At first, I couldn’t understand, much less believe, how precious an opportunity I had come across.

Then a shiver jolted me out of my stupor and I realized I was either hallucinating or--

FUCK! Was the only courteous response I could muster in the situation. Followed by the usual trio, no way, I must be seeing things, and is this thing real?

It was real: both the opportunity and the absurdity of it falling upon my head.

I mean -- I was a good kid, kind enough and fair enough, but did I deserve this system that seemingly had the potential to make me the ruler of the whole world?

Yes. I blurted without a second thought.

Who was I kidding? Only brain-dead zombies and pacifists would complain in the face of such an opportunity.

I was getting to my feet in the next second. I didn’t feel it until I saw myself in the mirror, but I was smiling and my eyes were wide open, filled with expectations and glee.

I had never been that energetic and spirited before. I looked somewhat scary, to be honest.

Then I punched that scary-looking me in the face with all the strength I could muster. To hell with the consequences. I overdid it. The guy couldn’t even fight back. One second he was complete and the next second the shards of his broken identity were flying all over the place. Most of it fell into the sink and only a few managed to touch the floor.

Suddenly, the words changed.

[Congratulations on getting your first superpower. Maybe it be the first step in your quest to understand fate.]

[Milestone unlocked - Acquire your first superpower.]

[Reward: Disguise Level + 10 and unlock a rare sub-skill.]

[Sub skill: Flawed Perfection unlocked.]

[Flawed Perfection: Looks can be deceiving, but a disguise with only form and no factor is inherently flawed.]

[Next Milestone: Acquire Ten Superpowers. Reward: All powers level up once.]

This was good. This was perfect. The only fly in the tea was my mother who was now banging at the bathroom door.

“What happened?” She did not say that calmly like Dumbledore.

“SAHIL! Did the mirror break? Are you all right?”

She was probably fuming. The bathroom door held on for dear life while my mother pounded it with her fists. Her hands might be small, but I had personally felt the raw power contained in them. I could say with certainty, she could have wielded the infinity gauntlet and come out unscathed after the snap. No problem!

I heard her voice and the world whirled into existence around me once again. I must have felt guilty inside because I replied, “Yes, Ma, I broke the mirror.”

That was a mistake. The banging ceased for a moment. Allowing quiet to creep into the conversation before it was scared away by a loud slap on the door.

“You rascal!” My dear mother said not so dearly. “Come out and see how I fix you!”

She stopped banging the door and started pulling the door handle to tear open the door instead. If banging on the door implied she was worried for my health, then now she was going to teach me a profound lesson in violence.

“You are breaking things now, huh? I’ll show you how to break things. You have such a temper at your age, what will you be like in your thirties? We didn’t have anything when I was your age. We didn’t have a TV, a computer, or even electricity. You have everything yet you behave as if we owe you something. Open the door or I promise I’ll kill you! OPEN IT!” She screamed at last.

That was exactly why I didn’t open the door. Or said anything. You speak and you are dead. You open the door and you are dead. So I acted dead.

I ignored my mother’s voice and examined my hand for injuries instead. My fist didn’t sting. Though I had broken flesh on the third knuckle. It was bleeding. It did sting when I put my fist under the tap and let water run over the wound.

While I was waiting for the bleeding to stop, my eyes fell on one of the taller mirror pieces that was standing dangerously on the sinkrest. It reflected my image. The same as always. Nothing changed; no transformations or improvements.

Unease encrusted my heart as the thought arose in my head: Shall I try it?

As if pushed by my will to change, something happened. My skin quivered. It stopped instantly when I felt and saw the change in the mirror shard. The changes instantly stopped and reverted.

My heartbeat didn’t. It got louder. I felt it. I heard it. It was not calming down. My breathing followed it, getting deeper, quicker.

I gulped down my hesitation and then pushed my will to change once again. To put on a disguise, but wondered: to disguise into what, into whom? The changes in my facial structure reflected my thoughts; they appeared uncertain, untrained, and in turn unrestrained. I almost screamed aloud when my nose drooped down like melted ice cream. MJ’s image flashed through my head and I immediately curbed my thoughts and stopped acting.

