybody. I’d experiment in the safety of my room while I recovered.
    I found that it was easy to zap things to my hand, but it was a lot harder to zap them back. My tries were so wild I had to laugh.
    Practice, I knew about. It had taken lots of practice to learn how to draw manga and anime figures, which was my favorite thing to do. After a day of tries, I perceived a kind of whisper inside my head, though I couldn’t tell you the actual spell. But I could zap paper clips and rubber bands to my desk blotter.
    The rest of the summer I spent biking down to the beach to explore, drawing, and—when no one was around—zapping little stuff around.
    The first day of school came. There I was again, in a sea of strangers, only now it was high school, bigger and scarier than middle school had been. At least there was a Gay-Straight Student Alliance. I wasn’t sure yet who or what I liked, but as our many moves pretty much guaranteed little luck in finding and keeping friends, my parents had said that if a school had a version of the Alliance, it would probably be a safe place to hang out and eat lunch. Way better than finding myself totally alone in a crowd of three thousand.
    The rest of school was school, and at least it was the first day in high school for all the ninth graders, not just me.
    Meanwhile, I kept experimenting, and I was able to zap paper clips to land near, then in, a water glass on my desk. As the days turned into a week, the objects got a little bigger. Paper was tricky, because of the way it bent and fluttered in the air. If I moved it too fast it crumpled, and once even tore. Learning how to zap paper made me aware of stuff like air currents.
    I kept my experiments to myself, either in my room or at the beach when I was alone. At school, I used my well-honed skills at blending in, like always sitting in the middle of the room if there was a choice. Front, you were too exposed, under the teacher’s eye. The back was where the troublemakers like to hide from the teacher’s eye.
    One day in math class, I heard a guy in the back row behind me sniggering while the teacher was at the door, talking to somebody in the hall.
    Our family has been moving every two years, whenever Mom Gwen was reassigned to some other military base, so I didn’t make much effort to learn people’s names at every new school. But you don’t start over every two years without learning how to spot the bullies who go after anyone nerdy, alone, who can’t fight back.
    To identify possible danger, I knocked my math book off my desk. As I picked it up, I snuck a peek behind me—just as this moose of a boy tossed a spitball at a skinny girl with enormous glasses, who sat two desks away from me.
    Anger boiled in my stomach. The girl wasn’t doing anything. She was bent over her work, her shoulder blades poking like wing stubs at the back of her oversized tie-dye t-shirt. The spitwad was about to land in her pale, frizzy hair, unless …
    I flexed my zap muscle, and zinged the spitball right back at the boy. It landed on his cheek with a splat.
    The boy jerked like he’d sat on cactus, and the entire back row broke into snickers. The teacher whirled around, her eyes going straight to the boy, who was wiping the spitball off his face, and said, “Lunch detention, Kyle Moore.”
    â€œBut I didn’t do anything! ”
    â€œWould you like after-school detention as well?”
    I bent over my notebook, my heart pounding.
    I’d broken my promise to never use my power outside my room, but zapping a bully had felt good.
    So good that I couldn’t resist another opportunity to try my power.
    When I look in my mirror in the morning, I see a plain girl with brown hair and a round face and a duck body. Normal. Normal for my parents means