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Chirality is a property of asymmetry important in branches of physics, mathematics and chemistry. An object that is not identical to its mirror image is said to be chiral.
Kitty was lying on her bed when it happened the first time. She was supposed to be sleeping, or at least resting her eyes after the last migraine. Instead, she held her hand up to the light that was slanting through the curtains, which were not quite closed, watching the shadows fall against her poster of the solar system. Particle or wave? Will anyone ask her to the prom? Halfway between wakefulness and sleep, thinking about light and the colour blue, she suddenly saw with incredible clarity a way to explain energy exchange between matter and light, an explanation for the way that the universe talked. Then she fell through her bed, and the floor, landing winded on the carpet behind the sofa in the living room downstairs, and the beautiful, perfect theory was lost.
Her mom took it all really well, checking her for broken bones and ushering her back to bed, laying a cold cloth over Kitty's forehead as though that would fix the problem of having been intangible. Kitty curled over on her side, and thought about the crease between her mother's eyebrows and the way she seemed to be able to deal with everything these days, so much so that a manifestation of a mutant power was no more or less frightening than the looming mortgage on a house that was far too big for just the two of them. Her mom was "Capital D" Dealing. Kitty didn't want to be a burden. "Capital D" Divorce was enough to handle already. In the morning, after her mom had left for work, Kitty found websites bookmarked on the computer: "Your Child – A Mutant?", "Mutation – Evolution in the Family Room". A lot of the sites had addresses that ended in .gov. Kitty deleted them from the cache. At least her mom had stopped looking up the symptoms of brain tumours or even worse, mature dating sites.
Kitty sat on the stairs, halfway up, a transition state, neither here nor there. She held an ice pack to her head – in the last few days the migraines had thankfully receded. The new mutant power was less than well behaved, and her two black eyes were testament to the fact that one cannot rely on quantum field theory to help one run full-tilt through a wall, even when shouting "I’m a photon! I’m a photon!" Trying to use the force got Kitty nowhere. The universe just doesn't work that way. In the living room, she could hear her mom, using her best interview voice, questioning the educational merits of the Xavier school, and whether such a small student body could be of benefit to her daughter's development. Kitty rolled her eyes and winced. It wasn't like they had much of a choice. She'd already been asked not to return to her private school, and had her scholarship withdrawn. It was hard not to make lists of the few people she had told about her power – they were all friends, really good friends. One of them had taken her secret and shared it with local press and the school board.
This was the third visit since the headline in the Tribune. Kitty rested her head on her knees, and eyed the man in the red glasses who waited in the hallway. He didn't get to sit in on the important meetings either, and had to wait outside the room with the kid. He smiled, and she gave him half a smile back, then rested her head on her knees. She looked at her toenails that she had painted pink a week ago, when the world was sane and the worst thing in her life was her parents' divorce, and even that wasn't so bad, since they weren't fighting much any more. Kitty never wanted to be famous. Now her existence, if not her name, was a front page headline in the Tribune, and a topic of discussion in the Senate, and an internet rumour. Her friends from math camp last summer sent her mail about this weird girl in Chicago with a mutant ability. She really didn't know what to say. That mutant kid? That's me. I'm her. A mutant, different from all of you. Mutant. There had to be a better word. Mutants needed some good PR, big time.
The military guy who visited yesterday had said that there was no way any Ivy League school would be taking a mutant student, and Kitty's best chances were with the Army. The woman in the white suit who visited this morning didn't say much at all, but afterwards Kitty's mom had a glazed expression on her face, and couldn't shut up about how great this Boston school looked, and how they should take a visit over there. Kitty had to hide the credit cards, because she couldn't convince her mom not to buy two tickets they really couldn't afford and fly to Boston right now. The weirdness didn't stop until the third visitor, a creepy wheelchair guy, had showed up with two of his former students in tow. Professor Xavier had looked at Kitty's mom with narrowed eyes, and vanished into the living room with her. They had been talking for an hour.
