"What can I get for you guys today?" Notebook in hand, Alex gave a tired smile to the family who'd just sat down at their table.
"Fish fingers! Fish fingers!" Pudgy-cheeked and covered with green face paint, a toddler thumped it's balled fists on the table and demanded fish fingers.
The child's mother sighed and rubbed her temples, smiling helplessly, "Kids fish finger meal for him please, and an apple juice."
The child cheered and beat the table triumphantly. The colorful treasure map and crayons on the table proceeded to capture its attention.
"I'll have the ribeye and a lemonade. Well done, not a drop of blood you hear?" The child's father hadn't ever opened the menu. He'd known what he wanted before he walked in the door.
Alex scribbled down the family's orders.
"For you miss?" He asked, smiling politely at the child's mother who had yet to order.
The child's mother seemed uncertain, her eyes scanned the menu, but never lingered.
Her husband rolled his eyes and mumbled something under his breath. The menu in front of him was picked up for the first time and he inspected it with a focused expression.
"How about the Ceaser salad honey? You used to like it from that Italian place."
The woman's eyes lit up, "Yes, a Ceaser salad! Perfect! You always know what I fancy Jim!"
Laughing, the man stretched out his hand and placed it gently over his wife's. He looked at her lovingly, "You've been talking about Ceaser salads since Tuesday honey, you make it pretty easy for me."
"And a mojito with that." He added, folding up his own menu and doing the same with his son's.
Alex smiled and took the family's menus. He looked at his notebook and repeated the orders he had written down, "One kid's fish finger meal with an apple juice. One ribeye with a lemonade and a Caesar salad with a mojito to drink."
Recieving polite approving smiles in return, Alex folded over the cover of his notebook and headed to the kitchen.
Just before the kitchen's heavy doors swung shut, Alex heard the pudgy-cheeked child shout.
"Green ghost! I wanna watch green ghost!"
The kitchen was loud and busy. The soft noise of a sheet being torn out from a notebook was swallowed up without a trace.
Handwriting was important in the restaurant industry. A chef wiped sweat from his brow and studied the page that had just been pasted to the hood of an industrial extractor fan.
"Cheers Alex." The chef said. Alex had never heard him speak more than a few words, and always with the same fast-paced and urgent tone.
"No worries." Alex's reply fell on deaf ears. The chef had already disappeared into the kitchen.
Alex felt something twitch in his stomach. The sensation brought above a wave of nausea.
"Bathroom break." He called out, not caring if anyone heard him. Clutching his stomach he staggered to the bathroom. The door shut behind him and the lock clicked into place.
One hand held his aching stomach, the other hurriedly lifted the toilet seat in case ready to vomit.
He'd had food poisoning before, a bad burger at a school football game. This felt different.
He ran through everything he'd eaten in the last week. Yesterday's tea had been his mother's lasagna, the chance he'd caught something from that was minuscule.
"That curry!" He cursed his appetite. The feeling of fullness from a good meal never managed to last more than a half hour.
The night before last he'd gone over to a friend's house to watch a baseball game. Jason had been his best mate for as long as he could remember. He'd already had dinner that night, he hadn't needed to eat anymore.
There was a viral hot sauce doing the rounds on TikTok. Jason switched up what trend he was following practically hourly, but he'd managed to stick with one long enough to purchase the hot sauce.
Between his constant teenage hunger, the smell of the curry and the egging on of his friends, he'd ended up having a bowl. And then another. The hot sauce was aggressively mediocre, this only made the boys laugh harder and eat more.
"Those bastards better have it too! If I'm the only one I'll hit them in the frickin' balls." Alex cursed.
His anger suddenly faltered. He stared at his stomach. The world came to a standstill.
"What the fuck?"
He'd lifted up his shirt a few inches. The squirming sensation in his stomach was so real he'd started to spiral that it could be some kind of tapeworm or parasite.
Skin folded and twisted, rising and falling randomly. Alex stared at it. His mind endlessly conjured up images of larvae burrowing out from his stomach.
His heart pounded in his chest. His knees felt weak.
"Stop-stop-go away!" He said breathlessly.
The wriggling halted. There'd been a strange twinge in his head and then it had just stopped. The twinge felt odd, like trying to move your index finger without moving your middle finger at the same time.
The panic subsided slightly. Alex felt a new emotion.
The twinge was still there. Faint, but present. He knew where it was, it took up a space in his head that he hadn't known existed.
Alex tugged at the sensation. He imagined the skin on his stomach being stretched upwards by an invisible hand. The skin did exactly that.
"Superpowers?" Alex whispered.
It wasn't flipping a car or leaping a tall building, but he'd just done something that wasn't supposed to be possible. His thoughts drifted and the pointed lance of skin snapped back into place.
There wasn't a mirror in the bathroom, but it didn't matter. Alex crouched on the floor grinning, urging his skin to fold and move in ways that shouldn't have been possible. Change required concentration, as soon as his focus slipped his body would return to normal.
Alex stared at his right hand. A nub slowly pushed out from beside his pinky finger. Bone formed, a section of minerals barely larger than a grape. His stomach rumbled, signals of hunger were transmitted to his brain.
Alex pushed the hunger to one side. All he'd done so far was play around with skin and move around a few veins, this was different. An entirely new joint was growing on his hand. The metabolic demand was completely different, growth required energy. The hunger was bearable, it wasn't any greater than what he'd feel after a run.
The nub grew longer. He pressed it between the fingers of his other hand, feeling the hard bone beneath the flesh. The hunger grew stronger, he weighed up his options for a moment. It was still manageable, he could keep going.
