Rebel Without a Cause

[Isabelle Amherst]

Sneaking around had never been much of a difficult task for the psychic sixteen-year-old girl. Despite her strikingly brightly colored hair and flamboyant personality, she was tiny enough to slip in and out of the hallways and, for the most part, remain well below the eye level and underneath the radars of most of the faculty members. Plus, it helped that Isabelle could sometimes supernaturally predict when those pesky "hall monitors" (or whatever they called themselves) would take off for their breaks or when one would end his or her shift and the following would be slightly late.

Just this morning, she'd had a rather random premonition of Dr. James Campbell going for a coffee run and leaving his office unlocked at precisely two fourty-five PM. And although she had let go of her grudge against all of the faculty members for bringing her to the Institute and had accepted the fact that she was there to stay, she couldn't resist the opportunity for a little playful, harmless mischief. Isabelle thought of it as long overdue retribution for bringing her to a place of order and organization, of rules and regulation, when she was meant to be an unbridled free spirit. Besides... a little reorganization had never hurt anybody.

Unfortunately, Isabelle was not a master of her premonitions, so she had no idea just how long James would take to get his coffee and return. She had to be quick. Knowing that the office would be empty, that the door would not be locked, she waltzed right in, shut the door behind her, and got to work.

Gee... she knew that Dr. Campbell liked to be organized, but could you say 'anal?' She wondered to herself if the man had ordered his room by the Dewey Decimal system or something. She wouldn't have been too alarmed if she learned that he had invented the Dewey Decimal system. Everything seemed to have a proper place. Not for long, she thought.

By the time she was done, a large stack of papers was inside the microwave, which had been rotated. The container of pens was inside the small refrigerator. She was greatly amused to discover that the labels could be removed from the front of the filing cabinets, allowing her to easily take them out and switch them with one another so that they were all reordered in a wonderfully nonsensical manner. Furthermore, she noticed that she could pull the sliding cabinets out all of the way. It made her smirk to think of how annoyed James would be when he opened the top cabinet and found the things that should have been in the bottom one. Anything that seemed to be color coordinated, she reorganized. Once she found a box of different-colored post-it notes, she took a few of each color and placed them in various corners around the room with random notes written on them, such as "Potatoes haunt you in your sleep." When that was finished, she messed with the digital clock and changed the time so that it was just a few minutes slow.

On top of that, she got to work on rearranging all of the picture frames that were on the walls and desks. Some were moved. Others ended up upside down.

When all of this was done, she took a second to admire her work thus far. Had she just slipped out right then and there, she might have gotten away with her seemingly harmless prank. But Isabelle was having far too much fun, and she wasn't quite ready to cease her shenanigans. As a finishing touch to her handiwork, she found the head recruiter's red and silver paperclips and did what she knew would set him off. She started to mix them. Ohhh, James was going to be pissed...

[Dr. James Campbell]

James liked order. It was comforting that he knew exactly when and where things in his life were supposed to go. That meant he liked routines, and he liked patterns, and he liked going into the staff room at 2:45 to make a fresh pot of coffee every afternoon, because it was just before all the high-school level teachers showed up to grade papers or whatever else they did after they didn't have to be in their classrooms.

And the teachers liked that there was a fresh, almost-full coffepot, and James also liked being popular.

When he returned to his office, however, he was confronted by a great many things he did not like. The first thing he saw as that Isabelle was there. He didn't mind that a student was in his office, if he wasn't able to see instantly that there was a lot wrong with his office. And not just wrong, it was wrong. The picture of him, Chase, and Ginny when she came up for the ­­­­wedding was upside-down...and that was probably the thing in the best shape in the entire room. He grit his teeth and looked around again.

It was a mess; nothing was in the right place. And he'd caught Isabelle red-handed, with putting the silver paperclips in with the red ones. The red ones were only for potential cases. The silver ones were kept at the other end of his desk, where he worked on progress reports of the current students. (It was part of his job to monitor the development of the students powers and how well they coped at Hammel.)

