Just Call Me Superhero Read Online Free PDF Page B

This time he was punctual. We all were. Janne and Marlon were sitting there silently. Friedrich was chatting with Kevin about nightmares. Richard was reading the paper again.
    The chair between him and Kevin was free.
    “Hi, Marek,” said Janne smiling. I nearly missed the chair and fell on the floor.
    “Hi, Janne.” My face tingled. Richard folded up his paper and looked at me for a long time.
    “People, this isn’t going to work,” said the guru suddenly.
    I had nearly forgotten he was there. He was sitting there on his chair, small and long-nosed and looking a little too distraught.
    “I’m sorry, people,” the guru said into the silence that had descended on the room.
    “What?” asked Marlon.
    “It was a stupid idea.” The guru looked away as if to avoid Marlon’s gaze, as if he had forgotten Marlon couldn’t see anyway. “I’ll give your parents the money back and we’ll disband the group. It’s just not going to work. I overestimated myself.”
    I thought of how I would go home with a hundred euros in my pocket. I didn’t have to tell Claudia anything. She wouldn’t know that I was no longer leaving the house every Thursday at three-thirty. I could go back to spending the entire day watching my fish and looking at images of deformed people in reference books without the annoying interruption. I would no longer be a participant in a self-help group for youths with physical and mental impairments. I could bid them all adieu with a light heart.
    Especially Janne, who thought it beneath her to answer me.
    Marlon sat there motionless. He probably loved to be filmed. I used to be photogenic once, too.
    Friedrich’s features were soft and his mouth trembled silently. Richard tugged at his earlobes, frowning. Kevin smiled pensively and looked at Marlon. And Janne . . .
    Janne said loudly: “No!”
    “What do you mean no?” The guru let his hat roll around on his knees the same way I sometimes did. “I say yes and I ask all of your pardon. You’ll get your money back.”
    “Will you look for other disabled people?” asked Friedrich.
    The guru waved his hand in the air. “You’re not replaceable. It was doomed to fail from the start.”
    “No,” repeated Janne.
    She was sitting next to Marlon, very upright, and her green eyes seemed to be giving off sparks. I just couldn’t get used to her face, it still surprised me every time. And even though there was as much space between her and Marlon as there was between Friedrich and me, I still saw them as together. And I thought to myself that there had never been a couple like that before, not in the movies or in real life. A couple that you had to congratulate on aesthetic grounds alone.
    I suddenly had a bitter taste in my mouth. I would like to have spit on the floor.
    “We’re going to keep going,” said Janne.
     
    We’re going to keep going
, Janna had said.
    Nobody asked her who she meant by
we
. Marlon and her? All of us? Since when were we a
we
? We had barely exchanged more than a few sentences with each other, we’d gone for ice cream together one single time, and we all made each other sick. I couldn’t even figure out why I came back here and why the others did. Did they not have anything better to do, either? Were catfish and reference books the only things waiting at home for them, too?
    And yet nobody disagreed with her. Not even me, even though I was suddenly very angry with Janne. I wanted her to look at me. I wanted her to smile at me. I wanted her to cry. Or do anything that showed she was a real person and not some alien trapped in the body of a cripple.
    The guru was a bit speechless.
    “I feel honored,” he finally said, though it sounded like “you can all go to hell.”
    “Are any of you already eighteen?” he asked, looking around quite despairingly and lighting on me, oddly enough, as if my age hadn’t been mentioned alongside my photo—the
before
photo—in every newspaper in the country.
    Kevin slowly raised