by Jane De Suza
‘34 illegal aliens to be deported.’
They exist! There is hope! There is light! There is Anna Conda’s alien, not just one, but thirty-four of them!
I slept a happy boy that night.
9. Don’t go too close to a UFO
Another week passed with everyone at Superhero School just getting more and more super. The Fly flew in every week to teach us new tricks, which everyone except me seemed to get. Blank got better at disappearing without random body parts like one eyebrow, or one shoelace still showing. Even Slime Joos was getting his act together: he could shoot slime darts now that were almost works of art. I caught him sending Anna Conda a slimy rose. Only, she bent to pick up a pencil at that precise moment so it flew at Masterror instead. After my spoon hit Masterror’s forehead (it took forever for his lump to go away), he had very low tolerance for anyone throwing anything more at his head. Even if it was only a slime rose. So he sent Slime Joos to scale the building wall up and down twenty times. It took Slime Joos half the afternoon.
As for me, this is my tally.
Aliens: 0
Superpowers: 0
Marks scored in Masterror’s latest quiz on ‘Origin of Superheroes’: 0
Bites: 1000 (from mosquitoes)
I noticed Anna Conda’s attention straying often these days. After our class on mind reading, when we were in the canteen, I caught her staring hard at TRex, one of the seniors, who has big, shiny teeth and is always smiling. He is super strong and super savage AND super ancient. He’s lived billions of years—like she cares! ‘I wonder what he’s thinking about. I can’t read his mind too well,’ Anna Conda sighed.
‘That’s because he has a brain the size of a pea,’ I said but softly, lest TRex turn on me and chew off my head (and my pretty decent-sized brain, even if I say so myself). TRex turned his red eyes on me and I immediately began to think pretty pink flowery thoughts about him (just in case he had got this mind reading thing correct).
‘You know who make brilliant mind readers?’ I said to get Anna Conda’s attention back to me. ‘Aliens. You can’t hide any thoughts from an alien. They’re brilliant. They see right through your head.’
‘When are you going to let me meet your alien, SuperZero?’ said Anna Conda, a bit impatiently.
Oh yes, right. Self-goal! Own trap! Bah.
I spent a long time at home on Google that evening, looking for people who had seen aliens. There was this movie called ET (apparently the most famous alien movie to be ever made), and I was thinking . . . ET looked like Gra a bit. He was all wrinkled like Gra and had skinny legs like him too . . .
That was it! I’d found my alien! Gra would make a convincing alien in front of Anna Conda, with a little help. Pretend potato wedges, now pretend aliens!
‘GRA.’ I ran to where he was digging the garden wearing a huge big Chinese hat that looked like a satellite dish. ‘Gra, take off your hat. It’s not sunny anymore.’
‘It was never funny,’ Gra said.
‘Sunny—oh, forget it. Gra, will you help me by pretending to be an alien?’
He stared at me. ‘Eh?’
‘Dress up like an alien!’ I shouted. ‘Ali-eee-yen! To meet my friend.’
‘Ali Yen?’
‘Kind of, yes.’
‘The names kids have nowadays. Do you know they named a baby Jackpot?’
‘So you’ll talk to my friend?’
‘To Ali Yen? Yes of course,’ he chuckled.
I loved Gra. I knew I could count on him. I spent another two days prepping him up, telling him to talk about outer space and planets and stuff. I told him, whenever he was stuck, he should say as in the movie, ‘ET, go home.’ It always made all the girls cry. Girls love soppy stuff. I haven’t figured out why anyone would want to watch something that made you cry, but then no one’s figured out girls. Girls should be aliens, yeah!
On Saturday, I invited Anna Conda home to meet my alien. She was so excited, she kept flinging her tail around my arm, which suited me just fine. Vamp Iyer and Blank tried to come along, but I said my alien was allergic to vampires and invisible people.
‘Your alien sounds like a scaredy-cat wimp,’ grumbled Vamp Iyer.
Blank didn’t say anything but I suspected he meant to turn invisible and come along anyway. How would we know?
So like I was saying, on Saturday, Anna Conda came home and Mom went all gushy over her and made her drink iced tea and eat her home-made jellies (which between you and me, look like Slime Joos’s slime). Finally I pulled Anna Conda out into the back garden. ‘Shhh!’ I whispered.
