All My Friends Are Superheroes - Andrew Kaufman [9]
Tom rushes to take his seat belt off. He pushes past the man in the aisle seat. He holds his left hand to his right wrist. He clenches and unclenches his fist as he half-jogs to the back of the plane.
The washroom on the left is unoccupied. Tom bolts the door behind him. The fluorescent light flickers on. He rolls up his sleeve and looks down at four crescent-moon cuts on his wrist. He turns on the tap and runs cold water over his wrist. The bleeding isn’t bad. A mirror hangs over the stainless steel washbasin and Tom smiles at his reflection. He laughs out loud.
‘She touched me,’ he says. ‘She touched me!’
SEVEN
THE SUPERHEROES OF TORONTO
There are 249 superheroes in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. None of them have secret identities. Very few wear costumes. Most of their powers don’t result in material gain. The Amphibian can survive both on land and underwater, but really, what use is that? Who’s going to give him a job for that? He works as a bike courier for a company downtown called Speedy.
Even the Clock, the only superhero who can travel in time, doesn’t think her power is anything special. She’s quick to point out that everyone can travel in time and everybody’s constantly doing it: a real superpower would be the ability not to travel in time.
There are no supervillains. Not one of the superheroes believes this. Every superhero considers one of the others a supervillian. The Perfectionist fights with the Projectionist. Businessman and the Union consider each other evil. Even the Amphibian has come to blows with the Linear.
At parties, the host will inevitably have to listen to some outraged superhero say, ‘I can’t believe you invited so-and-so.’ Or this superhero and that superhero will run into each other on their way to the bathroom and stand there with their fingers pointing, yelling, ‘Evil! Evil!!’
The Stress Bunny throws the best parties. The Amphibian took Tom to one of the Stress Bunny’s end-of-summer parties. It was the first superhero party Tom was ever at. He nudged the Amphibian with his shoulder.
‘Watch this,’ he said to the Amphibian. ‘Hey ... hey, The!’ Tom called.
The Scenester looked. The Greenlighter looked. The Phoney, the Verb, the Minimalist – almost everybody in the room looked. Including the Perfectionist.
The Amphibian didn’t think it was funny but the Perfectionist giggled. She’d never noticed how many of their first names were ‘The.’ She smiled at Tom. She flipped her hair over her shoulder.
Hypno thought the joke was funny but he didn’t think his girlfriend finding it funny was funny. He hypnotized everybody in the room to forget Tom’s name. He tried to hypnotize Tom into wanting to go home and discovered that he couldn’t – Tom is the only person Hypno has never been able to hypnotize.
Even though she couldn’t remember his name, the Perfectionist still spent the whole night talking with him.
‘What’s your name again?’ she kept asking him.
‘It’s Tom,’ Tom kept saying.
‘Right. That’s right,’ she’d say. She’d immediately forget it. She forgot Tom’s name eighteen times over the course of the evening.
THE FROG-KISSER
The Frog-Kisser was in high school when she first discovered her power. Dating the captain of the football team had left her drained and unfulfilled. That’s when she discovered Brian, the head of the debating club, and her latent powers emerged.
Blessed with the ability to transform geeks into winners, she is cursed with the reality that once she enables this transformation, the origin of her initial attraction is gone.
FIFTH BUSINESS
Fifth Business picks a new subject every three years. His current subject could be you and you wouldn’t even know it. Fifth Business is invisible.
If you are his subject he’s spent the last three years watching you bathe, dress, cook, fight, caress