Kitty was so tired of everything. Her head ached. She pushed her forehead into the melting ice pack, and pretended the drips of water on the carpet were from condensation. When she looked up, Scott, the guy in the red glasses, was examining a woven wall hanging, pretending not to notice she was crying. It was an awkward, polite thing to do, and the kindness made her choke on a sob. The sound was explosive and difficult to ignore. Scott held out the box of Kleenex that normally sat on the side table. Kitty took a handful and blew her nose noisily. The woman, Ororo, elegant and composed, tall like a model, put a hand through the banisters to pat Kitty’s back.
“I’m sorry. I just wish I could control it.” Kitty blew her nose again and tucked the Kleenex into her sleeve.
Scott returned the box to the side table, adjusting it so that it sat squarely against the wall. “Sometimes it can’t be controlled.” He tapped the edge of his glasses. “But there are ways to find a compromise. The Professor helps people to do that.”
"The school is a good place," said Ororo. "There are other children there around your age. It's easier sometimes, when things change, not to be the only one."
Kitty was about to protest the use of the word children, when a screech of rubber from the street outside caught Scott's attention. As he moved to the front door to look out, a brick sailed through the stained-glass window above the door. Pieces of broken glass rained down on Kitty like glitter, and she realised that though she was standing bare-foot in the debris, her body was insubstantial.
The glass was everywhere. She should have been cut to ribbons, yet somehow she was intact. She had saved herself by using her power. She hadn't even felt it switch on. Kitty watched as her mother came to the doorway, and took in the scene. The future spooled out before her – a life where her mom was constantly called on to defend Kitty, where the choice was between lying or being the undesirables in the neighbourhood. Kitty had been told about her great-grandfather, and why her family had come to live in the United States. Would she able to save her mom the next time a brick came through the window? Were there going to be soldiers knocking on their door in the middle of the night? The look on her mother's face as she stood in the doorway made Kitty's decision easier. She glided down the stairs, shuddering a little as her body slid through the wooden banister, and her arm brushed lightly through Scott's body. Her mom wisely leapt out of the way as Kitty moved into the living room, to address the Professor.
"I want to know about your school. I think I'm the one you need to talk to. I want to know how take care of myself. And my mom."
The Professor held out his hand, and Kitty felt her own hand solidify against his. It was warm, and not particularly creepy after all.
"I would be very pleased to welcome you to my school, Miss Pryde."
Kitty's mom cried while they folded socks and sewed name tags onto her clothes. She cried while they assembled copies of school reports. She cried, then looked askance as Kitty tried to smuggle in to the suitcase her extra-daring bikini, which would never see its debut at next summer's math camp. Kitty distracted her mother by giving her a photo album to pack. This brought a fresh fall of tears, and Kitty consoled her mother with a hug.
"I have to go to school somewhere, Mom. And this place, it doesn't look so bad." Kitty almost believed her own words; they sounded so calm and self-assured. She wondered if this was part of her new, grown-up personality. Her mom cried as she turned to peel the luminescent decal of Einstein's face off the wall.
When they were finally ready to leave, though, the tears vanished from Kitty's mom's face as she opened the garage door and firmly nosed the family car past the idle gawkers who gathered daily to watch the mutant house. Some of them, slackers Kitty vaguely recognised from the mall, took photos of the car with their phones. She slouched in her seat and scowled at them as the car moved implacably through the crowd.
"Like they're going to get a photo through the glass. Haven't you heard of polarisation?"
Her mom was going to spend a couple of nights at a hotel until the fuss died down.
Kitty had worked hard to convince her mom that everything was cool. When it actually came to saying goodbye, she nearly ran back through the departure gate to hurl herself at her mom and cry.
The flight over had been stressful. Kitty had never flown alone before, and what should have been a great adventure was a constant worry that she would become insubstantial at 50,000 feet, and fall through the plane, as it soared away from her at 500 miles per hour. She kept one hand on the window, and clicked Pez bricks out of Hello Kitty's plastic head, trying not to think about aerodynamics and how the rounded shape of the wing generated lift. By the time she disembarked at JFK, she was a jittery, over-caffeinated ball of nerves. Scott (Mr Summers, now that he would be one of her teachers) and Ms Munroe met her at the airport. When she caught sight of them, so reassuringly solid, she threw her arms around Ms Munroe and burst into tears.