‘Doesn’t your mom know you have an alien?’ she whispered back.
‘No. My alien is er . . . shy of moms. Aliens don’t have moms. They come out of eggs,’ I lied glibly on and on and on.
‘Oh, that’s so sad,’ said Anna Conda, the snake girl with the heart of gold. And then she stopped.
Out there in the sun in the turnip patch in our back garden, instead of behind the banyan tree as I told him to be, was Gra, looking as alien as alien could be. I’d made him up expertly. I’d read up about how aliens came in UFOs and people were constantly spotting them in their gardens. And as luck would have it, Gra’s big Chinese hat looked just like a UFO, a flying saucer. So I’d made sure he wore his hat, which hid his face, and I’d taken all the bandages out of our medicine cabinet and wrapped them around him—from head to toe.
‘What’s your alien doing?’ whispered Anna Conda.
Gra must have got bored sitting behind the banyan tree and decided to do some gardening.
‘He’s looking for earthworms,’ I whispered back. ‘He eats only worms.’
‘What’s on his head?’
‘Oh, he carries his own UFO around, you know, his flying saucer. He is scared someone will hijack it.’
Anna Conda straightened up and happily slid over to Gra and held out her hand. ‘I am delighted to meet you, Mr Alien.’
Gra whipped around, startled, and grabbed on to Anna Conda’s hand for support. ‘Ali Yen!’ he said delightedly.
‘Yes, alien,’ said Anna Conda. ‘Greetings from Earth!’
‘Ali Yen!’ said Gra. ‘Greetings on your birth too!’
‘He is a little strange,’ whispered Anna Conda to me, but she smiled at him. ‘Which planet are you from?’
‘PLANE-TTTT,’ I shouted out to make sure he’d understand. But I guess he still didn’t hear it right. He stared at the plant near his foot. ‘Turnip,’ he said, surprised that the girl didn’t recognize a turnip plant when she saw it.
‘Turnip! You are a strange-looking people in the planet of Turnip. I must say you look more like a mummy than an alien.’
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes, MUMMY!’ said Anna Conda louder.
‘Come now, don’t howl. Where is your mummy, Ali Yen?’
‘Oh no,’ said Anna Conda, ‘I’ve made him feel bad. I know you have no mummy, Mr Alien, I am so sorry that you came out of an egg.’
Gra was trying desperately to catch on to what she was saying. ‘Sorry—about my leg? Ah, it’s fine.’
‘EGG!’ I screamed in his ear, trying to help out.
‘Egg, oh no,’ said Gra, ‘I don’t want eggs, thank you.’
‘Oh I know,’ said Anna Conda, shouting too, like me, ‘DO YOU WANT SOME WORMS TO EAT?’
Gra told me, ‘Ali Yen is very rude. Did she just tell me to eat worms?’
The meeting was going so badly I wanted to cry. Anna Conda and Gra stood glaring at each other. Finally Gra had enough. His bandages had begun to unwrap and fall off, and he took the escape route we’d decided on. ET go home. Except that he forgot the ‘ET’ part. ‘Go home!’ shouted Gra.
‘Okay, okay, don’t lose your hat, Mr Alien,’ muttered Anna Conda, sliding off.
‘You’re mad as a bat too,’ Gra shouted after her.
I guided Anna Conda back into the house, where Mom made her eat more squishy jellies. I don’t think Anna Conda will come back home for a long, long
time. She flicked her long, sleek hair and waved goodbye a little too fast, I thought.
‘Well, that was fun,’ said a voice near my elbow, and Blank reappeared, grinning.
10. If you can’t solve the problem, add to it
The next morning, we hadn’t even begun class when Masterror sent us right out, and not even because we were punished. Yet. He sent us out on an urgent job. There was a government building burning in the eastern part of the city. People were stuck on the fourth floor, the Department of Marriage Registrations.
‘Go out, superkids, and save the people! Make me proud!’ he shooed us out, and then muttered at me under his breath, ‘SuperZero, stay out of trouble. Or you’re in even bigger trouble when you get back.’
