Jack grows up in awe of his parents. They’re incredible. They super heroes. His father, part of the five percent of the population that inherited both parents’ powers, and his mother with the incredible ability to shapeshift into anything she can imagine. People from all over the world watch them, Bad Bob and Glamour, and they love them. The Superhero community looks up to them, watching their every move. Jack is eight when he realizes that they’re all watching him too.
They want to know if he’ll inherit two powers like his father did. They want to know if he’ll inherit all three. They want to know if he’ll live up to his parents’ legacy, if he’s training already to become a protector like they are. They want to know how two people as gorgeous as his parents had such a homely looking little boy.
He’d heard that question exactly once, muttered from one woman to another at a meeting his parents had dragged him along to. He didn’t have super hearing, but he didn’t need to. His mother had swept in and lead him away, glaring at the women with literal flames in her eyes, but it was too late for Jack to unhear it. The older he gets, the more he hears all about himself. How disappointing it is that he didn’t appear to have any powers at all. How his parents must be so devastated. How odd and antisocial the Zimmermann boy is.
He hates to look at himself, hates to think about super powers and how loved and respected his father is. How unloved and disrespected he is. The kids at the meetings are like sharks smelling blood, and they always have a barbed comment for him. They’ve got tons of names for him, ranging from Fatso to Muggle, and the worst part is, he doesn’t know if hates them or himself more.
One night, as he’s falling asleep, he thinks about how beautiful his mother is and the way he always feels so loved when she smiles at him and her blue eyes crinkle at the corners. He wishes he could look more like her.
In the morning, when he’s brushing his teeth, he accidentally catches his own eyes in the mirror, and they’re the same bright shade of blue as his mother’s. He pauses, stares, and watches as they fade back into the same dull gray color they’ve always been. His heart skips a beat, and he drags up the image of his mother’s eyes again. He thinks about them being his, and then they are.
His heart starts pounding then, and he focuses on his chin then. It’s rounded and not really defined from his neck like it should be. (”More Chins than a Chinese phone book” the boys at the meetings jeer). He thinks of his father then, and his strong, defined jawline. It’s more of a struggle to change his face than to change the color of his eyes. He can only get his chin to define a little bit before he loses control and his face snaps back to normal.
He’s disappointed, but determined to get better. When he goes to school, his eyes are still blue.
He learns to control it, a little bit at a time. He’d probably do better if he’d ask his mother for help, but he strangely doesn’t want to tell her. She can shape-shift into anything she wants, from a different face to a dog to a tank, once. Jack only seems to be able to change how he looks. Even with the same power, he’s not as good as his parents. Not as capable or as skilled. But he likes his power, and likes how it helps him hide, so he doesn’t bring it up. He doesn’t need to hear other peoples’ derision on top of his own.
Soon, though, he can change his whole face, and later on, he can make himself, taller, shorter, thinner and fatter, older and younger, whatever he wants. He likes to go out like that, glamoured to look like a little old man or a soccer mom. No one looks at him. No one hisses under their breaths about what a failure he is, and how disappointed his parents must be in him. He loves the freedom it affords him. His parents are busy and he doesn’t see them often, so he spends most of his time in glamour as he turns thirteen, switching between faces and hair colors and skin tones and noses. It’s only when his mother looks at him one day on a rare evening off and comments on how well he’s grown into his nose that he realizes he got it wrong. Its the same nose he’s been shifting back to for his “default” stage for weeks, and he has it wrong.
He spends the night trying desperately to remember what his nose used to look like, wishing that he hadn’t insisted on avoiding cameras all throughout his childhood so he could remember. But there are no pictures, and Jack can’t remember. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes he doesn’t really know what he looked like before. He avoided mirrors just as much as avoided cameras. He knows he was fat and “homely” and that his eyes were gray, but he can’t remember the exact shade. He can’t remember the exact curve of his nose or the line of his jaw or the shape of his lips. He can’t remember what he really looks like, and apparently, neither can anyone else.
So he comes up with a new face, taken on slowly over puberty so it’s less suspicious. He studies pictures of his father and his strong jaw line and his Grecian nose. He takes on his mother’s sharp cheekbones and blue eyes. He switches back and forth between them on the shape of his mouth for a while, not sure if his mother’s full lips or his father’s crooked smile is better. Eventually he settles on his father’s smile, and he he has his new face.
He takes a picture so he won’t forget.
It’s the face he wears around his parents and the one he reverts to when people expect to be talking to Jack Zimmermann and not a random stranger on the street. It’s the face he wears when he starts at Sky High, and it’s the face he’s wearing the first time he meets Eric Bittle.
