Superhero Syndrome

by Caryn Larrinaga

  I cast around for anything to say. I didn’t have to look far. My sketch of The Fox still loomed at the forefront of my mind.

  “I saw a cool video. Did you hear about the guy who’s fighting crime in a fox mask?” I asked.

  Bethany laughed. “I knew you’d be excited about it. You and your comics. Most people grow out of reading the Sunday funnies.” She had a mischievous glint in her eye; she knew exactly what she was doing.

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” I said, taking another swig of beer.

  “Did you bring your computer like I asked?”

  “Yep.” I slung my messenger bag down off my shoulder and pulled out my laptop.

  She grabbed it and powered it on, then shoved it back at me. “There’s a password.”

  “Hold your horses.”

  As soon as I logged in and connected to the bar’s Wi-Fi, she took over my laptop again and pulled up a web browser. In seconds, I was staring at an online dating profile. The username at the top read “Sexy Tessy.”

  I looked up at my sister. “What is this?”

  “Do you like it? I had some extra time last week so I threw it together.”

  “Last week? How long has this been up?”

  “Don’t get mad. I just want to help you find somebody.”

  “I do fine on my own,” I retorted.

  Bethany raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really? That’s so strange, because according to what you said last time I saw you, you weren’t exactly queen of the dating scene back in New York.”

  I sat in silence. I couldn’t come up with a response that wouldn’t be an outright lie, yet I didn’t want to admit she was right. The last time I’d been on a date, I’d been wearing a prom dress.

  Bethany took my lack of an answer as an admission of loneliness. “You can’t marry your comic books, you know. This site has the best reviews out of all the ones I found. Just try it.”

  Sighing, I pulled the laptop closer to me and began scanning the profile. She did a good job, I thought grudgingly. Bethany had remembered the bands I’d liked in high school, and she’d even put in that I loved comics.

  My faith in her evaporated when I scrolled to the right and saw the profile picture she’d chosen. My mouth dropped open in horror. Sixteen-year-old me was grinning from the laptop screen, showing off a mouthful of braces and holding up a blue ribbon at an art fair.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “What?” Bethany leaned over and smiled down at the screen. “You look so cute! You were so proud of that painting. Besides, it’s the most recent photo I have of you where you’re smiling.”

  I stared at her. “Okay, first of all, I think it’s pretty dishonest to put up a picture that’s five years old. Second, this is a dating profile. Do you know what kind of man would be attracted to a picture of an obviously underage girl?”

  She gasped, covering her mouth with one hand. “Oh, no. I didn’t even think about that.”

  “Yeah, clearly.” I pulled out my cell phone and started flipping through my photo album. It was filled with pictures of sunrises, wildlife, and cosplayers at New York Comic Con. “There has to be a better picture in here somewhere,” I muttered.

  “Ooh, there’s one of you.” Bethany reached out to stop me from swiping past a bathroom-mirror-selfie.

  “Uh, that’s a ‘before’ photo for an acne medicine I tried last year.” In the picture, my light hair was held back by a black headband. I wore a neutral expression and my face was covered in a horde of angry red pimples. “Not exactly the first thing I’d want a guy to see.”

  “Where’s the after photo?” Bethany asked.

  “The medicine didn’t really work, so I didn’t see the point in taking another picture.”

  “What?” Bethany squinted at my face. “I don’t see any acne.”

  “It turned out to be a reaction to a moisturizer I was using. Easiest fix ever.”

  “Well, that’s good.” She kept examining me, her eyes narrowed in concentration. Or judgement. “What’s on your forehead?”

  Reflexively, my right hand shot up and touched the scar above my eyebrow. I hadn’t been planning to tell her about my fainting episode. My mind raced, scrambling for a lie that would explain it. Fell asleep on my desk and my keyboard left a mark? I’m really bad at filling in my eyebrows, and this is the result? Come on, I can do better than that!

  And then it hit me. I’d been lying to her nonstop since coming back to Weyland by not telling her about my illness. I’d been lying by omission—same as her not telling me that Bruce was back to his old punch-drunk self again. I stared at her. How could I expect her to be honest with me if I wasn’t honest with her? I didn’t need to burden her with everything. Not right now, in the middle of this hipster joint while a mellow indie-rock ballad played over the speakers above us. But I could start somewhere. I carefully set my phone down on the table and prepared for the worst.

  “I fainted in my bathroom a couple of weeks ago and hit my head.”

  Her eyes widened, and she went very still. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. No concussion or anything like that. The doctors say I don’t have anything to worry about.”

  She looked incredulous and opened her mouth.

  “Really,” I said, before she spoke. “I’m fine, okay?”

  “Did you tell Mom and Dad?”

  “Are you crazy? You know how she is,” I said. “Her magic power is finding a way to turn everything into a criticism. If I told her I’d gotten hurt, she wouldn’t ask if I’m okay or how bad the injury was. She’d cluck and tell me, ‘You should really be more careful, Tess. You know how clumsy you are.’”