I gave him my biggest smile of reassurance, and then turned and ran out smack into Blank, who was waiting for me at the door. We both tumbled over each other and down the stairs. My last glimpse of Masterror was of a very worried-looking man. He was twirling his moustache at super speed, which is something he does when he is stressed out.
The building was old and brown and smoke was pouring out of the lower windows. A huge crowd had gathered outside, howling and shouting, but no one was doing anything. There were vans with people from the media too, talking about how serious the situation was.
A reporter known for making up her own stories wherever there weren’t enough, stood in the middle of it all. ‘This is Tara Rumpum from the scene of the crime. Someone has set fire to the building that is home to millions of . . . of . . . of government files. At great personal risk, with the flames leaping out at me, I report that millions of . . . okay, hundreds of . . . okay, maybe eleven people are stuck in this building. They are crying out to be saved. Is anyone listening? Is anyone helping? Oh, who is that now?’
The superkids had arrived. And wow, did everyone get to work.
Anna Conda lengthened her tail to make a huge lasso and she threw it up to the fourth floor to circle a frightened woman and pulled her right down. Vamp Iyer flew up and when people saw him, they just fainted with fear. First fire, now vampires. That helped though, because the muscled Hulket could then just throw them down where the equally muscled Hulkette could catch them. Slime Joos tried to spurt slime at the flames to smother them.
The crowd was going wild. ‘The superkids are here,’ they shouted, clapping and trying to take pictures of the heroes with their cell phones.
The fire raged on even as the rescue operation was going on. Big orange flames were shooting through most windows now, and it was getting REALLY hot.
Tara Rumpum was screaming, ‘Oh, for a drop of help from the skies. Oh, for a drop of water. Will no one hear our cries?’
She looked so pretty and so sad there that my heart bled for her. ‘I will hear your cries, Tara Rumpum!’ I shouted bravely.
She turned to me, surprised. ‘Who are you?’
I puffed out my chest. ‘I am SuperZero. I will save the world.’ And with those very silly words, I went zooming off. You see, I had got an absolutely brilliant idea. I’d seen the park fountains just beyond the building wall. Water! Get it?
I swiped a helmet off a biker nearby, gathered water from the fountains, and went running over to the building and threw the water at it. It didn’t help even a tiny bit. The crowd burst out laughing. I ran up and down with my helmet till I was quite exhausted, but the fire kept growing larger, oranger and angrier.
‘Finally, a completely useless superhero,’ said Tara Rumpum into her microphone, ‘but he’s cute.’
Cameras clicked pictures of me puffing and panting while I leaned on the wall to get my breath back, turning my back to the leaping flames for a moment.
‘Fire!’ shouted Tara Rumpum.
‘I know, I know,’ I replied grumpily. ‘Everyone knows the building is on fire.’
‘No! You’re on fire!’ she shouted.
I turned back slowly and saw the end of my long cape burning. Of course, I went totally ballistic.
‘Help! Fire!’ I shouted madly while running out to the crowd. People began to run away from me, and there was quite a stampede as I barrelled through the crowd, and some people got squashed. A trail of smoke followed me and made those who weren’t already squashed double up choking.
I was in a complete panic, and ran helter-skelter through the scared throng, almost setting fire to a whole lot more people. All I wanted to do was to get to those fountains—that glorious, cool water. Since I was feeling so hot, my head was like a volcano about to erupt—and then I tripped on my stupid burning cape, and the last thing I saw before blacking out was a high fountain leaping out and coming at me like a wave.
When someone finally shook me awake, there was no fire any more. So why were people still running away? And then I saw water gushing out from the park fountains towards the burning building, which wasn’t burning any more, but was now flooded. The street outside was also flooded, and the media persons in their vans were trying to stay afloat. Tara Rumpum was up on a tree, still screaming into her mic.
Omigosh, I’d finally done something super, but in a really bad way. I’d turned the fire into a flood. Now, how would I stop the flood? Fortunately, I didn’t have to, because a tiny little buzzing thing flew in and stood in front of those raging fountains. The Fly got the fountains to calm down. How much greater could the little master’s super-awesomeness get? Was there anything he couldn’t do?
Later that day, while sitting wrapped up in a blanket at home, with Gra making me hot chocolate, I heard my name on Dad’s TV.
