Friday night, and here I was again cramming for Superhero Midterms alone in my room. My roommate, Jude the Jackass, was in the common room with his buddies, and I could hear them drunkenly cursing each other’s mothers and mocking their penis sizes over the music streaming through the thin dorm wall. I squinted my eyes, wrapped my arms around my head, and tried to focus on my studying through the noise. The Lazer Cannon Werewolf’s weaknesses… dammit… what the hell are they again… Frustrated, I picked up a stapler and started to furiously punch staples until it ran out, making empty clicking sounds. I ran a finger over the back of the stapler, and instantly filled it up again. I emptied another cartridge on my desk, and used the staples to draw circles on my notebook. The thumping from the music next door made the staples bounce on the paper like steel jumping beans. Last year I got a full scholarship to go to Superhero School, a boarding academy for kids like me who have “special” powers. To be honest, I wasn’t too keen on leaving home, but Mom had insisted that I was “such a talented boy” and that “it would be a shame to let me talents go to waste.” I felt bad about leaving her, especially with Dad not around anymore and all, but we unanimously decided that it was for the best. We weren’t the wealthiest family on the block, and it would be nice to give Mom a break. All of a sudden, I heard glass shatter against the wall dividing my room and the common space, jerking me out of my moment and making my heart skip a beat. Jude the Jackass was roaring with laughter. “I said not telekinetically, dipshit!” he howled at someone probably equally as dumb as him. Annoyed, I marched out of my room and stormed into the common room next door, where Jude the Jackass and his friends were zipping through the air, flinging things at each other. Judging from the empty sneaked-in wine boxes and their red faces, they were also very inebriated. Teresa, a girl from my social sciences class, was cowering in the corner, and I could tell from the salt lines on her face that she had been crying. Teresa’s superpower was that she could heal the sick with the touch of her hands, but with each illness that she cured her body became increasingly deformed. Because of this the kids in my school mercilessly called her Teresa the Leper, among other names. “H-hey, guys, you mind keeping things down?” I stammered. “Junior!” Jude the Jackass slurred, as he less-than-gracefully floated himself back down to the ground and drunkenly stumbled towards me. Junior was the name that everyone at Superhero School had given me since I enrolled last year, in acknowledgement of my dad. The thing is, my dad is the world’s most respected superhero, and for a time when I first came here I was somewhat of a celebrity for being his kid. To my dismay my popularity waned as my classmates got to know what my powers were: “Free Refills”. That’s right, the kid of the world’s most powerful superhero was going to save the world with free diet sodas. Soon the moniker “Junior” became more of an ironic one, digging at my incompetent capabilities as a superhero. “We bothering you, buddy?” Jude the Jackass asked me, in a way that I’m a little embarrassed to admit intimidated me a little. I silently cursed principal Abe for not letting me switch rooms, and mumbled, “Yeah, people are trying to study here. And leave Teresa alone.” “Hah! Leave Teresa alone!” Jude the Jackass hollered, and his friends/henchmen followed suit. After a laughing fit his face darkened, and took two steps towards me. Instinctively I took two steps back. “Listen, Junior, I’ll cut you a deal.” I stood quivering in silence, and he took this as a cue to carry on. “You use your cute parlor tricks to refill our beverages over there –” he tilted his head towards the boxed wines strewn across the floor “– and we let you and that human diabetic foot go. And maybe we will have a think about keeping things down.” He gestured the last three words with air quotes. “T-thanks, guys.” I shuffled towards the boxed wines, which had leaked a sticky red puddle on the floor. The jerks had left red wine footprints all over the linoleum. I rubbed a finger on the side, over the nutritional information label, and then picked up the now full containers and put them on the table. Teresa jumped out of her fetal position and ran behind me. We silently left the room, feeling Jude the Jackass’s mocking eyes glaring down my back the whole time. Back in my room, Teresa and I tried to carry on studying together, but Jude the Jackass hadn’t really kept his end of the bargain with toning it down, and we weren’t getting much done. Eventually I asked Teresa to anesthesize me, poke my eardrums out with a pair of chopsticks, and finished the rest of my revision in blissful deafness. Later that night, when Jude the Jackass decided he wanted to call it a night and stumbled into our room and told Teresa to “fuck off”, we moved to the common space where Teresa restored my hearing and we drank the rest of the boxed wine and hung out. –