It was a fairly easy thing to leave the school compound back in the late '90s. School shootings was a thing, but they were simply something that happens to others instead of something we worry about. They were simply other people's problems. The school police and private security was not a thing. The only thing that prevents you from leaving the school was the school guardians, two senior year students, one boy one girl, being punished to stand guard at the wide open school gate simply because it was their turn for the task.
Officially, the only duty of the school guard was to record the entry and exit times of the guests, often angry parental units. Unofficially, they were the office boy and girl for the management for the day. They simply were not instructed to know what to do, when a student suddenly decides to leave the school through wide open management doors. Because elopement was not something you do through main door and no one sane enough would have closed those doors in a hot September day in humid subtropical climate in '90s when air conditioning was not a thing in a public middle school. The girl was not even at the desk while I left, and the boy didn't ask anything, not that I would have let him.
Superstrength and superspeed are all nice and neat but young people often don't get the power of confidence and luck nowadays. You see, confidence is not only something you need when you decided to ask that one girl out in front of her friends. It is something you need at every breath, every step you take at the level of a young Frank Abagnale, Catch Me if You Can. That is superconfidence for you...
Luck on the other hand is simply one of the most underrated superpowers of all times. Let Robert Jordan witness that, luck is not something that you only need when you buy that lottery ticket which would make all your dreams come true. No, luck is something that would make you grateful to miss the largest jackpot of known history by a single number ten years down the lane. Luck was always been something I had plenty of, just a little bit shy of Matrim Cauthon level.
I haven't won even a single penny from any kind of lottery for all my life but I still consider myself the luckiest person alive for surviving not only two wars, three pandemics, one coup, two terrorist attacks, one plane crush, one school shooting and five fires, but also any sort of short and long term consequences of them. Hell, more than half of them happened in less than fifteen minutes after I left the danger zone.
My luck was as much responsibile as my stun zone for my legendary reputation amongst my friends at high school and collage. People that know me even made the habit of leaving concert and fest venues as soon as I leave as a precaution. Regardless, my wife often liked to joke about me having divine favor just like babies and dogs due to being too dumb to realize the social consequences of my actions.
Just like everything else, this fight on the first day of school too caused many favorable short and long term consequences on my middle school life. Alas, this time around I didn't want to leave everything to my sheer dumb luck but use another one of the most underrated superpowers of any successful adult, delegation.
Delegation, action or process of delegating or being delegated, is defined as the process of distributing and entrusting work, decision making and resposibility to another person. Instead of superconfidence, often represents itself on young and dumb or superluck always represents itself randomly, super-delegation is only a power that represents itself on respectable and successful adults. This representation often causes a misunderstanding between cause and effect, especially amongst young people who often thinks that right of delegation comes with sucess and power thus often tries to do everything themselves sometimes even without informing anyone else. Maybe due to this tendency of them, even fiction that targets young and young adults follows the same lack of understanding. After all, it won't be an epic adventure if it was the protagonist who has hundreds if not thousands of capable subordinates instead of the antagonist. Yeah, I am talking about you Batman. Sorry but you are a dumb fuck. You could have been inevitable if you would have chosen to be The Overlord instead of playing The Dark Knight.
Thus, just like any respectable adult who suddenly found himself in his 12 year old body due to unknown circumstances, I left the school through the front gate just saying I will be back, and went home instead visiting principal's office to delegate my father to visit the principal's office instead of me. By doing that, I not only put some much needed distance between me and the source of my not so immediate moral crysis, but also guaranteed to address to my existential crysis as soon as possible. Learn from your betters. If you think or feel like you only have two choices, bad and worse, create and choose a third one in another location at a better time.
As soon as I left the school compound, I walked across the crossroad and start walking towards home. I didn't turn to check the classroom window least I see Desiree sitting on the protagonist seat, back row next to the window. Anyone that was sitting next to window could have seen me and informed Mr. Jones but even if they care enough to do so I was pretty sure he wouldn't leave the classroom to get me.
My school, Eastern Middle, was a fifteen minutes walk away from my home which was right at the city center. It was the oldest middle school of the city with arguably the best educational staff and stationed right across the train station next to the biggest commercial port of the region. The school itself consisted of three main buildings in different states of disrepair, originally belong to church compound. While all three was old, the main building was of historical significance, served as city center in some capacity back in the '30s. The chapel at the back of the school was still in use and in a far better shape that any other buildings of the school.
There were many buildings of importance between my middle school and home, including but not limited to my elementary school, a Federal Reserve branch, a military base right next to it, five different private bank branches, a Red Cross Blood Donation Center, and two city hotels. However, the most important building on my route was a rather unimportant one.
One of my late paternal half uncles was a partner of a small transportation business and working as one of it's drivers near the military base. He died due to hearth failure at least a decade before my father which would have been another interesting encounter if he was at the office, but he wasn't. Thus I have checked out the other things I have remembered from my first childhood to find any difference or error.
Despite walking in a school uniform in a crowded center, no one stopped or questionee me. It was the duty of state police to bring a truant child to school or home at this point of time but as long as you were not in a place where real truants frequent like a pool hall or an arcade no one cared enough to do something about it.
It was a short an uneventful walk and didn't provide any additional information that would help my existantial crysis. I didn't met any familiar faces untill I arrive the street my home at. Right now, we were living in a specially renovated apartment at the city center, in the same building of my mother's hair and nail salon is. We had a house a short ride away from the city center, at the same neighborhood of the maternal side of my family, which was rented out to someone else for a small income. It was a weird living arrangement which didn't make sense untill much later, after collage, when I decide to comfort my parents about it.
