Generation X Read online

  “He died, right?”

  “Yeah,” Jono said, “with the other Hellions.” They both paused. “Happens,” Jono said.

  “Who died?” asked Angelo, running down the big curving staircase, a pair of new thermal boots helping to hold his feet in shape so he didn’t trip over them. “You look like hell,” he noticed Monet’s dirt-caked face and clothes, “what happened?”

  “You’re no Clark Gable yourself, Skin,” Monet said, and he wasn’t. Angelo grew epidermal tissue at an alarming rate and needed more practice at sucking it all tight around his body so he looked more like a human and less like a Chinese sharpe. “Did you see Emma?”

  “Oh you’re a charmer today, M. She went up to Sean’s office and he closed the door.”

  “He closed the door?” Jonothon repeated. The headmaster almost never closed the door.

  “So what’s all the buzz?” from Angelo as Monet shoved open the hallway door to a bathroom with an elbow that seemed to be fairly dirt-free.

  “We saw a glowing egg she thinks was a dead Moroccan,” from Monet.

  “Well that doesn’t sound like you, M, if you don’t mind my saying,” Jonothon suggested. “Have you got something against Moroccans?”

  “I’m Algerian.”

  “What? Are you guys not getting along these days?” “Our countries get along fine. Good fences make good neighbors.” With that, she slammed the bathroom door in the two boys’ faces.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH

  Sean Cassidy’s door stayed closed for about half an hour. Paige was the first to join Jono and Angelo’s vigil.

  “What’s the buzz?” the girl with the breakaway body wanted to know.

  Paige Guthrie was better known, if she was known at all, as Husk. “With a name like that,” she commented once, “I could go on American Gladiatorsbut Sean had given her the name and she was stuck with it.

  Paige had the remarkable, if less than attractive, ability to transform her outer layer of skin to pretty much any material that was necessary to withstand whatever potential injury might accost her, and then to peel or crack or melt off that new layer, revealing the good-as-new, peaches-and-cream Paige underneath. Whenever she did this she felt a little tingly and raw for a few hours, but it was nowhere near as bad as a sunburn. Problem was, with a tendency to have the part of your body you greet the world with turning—sometimes spontaneously—into tree bark or manganese or phlegm, it was hell trying to meet guys.

  “What did you see?” Paige asked Jono.

  “He saw nothing,” Angelo popped in because he felt he should, “just some glowing something-or-other on the ground is all.”

  “Jonothon?”

  “I told you,” from Angelo again.

  “Did I ask you?”

  “Oh,” Angelo waggled his hands in the air near his

  head, and the seams of his skin waggled in the opposite direction. “Sorry.”

  “What did you see, Jono?” Paige asked.

  “Matters more what Emma and M saw,” he said as Monet finally emerged from the bathroom and joined them.

  “Remarkable,” Angelo said, looking Monet up and down as she approached.

  “What’s remarkable, Skin?”

  “You.”

  “This is news to you?” she asked coolly as Paige rolled her eyes.

  “Look at you. Chamber here said you were head-to-ankles in the dirt and it was caked all over you like white on rice. Now there’s not a trace. How do you do it?” “I have super-powers. I can scrub really hard.”

  The door of the headmaster’s office opened a crack, and Sean Cassidy stuck his head out.

  The first point of Sean’s authority' was his size. He thought it was his history, but these kids of whom he was in charge were beginning to grow an impressive history of their own. Sean had done things and seen things of which most people were not even capable of dreaming. He had battled villains, both as a member of Interpol and as an X-Man; combatted the forces of an ignorant hostile government; repeatedly helped save the world for those who hated him. He had a larynx that was unmapped by any known medical authority and a voice that he had trained to shatter steel.

  He used that voice—in a more benevolent tone—to say, “Monet, would you come in here?”

  “Of course, Sean,” she said smoothly, and vanished behind the closed door.