Six fingers. He tapped at the air as if there was a piano in front of him. The sixth finger, the same length as his pinky, moved as well.
Knuckles rapped against the bathroom door. The chef leaned against it, glancing at the clock, "Kid you okay in there? Order's up."
Alex swore under his breath. He flushed the toilet and called back, "Sorry I was just-"
His mind went blank. Excuses came to mind, but none of them could explain why he'd been in the bathroom for twenty minutes.
"I was texting a girl!" He cried out, the words left his mouth before his brain could properly process them.
The chef laughed, "Been there lad, you're a good kid, buy her some flowers aye'?"
Alex's eyes didn't leave his hand. He called back absent-mindedly, "Sorry chef, I'll get her roses."
The sixth finger rippled unaturally. He tugged at the feeling of control in his mind and urged the finger to return to normal. The change couldn't have taken more than ten seconds but it felt like hours. Alex exhaled heavily with relief and hurriedly unlocked the door.
The chef was waiting by the plates, steam still rising from the fish fingers. He smiled knowingly, "Red roses are pretty romantic, can be a bit much on a first date. Go with white."
Alex rubbed his neck nervously, "White, got it."
He picked up the plates, balancing them despite his trembling hands. He'd been working part time at the restaurant since he'd turned 16, it had been more than a year since he'd last dropped a plate.
"Here you are folks." The words came easily, he'd said them more times than he could count.
The child yelled with delight, a crayon covered hand snatched up a fishfinger before the plate hit the table. The father looked at the steak approvingly and crunched down on a fry.
The rest of the shift went by quickly. A few unhappy customers, some free onion rings one of the chef's had accidentally fried, nothing he hadn't seen before.
Service wasn't constant, there were busy moments and quieter lulls, albeit usually brief. In the lulls Alex practiced changing the shape of his skin beneath his clothes.
"Night kid." The chef called out without looking up from his knife.
Alex slung his rucksack over his shoulder. To get to the back door he had to walk through the kitchen. It smelled of chicken, beef and fish all at the same time. Stews simmered in pots and cuts of meat were tossed in thick-bottomed pans. His stomach rumbled. The chefs who weren't too focused on their work said good night as he walked past.
The walk home didn't take long. The smell of pizza hit him immediately, the greasy takeaway kind. The television was on, Alex heard his mother's laughter from the living room.
A still-warm pizza sat in its box on the kitchen table. Alex opened it and grinned, hawaian. He pulled out a slice, watching the cheese stretch and eventually snap. It struck him that it looked oddly similar to the way his own skin stretched.
"Hey kiddo how was work, any free stuff? Was feeling too lazy to cook tonight, dad had a couple slices and nodded off an hour ago, didn't think you'd mind pizza for tea." Alex's mum, Amanda, beckoned her son over and squeezed his hand lovingly.
Alex looked at his father fast asleep on the sofa, his head was drooped and a half-eaten slice of pizza rested on his lap. He snorted with laughter, "Work was good, free onion rings. Thanks for getting hawain."
"Anything for you honey, just happy to see you eating some fruit." Amanda said with a smile.
Alex rolled his eyes, "I eat more apples than you do. When was the last time you ate an orange?"
Amanda paused, "Maybe-", she burst into laughter, "Maybe a week ago!"
Their laughter didn't manage to wake Jack who was sound asleep. Amanda reached over and stroked her husband's hair gently.
"Dad and I are so proud of you, we'd put your grades up on the fridge if we could, who says high-schoolers don't need school reports!"
Alex laughed, he rested one hand on the banister and turned back to respond, "I told you, they're sending over the certificates soon."
"My son, the straight A student!" Amanda's proud voice drifted up the stairs.
The sudden and inexplicable emergence of his powers had been weighing on Alex's shoulders all day. The love and softness in his mother's voice made something click in his heart.
He hadn't realised it, he hadn't even been conscious of it, but on some level he'd begun to think of himself as different to his parents. His mother's voice made him realise that a superpower didn't change who he was. He'd spent eighteen years building an identity, figuring out who he was and who he wanted to be. He was still Alex.
The curtains swished shut. Clothes were swept off his chair and thrown onto the bed. He placed the pizza box on his desk and locked the door.
After he'd merged the extra digit back into his body, his hunger had reduced significantly. The conversion was impressively energy-efficient, he was only slightly hungrier than he would usually be after a shift.
He concentrated hard. A nub emerged just beyond his little finger on his left hand. The skin on his right hand in the same spot began to squirm. A second nub formed. This was harder, he hadn't tried to split his focus like this before.
His concentration slipped, the nub on his right hand rippled. Almost like an elastic band, it snapped back into place. Alex groaned in pain, he'd had his hand trodden on before playing football in PE, this pain was slightly worse.
The pain sharpened his focus. The nub on his left hand that had begun to ripple stabilised. He took a deep breath.
"Slow is steady." He whispered.
The pain didn't dampen his spirit. He tried again. The second nub grew further this time, but again his focus slipped and the growing flesh and bone pinged back. Beads of sweat had formed on his brow.
He kept working. The pain was a little less each time, his control was improving. The flesh still pinged back, but he could influence the process, make it more gradual, less painful.
Alex didn't notice the time go by. He completely forgot himself in his practice. The low hum of his father's voice and the sound of the TV turning off brought him out of his focused state. He turned in his chair and looked at the alarm on his bedside table.
He picked up the alarm clock and turned a dial on the back. It beeped to let him know that an alarm had been set for eight o clock the next morning. He threw the alarm clock from palm to palm, catching it. Six fingers curled around the clock with every catch.