Clyde stared at Kaitlyn. She could make things explode? That was, honestly, a little scary. Especially since she mentioned that she lost control of it at times. Yep, he could see why thugs would leave her alone. But she wasn't doing detonating anything at the moment, so he shouldn't be afraid of her.

“I have to say it is one of those powahs everyone's scared of,” Clyde admitted, shrugging. “Though, as long as you ahn't hurting people with it, they shouldn't be.”

“Were you here for the hiccup incident? Or that time I gave Gabriel a concussion?” The incident with Gabriel happened a few months earlier. The 15-year-old boy was a jerk, and the concussion did good a lot of good things for his personality. Plus, the time she spent in detention helped her catch up on that book about socialism.

“I kinda deserve it. Still sucks though.”

“I wasn't around for eithah one. I don't even know who Gabriel is.” A lot of power mismanagement incidents happened at the school, so tales of one got mixed with stories of others. Heh. Maybe she made up those stories so she'd have something to brag about. He didn't know, but he wasn't going to put it past her.

“I can see how it would be a hassle.” A person with such a destructive power was under a lot of pressure to keep it under control. Maybe he could be considered lucky in the sense that his power couldn't be considered dangerous, and he, at this point, wasn't using it on accident.

“Basically, one time I started to blow something up every time I hiccupped. And uh…” What was the best way to put this?

“I get into fights with people who are being jerks. Gabriel was an idiot picking on some kid for some idiot reason. It just… it pisses me off to see a mutant picking on another mutant like that, you know?” She was starting to sound defensive. “The rest of the world hates us enough. We don’t need to make things worse for ourselves like that.”

At times, Kaitlyn felt like the school administration disapproved of her decisions to injure certain students solely because those administrative types had a personal problem with her. At least she wasn’t so far gone that she actually believed that; it just felt that way, sometimes. But, for example, the DocProf didn’t even seem even slightly sympathetic to her position. Didn’t that guy ever want to hurt someone else over something like this? Or did he have a mutation that allowed him to survive without a spine?

“Yikes.” Something as simple as the hiccups making a mutant's control of their power falter? It must be scary to have powers like Kaitlyn's.

“I don't like jerks much, eithah. People shouldn't pick on othahs in general.” Hearing about the bully brought Clyde back to elementary school, where all he understood about his situation was that he was the shortest kid in the class. Being picked on so much, he had gotten into a fair few fights himself. It never helped since the other kids were bigger and stronger. In the end, there wasn't much he could do to shield himself from their cruel remarks other than avoid them and harden his personality.

Clyde couldn't say he agreed with Kaitlyn's actions, though. “I don't think using yo powah like that was a good idea, though. You say that the world hates us and you don't want to make things worse, but the world hates us when we use mutations to hurt othahs. It's kind of countahprodective, isn't it?”

Kaitlyn shrugged. “Gabriel was using his mutation to give people seizures. They lasted just a coupla seconds, but they’d still make you fall over and hurt yourself. So he was already hurting people. I just wanted him to stop.”

Admittedly, he was a lot worse than most of her other victims.

Using a mutation to cause seizures? “He was doing that?” Clyde gasped in disbelief. That was pretty serious stuff! “I guess if that's what you had to do to get him to stop, then he kind of had it coming...”

Even then, knocking someone hard on the head still sounded like a pretty extreme measure. Usually, students were supposed to find an adult in those sort of situations.

“He did have it coming,” she agreed. “And you can’t just wait for the school to do anything about it, either. Either they don’t take your word for it, or they don’t do enough to punish it. Kinda like how human courts deal with humans who hurt us.”

Kaitlyn made that last remark as though any other mutant would be able to relate to it.

Kaitlyn seemed to think the school did nothing about bullies. Clyde hadn't had too much experience trying to report stuff like that yet. He normally didn't tell on people for teasing him. The last thing the staff needed to hear about was how some of his classmates called him “Shorty” or “Child” or whatever stupid name they could come up with. He was seventeen; he should be impervious to something as childish as name-calling.

Though, Clyde understood what Kaitlyn meant about the judicial system being unfair. Sometimes, those who committed hate crimes against mutants got off easy. “Yeah, I know the courts can be biased. Though, to be fair, sometimes the attackahs get pulvahrized.”

“Sometimes people win the lottery, too.” She shrugged.

It wasn’t that unlikely, and Kaitlyn knew it. “Anyway, don’t you have a bunch of cool seventeen-year-old friends to be hanging out with or something?”

She touched her forehead, then examined her fingers. Still bleeding.

“Do you think I'm part of the cool crowd? Do I look like someone people would want to hang out with?”

Kaitlyn couldn't have been serious. Looking like a kid wasn't cool at all. Not that Clyde wanted to be part of the cool crowd – most of them were jocks that had been knocked on the head one too many times. He just wished his mutation was different so that people would actually treat him like an equal.

Kaitlyn raised an eyebrow. “You look like a normal human kid?" Seriously, he should try making that case again when he looks like a walking fish. "Who the hell are the cool crowd?”

The first thing that jumped to her mind was the student council. Everyone knew those elections were popularity contests.

“Yeah, of course I look like a normal kid. Key word: kid. I'd be bettah off as a teen with blue skin oh a furry tail at this.” Yeah, Clyde had seen a few mutations, even physical ones, that he would have taken over his own. If his mutation had instead been one of those, at least there would have been fewer people talking down to him.

Clyde didn't understand why Kaitlyn was asking what a “cool crowd” was, but he was going to explain it as well as he could. “'Cool crowds' ah groups of people that almost everyone wants to be friends with fo some reason. Honestly, I don't know why some people become populah, because most of the 'cool kids' I see ah supahficial and not all that intelligent.”

“I didn’t know that was a thing.” She rubbed her slightly bloody fingers off on her jeans. Maybe she should get a band-aid or something? “But now that I think about it, I guess I know some people like that.” Some of them owed their popularity to actually being pretty nice, but a most of them were jerks. Come to think of it – wasn’t Curtis kinda like that? The rich kid whose nose she broke on ‘accident?’ Or at least his parents were rich. Having rich parents was an easier way to make friends than not-being-a-dick, apparently.

“Either way, I bet some of the high school girls think you’re cute.” Granted, probably not in the way most high school guys would want high school girls to think they were cute. But it was something, wasn’t it?

“Sadly, it is. I don't get why.” Life would have been better if kids like that didn't rule the school. Clyde figured that he was smarter than average. There was no reason the dumb kids should lord over him.

Clyde's face went red with embarassment at Kaitlyn's remark. Cute? Yes, there were some people that said that about him, and he hated it. “I've heard that before,” Clyde growled. “'Little kid' cute is not a good thing. Besides, guys don't like being called cute.”