'Student 02-243006
Age: 11
Power Class: Telekinesis
Name: Laila Bushido, assigned to the Kinetics and Physiotherapy Classes due to weak signs of telekinetic strength.'
That's what it said in the report about me when I was transferred to learn in this new school. I managed to read it by sensing the small depressions left from the pen pressed against the paper when my tutor wrote it. No one really knew about it. When I asked my mother why I had to leave, she said I would be going to a high-rank, prestigious academy for special kids like me. The thought made me happy because if it's for special kids, then I'll meet new friends who will like my peach-blonde hair, the same colour just like Mamas. Since everyone in my old school seemed to think I colored it. It's only normal for them to assume that when all of them have the same black hair, black eyes and simplistic childish mindsets. "Our hair is black but our hearts differ", if that really is true, than my heart is just as alien as my hair. But over time, my 10-year-old heart realized that I would be gone for a long time. It made me sad because I would miss Mama, Papa, and my pretty books.
They were science books, encyclopedias, full of drawings of animals, space, and science. Though my favorite ones are the ones that showed the diagram of the human body. If I closed my eyes and focused hard enough, I could feel my hands going through my chest and touching my beating heart. If I put it on my abdomen to my right, I felt a tough rubbery piece—my liver—and just below that a long soft snaky tube that moved like an earthworm: intestines. I could also do the same to the people and things around me.
Whenever someone was feeling sick in class, I could feel the changes in their body when I'm near them. Fever—the blood vessels near the skin shrink down to prevent heat loss—while the ones deeper in the body direct blood to vital organs and feel thicker, tougher when I try to press them. So I was always aware of the conditions of the people around me. Still, if they wanted to tell the teachers that they were sick, then it's none of my business.
One day, a new teacher came to my old school. She taught us science; naturally, I'd have loved seeing her come into class for lessons. She was also really fun. She loved exaggerating and playing with our imaginations when we learned. Even if it was as boring as learning about our six senses. Yes, it was that lesson that changed my trajectory in life. She made it seem that if we couldn't feel with our skin, we could touch a frog and it would feel like a water balloon; of course, the girls in our class were grossed out. After a few more examples, I raised my hand.
"What about the seventh sense?"
I could already feel their collective eyes looking at me, 'budak rambut oren.' It wasn't bad enough that I inherited my mother's mutated gene, but I said something that made me sound like an alien altogether. So I told her, explained myself—how I could feel my own beating heart, how livers felt smooth and muscles were stringy yet both were just as tough. I also felt the water flow in the blades of grass and the seeds develop inside pollinated flowers. I could feel all those things without even having to touch them with my skin.
She fell silent for a moment, yet no trace of confusion—only revelation—one I couldn't understand. Before I could leave class that day to go home, she stopped me and asked to chat.
She wanted to ask me about it, my "seventh sense", I was hesitant, reluctant even. All I have gotten from my rotten school were sneers and side-eyes whenever I almost got caught stopping butterflies and mosquitoes in mid air and disassembling them like I do with the flowers from my school garden, slowly, methodically, from wings to proboscis. Yet, she assured me that she won't judge me, and she saw in me something I had lost sight in myself. That my curiosity was not a curse and so wasn't my powers. So I left the class and came back with a hibiscus. Slowly, I focused my energy and pulled away its petals and ovary from its sepal and into the air. Stripping the petals, pulling the outer epidermis of the ovary to extract the tiny ovules inside.
"Incredible. You have a gift, Laila!" She praised me.
Not even my parents are aware of my powers. It wasn't like I could carry boulders or take things that are farther than my arms reach. That was the first time…someone finally saw me.