By Alexander Gu

I, 15 year old Micheal Thomas, am probably the most special human alive. At the beginning of this year’s summer, everyone on Earth gained superpowers except for me. Of course, I haven’t let anyone know about this out of fear of isolation or ridicule, but life still sucks. On the bright side, these superpowers, to my knowledge, aren’t very powerful. For example, my mom obtained the ability to float two inches above the ground.

However, the pain has just begun. Today is the first day of the school year, and I am on the way to my bus stop right now. I can only imagine how bad my day will be if everyone finds out about my lack of powers. As I got seated on the bus, I noticed that many of my classmates looked down as well.

“What’s wrong?” I asked the person sitting next to me. “Got something on your mind?”

He responded, “Nothing much, it’s just that my power stinks.”

“Come on, it can’t be that bad.”

“You can’t tell me that the power to darken the color of my thumbs is useful.”

I laughed. Now I was thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that I didn’t have power. This also made me wonder how powers that change one’s appearance worked.

“How do you change the color of your thumbs?” I asked, “Is it like using a muscle?”

He looked perplexed. “Everyone’s power is activated the same way, we all just suddenly knew how to and it just happens when we picture it. Did you not know that?”

“Oh yeah, of course I knew that,” I laughed nervously.

At this point, we had arrived at school. I was feeling worse than ever. Now I was sure that I didn’t have a power. Oh well, no point dwelling on it. I got to my first period class without incident.

“Hi, I am your English 9 teacher, Ms. Bowers,” the teacher said.

She proceeded to scribble “Bowers” in big letters on the whiteboard.

“I will not allow any use of powers in my class. This is a place for learning.”

We then did some basic introductions and classwork. Surprisingly, this felt like a completely normal English class. My other classes passed similarly. None allowed the use of superpowers and the day had gone by just like previous schooldays. On the bus home, I felt the happiest I had been in a while. I had worried so much about being an outlier, but my life is going on as usual. Maybe my school year won’t be so special, after all.