Tara Rumpum was reporting from up on the tree, ‘News has come to us that the day was saved by the superkids, except one in particular called SuperZero. The flood that SuperZero very cruelly brought on washed away all the records and documents from the Department of Marriage Registrations. Millions of . . . hundreds of . . . well, at least six young wives have run away from their husbands already, saying there is no record that they were ever married! Angry young husbands are searching for this boy called SuperZero. They have cricket bats in their hands. Does anyone know where this boy is?’
The boy climbed under his blanket and slept for the next twenty-four hours, until all the noise and anger had faded away.
11. Every superhero must have a sidekick who won’t eat him up
Everyone looked at me coldly when I got back to school. It was a long walk from the school gate across the huge front field, up the stairs under the Egyptian-looking sign, to class, with angry superkids from all the classes and disappointed teachers staring at me.
Masterror made me write a 100 times on the invisible board:
I will not burn people up.
After that, he made me write another 100 times:
I will not drown people either.
Of course, since it was an invisible board, no one knew that I had written it a 100 times so he made me write it again. He seems to get a kick out of being mean. I tried over lunch break to get chatty with my old friends but . . . Blank stayed blank and did not show himself to me at all. Vamp Iyer told me vampires were allergic to the smell of burnt capes. Anna Conda stayed stuck to the pea-brained TRex throughout, hanging on to his words, or growls or whatever.
At home, it wasn’t any better. Mom acted like I’d cut up all her dreams into ribbons. Like it was her who was featured burning up the crowd and flooding up the building. Dad kept saying he’d told her so! (‘He’s just a normal kid! Even the dustbin has more superpowers. C’mon, look how crushed he is with these ridiculous expectations you have of him. Have you looked at the kid?’)
Gra hobbled in. ‘Oh, I saw the lid. The dustbin lid. I thought it would make a great hat.’
That’s the way it went. Home to school to home. All equally miserable!
The classes were getting worse too.
There was this idiotic class called Super Sight. You were supposed to be able to look through the wall and see what was behind it—X-ray vision, kind of.
Slime Joos turned out to be really good a
t it. ‘Double-Headmistress is in her office, phoning your dad about chucking you out of school, SuperZero,’ he said. ‘I can see through all the walls from here to her office, and can hear through them too.’
Everyone thought that was really funny. What was this? Be Mean to SuperZero Day/Week/Month?
‘What’s behind this cloak?’ asked Masterror, holding up a red cloak over the table one day when we walked in. ‘Whoever guesses gets it! And I promise you it’s really grrrrrrrreat!’
I’d show them! I glared hard at the cloak. I was bent on proving that I had as much super sight as the next guy.
‘Er . . .’ started Anna Conda, frowning in concentration, ‘it’s round with a handle at the end. It’s a saucepan.’
‘No,’ said Slime Joos squinting hard. ‘It’s bouncing! It’s a beach ball.’
‘A beach ball with a handle?’ laughed Anna Conda.
Masterror shook his head. ‘No. Try harrrrder, class! Fow-cussss! Feel the red beams from your eyes drrrrill into that cloak!’
‘It’s milk!’ shouted Vamp Iyer suddenly, whooping with delight.
‘Milk?’ Masterror snapped. ‘MILK? Milk which is round and has a handle?’
‘A cow, I mean,’ mumbled Vamp Iyer.
Everyone else guessed, but no one was quite right. Some kids guessed it was a buggy, a spacesuit, a spinning top. Lizzie Lizard thought it was the world’s biggest bee. And then it was only me and Blank left. ‘Where is Blank?’ shouted Masterror. ‘Boy, are you cheating now? Have you disappeared behind the cloak to see what it is?’
We gasped because we heard thrashing and growling and whimpering (from Blank) from behind the cloak. Masterror was right. The dweeb had gone behind the cloak. And then a very terrified Blank ran out. Gripping his ankle was the world’s ugliest, fattest beast. It was built like a sausage on four legs and wore a look even more menacing than Masterror’s.
Masterror turned to us, to me in particular. ‘Well, I guess only one person’s left to guess and even SuperZero can’t get it wrong now! And the meanest dog in the world goes to SuperZero!’ The class burst out laughing once more. I suspect they were all really relieved they hadn’t won the prize.