James crossed the room abruptly and took the little cup of paperclips, dumped them onto the desk, and began to sort through them, neatly moving the red ones to the left and the silver ones to the right. It was small, but it was a start, and he could feel the panic rising in his throat.
He had to fix his office; it was making him ill.

"Isabelle? You have exactly five seconds to explain what you're doing."

[Isabelle Amherst]

Isabelle had a problem, and it was a serious one. It could arguably have been an undiagnosed condition. If the human body had a fear gland or a certain trigger in the brain that induced intimidation, then Isabelle's was clearly broken. The second that Dr. Campbell entered the room and observed her reorganizations, she knew that the proper reaction would have been nervousness and submission in the presence of the head recruiter, and yet all she did was look up. The shameless girl was admittedly a little bit sorry when she saw his panic-stricken reaction, but she was mostly just amused.

"Sinclair and I are welcoming the spring with colors," Isabelle explained cheerfully, with her signature doe-eyed look of innocence plastered on her face. She and her partner in crime had already ground up brightly colored chalk and thrown it around at the pond; she silently wondered if James knew about that yet. "The world needs more colors. I thought I'd start with your room," she added, looking around at the overly organized room with disdain then smiling at the post-it notes around the room and the color-coded paper clips among other items that were now mingling with each other.

[Dr. James Campbell]

James swallowed thickly, trying not to freak out. She didn't know, she couldn't know what would happen if she were to move things. Ruin things. Otherwise, she would never have done it, right?

Right?

He quickly sorted out the paperclips. They were so small, too small for it to count for much in the grand scheme, not when pictures were inverted on the wall, and something about the filing cabinets that bothered him as well. (Post its didn't bother him half so much. He also hadn't read all of them yet. James often put little notes to himself and Chase around their home.) A stray glance let him focus on the label on the front of one....the names were wrong.

Over the course of his time in the new office, he'd created his own filing system. Though many people found it confusing--including his husband, who had called it crazy, and the other recruiters, who called it idiosyncratic, when they were being kind.

His face twitched, and he slowly clenched his fingers, trying not to panic, not to melt down. "Why would you do this? There was plenty of colors. There was more than enough colors in here, I didn't need--why would you do this?" Sometimes, the cruelty of teenagers escaped him. He didn't work with them every day, after all, and his daughter had grown up wary of setting him off.

[Isabelle Amherst]

Isabelle was torn. She was playful, mischievous even, but she was far from malicious. All she had done was move things around a little bit, right? Throw a few colors around? She had intended to reorganize, not to vandalize. She had half-expected her prank victim to be somewhat amused. A breakdown was not on her list of possible reactions. She was not sure if she was going to continue making sarcastic remarks or if she wanted to run to the filing cabinets and start fixing the labels as quickly as she could. She was sure of one thing, though. Dr. Campbell deserved an answer to his question. Why had she done this?

She knew why. The answer was a simple one. Dr. James had been the recruiter who had sent her that letter, who had knocked on her door. She didn't hate it at Hammel Institute. A year had passed since the day she was recruited, and she had long accepted her sentence, but that didn't change the fact that a "sentence" was exactly what she thought of when she thought of the time she would be spending at the school. Jail time.

Isabelle Amherst was a wild one. She simply preferred to be untamed, to be a loose cannon. It had never been her style to train, so when she was officially confined to a little school in the middle of nowhere, where she would be expected to let them shape and mold her into something she had no desire to be, she had no choice but to resent whatever authority had brought her there. That authority just happened to be James.

"Because you brought me here," Isabelle retorted defiantly, even as she walked to the walls and started turning the pictures right-side-up. It really wasn't funny when someone got hurt. Then she remembered something. Still fixing the picture frames, she spoke without turning around.

"By the way, do not look in the microwave. Or the fridge." She'd fix them herself as soon as she was finished with the picture frames.

