She turned around to face the speaker.
It was the guidance counselor, Mrs. Nelson.
Wordlessly, she followed her into her office. She had been here before. Mrs. Nelson, as part of the standard guidance she provided to all seniors, had shown her various pictures of lawns and asked her which she wanted to spend the next four years studying at.
She had chosen a nearby state school.
It wasn't like she had any chance of getting into an Ivy League anyway. Although, she thought darkly, her life would let her write a killer personal essay. Other than that, the closest thing she had had to an extracurricular activity was Girl Scouts and Mrs. Nelson's reaction informed her that attending a few meetings at the age of thirteen was not likely to compel any admissions officers.
Which was fine to her. She had attended no robotics tournaments, started no small businesses, studied no programming languages.
It wasn't that she lacked ambition. Ambition—in the sense most others interpreted the term, at least, which was to say, both believing you possessed intelligence and skills capable of changing the world and actually wanting to use said intelligence and skills to change the world—was best left to people like Julian or Aidan.
Julian, as much as she might bristle at his bro-speak, was truly brilliant. And Aidan was apparently going to study biochemistry.
"Biochemistry," Cassandra had repeated. She hadn't realized he had a particular interest in either biology or chemistry. The loftiness of the word seemed incompatible with him. Or not with him specifically, but with people in general.
"Well, yeah, I figure I'll at least try to cure cancer or something."
"That's admirable," she had said.
"Well, what else is there to do in life? If I didn't make myself try to cure cancer, I'd just be on my phone all day."
She didn't personally see an issue with being on your phone all day. If it was some people's duty to save the world, it was some people's duty to enjoy being saved and not do any saving of their own. Maybe her role was to get cancer and be the first person to take Aidan's magic anti-cancer pill.
"Do you like it?" she had asked. "Biochemistry, I mean."
"I probably will. Or, even if I don't like the thing itself, I know I'll like just having a single thing I can focus on leveling up. If I'm ever bored, I can just remember that I picked biochemistry as my thing and go learn some new molecules."
"You make it sound like a video game."
"Some things are like video games. Getting better at things, improving your skills, gaining experience," he had said, flattening his hand and sliding it up like a line graph modeling linear growth. "You can just either level up in things that are kind of useless, like video games, or try levelling up in things that help society."
If he really did become an expert in biochemistry, maybe he could find a cure for her power. It was possible it was some sort of selective schizophrenia. As unfair as it seemed to divert his efforts from curing cancer to curing a disease with a patient population of, as far as she knew, one…
At the time, she had told Mrs. Nelson that she wanted to major in psychology.
And the state college she had chosen just happened to be the one Aidan was planning on going to for biochemistry.
"I don't really want to think about it," she had explained to him. "I trust your decision, so I'll just go where you go."
Proximity to brilliance could be just as gratifying as brilliance. Besides, her own life was basically wasted. The moment she was born with this power, it was destined that she would spend so much time fretting over it and trying in vain to understand it that she would have no time left to become a genius at anything.
Since there was a non-zero chance that this power, whatever it was, was genetic, the right thing to do was likely to go through life as quietly as possible, never marry, never have sex (so as to never introduce the risk of reproduction), and die. Dying with this power would be her way of killing it once and for all. Her useless life could find use in that at least.
Other than that purpose—living like a nun so as to "kill" her power—if she were to follow Aidan's philosophy, the only skill she would have to train, to "level up," would be her ability.
That push she had felt back in class meant that now, perhaps even just slightly, she had some control.
Mrs. Nelson had taken a seat in front of her. Her numbers reflected a date approximately two years ago. Not uncommon for middle-aged women, as Cassandra's power had taught her.
Her eyes, having gone to Mrs. Nelson's numbers first, didn't notice the pained expression on her face.
Was she crying?
"Something horrible has happened," Mrs. Nelson said.
"I don't understand what you mean," Cassandra said. Did it have something to do with her college applications? She had already been accepted. Were they rescinding that acceptance? Did that sort of thing happen?
"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Nelson said, and now started openly weeping, reaching for the box of tissues that Cassandra figured had, up that point, seen most of its usage by the students she counseled and not Mrs. Nelson herself.
