Illustrations by Alison Berry
Guest art by Afu Chan
Episode 1: The Girl with Dandruff in Her Head
Hana’s short and thick brown hair was a good place to find dandruff. Other decent places to find dandruff were her pillow after a night of tossing and turning and her shoulders whenever she felt the need to scratch her head, especially when she was wearing the light blue jacket of her school uniform where the flakes showed up really nicely. She mainly stuck to wearing white shirts when she could so that the dandruff flakes were camouflaged; this upset those who liked to tease her, like James, a delinquent who always carried around an aluminum baseball bat and never left Hana alone. James never left Hana alone because they were best friends, but they were not best friends because of the dandruff.
Hana always hated her dandruff, even when she found out she could make objects out of it; she would have traded this gift just to have clean hair at least once in her life.
She discovered her bizarre ability to make things out of dandruff a year ago, when her dandruff started getting really bad. The discovery occurred while she was reading an old science fiction short story anthology. As always she read the book while lying down on her bed, one leg up in the air like a questing antenna, her fingers trying to keep up with her imagination as they turned the pages. From time to time little flakes would flutter down from her head and land gently on the pages, and she would furrow her brow and grimace at the little white intruders before brushing them off. At one point she scratched her head, causing an avalanche, but instead of stopping she jammed her fingers through her hair in a fit of frustration, rubbing her scalp until the book was hidden beneath a large white mound. She looked down at the mound in horror.
With trembling hands she picked up the great pile of dandruff; all of the flakes clumped together like packing snow, and she found she could press it into shapes when she tried to crush it into oblivion. First she made a sphere, followed by a box.
Then, because she was alone in her room and could get away with doing something embarrassing, she began molding it into the shape of one of the spaceships in the stories she had been reading. It ended up being a remarkably faithful representation of what she had seen in her imagination. Much to her surprise, the dandruffship lingered in the air instead of dropping to her bed when she let go of it; it then followed an invisible trajectory towards the wall, where it crashed without ceremony, exploding into a thousand individual flakes.
Hana had to drag the vacuum upstairs to her room, much to the delight of her parents.
She wondered if she was a mutant, or the world’s first and worst superhero; since there was no way she would confront a criminal with an array of dandruff-based devices, she ruled out the latter. Sometimes at dinnertime she looked at her mother and father across the table from her and wondered if she could have inherited the power from them, but both had hair that was perfectly clean and they seemed like the most normal parents a kid could have. Then she would take a sidelong glance at her sister and try to spot any irregularities in her, but outside of her startlingly long hair she was completely normal as well.
After the first major dandruff incident had not only changed her life – casting her as an outsider, if only in her mind – but also altered her perception of reality, Hana spent more time with James as a means of taking her mind off of everything. Hana enjoyed the mundaneness of everyday life too much to want to see it destroyed by anything even remotely magical, even if it came directly from her.
Hana could tell James was surprised when she started hanging out with him at every available opportunity, since usually it was him who kept trying to hang out with her. But they had good times together all the same, going out to karaoke and riding around the city on James’ bike and playing catch at empty diamonds and all of the other meaningless things that emptied Hana’s head of thoughts of her affliction. She wanted to pretend her dandruff powers did not exist, but despite that she continued making little dandruff toys in the safe confines of her room. Sometimes she felt like she was betraying herself.
But even with the private acceptance of her newfound power, whenever Hana’s family went out on a grocery store trip together she spent the majority of their allotted time inspecting the walls of shampoos like an expert, ignoring the mainstream brands and focusing on the independent and imported bottles instead. Pouring random, mysterious chemicals into her hair was of no consequence to her; she wanted something, anything – even if it was borderline illegal – that would rid her of the nasty flakes once and for all.
One of the store trips ended up being rather memorable due to its side effects. While Hana’s father and sister decided on frozen desserts together, she dragged her mother down to the hair care aisle, all part of the usual routine. Her mother was the only member of her family with whom she could talk openly about her dandruff problem, though she would never make any mention of the strange ability to her.
‘Wow, look at this one!’ her mother called out. ‘It has a picture of some kind of demon blowing away all of the dandruff.’
‘No, I think we need this one,’ Hana said, picking up a small bottle. ‘It’s completely black and has a skull and crossbones on it. And look at all of the health warnings on the back! Can we get it, Mom?’
