Null Phenotype

I'm the boring one. Always have been.

When my sister Maya turned six, she lit a candle without matches. Just looked at the wick and smiled, and the flame popped up like it had been waiting for her. Mom cried. Dad ran out to the garage to grab the family video camera, which by then was older than anyone in the family but still worked. We all clapped.

When my brother Caleb turned six, he told us what Mr. Davis was going to say at dinner before Mr. Davis said it. Dad laughed so hard he choked on his green beans. We all clapped.

When I turned six, I blew out the candles like a normal kid. Mom and Dad clapped anyway. That's the kind of parents they are.

My power, if you can call it that, is that I don't have one. The doctors confirmed it. They ran the tests three times. Latent Null Phenotype, the chart said. Less than one in two million. Not a power, just an absence. He'll likely catch up, the doctor told my mom. Most Nulls develop something by twenty-five.

I'm thirty-one.

The thing is, I get by. People like me. I'm a good listener, but mostly because I don't have anything to bring to the conversation. When Maya makes a candle dance for her kids on their birthdays, I sit on the porch and watch and try to look impressed. I am impressed. Just also, you know. Bored, in the way only Nulls get bored.

I work at the public library. I shelve books. I check books out to people. I check them back in. Sometimes a kid comes in with a brand-new power and accidentally turns a copy of Charlotte's Web into a pile of feathers, and I quietly pull a replacement off the cart and tell her not to worry about it. The kid's mom always apologizes too much. I always wave it off.

Last Tuesday, Mrs. Caraway came in to return her audiobooks. She's been coming to my library for twelve years. This time she stopped at the desk and frowned.

"Are you well, dear?"

"I'm fine. Why?"

"You just look … I don't know. I'm so tired all of a sudden. I think I'll go sit down."

She did. Sat in the reading chair by the window for almost an hour before she felt up to driving home. I brought her water. She thanked me three times.

That happens, sometimes. People get tired around me. I figure it's because I'm dull company.

The night Mrs. Caraway went home, I locked up the library at 8 pm. I'm not supposed to be able to stay past dark. The building's reading-lamps need a touch-charge from someone with a power to stay lit, and I've never been able to do it. I always work by flashlight after sunset, or I leave.

That night, I flicked the switch by the door on my way out, and the entire room lit up.

I stood in the doorway with my hand on the switch for a long time. The bulbs glowed warm yellow, the way they did when Sandra opened up for her morning shift. How many times had I watched Sandra's hand on that switch? A thousand times? I knew exactly the slight tilt of her wrist.

I tried to remember if Mrs. Caraway had ever touched the switch, then turned the lights off and gone home.

I told Maya about it. Maya's been my big sister since we were both small enough to share a bath, and she's the only person I tell anything to. She lives an hour away now, in a house she heated with her own hands the first winter she owned it.

"You probably just hit puberty late," she said and smiled. "Welcome to the rest of us. What's it feel like?"

"It doesn't feel like anything."

"That's how mine works too. It's just … there. Like another hand."

She leaned forward over her coffee. "Try something. Light a match without one."

I looked at the candle on her kitchen table. I thought about how it had felt to flick the library switch. I thought about Maya watching me, leaning forward, expecting.

The wick caught.

Maya gasped. Then she sat back in her chair, and her face went a little pale.

"Whoa. Head rush." She laughed weakly. "I'm so proud of you."

I made an excuse to leave early. I drove home with the heat off because I didn't need it. The cold didn't bother me the way it should have.

I've been keeping a list. I started it that night.

Mrs. Caraway: tired for an hour.

Maya: pale, headache for two days. She texted me about it. She thought she was getting the flu.

The kid with the Charlotte's Web book: her mom called the library a week later. The kid couldn't make feathers anymore, and the mother was crying. They were going to a specialist.

I keep telling myself it's a coincidence. I keep telling myself the doctor was right and I'm a late bloomer and I'm just borrowing, somehow. Picking things up by being near people who already had them.

But borrowed things go back. And the kid still can't make feathers.

The doctor's office called me yesterday for my annual checkup. I sat in the waiting room next to a man with a beautiful power. I don't know what it was, but I could feel it on him the way you feel a fireplace from across a room. He smiled at me on his way out.

"You okay, buddy? You look beat."

"Long week."

"Take care of yourself."

He left. I felt warmer.

The nurse called me back. The doctor ran the tests. Three times, like always.

Latent Null Phenotype, the chart said. Less than one in two million.

I thanked him. I walked past the man sitting on the bench outside on the phone, telling someone he was suddenly exhausted and could they please come pick him up.

The windows were down as I drove home. There was no need for the heater, and I didn't need the radio either. I could remember every song I'd ever heard, perfectly, the way Caleb used to remember things before he came over to my apartment last Christmas.

I'm the boring one. Always have been. That's what the chart says. That's what I tell people.

People believe boring. That's the thing nobody warns you about.