I know she means trouble the minute she walks in to homeroom.

Teenage miasma fills the air like a large pizza in a small pizza box, smearing the hot cheese of boy sweat, body spray, illicit cigarettes, floral deodorant, egg McMuffin wrappers, coffee farts, misery, and Calvin Klein's Existential Dread®, into every crack and crevice. Late-summer sunlight picks out the zits on every face. Mr Groan (I swear to God), the geography teacher and our jailer for the next twenty-five minutes, sits behind his metal teacher desk, not teaching. Humid maps peel limply from the walls. My ass already hurts from squishing into a fucking chair-desk made for a goddamn elf.

And then she walks in, with those legs that reach all the way from her white hip-hugger shorts down to the cracked linoleum floor, and waves of apple-red hair crashing down from her head like her head is the ocean and her back is Hermosa beach. She snaps her gum, then winks one of her big baby blues at me, and takes the next desk over.

Reiko Rolleston. "Lain" to her friends, ever since the anime of the same name entered our collective consciousness around the sixth grade.

My best friend.

"Your eyes were brown last time I saw them," I say.

"Contacts," she says, and then she takes a pencil out of her purse and stabs me in the hand. Pretty hard, I think. The pencil snaps in the middle, with a sound like a child's heart breaking because of a puppy or some shit. To me, it feels like a night in satin sheets, like an angel's kiss.

I mean, more or less. Invulnerability, right? To be perfectly frank, it doesn't feel like much of anything.

"Damn," she says. "It's true."

We haven't really spoken since the thing. I don't know why, except that after a while of not talking to someone, keeping on not talking gets too fucking easy.

"Lainie," I say. "You've got TV, right? So you've probably seen me get shot and fly and shit. And you're amazed that you can't stab me with a pencil? Have you been to physics class?"

"Shut up, Beth. I'll physics your class."

I spit out a giggle and my heart sort of breaks and I literally snap my desk in half in my hurry to give her a big old extremely careful not to crush you to death hug.

"Missed you," I say.

"Me too," she says.

Then I start screaming, because have you heard what school announcement speakers sound like when they come on and start feeding back? And have you heard it while in the possession of hearing acute enough to detect the grumbling stomachs of hungry cats in that one house down the street where they never, never, never take out the garbage?

I may be immune to pencils, bullets, fire, et cetera, but if I ever run up against some kind of sonic avenger motherfucker, I am seriously in for it.

I am a panting wreck on the floor by the time the new Principal comes on and starts her speech.

Here it is, in full: Blah blah blah, students with special concerns, blah blah blah, community, blah blah blah, safety, blah blah blah.

What she means is: Dear Beth, and any of you other newly super-powered and/or magical freaks I don't know about, turn it off during school hours because if you kill somebody on my time, God might forgive you, but I will go up there and kick his ass through his face until he changes his mind and puts you personally on the one-way train to old smokey.

Fair enough. I can do that. I remember how to normal. Who needs super-strength, super-hearing, super-vision, or super-smellin' to get through AP Calc?

And that fuzzy feeling of not being in the shit lasts… for about, oh, five minutes. Then my phone rings, and Groan tells me to turn it off and turn it in.

It rings again. And again. Groan holds out his hand and taps his foot and tries to stare me down.

Thing is, these are all texts from my friend at the FD, and he is in a panic which I expect emoticons fail to fully convey, because someone is lighting up a whole bunch of Fs all over town and the D does not have sufficient trucks, helmets, hoses or hunky bearded dudes to fight them and he is wondering if I might, you know. Help people not die.

Which, I have recently discovered, is my thing! Totally my thing. I love helping people not die. If helping people not die was a hunky bearded dude, I would be on him like fire is currently on: three homes on Crest, two of the dorms at Kramer, the animal hospital, all six gas stations within five miles of Nelson, CT's nearly block-long downtown, and a whole bunch of cars in the Wal*Mart parking lot that, from the air, I am told now make a picture of a smiley face. Speaking of emoticons.

So I try to explain in my best polite-to-teacher-ese that I have to go but I will be back, just as soon as nobody is dying, to do whatever first day of school bullshit is required of me.

"No," says Mr Groan. Sweat starts to pour down from under his toupee.

"I'm sorry," I say. "Someone must have asked you something else while I was explaining about how I need to go for juuuuust a bit to prevent some of our neighbors from burning to death. So I'm going now. 'K?"

"Ms Jameson, if you fly out of that window, you are suspended," he says. He crosses his arms. He has enormous fucking pit stains, in layers like lines of topography. Goddamn, man, hygiene! Hygiene.

"Beth Beth Beth!" Lain says. "Take me with you! Take me! I'll take pictures!" She waves her iPhone around in the air like every fifth kid hasn't got one. "You'll be famous! —er!"

"I don't know—" I say.

"If you take another student with you out that window, you are expelled," says Groan.

What is that saying? Don't push a pusher?

I'm pretty sure that's not it.

"Come on, Lain," I say. She runs over and jumps in the air for some reason, forcing me to float up and catch her in a totally awkward embrace in which certain people could if they wished motorboat certain other people. I put her down and re-adjust into a stance more carrying the bride over the threshold than vaguely HBO soft core.

Out the window we go. Saving occurs. Free sodas are drunken. Drank? Whatever.

But boy, are these school people quick. When I get home, all smudged and having ruined yet another cute skirt, I am met by my mother, who shows me a letter outlining my change in educational status and future options, and then deals me a hearty slap to the face.

That stings. I mean, it doesn't. But it does.

(For another Beth story, m ake clickings)