Superhero Syndrome

by Caryn Larrinaga

  “Why a cyborg? It could be a pod person, a doppelgänger, an alien… There are a lot of possibilities.”

  He frowned and rubbed his chin in mock thoughtfulness. “Hmmm. You’re right. I’ve been too limited in my thinking. But no matter what, the odds are good they’ll assimilate me on the second date. So for safety, it’s best to steer clear. You know, change my number. Go into hiding. Start wearing tinfoil hats.”

  Maybe it was because I was finally starting to relax after that awful date, but the image of this handsome guy wearing a pointed, shining lump of tinfoil on his head was too much to bear. I began to laugh so hard the tiny bit of aloo gobi I’d eaten earlier threatened to come up again. It took me a while to settle down, and I had to wipe tears from my eyes before I could look up.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I needed that.”

  “So how’d you meet Mr. Wrong?”

  “Online.” I winced. “My sister talked me into trying it. We’re going to have words later, and my account will be history by morning.”

  Reed raised a heavy eyebrow. “Was this the first time you’ve gone out with somebody you met online?”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t rush to delete it then. You could miss out on meeting somebody great just because you met a dud. Besides, I swear everyone I know who’s gotten married lately met online.”

  “Really? Nobody met anyone the old-fashioned way?”

  He shrugged. “Everybody has their faces in their phones all the time. How are you supposed to meet anybody anymore, unless it’s through the Internet?”

  They could strike up a conversation with you on the train, I wanted to say.

  He grinned at me again. “It’s not often you run into a pretty girl on the train, right?”

  A lightning bolt struck me in the gut, and I gripped the stanchion again. The metal pole was cool beneath my fingers… then cold.

  This time, I recognized what was happening in an instant.

  My right hand changed color quickly, the shining gray of the steel pole bleeding into it from my fingertips down to my wrist. I released the stanchion just as my hand began to stiffen up and jammed it into my coat pocket. I glanced at Reed.

  Did he see that?

  No, he was distracted by his phone, tapping out something on the glass screen.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking back up at me and slipping his phone into his hoodie pocket. “Talk about bad timing. I’m not a hypocrite, I swear. My nose isn’t always in my phone.”

  I needed to get off this train. Fast. What if he wanted to shake my hand? What if the metal spread, and he saw it somehow? I didn’t need to know exactly what was going on with me to know it was better if other people didn’t know about it.

  Just then, a chime sounded, and a woman’s recorded voice announced we’d reached University Avenue. It wasn’t my stop, but it would do. I sidestepped to the doors, keeping my hand locked inside my pocket.

  “This is my stop,” I lied. “Um, nice seeing you again. Hope you have a good night.”

  Reed stared at me, his heavy eyebrows raised in question. He opened his mouth to say something, but I didn’t give him a chance. The train had rolled to a stop, and the doors were beginning to slide open.

  I hopped out of them and fled into the night.

  The train platform was quiet. An elderly woman waited for a downtown train on a bank of benches across from me, but otherwise I was alone.

  I turned my back to her, pretending to examine a map of the transit system, and pulled my hand out of my pocket. It was pure steel, and if I squinted right, it just looked like a dark gray glove. My fingers were frozen, stuck in the fist I’d made when I stuffed my hand into my pocket.

  Tentatively, I tried to uncurl my fingers. They wouldn’t budge, and soon a vein in my forehead began to pulse with the effort. I wasn’t strong enough to change my hand’s shape. It’d become as solid as the steel bar I’d been gripping on the train.

  Would it melt? I wondered. It was a grim thought, and as curious as I was about my condition, I knew that was one experiment I’d never try.

  This time I didn’t feel afraid. The adrenaline and nausea that had accompanied the first two episodes were nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was because compared to dinner with Will, this wasn’t so bad. But more likely, it was because I knew now that this wasn’t permanent. I knew exactly how to make it go away; all I had to do was imagine my normal—

  Stop! An idea struck me. So far, I’d had zero luck getting this change to happen on purpose, and if I was being honest with myself… I wanted the change to come. I needed to figure out how to make it happen.

