(ONC 2024 Round Two Qualifier)
"Wait! You were born at the time when there weren't any Superhumans?"
"Technically yes!" Nishi paused. Looking at Kabbo's flabbergasted face she continued, " So, Mr.Kabbo what Generation of Superhuman were you again...
Renessa peered inside the car window with a severe frown. Though blessed with a beautiful face, that beauty was somehow lost in the deepening creases of her brow. One glance at her was enough to tell she wasn’t happy to see Kabbo awake. Her pure gray eyes twitched ever so slightly, and her beige lips pressed into thin lines—not a good sign.
From inside the car, Kabbo let out a humorless laugh. "Can I really sleep after all the beatings you made me endure?"
He barely finished speaking when Renessa's eyes blazed with fury. She didn’t say anything, but her glare said it all.
The way she looked at him, it was hard to tell if she was seeing Kabbo or some random thug she might punch at any moment. Kabbo shifted in his seat and avoided her eyes, turning instead to the rearview mirror to fix his disheveled hair. He quickly realized that fixing his hair wouldn’t help much—his swollen nose from a punch earlier made it painfully obvious.
"Eto din shunesilam kivabe angul fule kola hoy, ajke naak fule kivabe bedana hoy tao dekha hoye gelo," he mumbled to himself. ("Until today, I knew how a finger swells into a banana; now I’ve seen how a nose swells into a pomegranate.")
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"What did you say?" Renessa asked. Kabbo shook his head. "N-Nothing!"
Still, he couldn’t shake the discomfort. Looking at himself in the mirror reminded him of that 'clown' from his childhood—the one who singlehandedly ruined two 'C's of his life: Circus and Chocolate!
He’d been quite young, maybe five or six, but that didn’t make the clown go easy on him. During a bustling circus show, the clown randomly picked a kid from the audience for his next act, and unfortunately, that kid was Kabbo.
“There’s a lot of chocolate inside!” the clown had said. “It’s going to be so much fun!” the clown exclaimed.
That was all it took for Kabbo to fall into the trap. The lure of promised chocolates far outweighed any concerns about getting into a small wooden box. But once inside, Kabbo stepped on a hidden noose. Before he realized what was happening, the noose tightened around his ankle and pulled him up, leaving him dangling upside down.
Poor Kabbo! Neither physics nor luck was on his side. As the rope yanked him into the air, his pants slid down to his knees. And there he was, in full view of the crowd, hanging upside down in his new red underwear adorned with brown bears, courtesy of his mother.
It was a disastrous sight. In the middle of a packed circus, a boy hung upside down, his underwear the star of the show. The audience roared with laughter, clapping and cheering at his expense. Even the clown, the mastermind behind the disaster, laughed unapologetically.
Kabbo’s mother had to come up on stage to retrieve him, and even then, it was a struggle to calm him down. Ever since that day, Kabbo hated chocolates and circuses with a passion. He’d fake illness to avoid them. He could never get over that incident, and the two 'C's remained enemies.