  Here’s the way things go at a normal high school: Something innocuous happens. Mr. Carrington the French teacher comes in with a toupee over his goosegg skull and everybody acts as though he has been wearing it for years. Or Jimmy gives Tiffany his class ring. Or someone puts a graffito on the girls’ room wall that says, “Principal Skinner gets high on bananas.” And then the rumors grow. The word is that Mr. Carrington's had his head shaved for an imminent brain surgery procedure and that’s why he’s been mumbling under his breath using French words he’s never taught his classes. And suddenly everyone knows that Tiffany’s skipping town next semester so she can go to a clinic to give birth to Jimmy’s love child. That’s the basic dynamic of information in a conventional high school.

  At Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, it went the same way, only faster.

  Jono, Paige, and Angelo hung around the top of the stairs by the door to Sean’s office, as Monet and Emma talked with Sean inside about a manifestation in the biosphere. Jubilee—Jubilation Lee, the thirteen-year-old from the San Fernando Valley who actually had more time logged among the organized mutant establishment than her older schoolmates—appeared and wanted to know: “What’s the poop, guys?”

  “Is that the same as the buzz?” from Chamber.

  “Paige is looking for the buzz and you’re looking for the poop. What’ll it be, lassies?”

  “Some big hoo-hah in Sean’s inner sanctum, Jube,” said Paige. “Looks heavy.”

  “How heavy? It’s not about the new kid, is it?” “Much heavier than a new kid,” from Paige again. “More like crisis with the X-Men down in the city heavy, or that’s what it sounds like. There’s a new kid?” “That’s the buzz,” from Jubilee down below.

  “I thought you were looking for poop,” from Jono. “Paige was looking for buzz.”

  “And whatever happened to haps?” Angelo plugged in. “Back in the ’hood we used to look for haps all the time. Now I’m not even sure they still call it the ’hood.” “What’s the haps?” Everett asked as he joined the gathering.

  Everett was Synch, who could cast an aura of syn-chronicity that allowed him to get on the physical vibratory wavelength of pretty much anything you can see, hear, touch, smell, or think about. He was like a matter-hacker, able to use his aura like a computer uses a modem to get into the system of objects outside himself and reprogram them at will. A smiley, self-contained black kid from St. Louis about a year or two younger than Jono, he was the one person in the building with the potential to end up more physically powerful than Jono.

  “You’ve been hanging with Angelo too much,” Jubilee told him. “Looks like a big emergency brewing in the sanctum. We’re probably all going to New York to help the X-Men fight some super-duper bad guy. Maybe a time traveler, think so?”

  “Who said anything about time travelers?” Jono poked in. “There’re no time travelers here.”

  “Slippery little suckers, huh?” from Angelo. “Nudging their way in and out of the continuum like it’s Swiss cheese. Like to try that someday.”

  “You didn’t say anything about time travelers,” Paige asked, “did you Jonothon?”

  “No I didn’t say anything of the—”

  “Don’t get your floppy fingers caught in the time machine door, Skin,” Everett called up to Angelo. “Find yourself in the Middle Ages and your extremities dribbling off aboard the Starship Enterprise or something.” Paige looked Angelo up and down for a moment, at the skin that hung off his body like bobbling icicles from every eave and said, “That’d be a pretty good cure, huh?”

  And Angelo put his face in Paige’s.
“A cure?” he asked letting his jowls drip down below his shoulders. “So what’s the disease?”

  Everett liked to call Sean Cassidy’s office the “Bill Room” behind the headmaster’s back. He said it looked like a place where Bill Blass installed the technological systems and Bill Gates did tire decorating. And behind his student’s back, Sean referred to Everett as “Wit.” Sean had private nicknames for all of his students to go with their public code names, which made intimacy with the headmaster on an intellectual level very confusing.

