Teddy, at fiteen years old, has come a little unstuck.
Ever since kindergarten, she's known where she was going. She led recess-wide war games, learned how to read faster and louder than anyone else, lined up first at the door. She taught herself long division the summer before she was supposed to learn it in school, tried out for every team and joined a shocking number of them. She's always had a drive to be better, not better than anyone else, specifically, but just to exceed. When she learned the word 'superlative' at age 11, she wrote it on her arm in Sharpie every morning for three straight months.
And if people at her schools thought she was being too loud, too proud, and too present, then that was on them. Teddy figured that every dirty look or locker room snub was unavoidable, anyway; she was one of four or five black kids any given year, and usually the only mixed-race one at all. Connecticut could be like that, and Connecticut private schools almost had to be. If Teddy had to stick out, then she was going to stick out the best she possibly could. And if, over the years, there were one or two fistfights, and a couple of fencing intructors who told her she'd be better off taking a boxing class if she was going to act that way, then fine. She'd take fencing and boxing and track and debate, and anything else that would keep her occupied.
Home was... tough. She had the live-in staff, a busy dad, a distant and idle mother, and not much else. Teddy took pains to not appear to be filthy rich in public, and endeavored to spend as much time out of the palatial house as possible.
That's how Teddy lived for the first fifteen years of her life. The past four months, though, haven't followed the tempo. Her dad died, first of all. Suddenly. One day he was complaining of a headache, the next he was being helicoptered to a hospital and the next a funeral was being arranged. Her mother had gone, too, although she hadn't left anything as permanent as a corpse. She had just vanished, with some clothes and some petty cash and without one Teddy.
The months since had been spent almost enitrely at home. Teddy had never really memorized the wallpaper until recently. Everything felt delicate, like it might shatter into a thousand pieces if she breathed or thought too hard. Something lawyer-related was happening with the money and the house, but nobody really seemed to want to involve a teenager in those discussions. There was a palpable sense of definite wrongness to everything that felt like nothing Teddy had known.
And then she got powers?
Fever. Awful chest pains. At one point, her vision had turned upside-down for three hours. Doctors had been rushed in, which brought back a lot of freshly-set-aside memories, which didn't help. It hadn't been whatever mystery illness that had taken Dad away, but, somehow, almost comically, superpowers. It was like someone had sent her a unicorn named Sorry For Your Loss. Teddy didn't want a unicorn. She didn't want to suddenly grow four inches in one week, or for her fingernails to suddenly start growing in transparent, or gold eyes, any of the other fantasy nonsense that sat in her grief like marhsmallows sat in gruel.
She just wanted to know where she was going again.
