What would you do if you found out you were invincible and had super strength all of a sudden?

While Mom freaked out and set about trying to get the money together to get me a doctor’s appointment, I had plenty of time to think during my suspension. For a while I thought about entering the Ultimate Fighting Championship in a mask and making loads of money to pay for my future college tuition, or waltzing back into school and kicking the crap out of all the bullies, not even just Bill Jackson, giving them a taste of their own medicine for once.

But neither of those options were really my style.

Both of those things would attract attention to me, attention that I wasn’t interested in. What I really wanted in life was to somehow get a scholarship to go to college and to make out with Ali Carter. Risking being outed as a freak with supernatural abilities wouldn’t help me towards that first goal. Although it might help me with the second one…

In any case, my powers were still very new to me, which meant I wasn’t sure of their limits yet. So for the next couple of weeks after I developed them, while I was still suspended and grounded, I spent most of my time locked in my bedroom trying to hurt myself with different household objects.

At first it was just little things: my fist, the mushed-up games controller, a pen. I took them and thumped or jabbed them into different parts of my body: my arm, my chest, my stomach. Nothing happened. The items just bounced off me. My body showed no sign of contact. And nothing hurt me even one little bit. Sometimes if I tried really hard I felt the very slightest far-off suggestion of the beginning of a whisper of a tingle of pain. But it was more like an itch, really--certainly nothing like how being hit on my body had felt before I developed the powers.

So, as my confidence in my powers grew, my experiments grew bolder.

I remember the evening when I first did an experiment with a knife. It was a Friday, Mom had shouted at me again and I was particularly bummed out that I wasn’t going to get to go out that weekend as there was a big videogames tournament happening over in Manhattan. So, when she had gone to bed, I went and got one of the sharp knives from the kitchen.

I sat on the edge of my bed looking at it, turning it over in my hands. I started with the smallest knife, but it was still very sharp. Its black handle was about as long as my middle finger, and where it finished a sliver of stainless steel appeared and came together at its end into a single, focused point. One edge was very slightly thicker, to blunt it, the other could slice through anything it encountered in the kitchen.

Am I really going to do this? They had lectured us about self-harm, or “cutting”, in school, which some people who were very unwell did to themselves to escape from bad feelings or because they believed they deserved to be punished. But that wasn’t what I was doing. I could never do that. What I was doing was different: I was testing out some astonishing abilities that I had developed inexplicably. I needed to know what their limits were, for myself.

Also I was really, really bored.

After an agony of indecision, I lifted up my superman T-shirt to expose some of the tan flesh of my slightly flabby skinny-fat stomach. I chose a place where I thought it wouldn’t matter too much if the experiment went wrong, where there weren’t any major internal organs, on the bottom-left side of my abdomen. There’s nothing that important round there, right? Which side is your spleen on? What even is a spleen?

I held the knife out in front of me with my right hand, point aiming inwards towards the spot I had chosen. For a long time I just held it out there, looking at it, noticing how it split the light of my desk lamp into a rainbows as it quivered ever so slightly in my hand.

Just a little test to start with.

Slowly, carefully, I brought the knife point into contact with my stomach. I felt nothing, but I didn’t yet apply any pressure to the blade.

On reflex, I inhaled, sucking my stomach in to avoid the touch of the knife.

Come on, you weakling. Even in my head I called myself the nickname Bill Jackson had given me at school.

Yet more slowly, yet more carefully, I pressed the knife back to my skin, and this time I kept on pressing. At first I only applied the smallest bit of pressure, what I thought would be just enough to pierce the surface of my skin under normal circumstances.

Nothing happened. I pressed a little harder: Nothing. My skin just sagged back and inwards very slightly, but less than it would do normally, and took the pressure of the point, refusing to break or be cut. I pushed harder.

Nothing happened. I put the whole strength of my arm behind the knife, as if to slot it into my abdomen.

Nothing happened.

I brought the knife away from my stomach again and exhaled with a gasp. I panted a few times, gulping in air greedily. Apparently I had been holding my breath the whole time I had the knife pressed to myself. I could hear my pulse in my ears.

This was terrifying, granted, but also thrilling. There was only one logical next step in my experiment. I was a scientist, or at least a science student, so I needed to test out my powers fully. There was no point holding back, because then I would never really know what I was capable of. I took courage from the latest piece of data and my pulsating chest began to swell further with exhilaration.

I held the knife out away from me at a full arm’s length, point facing inwards towards my stomach.

I nearly did it that very moment, but just before I did a question came across my mind:

What if I had already reached the limit of my powers?

Or what if they suddenly left me as quickly as they had come, just before I did what I was about to do?

Or what if I had just been deluding myself all along and I was about to pay the ultimate price for my delusion?

No, another part of me answered back to the questions. I know what I’ve experienced. I need to test this out for myself.

I breathed in.

I scrunched my eyes shut.

I stabbed the knife towards myself with the full force of my super strength.

“Ouch!” I exclaimed.

I had felt the first faintest flash of pain in my stomach. I wasn’t sure if I had cried out because of this or because of what I had expected to happen.

I opened my eyes and looked down.

There, still held in my right hand, was the kitchen knife, its handle intact. But the blade now looked different. Where before it had been straight as a ruler, now the blade was concertinaed into a wavy ripple of metal. It had buckled in on itself.

I looked down at my stomach. I had cried out with pain--but only a little bit of pain. There on my stomach was the faintest of marks, a little red dot where the topmost layer of my skin had split and a tiny little ball of blood had seeped out, held in place by surface tension.

So I didn’t have completely unbreakable skin. My skin could be cut, but only, it seemed, a very thin layer of top skin.

The muscle under that must be extremely strong and durable, like a metal; strong and durable enough to make a steel knife buckle in on itself.

What the hell was happening to me?