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The test tube had tilted between his fingers and the liquid had poured down toward the beaker and Wally had had maybe a moment to half-blink before it had exploded.
It had all seared him, an unrelenting burst of energy that was red and white and electrifying, and it had torn through his blood and his bones and he had screamed, but he hadn’t raised an arm to shield himself, hadn’t even ducked. He had been sure that the heat would tear away his skin and turn his bones to ash, but it had invisibly branded him with breathlessness and speed and a power he didn’t even know how to hold in his two shaking hands. He had blacked out shaking.
When he’d come to, there had been smoke and coughing and his chest had been shuddering, and the stretcher underneath him had smelled stale. He had barely let his eyelids pull apart and had seen some blurring outline of his mother, her hand on his, her face smeared with soot. He’d smiled at her. His voice had been dry when he’d spoken and the words had hurt, but he hadn’t cared.
“Cooking dinner didn’t… turn out… awesome,” he had croaked, and she’d half-laughed and half-cried and he hadn’t known what to feel. His bones had been buzzing. “On the bright side, this – good excuse for… new kitchen. Like you… wanted.”
Uncle Barry had come to see him in his hospital room two nights later, when some of the burns had receded. Wally had been eating his weight in Jell-O, and it was never enough – never, ever enough. The constant emptiness made him want to scream.
“Kid,” Barry had told him, deeply, severely, his arms slung across his knees as he sat in the chair beside Wally’s bed. “I can guarantee you that it wasn’t worth it.”
Wally had swallowed his Jell-O and had said, without even looking up, “Then I’ll make it that way.”
Three weeks later, he had pulled the sunny yellow Kevlar over his knees and elbows and had fastened the scarlet goggles to his forehead and when he had run with Barry, sprinting over the ocean and past the trees until they blurred and fizzled into nothing, he had felt so alive that he could have sung about it.
Instead, he had skidded to a halt on a bluff somewhere and raised his fists into the air and had whooped so loudly that it had seemed to silence the sea itself.