I nervously gawked at the mirror shard. To my dismay, my appearance hadn’t reverted to normal. I still had a drooping nose and loose skin.

I have become a freak. The thought gave me Goosebumps.

My legs started shaking. I grabbed the sink’s ears to hold myself upright. I understood that the disfigurement was temporary, but that didn’t stop tears from filling my eyes. They fell as I waited for my heart to calm down and my legs to regain strength. Wiping my eyes on the back of my hands I took a deep breath and started disguising myself actively again.

I don’t know how long I spent standing in front of the sink. By the time I was done with changing my appearance back to the way it was, I felt physically tired and mentally exhausted. I looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn’t say if I looked normal or not. I tried my best and realized that however easy it was to mold a disguise, it was impossible to change into someone without a reference photo.

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I stood in the quiet, staring at the strange-looking face in the mirror and realizing what a dumb thing I had just done.

Never do big things with small hands! I reprimanded myself. You should have started small. Should have tried to see if you could repair the wound on your fist or try to add or remove old marks. But no! You wanted to become Brad Pitt on your first try and nearly ended up joining the circus instead!

I didn’t have the heart to do any more damage to myself and decided to leave the transformations alone for the time being. Even though in my heart I knew I didn’t look like myself anymore. I could not do anything more. I lacked the courage to overcome the fear.

Fear is a great divider. It separates the idiots from the smart. I wouldn’t call myself a smart person, but I wasn’t exactly an idiot either.

Knowing that I had spent too long in the bathroom, I pushed everything that had happened in the past couple of minutes to the back of my head.

I showered and left the bathroom. The fear of my mother forced me to thank God (even though I was an unbeliever) when I didn’t see her outside. Either she had taken Rani out for a walk or… who knows what kind of witchery she was out doing so early in the morning.

Hurrying into my room, I was looking through my wardrobe when I got a proper glimpse of myself in the mirror. That guy in the mirror… was not me. I was sure. That face was too streamlined to be mine. In my haste, I had spread my lips a bit too thin and narrowed my nose somewhat, something that I had always asked for, hoped for and wanted.

I picked up my phone from the bed and opened the gallery. Navigating through the few pictures I had of myself, I picked a recent one and found that other than these two changes I hadn’t touched anything else. Now I was in a dilemma. I couldn’t decide between keeping the changes and reverting my face to normal.

The changes were good, but they looked too unnatural. The boy in the mirror was a different person, to be honest. Deciding to go slow, I took a picture of myself with the changes to remember how I looked. Then I reverted to my normal face. Disguise came easier this time with a photo for reference. I believe the skill level and the sub-skill played a part. The successful surgery boosted my confidence but I didn’t have the time to play around.

It was 6:20 am.

Not only was I running late. I had ten minutes until the UFO arrived at the bus stop. I called the school bus an unidentified flying object because I always felt like an alien sitting inside it.

Ten minutes were all the time I had to get ready, eat breakfast, and become speed itself!

Frustratingly over my head, I jumped into my school pants and punched into the sleeves of my shirt like I was in the last round of my world title match, and scoring a knockout was the only way I could win. I was frantic. I was insidious. I am sure if my boots were alive, they would have escaped from me in panic.

“BELT! MOM BELT! WHERE’S MY BELT!” I screamed out the door. My life would have been much simpler if I had such courage against my bullies.

Rani rushed into my room barking. Her tail went bonkers behind her. She jumped up and down around me. I wondered what made her so happy. Her happiness was infectious and it made me warm inside.

“Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good girl?” I said. Rani started barking happily again and running between my legs. Abhey might have brought her home, but she was my girl. I grabbed her face and started rubbing it furiously. She stood still and let me have a piece of her happiness.

However, the warmth in my chest receded into a cold war between panic and fear when I heard the short-heavy footsteps approaching. Then Mom walked into the room. Rani pulled away from me and rushed toward her for pats. But mom wasn’t having it. She ignored Rani and stared at me with her puffed eyes. Her lips closed shut to keep her insidious thoughts from leaking. She’d hit me sometimes, but I was more afraid of being berated. Demons know, my mother had a way to make a grown man weak in his knees. My father could vouch for me.

