SuperZero (4 page)

The next few days I felt like I was walking around on a cloud. Anna Conda looked at me like I was this huge plane-flier. ‘It's called a pilot, not a plane-flier,' said Vamp Iyer grumpily. He was grumpy because Anna Conda wasn't looking at him with puppy eyes.

‘How did you doooo it, SuperZero?' Anna Conda cooed. ‘Teach me please.'

‘Ah, it's nothing.' I shrugged. ‘It's easy-peasy lemon-squeezy!' (I had no idea how I'd done it, of course, so I couldn't do it again, let alone teach anyone else.)

Blank and I were hanging out a lot too. Of course, that was a little weird, because Blank was always blank, see? So it looked like I was hanging around by myself. And talking to myself. But then all super people were weird, right? Superman was afraid of a piece of green crystal. A rock from the planet Krypton—like all those alien things really exist, huh!

Wait a minute.

‘Blank,' I said, ‘do you believe in aliens?'

There was no reply.

‘Blank!'

Oh, so he wasn't there. That's the problem about having an invisible friend: you never know when he's around and when he's not. Well, now I know he's not.

I sat down next to Vamp Iyer, who was drinking his morning bottle of milk. ‘Do you believe in aliens?'

‘Yeah, but don't ask me to eat them. They don't taste so good!'

I looked at him to see if he was joking. He was choking over his milk, spluttering and laughing. Hmpf.

I bet if I could find an alien to befriend, I wouldn't
need all these pseudo friends. I'd also learn a whole lot of superpower stuff too. Aliens travel millions of miles in minutes to visit from faraway galaxies.

I talked to Anna Conda over lunch. ‘Do you know any aliens?' I asked, chomping on my potato wedges.

‘No. Oh, SuperZero, do
you
know aliens?' Her eyes were so wide and so full of admiration that I didn't have the heart to break her heart.

‘Oh yeah. In fact, I'm going to meet an alien today. A good friend, really. He's going to teach me some powers.' Ahem. So I might have stretched the truth a bit.

‘Take me. Please, please!'

I chewed some more on my potato wedge. I had actually swallowed it long ago, but I kept pretending to chew to keep thinking. What a lousy, stinking lie to make up. How would I find an alien now to introduce Anna Conda to?

Of course, I kept diving in deeper. ‘My alien's very shy. He disappears when girls are around. Like Blank, you know. All my friends disappear. Haha.' I finally pretend-swallowed my pretend potato wedge. ‘Anyway, I'm late, and aliens fade away after sunset.'

‘You're making that up,' said Vamp Iyer. ‘It's us vampires that fade away after sunrise. Only the blood-drinking ones do, though. Not the milk-drinking ones like me. We don't fade. Our bones are really strong because of all that milk calcium we drink. So no fading and fainting and . . .'

‘Yes, yes,' I said impatiently, not wanting Vamp Iyer to take away my spot of gold in Anna Conda's eyes yet. ‘But aliens are way cooler than vampires. Vampires are just big bats.'

‘Take that back or I'll bite you,' said Vamp Iyer and flew at me, his wings flapping.

I began to dance around like I'd seen the boxers do on my dad's TV show, and then slipped on a real potato wedge that had fallen on the floor. I ended up hitting my head on the cold canteen floor and oh, did it hurt! Great, more bumps.

Anna Conda offered me her dainty hand. ‘Bye, SuperZero. Remember our secret, okay? Take me to meet your alien.'

I was in a bad spot. I'd lied. I'd made up an alien. I'd fought with my friend. I'd bumped my head. Again.

That night, as I sat moping over my dinner at home, I saw something very interesting in Dad's newspaper—a small headline tucked away on the back of the page he was reading. His thumb almost covered it but I managed to read it.

‘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.

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.