The shampoo actually helped lessen the amount of flakes for about a week, but then Hana began having regular nosebleeds and her precious new shampoo was found to be the culprit; it also lightened the pigmentation of her hair for the rest of the year. Hana thought it was worth it, and would have kept using it if her mother had not hidden it from her.
Hana’s life did not strictly revolve around dandruff, though. She was an avid reader, enjoyed outdoor activities, and generally enjoyed all of the other healthy things people put into personal ads. When it came to homework she was a known procrastinator, but ended up doing well on assignments and tests anyway, leaving James and her family to scratch their dandruff-free heads over how she could accomplish this. James would tease her, saying her dandruff was the bits of her brain that had withered and died under the strain; in reality she just had a really good memory, which was typically all that her classes required. In any case, she probably would have studied more were she not so consumed by her paranormal late night sculpting.
Due to the nature of her ability – the fact that it involved dandruff, of all things – Hana quite understandably decided to never tell anybody. But after a year of practicing making objects in her room, from teddy bears to jewelry to elaborate cakes (which she made certain to never eat), pulling things out of her dry scalp came naturally to her, and this resulted in the first and only time she let somebody in on her secret.
One day after classes Hana and James played catch out at the school baseball diamond. It was an empty desert that made the sun feel even hotter against their skin and white shirts, a light film of sweat threatening to slip the ball out of their hands with every throw. James was not as talkative as usual, but then again he was not usually talkative, so Hana attributed his quietness to the heat and saw no reason to press him on it. They only broke into something resembling a conversation when Hana accidentally threw two balls in a row, a notable feat given they had only brought along the one ball. Until then their talk between throwing and catching was a go-nowhere back-and-forth that Hana lifted from an old movie she had seen in her childhood.
‘How did you do on the test?’ Hana asked before throwing. Despite throwing like a girl she managed to put some force into it.
‘Which test?’ James asked, playing dumb. He caught the ball in his mitt with a satisfying slapping sound.
‘The test on the power,’ Hana explained, catching James’ ball in turn.
James paused. ‘What power?’ he asked, and then switched to throwing underhand.
‘Power of voodoo,’ Hana said. James’ underhand had yet to be perfected so Hana had trouble catching it. She switched to underhand as well but her ball went straight up into the air, and James circled the ground in a complex dance before having the ball land directly into his mitt. James may not have been good at underhand but Hana was even worse.
‘Who do?’ James asked, whipping the ball back to Hana.
‘You do,’ Hana said. She had to take a deep breath before throwing since the humidity was getting to her.
‘Do what?’ James asked. This time he cranked his arm before throwing, but it was only for effect: the actual throw was his weakest effort yet. Obviously the heat was getting to him too, preventing him not only from saying anything worthwhile but from making consistently decent throws as well.
‘Remind me of the test,’ Hana finished, looking down at the ball in her mitt. Catch was not as fun today as it usually was thanks to the bursting sun. ‘No, really, how did you do on the test?’
‘I won’t know until I get it back,’ he replied flatly, and received Hana’s hardest throw yet.
That was when he received the second ball, a lumpy white one that exploded upon contact with the ball in his mitt; it was so unexpected that it caused him to jump, and he looked at the flakes around him in wide-eyed wonder. ‘Did you just throw a snowball at me?’ he asked in utter disbelief.
‘Uh.’ Hana’s heart beat more loudly than her body could handle, threatening to thunder out of her chest and roll onto the ground between them. She had done it without thinking – had felt through her damp hair to release some of the excess sweat, but the more she grew impatient with James’ stubbornly defensive nature, the larger a clump of dandruff grew under her fingers, collecting more and more flakes as it went along until it rolled into a solid ball. Then, before she had realised what she was doing, the ball was already out of her hand and hurtling towards him.
She grasped for some kind of excuse, something that would explain away the bizarre rice ball she had summoned out of nowhere and stunned James with. ‘I was saving it in my pocket,’ she said lamely, toeing the dirt she stood on. Her heart was still pounding; she asked it politely to quiet down and, although it was not as malleable as her dandruff, it did the best it could to obey.
‘Wait – what was it?’ he asked, bending down and prodding the flakes with his fingers; they were richly textured and some had a yellowish discolouration to them. He continued to poke about at them until the horrifying realisation fully set in. ‘Gross! You saved up all of your dandruff and threw it at me! Monster!’
