#12 – The Hood

Adolescence sucks.

Anyone who is either going through it or is already, thankfully, done with it can confirm this for you if for some reason you weren’t aware of this.

Your body changes and contorts in ways that make you feel like you’re wearing someone else’s skin. Everything you know about the World becomes either a lie or a joke as authority loses complete grasp of you and your basic instinct becomes lashing out at everything and everyone.

And nothing proves the real seriousness of everything that we go through than the fact that many people don’t even manage to survive their adolescent years. They either give up, becoming completely stagnant, never making into adulthood or they are so irreparably damaged by the experience that it’s like their old self died and from it someone completely new was born.

And then there are those that do literally die.

Adolescence sucks.

And this only worth repeating because, for the most part, Graham Ellis could not give a fuck about adolescence. He is way too worried about everything else going on in his life right now to ever acknowledge the million existential crises, social rituals and high school drama he’s got in the back burner right now.

So, if we take into account everything we’ve previously discussed about adolescence so far, the only logical assumption is that Graham Ellis must be deep into some serious shit.

Graham is barely 15 and lives in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. He lives with his mother ever since the divorce but he sees his father almost every day on account of his being a teacher at his school.

He’s not “cool” enough or whatever to ever be acknowledged by his school’s it crowd, yet he’s safely above band geek/math freak level. Some girls even find him “cute” or whatever. He’s not an honor student but his grades are nothing to be ashamed of either and he used to have no real prospects about his future or what he wanted to do with his life.

This all very rapidly changed on his first day of school, when Graham accidentally got caught in the way of an oncoming train and got himself run over. Miraculously enough thought, at the moment of impact, Graham was somehow able to derail the train with his bare hands. He got both arms pulverized in the process, but it saved his life. It also got about fifteen people killed in the process. He also managed to save around fifty people too. This with the help of the arms that healed themselves minutes after being turned to mush.

In just those fast and brutal fifteen minutes, Graham Ellis became many things.

A hero. A killer. A menace. A freak.

But it all boiled down to two things: He was now a super-human and a wanted man. The statements from the crash survivors managed to slowly climb all the way through the bureaucratic ladder until they reached the desk of the offices of P.E.A.C.E.’s homeland security division director, Victor Grieco. Upon hearing the news Grieco became obsessed with this new super-human popping out. He has taken a team of P.E.A.C.E. analysts and operatives and is searching day and night for this “kid in the hoodie”, every new sighting putting him a step closer from catching poor Graham, who is yet to be even aware of his presence.

No, Graham already has enough dealing with his guilt over the deaths he caused when he first manifested his powers, the fact that the entire county has an APB on him, that his mother, his father, his friends and neighbors all talk about him as if he was a monster and a danger to his face, without any care of how confused he is. And most of all, Graham is now deeply afraid of himself. Afraid of what his body can do. He knows he’s strong. He knows he can heal really fast. But, what else can he do? How does he do it? Is it something hereditary or just happenstance? Are his parents hiding something from him?

The more Graham Ellis thinks about all this things, the more he simply looks for ways to just lose himself, get away from his head, and forget the life he is living even for a moment.

Because adolescence may suck, but being an out of control super-human is even worst.

Here’s hoping poor Graham can make it out of this alive.

Tags: growing pains, male, newbie, teen, tortured hero

Category: Drama, Superhero