XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me by Brad Magnarella

gone. She glanced over her shoulder at her friends, sensing perhaps that she was not going to be sitting with them.
    Amy would have been right. For the next thirty minutes, Mrs. Fern divined qualities from the origins of the students’ names and seated them accordingly. Alicia went to the back of the classroom (Joiner was an occupational surname for a carpenter, and Mrs. Fern wanted a good vantage for Alicia to monitor the state of the wooden desks). And Autumn was given a window seat (because Warren was Germanic for “guard,” and Autumn was to cry out at the first approach of anyone suspicious or untoward). Both of them had huffed and rolled their eyes and later tried to exchange a note before Mrs. Fern—still with her eyes sealed—plucked the message away, disappearing it into an unseen pocket in her skirt.
    It was the most unusual seating system Janis had ever witnessed—and also the most entertaining. Finally, she was one of only two students left standing.
    “Graystone,” Mrs. Fern said.
    “Yes?” Janis’s stomach quivered.
    “Nothing too revelatory about that name. Nothing too much to glean. English in origin. Self-explanatory, really. And yet I sense there’s something more to you.” She stood silently for a moment. “And your first name, Miss Graystone, is…?”
    “Janis.”
    The twin globes of Mrs. Fern’s eyes seemed to swell beneath her lids. “Ah, yes. Now we have something to work with. Janis, a derivative of Jane, perhaps, but also a variation of Janus , who was a Roman god. A god of two faces.”
    At this, Amy sniggered from her desk.
    “But not two-faced in the sense of duplicity, oh no,” Mrs. Fern continued. “Janus is a powerful god, a diviner. A god of doorways. Think of Janu -ary. One face looking to the past. The other peering ahead, to the future. But we speak not just of doorways in the sense of time. No, there is also the doorway between here and there.”
    Mrs. Fern’s head bobbed slowly. Janis had been anticipating having her name explained, but now she became uncomfortably warm. She curled her toes inside her white Keds, alternating feet.
    “The doorway between this world and another. Yes, another . One not quite seen, perhaps?” When her eyes opened, it felt to Janis as if they were poised to swallow her. “Isn’t that right, Miss Graystone?”
    But Janis couldn’t make a sound because she remembered why she had felt protective toward Margaret at lunch. She remembered what had happened the night before. The dream, the experience…
    In a torrent of horrifying images, she remembered it all.
    “This desk in the very middle of the classroom will suit a Janis quite perfectly, I would think.”
    But Janis did not go to the desk Mrs. Fern was opening her arm toward. She turned from the classroom and fled.

8
    Mr. Shine stood before Scott, chuckling and holding out a quarter. “Ain’t much magic to making her jump. Jus’ a little diligence. A little patience.” His brown eyes flashed sky blue as he snapped his fingers. The quarter changed from tails to heads. “Go on and try for you’self.”
    Scott accepted the quarter from Mr. Shine, whose eyes had settled to brown again, and snapped it between his own fingers.
    The quarter disappeared.
    “Not bad, young blood. Not bad at all,” Mr. Shine said. “Course, it ain’t gonna happen overnight, but look at you!”
    When Scott looked down, he was wearing a full-body uniform, dark blue except for what appeared to be a pair of Speedos and boots, both yellow. Above a broad red belt, abdominal muscles showed beneath the uniform’s fabric in interlocking columns. He was no longer Scott Spruel, he realized, but his favorite comic book character: Scott Summers of the X-Men.
    Smiling, Scott began to feel for his cyclopean visor.
    Brakes cawed, and Scott jerked awake to find the school bus approaching his stop. After disembarking, he stood a moment squinting into the heat, watching the bus rumble away. He turned to the bush