A Mindreader’s Guide to Surviving Your First Year at the All-Girls Superhero Academy
by Jenn Reese
The day you arrive at the academy, you spend just three minutes outside the car before begging your mom to drive you back home. There are too many girls. They’re too loud. They’re laughing. Some of them are flying. Even if you weren’t a mindreader, you’d be overwhelmed.
Your mother, who took a day off work and has driven eleven hours straight to get you here, refuses. She is the worst mother ever.
A girl approaches, her eyes so sharp you expect her codename to be DAZZLE or CHARISMA or SINGULARITY. You can’t stop yourself from reading her mind: she calls herself Meg.
You refuse to shake Meg’s hand and demand that she leave you alone. You tell her your superpower and that nothing she thinks is safe from you. You tell her you don’t want or need friends.
You’re grateful she’s not a mindreader, too.
Meg shrugs and tells you she can blow things up with a thought. She offers to show you to your dorm. Bewildered, you hug your mother goodbye, grab your duffel, and follow Meg, whose hair is brown and whose eyes are lighter brown and whose codename should be TEMPEST or HURRICANE or AVALANCHE based on how she’s making you feel.
For the next three weeks, the days are a blur of headaches and other girls’ anxieties.
I’m not strong enough to stop a train.
I’m too slow to defuse the bomb.
My witty rejoinders are not actually witty.
That creepy mindreader is probably reading my mind.
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