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Super Hero, Chapter 2 - Crushed Crown Stories
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Chapter 2
“Are you a superhero?” little Tristan asks.
The long drive home is awkward until this moment. No one talks. Tristan hasn’t taken his eyes off me but when he finally asks the question it splits the silence and defined the entire night. He’s beyond cute. His big eyes look up at me. He looks at me the way that any big brother would want his little brother to look at him. He looks at me like he’s proud.
For a moment, I think that everything that just happened was real. I was something special. The long jump would change my life and all these possibilities would be opened up to me.
I don’t know how to answer Tristan. I don’t even know what defines a Super hero.
“No, he’s not,” my father responds, “And he never will be.”
My father’s tone is strong and final. More thrilling than the videos of the superhero Mayor Morals from back in the day that could break bullets with his broad chest. My father’s tone humbled me and brought me back to reality. Whatever reality I had thought I’d seen before was gone. This was a new world and I was not that person.
We pull up to the house and my father waits in the car. We all know what that means. Mary silently takes Tristan out of the car and heads for the house. She doesn’t give me a stare or even a nod of understanding. Maybe it’s payback from earlier when I abandoned her. I sit in the car.
It’s moments like this where I know my father is going to go off on me for losing the race. I want to explain to him who Aaron Kanzari Jr. really is. White Frost wasn’t exactly some superhuman runner but maybe my father would find an excuse for my failure because Kanzari was a metahuman after all. This is different through. Through the silence, I don’t think my father is going to punish me for losing the race. He’s not going to make me run another lap. He’s not going to make me do squats until my legs fell off. This was different.
“Whatever happened today…a lot of people saw,” he explains to me, “Don’t do it again.”
That’s all he says.
It’s cold and empty and I don’t know how to interpret it besides threatening.
I whimper back as though I’m still a teenager looking at my father desperately for his attention, “Yes sir.”
He doesn’t ask me to run extra laps. He doesn’t ask me to train until the morning like he usually would. He just nods. I know that means that I’m excused. It always has meant that. With that, I get out of the car and see my father’s eyes watching me the entire time as I go into the house. It’s almost as though he doesn’t recognize me anymore and that’s a scary thought.
~
The next morning I wake up wanting to forget everything and luckily it seems as though the day is starting off like that. Tristan doesn’t ask me any weird questions that I can’t answer. He doesn’t keep looking at me like I’m one of those caped heroes in the comics his friends show him at school. Mary makes some small talk about the annual Metropolis fair that everyone is attending at the end of the week. Then there’s my father who is staring deep down at a paper with his morning coffee and his construction uniform on.