‘Wait!’ Hana called out. ‘It’s not like that! I . . . I’ll show you. Come here.’
James was visibly apprehensive, his eyes shaking and his feet locked into position to walk backwards instead of forwards; it was only when Hana emitted a small pleading sound that he felt he could trust her enough to venture towards her, though he still held reservations about confronting the girl who had thrown a massive ball of dandruff at him.
One hesitant step followed another and soon he was towering over her, casting a shadow over the small girl who had been his best friend since their lives in the school began; they stood together like a pair of strangers, which hurt both of them more than they wanted to let on.
‘So what is it you want to show me?’ James asked monotonously. ‘Not more dandruff.’
‘No, of course not!’ Hana said as she laughed nervously. Then she stopped. ‘Okay, it is,’ she admitted.
‘God!’
‘Wait! Wait wait wait wait wait! Let me show you something. See your bat over there?’ She motioned to the aluminum baseball bat that had been leaning against the wire mesh fence behind them.
‘Yeah, I see it. What about it?’
Hana reached into her hair and pulled out a long cylindrical object that had a startlingly salty and musty aroma to it. It was an exact replica of James’ baseball bat, right down to the logo emblazoned on its side. James gaped at it for a moment and then burst out laughing.
‘You gotta be kidding me,’ James said, holding his sides as he laughed through tears. ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.’
Stomping the ground with her foot, Hana turned red with anger and felt like steam was about to shoot out of her ears. ‘Don’t make me hit you with this, James!’ she shouted as she twirled the bat around in her hands. Like all of her dandruff creations it was greasy to the touch, and so it slipped out of her hands and broke in half on her feet. ‘Grr!’ She bent down, picked up the two pieces and then dropped them again. James was still laughing.
Hana was clenching her teeth in frustration, but then she placed her palm on her forehead and managed to sigh out her anger, admitting defeat to the absurdity of it all. ‘Man, none of this is going as I expected,’ she lamented. ‘I always imagined there’d be shock and awe, some kinda drama that’d make it out to be some kinda important event, but you’re just laughing at me. You’re still laughing at me. Are you almost done laughing, James?’
James held up a hand. ‘Gimme a minute,’ he begged, attempting to regulate his breathing. He had become red in the face due to the uncontrollable frequency of his own guffaws. ‘Okay, I think I’m good now,’ he said, gasping for breath.
Once his breath was caught they both paused and looked each other in the eyes, the only sound around them that of the chirping birds and the only movement being that of the rolling clouds – just the dramatic setting Hana had been hoping for –, both knowing full well what was about to happen next: James started laughing again. Hana rolled her eyes.
‘Okay, okay,’ James said apologetically. ‘I won’t laugh anymore. But what did you expect?’
‘I told you what I expected. You couldn’t hear me over your own laughter.’
James rested his hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it, Hana. Not everyone will have the same reaction.’
‘You’re suddenly serious!’
James nodded gravely. ‘So how long you been able to do this?’
Hana hesitated. She had kept it all a secret for so long that suddenly revealing everything to James was like stripping naked in front of him, the type of thing that could completely change a relationship – crush even their simple, beautiful friendship –, and she was desperately worried about the consequences. ‘About a year now. Please don’t tell anybody about it, okay? It’s a secret, just between us. Okay?’
James swore himself to secrecy and Hana nearly collapsed from relief. She had been tense for so long that finally being able to loosen made her bones feel rather pleasantly like jelly. ‘I’m so glad I was able to tell you, James, since for a while there I thought I was going crazy.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. I thought it was all in my head.’ She sniffled and then wiped her nose.
With the dandruff now out of the bag, Hana felt she should show off some of her ability to James so he would have a better idea of what she was capable of. She took requests, pulling out of her scalp a magazine with thirty individual pages, a fully dressed hot dog (which James decried as a crime against nature as he was growing hungry at the time and the white frankfurter looked almost appealing), and when James asked her to make the biggest thing she could, she pulled out an exact replica of his bicycle, but neither of them wanted to ride it.
Once the dandruff showcase was over, Hana had James beat the crumbling creations with his bat until all that was left was a fine white powder. James suggested they retreat from the hot day by renting a karaoke room and ordering food, and Hana had no problem with that since she was becoming hungry herself. They hopped onto his bicycle and he pedalled them away from the school grounds, Hana holding onto his dusty aluminum baseball bat, neither of them looking back at the whitened diamond they were leaving behind.