  I nailed my mom’s high-pitched, judgmental voice. It was the only impression I’d ever been good at, and it had always cracked us up when we were kids. I grinned at Bethany, expecting her to laugh, but her eyes were glistening. I sagged down onto the table in surprise. I’d always known she was the golden child, the one my mother never seemed to find fault with, but I didn’t realize the adoration went both ways.

  “You don’t understand. She says things like that because she worries. She loves you. A mother always loves her children.” Her voice hitched and cracked. “Always.”

  A cocktail of guilt and sorrow squeezed my chest. I suddenly knew who Bethany was crying for. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t our mother.

  It was herself, and the years that had gone by without her being able to have a child.

  I reached forward and covered Bethany’s hand with mine. “Hey. When you have a chance to raise a kid—I mean it, when—you’re going to be the world’s best mom. Your kids are going to be so damn lucky.”

  She flashed me a weak smile. “Thanks, Tess.”

  We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, sipping our drinks, until the melancholy threads of our conversation were muted by the effects of the alcohol. I relaxed against the wall once more and let a slow smile take over my face. This was the evening I’d been hoping to have when I’d visited Bethany during my first week back. Maybe not dredging up her heartbreaks or arguing about Mom, but all the rest was perfect. A warmth that had little to do with my Stella spread throughout my chest, and I felt like I’d stepped through a wormhole and returned to a time when I was happier, when I had friends.

  Bethany spoke, pulling me back into the moment. “You know, you look pretty amazing right now.”

  “You’re my sister,” I told her. “You’re sort of biased.”

  “I mean it. You look so relaxed and confident. The lighting in here isn’t hurting either, and your scar actually looks kind of badass.” She reached across the table and snatched up my cell phone. “Come on, if you hold up your drink it’ll say, ‘Hey, not only am I super cute, but I’m legally drinking in a bar, so pedophiles need not apply.’”

  “Well, I guess that would help undo some of the damage you did with that high school mugshot. Of course, I run the risk of people th
inking I’m an alcoholic or something.”

  “Just shut up and pose,” she ordered.

  Holding my beer bottle up near my chin, I grinned at the camera.

  “Too many teeth. Rein it in,” my photographer commanded.

  I rolled my eyes, but shrunk my smile so it didn’t show every tooth in my mouth. I heard the electronic shutter sound from my phone… and then heard it half a dozen more times.

  “Calm down, Bethany. We only need one picture.”

  “One more.” She grabbed me and pulled me toward her, then held the phone out at arm’s length. “Say ‘sisters!’”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  But I did smile, and she snapped a selfie of us before handing the phone back to me. I leaned over the screen, scrolling through the photo album. In the shots she’d taken of me, my smile looked sweet, and the light behind me gave me an almost ethereal glow. Even our selfie was perfectly framed and looked like the kind of shot you’d see in an ad for a new smartphone or something.

  “Wow. You’re good at this.”

  Bethany waved a hand at me dismissively. “Ah, you flatterer.”

  I wasted no time replacing my profile pic. I also updated the username to ComicBookGurl, feeling that listing my favorite hobby was a much better way to go than shouting, “Look at me! I think I’m sexy!”

  “Hey, we could take a photography class or something together,” I said. “It’d be fun, and you’ve got a talent. Let’s develop it. Huh?” I nudged her with my elbow.

  “Har, har. You’re a dork.”

  “I’m serious. I bet there’s something at the community college we could sign up for on a weeknight or something.”

  Bethany shook her head. “I don’t think so. Bruce likes it when I’m home in the evening.” She glanced down at her watch. “Oops, speaking of which, I need to get back. If I want to beat him home, I’ve gotta leave for the station now.”

  “What? I thought we were going to hang out tonight. I was going to introduce you to the miracle that is modern superhero cinema.” She’d never seen any of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, and it was my sisterly duty to educate her.

  She stood from her stool and kissed my forehead. “Sorry, kiddo. Another time, maybe. But don’t waste tonight. I know you’re too chicken to talk to any of the cute guys all around us, so”—she tapped my laptop—“start looking through the hotties on here.”

  I stared after her as she left the bar. We’d made firm plans, settled on the time to meet, and she’d agreed to come see my apartment and watch a movie with some Chinese takeout. There was no question—Bruce had something to do with her sudden change of heart.

  Sighing, I stared back at my laptop. Might as well browse while I finish my beer.

  Considering I’d never had much luck meeting guys the old-fashioned way, the online route appealed to me a little bit. I’d kicked the idea around before but never created a profile. The odds of finding somebody who thought I was attractive, who was good-looking themselves, who could put up with my weirdness but whose eccentricities were also bearable… Well, it seemed statistically impossible. And yet, I didn’t relish the thought of continuing my lonesome existence. In New York, I’d justified my homebody habits by telling myself I was still “settling in” to a new town. That excuse had started to wear thin after a few years in Albany; there was no way it would fly now that I was back home.

  On top of all that, I needed a distraction. If I was left to my own company all evening, I’d start thinking about my hands again and drive myself crazy.

  It took me a minute to figure out how to navigate the website and narrow my search. I decided to be picky at first, and searched for guys who were either my exact age—or slightly older—and lived right in Weyland. To my surprise, even my narrow search yielded a large number of results. I started at the top of the list and began working my way down, looking for anybody who struck me as being particularly interesting. There were a lot of good looking guys, but as I browsed their likes and dislikes, it struck me that I didn’t seem to have anything in common with any of them.

