The hospital waiting room was an excrutiation of self-consciousness.

I sat hunched over, palms tucked under my thighs, staring concentratedly at my bargain bin sneakers. Now and then I would bounce my gaze up to someone else in the waiting room to check what they looked like, then bounce it back to the floor before they could make eye contact with me: an elderly lady wearing a pair of neon-pink hearing aids; a Dad in a work suit with his toddler son who coughed every ten seconds in between fiddling with a plastic dinosaur; and worst, worst of all, a girl about my age with curly blonde hair and cherry lipstick whom I thought I might recognise from school.

What must they all think of me?

I bounced my eyes left, where Mom sat scribbling away with a biro in a battered old notebook. They lingered there for a moment, falling on the strange script she was scrawling out from right to left--Hebrew. I could make even less sense of this more shorthand, modern form than the elegant, ancient version that I had been made to mispronounce for my fleeting Bar Mitzvah lessons. They were just meaningless signs to me--all I knew was that she was working on her poetry. Why did she have to do that now? I guessed it was her method of escape, her way of dealing with the stress of what was happening.

I wish I could make use of one of my methods of escape right now. But I couldn’t afford a portable console and I didn’t want to be seen reading a comic book here.

My eyes did another circuit of the room: old lady, floor, Dad and son, floor, pretty girl, floor. This time the girl’s face twitched but I managed to look away before she lifted her eyes to mine. Who was that girl? Had I seen her before at school?

I was so embarrassed. Why did a fifteen-year-old boy need to be accompanied to the doctor’s by his mother? The girl was about my age, after all, and she didn’t need to be brought by a parent.

Maybe they thought I was some sort of simpleton who couldn’t perform basic tasks by himself. Maybe they thought that I had failed to reach maturity and was terrified of going anywhere or interacting with anyone without my Mommy on hand to comfort me. Maybe they thought that I had a chronic masturbation problem which my mother had accidentally discovered, whereupon she had demanded that I go with her to the doctor’s to have my genitals examined.

My face was hot. I wanted to crawl under my chair and die.

Don’t think that! I wanted to stand up and shout at them. That’s not the reason I’m here! I’m really here because I have superpowers and my mother can’t deny it any more!

But I couldn’t stand up and shout that. That was not the sort of thing that was socially acceptable in doctors’ waiting rooms.

Oh, and of course: they’d never believe me.

The sound of a door clicking open came from around the corner at the opposite end of the waiting room and we heard footsteps echoing down the corridor.

The sallow, weathered face of a middle-aged man peered around the wall.

“Lopez?” he said in a slightly bored, clinical voice.

“Yes, that’s us,” said my mother, slamming her Hebrew composition book shut.

Oh thank God it’s me next.