Looking at someone else crying was like looking at the sun. She looked down at her lap.
"I have so many girls to tell," Mrs. Nelson managed, "and I saw you—and so you're the first—I'm sorry, I'm not prepared for this at all."
So many girls?
Not so many people. So many girls.
"What do you mean?"
"I'll show you," she said, and retrieved from a drawer in her desk a folder of printouts. The printouts seemed to be images that had been processed through a low-quality photocopier, rendering them nearly indecipherable.
She found that "tendon," that muscle, in her mind again, and twisted it while focusing on the printout.
No numbers appeared. But a kind of aura throbbed from the image. Did that mean that it did represent a human after all? A being with the potential for numbers, just with no numbers themselves?
She looked around the room for an object to compare to, one that didn't have any human elements that could contaminate the experiment. Yet every frame in the room seemed to surround a picture of a smiling student; every pencil seemed to have an engraving on it from a grateful alumni.
She had to do something.
As Mrs. Nelson continued to sob, Cassandra crossed her legs sharply, planting her shoe in the corner of the desk. A well-annotated copy of Walden Two knocked over a glass figurine, sending it shattering to the floor.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Cassandra said, standing up.
"No, no, I'll get it, don't worry," Mrs. Nelson said, running to find a broom.
She had a few seconds now. She focused on the shards of glass. Focusing on the shards collectively might draw up the essence of whoever had gifted it—but what if she focused on one single shard?
She triggered that pulse again.
Nothing. No aura.
So the printout was of a person after all.
Mrs. Nelson cleaned up the mess and sat back down.
"Mrs. Nelson, who is this?" Cassandra asked.
"Oh," she sobbed. "It's you!"
"Me?"
"There's been an incident. A student—Kyle Hauser—has been using the laminator in the art room to—to laminate photographs of girls and—oh, I can't say it!"
"Ejaculate on them?" Cassandra offered.
"He apparently had a secret chat group where he would record himself—" Mrs. Nelson broke off again. "Oh, I have so many girls to tell!"
"Why did he laminate them?"
"So he could—so he could reuse them—there's a per-page fee on the library printers—after he soiled one—he couldn't afford to print out another."
She looked closer at the printout. She could finally recognize it as a shot from Julianna's Instagram of the two of them at the beach in bikinis, though cropped to only frame her.
She was still showing no numbers, so whatever Kyle had done to her—or to her picture—didn't "count." What about him, though?
She flipped to the next printout. This one appeared to be a smartphone placed on a flatbed scanner. The phone was playing a video, but through the layers of low resolution, even that was hard to discern.
If she could pulse on that, too…
It was harder this time. Like lifting a heavy object. She could feel the strain as she pushed into the image. The paucity of pixels was nearly painful to press through—she could feel the low DPI of that scanner fighting against her power and against her brain—but there was a moment where the resistance gave and she found the auras, both of them, hers and his, and no numbers.
So it hadn't counted for either of them.
She had learned through experience that masturbation didn't count according to her power. But apparently this, too, didn't count—whatever this was. Was there even a word for this?
"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Nelson kept crying.
"It's okay," Cassandra said. "Is there anything, uh, that I need to do?"
"No, no, but counseling services will be offered, I assure you, and Kyle will not walk at graduation or be welcome at prom."
"That's good. I mean, I don't think I'll be needing the counseling services, but thanks for the offer."
"So many girls to tell," Mrs. Nelson went on.
"This doesn't get sent to my parents or anything, right?" She almost added, "Like my report card?"
"No, no, of course not, you will need to tell them in your own way—with the help of counseling, if needed…"
"I'm good. Thanks." She was standing up now. "Thanks for telling me, I guess?"
Mrs. Nelson nodded wordlessly, dabbing at her middle-aged eyes, her two-years-ago date hanging comically over her head.
"We are going to get software on the printer," she was saying. "We are going to prevent this from happening again. We are going to get software on the printer to detect this."
She left the office and considered what had just happened.
She had, for the first time in her life, intentionally used her power.
"Cassandra?"
She looked up.
"Aidan?"