  Am I that much of an oddball? Are there really no guys on here who like anything but sports and weightlifting?

  Finally, I found the profile of a guy who went by William27. He was attractive—bright blue eyes and a five o’clock shadow—and, lo and behold, we shared an interest. His bio section said he never missed Free Comic Book Day. A green circle over his profile picture told me he was online and available to chat.

  After staring at his profile picture and imagining a million ways this could go horribly, terribly wrong, I chugged down the rest of my beer and decided to send him a message.

  COMICBOOKGURL: Hi there. You like comic books, huh?

  I struggled to decide if I should add a winky face emoticon or something, but eventually went with plain and simple. A second after I hit enter, a set of ellipses appeared at the bottom of the message window. My breath caught.

  He was writing me back.

  WILLIAM27: I like your profile pic. Stella = best beer ever.

  COMICBOOKGURL: Hey, two things in common. What a start.

  WILLIAM27: Yeah, we’ve already got more than just Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  COMICBOOKGURL: Ha! Deep Blue Something.

  WILLIAM27: You got the reference!

  COMICBOOKGURL: :)

  I had to hand it to Bethany—I’d literally been on the website less than an hour and had already found an interesting guy. If this went anywhere, I’d take her to every yupster joint in town.

  That is, if she could stand being apart from Bruce for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

  “Going on a date, yeah, yeah…” I sang. It was off-key, but I was in the shower. Everybody sounds good in the shower. And I liked the way my voice echoed off the tiles; it was like I was performing in a big, empty concert hall.

  There was nobody around to witness it, but I blushed as I got out my razor and shaved my legs. Was it forward of me to shave them? I wasn’t sure if that was like telling the universe, “Hey, I’m down for this to get physical, fast!” Because I wasn’t sure if that was true. The only thing I was certain of was that if I didn’t shave my legs, I’d wish I had. That was the story of my life.

  My singing turned into humming as I got out of the shower and dried off. Each time I thought about my plans for the night, my pulse quickened. It was my first date in years. Bethany loaned me a colorful blouse with a daring neckline, and I had just shaved my legs. The night could go anywhere.

  A hundred eyes—drawn in everything from colored pencil to charcoal to watercolor—watched me get dressed. The shadowed fox I’d drawn the Friday before had plenty of company these days. I’d been drawing him all week long, and one of my bedroom walls was now covered in that single, solitary figure in a variety of attitudes: leaping, punching, rolling, and crouching. Every news report about The Fox prompted ten new sketches. They’d taken over my entire apartment, from the wall above my couch to the front of my refrigerator.

  If I was being honest with myself, I’d call it obsession. Instead, I told myself I was finally feeling inspired. Besides, drawing The Fox was the perfect way to keep from fretting about my “skin condition,” as I’d been calling it in my head. I didn’t know how else to think about it, since “superpower” felt… well, way too cool, for one thing. A superpower was something you could control, not a weird thing your body did on its own that you’d been completely unable to replicate, despite trying to turn into literally every single surface in your apartment or your office.

  Ahem.

  For the first time in over a week, however, thoughts of superpowers and The Fox were being overshadowed by something else. As I rode the train downtown and walked to the restaurant, anxiety about my date began to grow in my stomach and worried thoughts filled my mind. Do I even remember how to flirt? Will this guy like me as much in real life as he did online? We’d been chatting all week, just sending little messages and stupid jokes back and forth. He’d se
nt me a few animated gifs, which Angie assured me was the modern equivalent of passing notes in class. But I’d been able to plan, edit, obsess over, and re-write my half of each and every one of those interactions. Put on the spot, when an immediate response to a question was required, would I come off as a total weirdo?

  And perhaps even scarier: What if he thinks I’m amazing, and we fall in love, and my whole life is about to change?

  There was only one way to find out.

  I pulled open the door to the Indian restaurant and looked around the waiting area. It was crowded; dinner out on a Friday night was apparently a popular idea. As I was scanning the faces of the other diners who were waiting for their table, someone tapped my shoulder from behind and stepped out in front of me.

  Will’s profile picture didn’t begin to do him justice. He was tall and lean and smelled musky, like aftershave. The light blue sweater he was wearing clung to him just enough to show off his muscular chest, and the color made his eyes pop.

  “Tess,” he said.

  My heart fluttered at the sound of my name being spoken in such a smooth baritone voice.

  “Y-yeah,” I stammered. “It’s nice to meet you in person.”

  “Likewise.”

  We stood awkwardly in front of the door for a few seconds, looking into each other’s eyes, until the host let us know our table was ready. I followed Will into the dining room. The walls were painted a warm cream, and deep maroon drapes hung across the ceiling. It felt warm and intimate. Our table turned out to be a cozy booth in the corner, which was partially hidden from the other diners by a set of sheer curtains.

  “Wow,” I told Will after the host left us with the menus. “This place is beautiful.”

  “Do you like Indian food?”

  I nodded. “I love it. It’s so flavorful and warm. I think it was a perfect suggestion.”