[Dr. James Campbell]

Though James suddenly wanted to open the little refridgerator, and the microwave, and see what the hell the teenager had done to them, he equally didn't want to know. Everything was bad enough; he didn't need knowledge of more. Some of his odd habits were well-known throughout the Instititute, like his obsessively neat office and his organizing things in public places. (Until someone else gets there, the various bottles of creamer and milk in the staff room fridge is usually grouped by size.) On occasion, a staff member or older student would joke that he was obsessive compulsive.

Except he was, and James didn't joke about it. Somewhere in his head, he knew that his reaction to the chaos in his office was irrational. But it was still wrong and it bothered him.
Her reply bothered him as well. Did she really blame him for her being there? Sure, he'd been the one assigned to convince her and her parents that coming to Hammel was in Isabelle's best interests. The only problem with her being mad at him for it was that she really was better off being trained. "But your migraines are less frequent, right?"

James went to start putting the lables on his filing cabinets back in the proper order, never even considering the possiblility that the drawers themselves had been moved. "So you don't like it here? How did you think I felt when I came?" He paused for a moment, then picked up the picture frame from the top of the cabinet. "Hammel found me when I was 22. I had a wife and a daughter and they took me from them. But I really was better off once I got the training I needed. I know it sucks to be here sometimes, but people have had it much worse than you." He turned the picture to show it to her. It was of a blonde teenage girl, holding up a softball trophy. "That's my daughter, Ginny."

[Isabelle Amherst]

"My migraines?" Isabelle repeated, scrunching her face at the thought of the wretched headaches that made her want to scream, or pull her hair out, or lock herself in a dark closet, or all of the above. Whenever she had them, every tiny little noise was ear-splitting, and every light was blinding. And yes-- ever since she had been training, they had become less frequent, but enduring them would have been a small price to pay for freedom.

Or so she stubbornly told herself when institute officials whose names could be found on soup cans used the migraines as a justification for locking her up in what she considered a prison.

"Yes. They're less frequent. But I credit that to my best friends, Vicodin and Ibuprofen, not to training sessions," Isabelle retorted while fixing the last picture frame. That was a blatant lie. All of the aspirin in the world couldn't fix her migraines, and he probably knew that, but she was determined to undermine the potency of her education at Hammel. "I'm a psychic. I see things. Then they happen. I'm sorry, but I don't see how that requires any form of cultivation."

While James fixed the labels and talked about his family, Isabelle half-listened and moved onto the fridge, which she opened to retrieve the stack of papers. After returning to the desk to place the papers back they belonged, she found herself face-to-face again with James, forced to actually listen and allow herself to take his words to heart. She didn't want to do that. She knew he had a good point, but she didn't want to hear it.

The photograph of his daughter was adorable, of course, and a faint smile appeared on Isabelle's face as he showed it to her. But as soon as he set it back down, she forced her expression back into that of a cold, hard delinquent who was determined to piss off the institute official.

"Look, if I wanted to exchange sob stories, I would have gone see that therapist dude, Dr. Neville. I'd rather not be here, but it's kind of a little late to complain now, so let's just forget I said anything," Isabelle said with a shrug while she retrieved the pencil container from the microwave and brought it back, thus fixing the last of the visible reorganizations aside from the silly message-bearing post-it notes. Once she set the pencils down, she stopped moving about and looked into the man's eyes for a brief exchange of sincerity. "I'm sorry I messed up your office. It was inconsiderate of me, and I should have thought about how much it would upset you." This one painfully forced-out display of remorse was all that would come from Isabelle. Though she hadn't intended to cause any real harm, and she really was repentent, she wasn't about to jeopardize her prized reputation of being shameless. After the moment was over, she returned to her usual attitude toward most adult authority figures-- defiant and disrespectful but in the sweetest way possible. "Okay, now we can skip to you giving me detention or whatever so that I can get out of your way."