Despite the sugar and caffeine, she dozed a little on the drive to the school. When she awoke, feeling nauseous and tired, they were still on the highway. She saw Mr Summers watching her in the rear view mirror, and she must have looked like she was going to puke, because he turned the car off onto a service road and into a shopping village, and parked the car outside a café.
"I need a break. Let's grab some lunch," he said, glancing back at her
While Mr Summers ate with one hand, holding the newspaper with the other, and Ms Munroe sipped herbal tea, Kitty picked at her chicken sandwich, and stared at the salon across the road. It was one of those "No Appointment Necessary" places, and they had a list of a thousand services on the window. She didn't know what all of them were, but nobody came out of the place looking too hideous. She stood up and pushed her chair in.
"Is it okay if I go look over there?" She gestured towards the salon.
Ms Munroe smiled and shook her head. "Just don't go too far away. We don't want you to get lost before we even get to the school."
The hairdresser was a little nervous about it. "You really want me to cut it that short, hon?"
Kitty nestled her head against the basin. "Yeah, I'm really sure. Cut it off, all of it." She thought of Professor Xavier's smooth pink scalp, and reconsidered her definition. "Well, cut most of it."
She could see her new teachers in the reflection of the mirror as the stylist snipped and fussed with the length of her hair. After a quarter of an hour, Ms Munroe came over to the salon, and stood beside the chair, looking a little surprised. Mr Summers followed shortly after her, and Kitty could see in the mirror that a salon was not a place in which Mr Summers was completely comfortable. She smiled at him. It was nice for a few moments not to be the only one who felt out of place.
"I hope you don't mind. I suddenly wanted to be completely different before we got to the school. You know, new school, new hair, new Kitty." She had been talking fast, letting the words bubble out nervously, but she had to stop when the stylist combed her hair over her eyes and started trimming near her nose.
Ms Munroe smiled, and took a seat next to Kitty. "No, that makes perfect sense, actually." She looked a little archly up at Mr Summers. "Maybe we should get a manicure, Scott?"
When it was done, Kitty felt lighter, balanced and new, different to the girl she had left behind in Chicago. This wasn't the plan from her childhood, but she'd already learned that the universe didn't like plans: it had buried a secret into Kitty's DNA, that had only just revealed itself. To try and make a plan herself seemed a little presumptuous in comparison.
Close to the end of summer, Kitty was in the Professor's office, introducing herself to a girl, long-legged and pale, who had returned with the team in the jet, and been ushered to the infirmary in a great flurry. Rumour had run riot, as it always did in the small community of the school, about the strange, swarthy man that was carried in unconscious, and the young girl that had accompanied him, but as always, when someone arrived at the school in a great drama, there was an atmosphere of tension. People were thinking of their first day, and that feeling of being lost and found at the same time.
She was really quiet, the new girl, Rogue. Kitty saw a little of herself in the pale face, and the stoic expression, and remembered what it felt like to be caught between two possibilities: what you wished for, and what you received.
"It gets better, I promise," she said, as she helped Rogue set up her stuff in the shared bathroom. "It takes a while to get used to the idea, that you're different, that things aren't going to happen the way you want them, but this is a good place." Kitty caught Rogue's gaze in the mirror over the sink, her lip curled into a dubious expression. "I know, I don't know anything about you, or what you've been through. Finding out you're not like everyone else, that sucks. Pretty much all of us have that in common here."
She offered a choice of new toothbrushes to Rogue. Rogue chose a green toothbrush, and silently tore the plastic wrapper off it. Kitty held the bin out for the rubbish, which Rogue lobbed in. "See? New toothbrush, new school, new Rogue."
Rogue twisted up her mouth into a smile. It looked like she hadn't smiled in a little while. Kitty put her hand over Rogue's gloved hand that rested on the edge of the sink, held it there though Rogue flinched.
"They try to help you here, if they can. If they can't, then at least you have a chance to be safe while you figure out what the universe has planned for you."