  A train platform didn’t feel like the best place for testing any grand theories, but I was too impatient to wait until I got home. I had to find a place to experiment. Hiding my hand in my pocket once more, I went down the stairs, heading south toward the Trident on foot. Ordinarily, I’d feel vulnerable walking the streets of Weyland alone at night, especially considering how many girls had gone missing.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, I had steel knuckles.

  The buzzing sign of a late-night diner caught my eye, and I dumped my leftovers into a curbside garbage can. I felt a pang of regret—the food would’ve warmed up nicely—but this was too important. I ducked through the door just as a group of girls exited. The smell of bacon and eggs greeted me as I surveyed the restaurant. It was crowded; the large tables at the front of the diner were packed with kids my age, laughing and making a lot of noise. I slid into a small booth at the back by the restrooms, keeping my hands in my lap and out of sight.

  A lanky guy in an apron was next to my table in an instant.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Anything else?”

  Still hungry from my non-dinner, I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a slice of apple pie. He returned a moment later with a bowl full of flavored creamers and a mug, then left me alone while he attended to a large group of sorority girls laughing in a corner booth. I eyed the mug’s small handle with amusement, picturing myself picking up the coffee with a metal fist and trying to bring it to my mouth.

  My hand was heavy in my lap. I tapped it against the bottom of the table, and it made a dull clunk sound. How solid was it? Was it a layer of steel over my bones and tissue, or was everything metal? I didn’t see how my blood vessels could have solidified, not without me having a stroke or something because of it. I raised my right hand to my cheek. The steel was cold against my skin, but my hands didn’t feel cold. Not inside, anyway. Inside, they felt warm.

  I sat up straight in my booth. The black vinyl squeaked beneath my coat. In my apartment, after my fall, my hands had felt warm. I remembered focusing on that warmth, and that was when…

  They’d changed.

  I could still feel it. The warmth coursed through my hands like an electric current, thrumming in time with my heartbeat. Closing my eyes, I imagined I could see it, a pulsing glow beneath my skin. The color changed—none of the shades felt right—until I pictured a vibrant, bright red.

  The color of passion.

  Something in my chest tightened, not from stress, but from excitement. My pulse pounded in my veins, and the red color intensified until it engulfed the blackness behind my closed eyelids. It was all I could see, fading in and out with each heartbeat.

  Smiling, I opened my eyes. I could find my way back now, make my hands change at will. I could feel it.

  Looking down at my hand, I imagined it becoming normal again. As I did so, the silvery steel faded away and my skin went back to its usual color. I opened my fist and flexed my fingers; they were stiff and stubborn from being locked in the same position for so long, but other than that, they were completely ordinary. My hands were just my hands, with chipped banana-yellow nail polish and hints of blue veins beneath my skin.

  I tucked them under the table. Now was the moment of truth.

  After another quick glance around me to make sure my waiter was s
till flirting with the other patrons, I closed my eyes again. My hands felt slightly cold from the draft of winter air coming in from the thin glass window beside me. There was no sign of the earlier warmth.

  Frowning, I focused harder. In my stillness, I could feel my heart beating in my chest. I imagined a red light in each of my hands, blinking in time with my pulse. In the back of my mind, I counted them, focusing on nothing but my breathing and that thrumming red hue. Twenty-five beats later, my hands began to burn.

  My eyes flashed open, and I sunk lower in my seat to watch my hands beneath the table. Just like on the train, they were changing. Morphing. Hardening.

  I let out a shriek of triumph, and the chatter around me stopped.

  “Oops,” I muttered.

  I imagined my skin going back to normal and rested my folded hands on the table. By the time the waiter had sprinted back to me, I was confident I looked completely ordinary.

  “Everything okay?” he asked. He looked panicked, and I wondered what extreme things he might be worried about right now.