  Everett Thomas—Synch—and his buddy Angelo Espinoza—Skin—were “Wit and Wart.” Jonothon Stars-more—Chamber-—was “Rock ’n Roll” and Jubilation Lee—Jubilee who shot blinding blasts of light from her hands—was “Fireworks.” Monet St. Croix—M who could fly and lift a tank—was, of course, “The Princess” and Paige Guthrie—Husk from Kentucky whose rosy face and blonde hair shone like the noonday sun over the American Midwest—was “Cornfield” or sometimes just “Corny.” Sean tended to know pretty much everything his students were saying and thinking about him because, after all, Emma Frost was one of the most powerful telepaths on the planet. The kids trusted her, probably more than they should and certainly more than they would have had they known that she told whatever she knew to the headmaster. Sean trusted her too, though he had not always. His nickname for her— which he came up with despite trying not to—was “Hellion.” He never used it and he knew she appreciated that. “What happens in your mind against your will,” she told him, “happens not out of venality but out of weakness,” and he realized this applied to her as much as it did to him. The kids’ latest nickname for Banshee was “Windy.”

  “Did you get any particular feeling from this manifestation?” Sean asked, sweeping away a random pile of three-and-a-half-inch disks so he had room to put his elbows on his desk.

  “It was kind of a—” Emma began but Sean interrupted.

  “Actually I wonder if I could get M’s impressions first.” Emma certainly had come to conclusions about the emotional aura surrounding the big glowing egg they had seen in the biosphere, as telepaths do about pretty much everything. Sean wanted Monet’s uninfluenced ideas first.

  “Feeling?” Monet wanted to know. “How do you mean?”

  “Did it seem friendly?”

  “No.”

  “Unfriendly?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Anything?”

  The girl thought for a moment. “Nothing really. It was...”

  “Was what, Monet?”

  “Well, maybe sad.”

  “Sad. Anything else?”

  “No, 1 don’t think so. Look,” Monet changed her tone, “I’m not a telepath or anything. How would I get some mental impression or something?”

  “We all have intuition, dear,” Emma said.

  Sean dug a computer keyboard out from under a pile of journals and loose hanging folders and moved a pile of books from in front of his monitor. On top of the pile was a book called When Dreams and Heroes Died by Arthur E. Levine, a former college president, who theorized that the whole social breakdown in adolescent education of the past generation is the result of role models falling off their pedestals in a very public way. Levine thought heroes (and potential ones) ought to keep an aura of mystery around them, if not for their own protection, then for that of those who look up to them. In moving the books, Sean lost his page. He called up Monet’s file to punch some notes into it when Monet interrupted.

  “Are you trying to be indulgent of us, sir? Because we actually saw this thing.”

  “He knows that,” Emma said as Sean said simultaneously, “I know that,” and shot her an exasperated look. That happened a lot.

  ‘Tm not being in any way indulgent, Monet,” Sean went on. “To the contrary, I’m trying to be as supportive as I can. It’s all about teamwork, lass.”

  “Okay,” said M, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m just a little touchy, I suppose.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not in the habit of seeing things.”

  “I know,” from Sean, who also was not, and simultaneously, “I know,” from Emma, who was.

  He took a breath and said, “So what about your impressions, Emma?”

  “I thought of Haroun al-Rashid when I saw it. Jetstream, from the Hellions.”

  “Lingering feelings of guilt?” Sean tiptoed.

  She shot him a glare.

  “I’m just asking. Lingering misplaced unjustified feelings of guilt on your part. It could be that, couldn’t it?”

  She let out a breath, then, “I thought I sensed a little bit of resentment, actually.”

  “Resentment. On the manifestation’s part?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You think so. Could that be on your part?”

  “No,” she snapped. Then Emma thought a moment and said, ‘ ‘Actually, yes. It could. Quite the psychologist all of a sudden, Banshee.”

  Sean motioned to some of the books and journals and reports on the shelves and the desk and the chairs and the cabinets and the floor. “I’ve been reading up.” Then they heard a noise from outside the door.

  “What do you mean I’ve got no self-control?” Paige got even closer into Angelo’s face. She had gotten quite good at this gang-war style of interpersonal negotiation since enrolling here.

  “I mean you can’t keep from dissing a man for his looks and you can’t even figure what you’re gonna turn into when you shed your skin.”

  “What’s wrong with the way you look? I didn’t say anything’s wrong with the way you look.”

  “You said I hadda get a cure. Do I look sick to you, chiquitaT’ Angelo couldn’t help but smile to see the lilly-white girl from horse country turn red in his face, but he let the skin of his jaws drop so no one would notice.

