Rounding the final corner, she slammed straight into a white t-shirted torso and stumbled back gracelessly against a bank of lockers. An angry male voice snapped at her. "Will you watch ..." Michael's voice trailed off as sour recognition spread across his face. "I should have known."

"Aaaaaaaah!" Maria yelled, wide-eyed, and clumsily scurried past him and through the bathroom door.

Michael stood in the deserted hallway, blinking. Okay, that was weird, he thought to himself. He knew they had been intentionally avoiding each other since the whole napkin holder incident, but he hadn't expected her to be so jittery when their paths did inevitably cross again. No, jittery wasn't quite the word, he frowned. More like ... spooked. Petrified, even. He shrugged. Humans. No, not humans, he sighed. Maria.

The sound of a toilet flushing and a stall door opening momentairly distracted her. Stacey Scheinin, head cheerleader, coolly sauntered out and over to the sinks. "You got that right," she muttered at Maria. Stacey gave Maria her most disdainful stare as she washed her hands. Normally, Maria would have had some sort of catty remark ready, but this time, she hadn't even heard what Stacey had said. She continued to stare at herself in the mirror, horrified.

As Stacey opened the door to leave, Liz walked through it.

"Maria!" She rushed over to her. "Maria. Are you okay?"

Maria's eyes filled with tears. "Liz, what's happening to me?" she whispered.

"I don't know," Liz admitted, praying the worry in her voice didn't show. "But we should go find Isabel. Maybe she can explain."

Maria nodded woodenly. Liz led her out of the bathroom, an arm wrapped around her shoulder.

"Isabel!" She looked up as Liz and Maria walked over to her. "Isabel, hey," Liz greeted her breathlessly. "Um, we need to talk to you."

A thin layer of anxiety clouded Isabel's face. "What about?" Her eyes darted around the hallway, quickly assessing who was within earshot.

"Well," Liz began, "Remember that thing we were talking about yesterday?" Isabel nodded slowly. "It sort-of happened again. To Maria. But not the same thing, exactly. Something different. But weird."

Isabel looked confused and turned to Maria. "What happened."

Maria grabbed Liz's hand, holding her friend's fingertip out to Isabel. "Liz had a paper cut," she said quietly.

Isabel squinted at Liz's finger. "I don't see it. Maria, what does this have to do wi--"

"Exactly," Maria replied softly. "It isn't there anymore. It isn't there anymore because I ... I healed it." She stared at Isabel mournfully. "I made it disappear."

Isabel's eyes grew wide, and she turned to face Liz for confirmation. "It's true," Liz nodded. "I wouldn't have believed it either, if it wasn't happening to me. But I swear, it's true. It really happened."

"Oh my God," Isabel whispered, the confusion on her face fading into bewilderment. "I ... how?"

"I don't know," Maria replied. "I just ... I remember feeling bad that I gave Liz the paper cut, and how much I hated paper cuts, then I pulled out a Band-Aid, and when I touched her skin the cut ... vanished."

Isabel let out a long, low breath. "You thought about it, and then it was gone?" she clarified. Her brain was trying to process something that seemed completely impossible, and yet, it had happened. Maria nodded. Isabel shivered. It was exactly what she, Max and Michael did when they used their own powers. Then she remembered. Michael. A frown spread across her lips.

"What's wrong?" Liz looked at her apprehensively.

Isabel swallowed. "It's Michael," she began uneasily. Maria's head snapped up from the spot on the floor she was concentrating on. "Today at lunch, he spilled some of his drink on his t-shirt, and when he went to ... fix it, he couldn't."

Maria looked ashen. "You mean ...?"

"His powers didn't work," Isabel nodded gravely.

Maria visibly paled. Her head felt like a balloon, as if it were floating away from her body. "So what does this mean?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Isabel looked miserable. "I don't know. I don't understand."

"What it means is that we have to do some investigating. Some experiments." Liz spoke assertively, the rational scientist in her rising to the surface.

"If you think I'm going to be your personal lab rat, you've got another thing coming," Maria replied.

Liz shook her head. "Maria. I'm not talking about dissecting your brain. I'm talking about trying to replicate what happened, in a controlled environment, so we can be sure. That's all."

Isabel thought it over. "It's not a bad idea. I mean, if we had some idea of what you were really capable of, maybe we could determine how this happened and how to fix it."

The two girls looked at Maria expectantly. Slowly, she nodded, letting out a deep sigh.

"You okay?" Liz asked.

"Yeah," Maria nodded. "It's just kind of weird, you know? I mean, one minute Michael tells me he doesn't want anything to do with me ever again, and just as I'm trying to get used to that concept, I get my own personal guided tour of his brain and ..." Maria realized her admission the moment the words were out of her mouth.

Liz studied her. "So he was thinking about you."

"Um ... yeah, sort of." Her cheeks flushed scarlet. "I guess you could say that."

"I thought as much," Liz giggled, in spite of the gravity of the situation. "So?"

"So ... nothing," Maria brushed it off, trying to be casual. "I mean, it wasn't like he was actually talking or anything, it wasn't like I could hear his voice or what he had to say."