  “Oh, yes.” I scanned the table, looking for anything to explain my outburst. “I just… um… spilled coffee on myself.”

  He stared down at me with one raised eyebrow.

  “Sorry,” I added. “I overreacted.”

  “Do you need a refill or something?”

  “No, no. Sorry. I’m fine.”

  “Your food will be right out.”

  He left me alone again, and I tried to do a better job containing my excitement. Several more times, I changed my hands back and forth. Skin, metal. Metal, skin. Each time it got a little bit easier to transition from focusing on the pulsing red warmth to imagining my normal fleshy hands and back again. By the tenth time, I didn’t even actually have to picture my hands; I just thought of them as being “normal,” and they were.

  My food arrived, and as I wolfed down my sandwich and pie I tried to think through the implications of what I could do. It was hard; it wasn’t like trying to work out the pros and cons of starting a new job or getting a different haircut. This was uncharted territory—outside of fiction, anyway. I wasn’t sure what my limitations could be or how I could even test them.

  I’ll just have to practice.

  After paying my bill, I headed home, cycling my metal hands on and off in my pockets. I grinned as I passed people having normal Friday night outings with their friends or significant others. No matter what they were doing, it wasn’t as cool as what I had going on.

  Back in my apartment, I sank down into my couch and stared across my living room at my drafting table. Above my cups full of colored pencils and my 12-inch tall posable wooden anatomy figure, my ever-growing collection of pictures of The Fox wallpapered my living room. I’d gotten especially good at drawing him mid-punch, his fist sinking into the faces of nameless adversaries.

  He obviously knew what he was doing with his powers. I wondered if he’d had any training before, or if his gift was a sudden magical knowledge of martial arts and general ass-kickery. I grabbed my laptop and searched for nearby boxing gyms, thinking that might help me make the most of these metal hands.

  And plaster hands, I realized.

  Shoving my laptop to the side, I focused on the red heat in my hands and tried to picture them turning into the same rough stone as the first time they’d changed. When that didn’t work, I pictured the fabric on the back of Angie’s office chair. Again and again, I tried to conjure up any other material, but my hands would only transform back into metal.

  I allowed a stream of profanity to flow from my mouth, which made me feel better about my failures.

  Then an idea struck me. I leapt off my couch and grabbed my wooden anatomy figure, gripping the basic geometric shapes that made up its body. It took a couple of seconds of focusing on my heartbeat and imagining the pulsing red light again, just long enough for me to wonder if it would work, but then it happened. My skin became grainy and began to stiffen, and within the space of a breath, I had wooden hands.

  Naturally, the first thing I did was knock them against my coffee table, listening to the heavy thunks and drumming out a steady rhythm. Then I imagined my hands returning to normal, and they did so.

  When I tried to recall the metal, it was gone. Just like the cement and the fabric, it was like my hands had forgotten how to change into them. Wood was all I could do. Once I figured that out, I ran around my apartment, picking up books, pencils, drinking glasses, and pillows. I absorbed them, made my hands change, then went back to normal just long enough to pick up something else. I laughed hysterically, filled with the thrill of discovering that I could turn my hands into literally any material I tried.

  Then I was finally able to say it, the word that I’d been too afraid to even think just days before. “Superpowers. I have superpowers.”

  That set off another round of laughter, and I collapsed onto my couch with tears streaming down my face. It sounded insane, but it didn’t feel crazy. Not with all the evidence before me. Not when I could be my own sledgehammer whenever I needed one.

  But the question remained: how had this happened? It couldn’t be totally random. People didn’t just randomly mutate in their early twenties. Or did they? I chewed my lip, wondering if this could be like cancer, if my cells could just be going haywire. There had been a lot of cancer patients at the research hospital, undergoing experimental treatments. I’d felt a little bit envious of them while the doctors were still trying to work out how best to tackle my Solstice Syndrome. Sure, they were facing down something terrifying, but at least they knew what it was. At least the doctors had a game plan for treating them.

