“Oy, nidmyeti!” said my mother once we were home and she had slammed the apartment door behind her.

This means “Woe, I am undone!” in ancient Hebrew. It’s what the prophet Isaiah says when he is confronted by a vision of the full shekinah glory of God. Mom always was one for dramatics.

“I can’t believe my sweet little boy is turning into a thug!” she continued, her voice rising to a wailing lament. She had been uncharacteristically silent the whole car ride home, so I knew that she was really upset. Now her grief poured forth in a torrent. “A suspension! What were you thinking, Gonzalo, getting into a fight?! This is not going to help you to get that college scholarship you want! If someone picks on you, you tell me, you tell the teachers! You don’t take matters into your own hands! What will your father say?!”

“He won’t care, Mom,” I said, putting my rucksack down on the rickety kitchen table in our tiny ground floor apartment in Williamsburg. “You know that. Fact, he’ll probably be glad that I’m standing up for myself for once…”

“I’m going to call him and tell him what happened as soon as he gets off his shift.”

What good did she think that would do? Dad had left us a long time ago, though Mom still stayed in touch with him to keep him informed about me and to try to pressure him into taking an interest. He never did.

“Go ahead, call him,” I said to my Mom, helping myself to some cereal from the cupboard which I ate straight from the box. “See if I care.” I sighed through my nose. I couldn’t believe that I might have lost my future college place without even doing anything.

Mom’s eyebrows raised underneath her dark curly hair. “What has gotten into you, Gonzalo?! This is so unlike you!”

“I didn’t hit the kid, OK Mom?” I shoved more cereal into my mouth, seeking comfort in the multi-coloured sugar. “You don’t know how many times this kid’s hit me.”

Mom sat down, her expression softening. She put her hand on my cheek. “Lolo.” (‘Lolo’ was her nickname for me, made out of the last two letters of my first name and the first two letters of my last name. I would die if anyone at school ever learned it. Still, it was better than ‘weakling’.) “Why have you never told me about this before?”

“I’ve told you plenty of times that I hate that school. You never listen.”

Mom pinched the bridge of her nose. She was still relatively young, in her late thirties, but the pressure of raising me alone had taken its tolls, wrinkles starting to show at the sides of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I just...what happened today, Lolo? Tell your Momma. Is that why you hurt this boy, because he’s been bullying you?”

“I didn’t hurt him!”

“But the Principal said you did.”

“The Principal didn’t see what happened. He doesn’t know.” I paused a moment, wondering if I could tell Mom what had actually happened. It felt incredibly strange, and part of me had even started to doubt that it had happened at all. “It was the weirdest thing, Mom… Bill Jackson punched me in the face, but it didn’t even hurt. I don’t have a mark or anything. Instead, he got hurt. It’s like… it’s like… it’s like God was protecting me, or something…”

My words hung between us in the air for a moment. Mom just looked at me for a while, hand clasped over her mouth, her face taut.

“I did not raise you to tell lies, Gonzalo,” she said at last. For a moment I thought she might have believed me. Her eyes searched above my head, like she was praying or trying to see what to do. They returned to me. “You’re grounded! Go to your room! No allowance or outings for a month!”

Heat rose in my chest. “Fine!” I yelled at her. “Don’t believe me! Whatever! It’s not as if I even have any friends to go out with anyway!”

I dropped the cereal box on the floor and slammed the kitchen door on my way out. It shook on its hinges, some dust dislodging and sprinkling down from the ceiling. That was weird, but I didn’t pay it any more mind. As I thudded down the corridor past Mom’s bedroom and the metal hatch of our garbage chute, I bit back tears.

What hurt most wasn’t that my Mom had grounded me—it was that she hadn’t believed me. If she wouldn’t believe me, who would, if they hadn’t actually been there? I had nobody I could talk to about this crazy thing that had just happened to me. I shut the door to my room at the back of the apartment against the sound of her sobbing.

Inside my poky little bedroom, I lay down on my bed and put my hands over my eyes, pushing on them to stop myself from crying too. What the hell was going on?

I replayed the events of the last few hours in my mind. Jackson had definitely hit me, as he had done so many times before, of that I was sure. But I just hadn’t felt any pain. It was so strange. And there were no marks or bruises from his blows on my face. I unbuttoned my chequered shirt to see if there were any on my arms or my stomach. Nothing. Just an old circular burn on my chest from where he had put out a cigarette on me a few weeks ago.

Instead, all the pain and damage seemed to have been inflicted on Jackson. It was as if he had been paid back for all the hurt he had caused me. I smiled a little malevolently at the thought: Justice. But how was that possible? Was it a freak accident? Was it a miracle? Had it really happened at all?