She didn’t go look for the belt but stopped in front of me.

“Hands,” She said and I felt like a chicken on the chopping block.

“Ma--”

She didn’t listen and grabbed my hands from my sides. Pulled them to her face, and I swear, her lips twitched when she saw the broken skin of my right knuckle. I don’t know why she pressed the wound, but she released my hands when I didn’t scream in pain.

“You are lucky you are late for school.” She said.

I heard the subtext. She was telling me to catch the bus or I was dead.

The belt she found slithering among my undershirts behind the door. Our eyes met. I almost thought I was getting whipped today. Then she snorted and threw the belt harmlessly at me before swaggering out of the room without another word. Rani looked between us before rushing after her. I sighed in relief. My mother’s stare was more venomous than her words ever had been. I wanted to apologize but where did I have the time for that?

Time was my excuse. In reality, I was just afraid to see her disappointed.

The belt was still in my hand when I finally burst out of the room with my school bag slung over my shoulder. Nothing fancy, the bag just had two infinite pockets of black that could swallow my books and spit them back out when(n)ever I needed them.

The lobby was empty. Dad was not around and Mom was outside. I could hear her dragging the clothes hanger out of the front gate. The Incense smoke gushed out of my way as I rushed into the kitchen, snapping close the belt buck on the way. I slid to a stop near the countertop, picked up my lunchbox –no money today— and dashed through every door there was.

I saw Mom outside, hanging clothes on the line. She had her back to me.

‘I’m leaving,’ the thought grew and died in my head.

By the time, she was out of my sight she was also out of my mind.

I ran… fast. Beside Abhey and I, there were two others, a boy and his older sister, who took the bus from the same stop. We walk to the stop together usually. But not today. It added to my worries that I had missed the bus.

It wasn’t enthusiasm driving me forward. Neither was it the fear of my mother’s beating. Though my days in the school weren’t any easier, they weren’t as bad as my day would have been had I stayed home. Truthfully, it was not as if my mother would go out of her way to make my life hell. She never reminded me of my failures neither talked about the depth of her disappointment in me. It was just... complicated. I guess I felt guilty that I couldn’t stand up to my parent's hopes. That I failed at all and everything.

But I wasn’t the only one responsible for my tardiness. The world had harassed me such that I could no longer raise my head with pride. They were the reason I was growing introverted, irritated, and lazier with each passing day -- Not me!

I passed a row of closed house gates on my way east, toward the highway. The dog at the lawyer's bungalow snapped at me when I rushed by. He almost scared me to death that little critter. The day was colder than usual. Wind scared the tree branches wherever it passed through them, forcing the leaves to ring alarm bells all over the place. Dead leaves rained in pairs of two and three on the road. I was alone there running down, the backpack bouncing off my back with every stride. My motive was a distant dream at this point. Then I turned the corner and found myself face to face with the side of the yellow school bus leaving my stop. I was thirty-some meters from the stop and the bus was already on its way away.

“STOP!” I yelled and picked up speed. I don’t know where I found the energy to speed up. I did it anyway.

The bloating feeling was a blip in my mind.

Just when my mind started suggesting I get ready for some belt whopping, the bus came to a halt in teh distance with a hiss. I was seething when I finally reached up and grabbed the door handle and climbed over the steps. My legs were jelly. I mean it. The interior looked darker than usual. I found a seat, not even my seat, and crashed into it like a baby falling into its mother’s arms. I was heaving and sweating, profusely. And it was still summer. I knew I was going to smell like sour cheese by the time we reached school.

Then the bus started moving and the sharp cold air breathing in through the open windows took all of my stress away.

I looked over the back seat at Arzoo, who sat at the back with her brother. Nodded to convey my thanks and she smiled back. I knew only she could have seen me running and cared enough to ask the driver to stop the bus. I decided to find a way to thank her later.

Turning back, I started thinking again. Like a great man once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Now I had great power. The question was, what should I do with it?