  But it turned out I was actually lucky. I didn’t have to go through chemo or radiation. The meteor shower had taken care of that.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  Solstice Syndrome. The meteor shower. One of those two things, or maybe both of them combined—that was the catalyst. That’s why this was happening to me.

  And that meant The Fox and I had something else in common, too. We’d both had the Solstice Syndrome. Somewhere, his name was on a patient list, either here or in Chicago or somewhere else.

  If I could find that list, I could find The Fox.

  Angie sat cross-legged on one end of the bright green, overstuffed sofa that dominated her tiny living room, tossing popcorn up into the air and catching it in her mouth. When I’d entered her apartment that evening, I’d thought it was a sci-fi museum. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized exactly how geeky she was. She’d painted the walls of the cramped downtown studio to look like the interior of the Enterprise, complete with horizontal black lines and faux bulkheads. Her shelves were crowded with memorabilia from every Star Trek series: model starships, figurines, com badges, and even a full-sized 4-D chess set. The effect was oddly soothing; it was like walking into a place I remembered from my childhood but hadn’t visited in a while.

  She’d thrown on a horror movie, but I wasn’t watching it. My eyes were glazed over, and I thought about the night before. I’d lain awake in bed for hours, turning my hands to the wood of my bed frame and back again until exhaustion claimed me, and I passed out. Now I flexed my fingers on top of a fleece blanket with Spock’s face on it, resisting the urge to pull on that pulsing thread inside myself and change my entire body into the warm, fuzzy fabric.

  “So, how was it? I want to know everything,” Angie said.

  “What?” Panic rose in me. How did she know about my hands? Had I accidentally changed them? I glanced down at the blanket, but my hands were their normal, pale selves atop the blue fabric.

  “Your date, nerd.” Angie caught another piece of popcorn in her mouth. “Is he your soulmate, or what?”

  “Oh.” I sagged into the couch and thought back to dinner with Will, which, compared to the rest of my night, was barely memorable. “It was… ugh. Man, it was terrible.”

  As Angie continued to test her ability to catch airborne snacks, I gave her a blow-by-blow of my Da
te from Hell. When I got to the part about Will trying to kiss me, half-chewed popcorn shot out of her mouth. I decided having dinner with Will might have been worth it, just to have a good story to tell.

  “He sounds hideous,” she said, picking wet popcorn off the couch cushions with a napkin.

  “Yeah, but he was tricky. He kept his ugliness on the inside, under a delicious-looking candy shell. So, I just took the train home and… oh, yeah.” Reed’s face swam in front of my eyes. “And I sort of met someone.”

  “You what? And you didn’t think to mention it until just now?”

  How could I explain to my her that out of everything that had happened last night, the cute guy on the train wasn’t actually the most exciting part? Inwardly, I squirmed. I hate keeping secrets, and now I had this monster thing I couldn’t talk to anybody about.

  Angie watched me with wide, expectant eyes. For a moment, I considered just telling her about my hands. She was the world’s biggest sci-fi junkie. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so weird to her. And she was my best friend… but that didn’t actually say much, since aside from my sister she was also my only friend.

  Not yet, I decided. Maybe once I have a better idea what it is.

  Instead, I stuck to the normal-ish details. “Remember that radiology tech who took me for my CT scan in the hospital?”

  “I think so. Tall? Light hair?”

  “That’s him. Well, that was actually the second time I’d seen him… I also sort of met him outside your mom’s restaurant.” I left out the part about my paranoia and falling on my face. I do have some pride.

  “And you ran into him on the train?”

  “Yeah, he witnessed the awkward limbo contest that capped off my date with Will.”

  Angie burst out laughing. I gave her a rundown of my conversation with Reed, sparing no detail about his lean, rugged face, or about his flirtatious comment about pretty girls on trains. That’s when I had to lie.

  “But right then, we reached my stop,” I told her. “So I had to go. But it’s weird… I felt something. Like a spark, I guess? I don’t know how to describe it.”