Yes, it had really happened, I couldn’t doubt that. There had been lots of other people there to experience it too. But would they back me up? Would they corroborate my version of events, or Jackson’s, that I had played some kind of trick on him? That was completely ridiculous.

So far nobody had come forward to the Principal in my defence. Mom was right, if this went on my record it would hurt my chances of getting a college scholarship. But the other kids who had been there must know the truth. They had seen it with their own eyes. Unless I was going mad. Was I going mad?

By now my whole body was lathered in a film of cold sweat so I sat up and turned on the TV at the end of my bed. It was an old Cathode-Ray-Tube TV, the kind with a big grey box sticking out behind the screen, that I had rescued from a skip a few years ago.

I fired up my games console—several generations behind the current model, another second-hand find—and put in the disc for a fighting game. I always played fighting games when I was frustrated or stressed. Since I couldn’t beat up anyone in real life, I took out my frustration by beating up pixelated characters, usually imagining my opponent was Bill, or one of his friends...

I started a match against a computer-controlled character on the hardest setting, normally easy for me to defeat.

Today, however, my mind was still buzzing with memories and questions about what had just happened and my head wasn’t really in the game. I lost my first match, and the words “YOU LOSE” flashed up on the screen in red, along with an animation of my chosen character applauding his computerised opponent’s victory.

“Argh.” Even if I failed at life, I could usually win at videogames!. I pushed the button for a rematch with exactly the same characters. I lost again. And again.

“Oh, come on!” I said the fourth time I lost.

I gripped the controller tight and the handles gave way in my hands and broke, crumpling up between my thumbs and index fingers. It fell to the floor in a smashed mess, strands of red and blue wire sticking out from the sides.

For a moment I just stared at it.

“Gonzalo!” cried my Mom’s voice from down the hall. She must have heard the sound of the controller breaking through the door. “You had better not be on your videogames!”

The door slammed open. She marched in, trailing tears, and yanked the power cable out of my console.

I said nothing. She didn’t notice my lack of protest or the smashed-up controller on the floor.

Mom waved the cable at me. “No more videogames for a month! And I’m shutting off the internet too!” she said between sobs. “If you are bored—you study! You’re a smart boy, Gonzalo; I am not going to watch you throw your life away with this violence!”

She slammed the door again on her way out.

Without even thinking about it I rushed over to my battered old desk and booted up my laptop—a cheap little netbook I had bought a couple of years ago with the Bar Mitzvah money from my uncles in Tel Aviv.

I clicked into the wifi menu and watched as the little icon for our apartment’s internet, ‘STEIN1’, disappeared.

I clicked on a different icon, our upstairs neighbour’s wifi, ‘O2-MCGUIRE’, and typed in the password. I had hacked into our neighbour’s wifi months ago as a challenge, just to see if I could do it. They hadn’t changed their password.

I brought up google, typed in ‘invincibility’ and hit enter.

That gave me 2.65 million results, but everything on the first page was definitions of invincibility; there was nothing about actually being invincible.

I typed in ‘sudden development of invincibility’.

4.35 million. How were there even more than the first search?! I wasn’t even narrowing it down!

I started reading. The first link I clicked on was a psychiatric info page about ‘mania’ and began by defining what a manic episode was:

When under the influence of an episode of mania, some people may have a sudden development of feelings of invincibility, temporarily coming under the optimistic delusion that they cannot be hurt.

I could feel the sweat starting to drip down my back now. Was I having an ‘episode of mania’? Was I a ‘maniac’? My thoughts began to race. Oh no, that was another symptom of mania that they listed! The upper left side of my chest started to constrict and throb as though it were being squeezed. No, this wasn’t a delusion, what had happened to me today was real. Wasn’t it? People had seen it. My videogames controller was right there smashed up on the floor.

I googled ‘super strength’. Up popped wikipedia.

Superhuman strength is a common trope in fantasy, science-fiction and superhero comic books.

No! That was not what was going on here! This was reality, not fiction! I mean, I loved fantasy, science fiction and superhero comic books, I really did, but...could I really be deluding myself into thinking I had become like one of the characters from those stories?

Three loud knocks sounded on my bedroom door.

I nearly squeaked with surprise, then shut my laptop closed at once. I jumped out of my chair.

“Gonzalo?” came my mother’s voice from the other side of the door. I was lucky that she had knocked this time rather than just bursting in again. Maybe she felt bad for getting so angry before. “It’s your father on the phone.”

Dad... Did I really want to speak to him?

“Go away, Mom,” I said.

Her voice jumped an octave and a few decibels. “Gonzalo, you open up this door right now and take this phone so you can talk to your father and sort out your life!”

