Kyle 2015

Originally posted on x_project.

There wasn't a teacher's desk in the classroom. Just a table pushed up against the wall by the window with a comfortable-looking office chair, the kind with wheels on it. Kyle had stolen it from Forge's lab -ages- ago, and refused to give it back. It was his chair now. If Forge tried to claim it now, Kyle'd just go back down and steal it again, fair and square.

Sometimes he still spun around in it, in the evenings after grading tests or homework or writing lesson plans. He'd learned a while ago that teacher stuff stayed in his classroom, and not-teacher stuff stayed in his apartment, and if he didn't do that, he'd get it all mixed up and end up forgetting to give the kids the weekly vocabulary quiz. And while that made his kids happy, making them like him wasn't the point. It was a nice benefit when he got apples, which he still peeled with his claws before eating, or a quick hug, or punch on the shoulder. Depending on the kid, of course. But it wasn't the point. The point was getting nine kids all to remember what an adverb was.

On the table was a framed 'picture', really two sheets of thin Clearsteel, or whatever Forge'd called it with a picture frame around them. Sandwiched between them were some red feathers, a long lock of lavender hair curled around them, silver and copper and gold wire in strands woven around the ends of the feathers, and twisted through the hair.

It was one of those days, one of the good ones. Most of his students were pulling at least C's, and the two who weren't, he'd sit down with. One of them was going to need testing, probably for ADD, and some special help there. The other one, Kyle thought, it was a social thing. They'd figure something out. Even mutant kids could be little shits sometimes, and they had a couple of cliques, a couple of social groups that were hard to break into.

It meant it was probably time for the talk about reverse discrimination again. It always seemed to take the more visibly different kids a few semesters to get that there wasn't any 'mutant cred' and that being orange or blue-spotted or glow in the dark or having no hair didn't mean they got to be little shits to the kids who looked 'normal', or near-normal. Of course, the first of them that forgot that their English teacher could hear them whispering outside the classroom and called him a passer was getting detention.

Time to explain 'normal' too. What was, what wasn't, and why it really depended on who you asked.

The number on his phone was long-memorized. A personal direct line, bypassing secretaries and voicemails and bodyguards and hangers-on and people who thought they mattered.

"Yo, Jay? Feel like making a special apperance? I've got a couple of kids who don't get what coming out of the closet means."