  “Oh you don’t look that bad,” and for the first time Chamber looked up from his sullen rock-star snit on the top of the stairs to see her say, “You’re self-conscious is all.”

  “Well at least I’m better-looking than he is,” Angelo pointed at Chamber’s cracked face and wrapped-to-the-nose bandages.

  She started to say, “No, you’re not,” but thought better of it. “I just thought of it so I said it. No biggie.” “No self-control.”

  “Really?” she said, throwing her head back and twisting her neck to the side. “Well I think I feel—” Then everybody looked at Paige when they heard the sickly ripping sound.

  “•—like something really tough.”

  And the ripping got louder and turned gutteral. Paige lowered her head; the back of it was torn in a jagged path down underneath her loose T-shirt. There was no blood, but a glinting shiny something under the shreds of the girl’s flesh. She shimmied under her clothes and twisted her right shoulder, holding her right hand down off the rail of the balcony. The casing of her arm all the way to the shoulder blade peeled off like snakeskin onto the floor.

  “Euu, gross,” Jubilee shrieked.

  Everett cackled with laughter because he thought it looked so cool.

  Angelo kept a poker face, staring down Paige as she metamorphosed because he thought it was the proper thing to do and besides, it gave him an excuse to watch because he thought it was really cool too.

  Paige was a sweet, innocent, decent child as far as

  Jono was concerned: quite the finest person he had met in America, perhaps in all his life. She was a vast moor covered in perfect white snow without a flaw in its shining blue-white surface. He looked up at her ripping away her outer layer of skin to replace it with sheer reflecting crystal and would have smiled if he had a mouth. He wanted to run through that perfect field of snow in heavy thigh boots and roll around in it until it was chunky and worn and comfortable.

  Paige clutched the flap of her shirt in a diamond crystal hand and pulled up on it, tearing the seams as she tried yanking it over her head. She shed her shoes and red spandex school uniform as destructively. What remained of her epidermis fell on the flo
or.

  “All right girl!” Everett howled and applauded.

  She had said she felt like something really tough but she had never been this hard before. She felt like an athlete in the Zone as she twisted the hundred facets of her diamond mouth into the rictus of a smile. She turned her face so that her dense rock of a corn-fed tumed-up nose brushed Angelo’s floppy-skinned South-Central pug and scraped it across the bridge.

  Softly, she said: “Boo!” swiping a diamond-edged set of fingernails across where Angelo’s chest had been a moment before.

  Skin took a step back and vaulted the railing of the balcony, dropping the twenty-odd feet to the floor below. He wrapped five thick tendrils of flesh extended from the fingers of his left hand around the horizontal bannister. As he went over it, he swung in an arc.

  But before Skin could light on the ground and retract his fingers, Paige flipped over the rail too, and hit the ground flat, landing on a diamond-hard butt. The hardwood floor cracked and poked up through the Oriental rug—that Professor Xavier had once told Sean he had picked up at an estate auction at a “steal away price” of forty-five hundred dollars—which tore in the center.

  Everett, grinning, crooked his elbow and waved his fist like an umpire calling a runner out. “Husk! Husk! Husk!” he chanted.

  Jubilee skittered over the back of the couch and joined him: “Husk! Husk! Husk! Husk!”

  Angelo kicked off a shoe and threw a foot upward at a slow-moving ceiling fan and wrapped his ankle flesh around the fan’s post. He swung up toward the fan, avoiding a diamond-hard tackle from the girl as even Jono joined the refrain with Jubilee and Synch chanting, “Husk! Husk! Husk!”

  As Skin retracted himself upward to hang by a leg below the fan, holding it still by blocking its rotation with his knee, Paige stood on the floor twenty-eight feet below him. She stood with her diamond hands on her diamond waist slowly blinking open-and-shut with her diamond eyelids making the slightest scraping noise along her tear ducts. She said, “You don’t think so, do you?”

  And with that she began scaling the rough-sawn pine wall like Spider-Man, creeping up by digging fingers and toes ever so slightly into the wood panels to triangulate herself upward foot-by-foot, inch-by-inch toward the dangling Angelo.