"Well if he wasn't talking, what was he doing?" Liz probed.

"Uh ..." Maria scrambled for some type of answer. "He was ... taking out his frustration on me," she finished in a hurry. It was the truth, sort-of.

"He hit you?" Liz asked incredulously. "Oh, my God ..."

"No!" Maria roared. She sighed. "No ... not that kind of frustration."

"Oh." Liz was slightly confused, then realization dawned on her face. "Oh!"

"Yeah ..." Maria muttered, completely embarrassed.

Liz's eyes widened. "Wait. You mean you saw him ...?"

"No!" Maria roared even louder, her face indignant. "Ewww! God, Liz! No. I saw us." She blushed a vibrant pink. "Him and me … together."

"Okay! Okay!" Liz interrupted. "I-I get it. I understand. No need to go there."

Maria looked troubled. "Trust me, Lizzie, I wish I didn't. Being a voyeur was disturbing enough, but being a voyeur and watching myself was just downright creepy."

Liz gave her a sympathetic look, and was about to offer some morale support when the bells on the Crashdown's door jingled. Isabel entered, and Liz jumped up to meet her, turning the sign on the front door from Open to Closed.

Isabel sat down on a stool next to Maria. "How are you?" she asked cautiously.

"Well, I haven't blown anything up yet, if that's what you're asking," Maria grumbled.

Liz sat down on Maria's other side and glanced at Isabel, full of concern. "Were you able to find anything else out?"

"No," she sighed. "It's kind of hard to get information out of Michael without arousing suspicion. I mean, what am I supposed to say? 'Hey Michael, notice anything strange about your girlfriend lately?' That's just begging for trouble."

"I'm not his girlfriend," Maria corrected.

Isabel rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Anyway, the point is, I didn't ask him anything. But Max could," she suggested.

"Max?" Maria repeated. "Max? What does Max have to … you didn't tell him about this, did you?"

"Calm down. Max doesn't know about you. But he does know about Michael. He was there today, at lunch. He saw what happened. I could ask him to look into it."

Liz jumped in quickly to try and calm the uneasy look on her best friend's face. "That's a good idea, Isabel. Michael will handle questions from Max a lot better than he would any of us."

"Then it's settled." Isabel replied in her most authorative, leaving no room for discussion. She glanced at Maria. "That takes care of Michael, now what about you?"

Maria eyed her suspiciously. "What about me?"

Isabel stood up. "Let's see what you can do."

"Well, apparently I can fix boo-boos and play peeping Tom. That's about it," Maria answered flatly.

"Healing and dreamwalking," Isabel nodded. "That's two out of three."

"Two out of three what?" Maria echoed.

"Powers. As far as we know, Max, Michael and I can do three things - heal, dreamwalk, and manipulate the molecular structure of objects. Have you done that yet?"

"I haven't really tried," Maria answered. "Everything I've done has been unintentional."

"Well, now's your chance," Isabel picked up a fork and handed it to Maria. "Here. Let's start with something easy. Let's see if you can change this into a spoon."

Maria looked at her incredulously. "How am I supposed to do that?"

"Here, I'll show you," Isabel replied matter-of-factly. She picked up another fork from a nearby table. "You just focus all your energy on the object … try to picture all the individual atoms … make them behave the way you want … push them apart and fuse them together with your mind …" Before the other girls' eyes, the fork Isabel had been holding slowly morphed into a spoon. "There."

Maria stared at the utensil as if it held a spoonful of toxic waste. It was one thing to know that Isabel, Max and Michael had supernatural abilities, but it was quite another to see those abilities demonstrated right in front of her. Of course, she was never completely unaware of the situation - Michael's near-death experience, Max's healing of Liz and the whole Topolsky/FBI investigation hardly permitted that - but barring such instances, Maria often found she let the fact that three of her friends were alien lifeforms escape her cognizance. Out of sight, out of mind. It made day-to-day living a lot easier that way.

She came to terms with it all by rationalizing their powers as merely quirky character traits, like being double-jointed or ambidextrous ... something a little unusual, but essentially no big deal -- except when one of them was "double-jointed" or "ambidexterous" in front of her. Then the unusualness of it all smacked her right across the face, and it was a very big deal. And to discover she potentially had the same quirky character traits herself … well, that was the biggest deal of all.

Maria launched into her trademarked hyperbabble mode. "You know, manipulating things into behaving the way you want might be second nature to you, but I -"

"Just concentrate," Isabel told her firmly. "Close your eyes. Visualize the spoon … imagine the metal melting and reshaping and solidifying."

Reluctantly, Maria did as she was told. She tried to picture the spoon, each of its atoms shiny and silver and round. A kaleidoscope of patterns rushed through her tightly-clenched eyes until they almost hurt from the strain. She concentrated so hard she felt dizzy and when she could finally stand it no longer, she snapped her eyes open, blinking several times in rapid succession.

Maria looked from Isabel to Liz wordlessly. They were both staring at her hand. Slowly, she followed their eyes down, almost afraid to look. Clutched in her left hand was a small metal teaspoon.