[Dr. James Campbell]

James continued to straighten his office. He knew that Isabelle knew that the training was helping her migraines. It was hard to lie to James, with his power. It was also hard to lie to him, because he had a teenage daughter as well, and she could be just as obstinate when she wanted to be, and she knew her father was right.

He caught her little smile, and knew that something of what he said was getting through to her, even if she wasn't acknowledging it. But then she was back to her delinquent mode, and he had to adapt to that as well. "You brought it on yourself by coming in here." And even though his story would out-sob most of them, it had a happy ending, at least so far. He had Chase, and he would never have met him if it wasn't for Hammel.

Her apology seemed heartfelt enough, even though it appeared forced. And she acknowledged that what she did had consequences for him. It wasn't a harmless prank, like doing the same thing to another school official might be. He could live with that. Somehow, he wasn't particularly angry at her. Maybe in a while, he would be, when he discovered the files in the wrong places. But for now, as the office approached normality (with the exception of the post-its everywhere) he was feeling less anxious. It was almost better. Once the notes were taken down, he would be able to concentrate in there again.

"No." James looked at her and frowned, considering. This was the kind of thing for which teachers might give detention. But he didn't actually have that option. "I can't do that, Isabelle. I have no authority over punishments of students, even when they happened to choose me for a prank. So how about this: You get rid of the notes and promise me this won't happen again, and I won't inform someone who can punish you. Deal?"

Sometimes, he really did wish he could send kids to detention. She certainly deserved it. But he's rather handle this himself.

[Isabelle Amherst]

"Wait, notes?" Having already forgotten about the finishing touch of her redecorations, Isabelle looked genuinely confused for a second. Her doctor had called her forgetfulness A.D.D., but sometimes she was convinced it was a case of short term memory loss. There where times when her ability to remember was about as sharp as that of a ninety-nine-year-old with Alzheimer's. Then she looked around and spotted the colorful little squares that she'd placed around the room just minutes earlier. "Oh!" she said with amused laughter as she recalled the bizarre messages she had written on them (e.g. "Pluto, you'll always be a planet to me"). "Those were intended for your amusement, but if you insist."

Walking around the room for the last time, she collected all of the little notes (aside from the ones she couldn't see and had forgotten about). A colorful little stack had accumulated in her hand by the time she returned to James' desk. Shooting a glance at the trash bin from her peripheral vision, Isabelle contemplated chucking the pile of post-it notes away, but she immediately thought better of it. There was sure to be some other area that she could subtly vandalize without causing as much of an upheaval, so she slipped the notes into one of her front jean pockets instead. As for the promise, Isabelle was cautious. She wasn't about to vow away her God-given right to be up to no good most of the time, but if she chose her words carefully, she wouldn't be promising much.

"That's fine. I promise I won't ever come in and mess up your room again," Isabelle vowed, wearing a lighthearted grin that suggested that she was already over the slight unpleasantness of their encounter. "So am I dismissed?"

[Dr. James Campbell]

James didn't believe that the girl had already forgotten about the notes she had left. After all, they were all sorts of neon shades and ALL OVER HIS OFFICE. But he merely let out a slight hiss through his teeth and let her go and collect them all. But at least the rest of the stuff was mostly done. The desk wasn't arranged properly, but he couldn't expect Isabelle to get everything perfect, and he could make it symmetrical once she left. He didn't need her laughing at him for his compuslsion to make it perfectly balanced. Even though it was just a few inches of movement, he could wait, he would wait until he was alone.

Soon she'd cleared them up, and with the exception of his not-yet-perfect desk and the files he did not know were moved, his office was back to normal.

Well, as normal as James Campbell's office ever got.

Her wording did not escape him, as he'd done the same thing repeatedly to his parents when he was younger. It was easy to manipulate words to his will, and make it seem like they were agreeing to the thing they wanted, while leaving massive loopholes for him to play with. But so long as she wasn't going to rearrange his office again, he didn't particularly care. She could go bother someone else.

"Yes, fine Isabelle." James waved slightly towards the door, indicating she could go. "Dismissed is a good word for it."