I could hear that she was on the verge of a category-A meltdown which I really didn’t want. I had already caused her enough grief today—though through no fault of my own.

I opened the door to be greeted by Mom, mascara running down her cheeks, thrusting the cordless phone in my face.

“Here,” she said. “Take. Talk. Sort out life.”

I shut the door and put the phone to my ear. For a while I just stood there like that, listening. I could hear my Dad breathing and taking puffs on a cigarette on the other end of the line, wherever he was. Was that music in the background? Oh great, he was in a bar. Maybe he was drunk too. It was only six in the evening. Mom must be desperate if she thought talking to Dad would help me.

I listened to him smoking for a few more moments: the long, languorous inhale, the pause as the smoke lingered in his larynx, and then the slow sighing out like he was breathing away his troubles. It sounded like a man who was enjoying relaxing after work. It sounded like indifference. With the state I was in, I was pretty sure he would be able to hear my frantic breaths on the other end of the line too.

“Si?” he said eventually in Spanish, as if he didn’t know who he was talking to, as if I had called him, and not been forced to speak to him by Mom.

“Hi Dad, it’s me,” I conceded with reluctance.

“Gonzalo.” It wasn’t surprise; it sounded like the start of a speech—a very short speech. “Your mother is very upset by...something. She is being—how do you say?—hysterical. I cannot understand what she says. You tell me what happened.”

I swallowed and ground my teeth. Why should he get to hear what happened? He didn’t care. All the same, he was my father. In the end he drew it out of me like he drew the nicotine out of the little stick he was sucking in some seedy bar somewhere after his meatpacking shift.

“Well, Dad, a guy called Bill was picking on me at school. He hit me, but then…” For a moment I considered telling him what had really happened. But no, he of all people was the least likely even to listen closely enough to understand what I was saying, let alone believe me. “...he got hurt. That’s why I’m in trouble. School sent me home.”

“Well done, Gonzalo!” Now there was surprise in my father’s voice. I couldn’t remember the last time he had said ‘well done’ to me, or if he had ever said it to me, so it hurt all the more that he was saying it in praise of something I hadn’t actually done.

“No,” I said, “you don’t understand Dad, I didn’t hit him back.”

“Que? Why not? How did he get hurt then?”

“Because I’m not like that, Dad.” What should I say to him? What would he believe? “It was an accident. He...he missed me with his punch and hurt his hand on a locker.”

“Gonzalo.” His tone had completely changed. Now it was something more like mocking disapproval. “If somebody punch you, even if they miss, you punch them back, son. You are weak, boy.”

And there it was. The word sent a jolt of electricity down my spine. Not exciting, enjoyable electricity, like the kind when you win a match at a videogames tournament or when you see Ali Carter walk into your Physics class for the first time—more like the cold, unexpected stab you get when you accidentally touch a live socket that hasn’t been earthed properly, the kind that leaves you aching and numb.

“You hear me, Gonzalo? You are weak to not fight back. Somebody hit you again, you hit them back, understand?”

I was watching myself have the conversation with my father now.

“Yes, Dad,” I said obediently.

“Bueno. Now, you look after your mother. I do not want any more ‘hysterical’ phone calls, si?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Bueno. Oh, and you stay out of trouble at school. If someone hit you, you hit them back, but you do not let the teachers see you, OK?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Bueno. Your grades are good?”

“Yeah Dad, they’re great. Straight ‘A’s in everything.”

“Muy bueno. You get your good grades, you go to your college, you live a better life than me or your Mama.”

He hung up. The line just went dead and after a few seconds the high-pitched empty default tone of the phone kicked in.

I stood there clutching the phone which I held out in front of me. Little cracks started to appear on the casing. In my chest, the hurt, the confusion, the stress all mixed up and began to swell until they met with something else bubbling up from my stomach: fury. The hurt and the fury collided, jostling for first place in my body, and for a moment—just a moment—the fury won.

I punched my bedroom wall with the phone still in my hand, right on my poster of the Incredible Hulk.

Wham!

Mom opened the door. She must have been standing just outside it listening the whole time. The door hit me on the back of my head and bounced off without hurting me at all, but Mom didn’t notice.

I turned and she opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. Her mouth stayed open. She looked at the phone which lay shattered in hundreds of white and electronic pieces on the floor. She looked at the wall.

The Incredible Hulk poster had torn in the middle, where his torso was, where I had hit it. And behind it, behind where the poster had ripped and some of it was hanging down limply, in the place where my hand had made impact with the white plaster wall, there was an undeniable, unfathomable, unanswerable hole.

It was like a small crater in the wall, of the kind that no normal person can make with their fist.

We stared.

“I think I might need to see a doctor,” I said.