Free Powerless Revision 1 by Jason Letts Page B

doesn’t feel all of the cuts and scratches in the center of her heart, then she will have no reason to change.”
    “It still seems cruel to let her suffer like this,” Jeana said. “Why not just help her get through this, make her feel better, and then the pain will be gone.”
    “I wish it could be that easy. If she had fallen and scraped her knee, I’d be the first to distract her from it. But this problem won’t disappear tomorrow or the next day. She needs to learn she can never escape from it, and this is just the beginning of her learning.”
    He looked at his fretting wife and tried to change the subject. “Do you remember your senior year tournament trial?”
    “Oh, of course. I made it through the first few rounds and finished in the top third. As long as I could get my hands on them I was fine. You should have seen these kids running away from me. But as soon as I came up against someone with an external gift I was finished.”
    “I competed on the very same field Mira did today. It was tough, but I—”
    “Finished first,” Jeana said, cutting him off. “Let me save you the trouble of bragging since I actually remember the last time we talked about this. You played with your opponents, trapping them, disorienting them, and fooling them into giving you the victory.”
    “If you remember the last time we talked about this, why did you bother to repeat your story?”
    “I’m not going to pass up a good opportunity to talk about myself,” Jeana smiled.

Chapter 6: The Toughest Medicine to Swallow
     
     
    Although the bad taste in her mouth from the first day at the academy remained, Mira refused to give up so easily. While she acted shy before by accident, she returned resolved to spend the day in complete silence.
    Taking her wobbly seat in the back, Mira avoided eye contact with any of the other students. She kept her head down when Fortst arrived, and even closed her eyes when he read the results of the previous day’s tournament. Mira’s name came at the very bottom, but she didn’t hear the sounds of any mocking students, mercifully.
    During Fortst’s lecture, she squelched any temptation to answer questions, even when it meant no one would answer and Fortst would supply laughably inaccurate information. She stood behind the rest of the class at all times when they went out in the afternoon for field lessons, quickly slipping away before anyone else once class had ended.
    This pattern of behavior became routine for her. For a handful of days she had managed to avoid interacting with anyone at all. It dug at her though, and she often bit her lip as one does when doing something unpleasant but necessary. Disappointment and jealousy rippled through her when other students laughed and played together. Boys and girls flirted and held hands, but she wasn’t involved in any of it. It got to the point where Mira believed the other students were as used to ignoring her as she was to ignoring them.
    “Ok, students,” Fortst said, beginning his lecture. “We’ve talked about knowing your surroundings, and we’ve talked about battle formations, but the most important thing you can know is yourself. You’ve got to know exactly what you’re capable of. You need to be aware of your strengths, and you absolutely must know where and how you are vulnerable—your weaknesses.
    “How about we try writing about this? Take out a piece of paper, and write a few sentences about what your power allows you to do and what you can’t do with it. Think about how someone might be able to get around your defenses and attack you. Ok? Go to it.”
    Like the other students, Mira took out a sheet of paper, but it just sat there on her desk. Everyone else had begun writing, while Mira scratched her head. This assignment didn’t apply to her. She tried to think about who she was, and looked around at the students in her class who she had begun to get to know. She wrote the words “helpless,” “hopeless,” and