According to my mother, my father left to work in UK when I was three years old with his two brothers, whose business was not doing well despite his own business was doing pretty well at the time. Bad economy I guess. It was obviously a decision fueled by brotherly bonds despite the family arrangements of all three of them. Three years later, one of my uncles moved his wife and two children to UK for permenant residence, the other one divorced leaving the cudosty of his child to his wife and married again in UK for permenant residence and my father returned to the country permenantly.
During that time, due to multiple bad experiences with babysitters and being the overprotective woman she is, my mother decided to buy a salon and an apartment in the same building and specifically renovate them as a single unit rather than living at the house and commuting to work every day while also paying rent for the salon.
It was basically an apartment accessed through the salon with two way mirrors that monitor the public space of the salon through the foyer of the house. More than half of her clients were her own relatives and friends who are aware of the arrangement and loved to come to the house part of the apartment for a sitting in a more intimate setting and gossip while watching the salon. I still can't believe how did she get the renovation permit for something like that. Although nothing malicious, it was not only weird as fuck but also completely destroyed the notion of personal space. It was basically impossible to access to the house without entering the salon and it was a round-the-clock work arrangement due to her clients knowing where she lives. Just knock untill they open the door even when it is obviously closed and not even a work day, they are living right here after all. It was a pretty neat arrangement for my mother and older sister most of whose friends are clients of the salon but basically my worst nightmare during high school. Regardless...
It turns out, despite not preventing him from leaving, my mother considered the clock on her marriage ticking away and started to prepare for the inevitable parting as soon as my father left the country with his brothers. She used her savings as down payment for mortgage of the salon and apartment. Then she rented out the house and used the money my father was sending to pay for the mortgage. When my father suddenly decided his permanent return after a rather blistering phone call which includes lots of fucks from his six year old son, he was shocked to learn that he has the shared ownership of a new salon and an apartment and suspicious of the origins of the money used to buy them. On the other hand, having already preparing for a divorce my mother was shocked due to the sudden return and extremely suspicious of being cheated on despite having no way to prove it.
Again according to my mother's statement, my father not only couldn't accept the new dynamics is his marriage but also couldn't adapt the new environment of business in the end. In less than a year, he decided to liquidate everything he owns and even took plenty of loans to start his own company in the UK, promising moving us too after getting related permits despite my mother's threats to file a divorce. He lost the money, mugged or conned in the airport of a third country during transit, and even stranded for a whole week in the embassy before my mother took him back to the count.
At least it was mother's side of the story. After a few decades, I learned to take any retelling from my mother's side of the family with a grain of salt, sisters often telling entirely different stories on the same account of events. I have heard at least three different version of this story over the years depending on which maternal aunt you ask and some of them pretty much included smutty love triangles and multiple illegal stuff. My father never formed any kind of defence. In fact refused to tell anything about the whole thing just like his side of the family never talking about anything else. I often blame my social detachment to that side of the family.
Street was just like I remember it with plenty of small businesses left and right harboring too many familiar faces. Despite living in this place untill leaving for collage eventually, l only knew less than ten names amongst all these people and only familiar enough with three them to talk more than a brief greeting. Something I deeply regret and would like to change if an opportunity presents itself which brings me to another one of the severely underrated superpowers of all fiction.
Basically, regardless of the presence of other skills or the lack of them, any kind of social information gathering skill is basically a multiplier in the level of a superpower in real life. One thing adults seem to don't like to inform children is, aside from confidence and luck, the single most important skill for success in real life is networking, the action or process of interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts. Basically, it is not important what you did but who knows it. Just like Itachi Uchiha said. It is never been "The one who becomes Hokage will be acknowledged by everyone". It is "The one who is acknowledged by everyone, becomes Hokage". Sadly Naruto is still not a thing yet, and adults hates to tell their children that regardless of their academic achievements, it takes a mother in the board of directors of the national United Way to become a Bill Gates.
You will not see Charles Xavier using super-telephaty or Clark Kent using super-hearing to collect dirt on every corrupt politician out there to clean their backyards while also gaining political for a rightful cause. No, because that is what villains do. CIA begs to digress.
Even relatively overpowered superpowes, like super recognizion, super smelling or super empathy would make up around 1-2% of the human population, not to mention all of them can also be trained just like cold reading. Sadly, I didn't have such superpower.
My not so superpower however, or more like occupational disease was an educated sense of smell which can easily distinguish approximately a hundred common chemicals. It was not something I trained to enhance like a sommelier or a perfumist but simply collected over the years. Although not exactly a social superpower, it was a pretty neat one especially when you can easily distinguish the aldeyhydic smell of the perfume of your crush on your best friend or the changing body odor of your wife according to her hormonal levels.
I went through my old neighborhood, letting the smell of nostalgia stir my emotions while processed in the limbic system of my brain, distinguishing the pungent smell of ozone, the fruity smell of vinyl acetate, the acrid smell of nitric acid, together with people and places associated with them untill I reach the ammonia and acetone of home.
My mother's salon was basically printing money until the banking crisis with no less than ten clients taken care of three technicians and five stylists during any hour of the day. Alas, we were living a frugal life despite making tons of money this time around due to the loan installments. Despite over five years, my father was not doing his own business but instead working for my mother's.
It was an interesting feeling to realize that your loving family was a disfunctional one when you are at your early twenties. Ten years before that though, with the wouns much fresher, it was almost impossible to miss the signs. I am pretty sure that I was unknowingly trained to be socially inept by my own mother who were as much dis-functional with her side of the family if not more.
I have arrived my destination and stopped for a brief moment before entering through the open door of the saloon for the moment of truth, still thinking if it is possible to train a social superpower this late in life.