Karaoke was a strangely intimate experience with only two people. Usually they went with Henri, who was the most level-headed member of their group of friends and had been chosen over James for the school baseball team, but he was away on a game and would not have been welcome anyway; Hana was enjoying not having to hide the existence of her power, if only for one day, and Henri’s presence would have put an awkward stop to that.
So Hana sung an 80s ballad with her eyes closed, subtly swaying as she held the microphone with both of her hands, while James, having lost his appetite for hot dogs, worked his way through a club sandwich as he listened to her quavering rendition of Human. Most of the light in the room came from the large screen and prompter that displayed the sentimental lyrics over shifting images of nature, metamorphosing the otherwise clinical room into a surreal escapist environment.
When Hana finished she took a little bow and James clapped as a corner of bread dangled out of his mouth. She sat down beside him as the music was fading out but he seemed to be too engrossed in the romantic image of a purple-tinted mountain to notice her, and he did not even turn to thank her when she pressed a greasy microphone into his hands. Instead he stood up, finished chewing the last of his sandwich, and swallowed it as he arrived at the prompter. They had set the songs to random but he knew most of them anyway, being a music fan who played guitar on the side, so when the opening notes of Ashes to Ashes came in he was not surprised.
He was, however, quite surprised to notice that the microphone in his hands was made completely out of dandruff, which he noticed right before he was about to unload his heart into it; he sent it to the ground as though it were a large and menacing spider that had dropped onto his hand. The music went on without him, accompanied only by the sound of laughter.
Hana was hugging her sides as she laughed at him, laughing so hard that she hurt her stomach and squeezed tears out of her eyes; in her mirth she even gave the table a few friendly kicks. James threw the real microphone at her and it bounced off her head before rolling away.
‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ Hana cried out as she clutched her head.
‘No? Must’ve slipped out of my hand. I guess I’m still in baseball mode,’ James said, shrugging. ‘Can’t be helped.’
‘I feel a bump!’
Sighing, James walked over to her to lay a consoling hand on her shoulder but she kicked at him and rolled into the couch.
‘Look at you – you’re all curled-up like a pill bug,’ commented James, but Hana said nothing in response. He sat down beside her curled-up form and rested his arm on her side.
A minute passed like this and then he shook her. ‘I didn’t know how to react. I did it to be funny; I didn’t think it would hurt you.’
‘It’s made out of metal,’ Hana said into the fabric. ‘Of course it was going to hurt me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Hana pushed herself back up and smiled devilishly. ‘Really? I just wanted to scare you, but it looks like I got to hear you apologise for the first time ever.’
James gave her a playful punch on the shoulder which made her smile even wider. ‘I take back my apology,’ he said.
The next morning Hana was woken up by the arrival of Henri at her doorstep. Her mother called up to announce his arrival and she groggily rolled off her bed, fell onto the floor, picked herself up, dressed into her school clothes and trudged down the stairs as she wiped the sleep from her eyes. Henri had woken her up ten minutes early and she was not about to thank him for it.
When she looked down she saw Henri standing in the doorway with a black eye and she nearly tripped over herself as she rushed down towards him. ‘What happened? Did somebody beat you up? I’ll get him!’
‘“Get him”? Have you even had breakfast yet?’ Henri asked in greeting. ‘It was a stray ball and I wasn’t paying attention. Knocked my helmet clean off.’
‘You weren’t paying attention?’ Hana asked, dumbfounded. ‘That’s not like you at all, Henri! Are you okay? Did you win?’
‘I’m okay,’ Henri said, ‘but we lost.’
Hana swung the door shut in front of him. Then she opened it again.
‘Good morning,’ Henri said.
Hana’s mother let him stay for breakfast even though he had already eaten. Hana, her sister and Henri all sat around the small dining room table as they filled up on cereal and orange juice, and Henri asked Hana’s sister how her classes were going. The normalcy of it all was in sharp contrast to the happenings of the previous day and Hana had trouble readjusting, having to prevent herself from setting out dandruff utensils and other such mischievous activities.
After breakfast they walked to school together, the morning breeze helping them forget how dreadfully hot the previous day had been. Hana wondered how she and James would behave around Henri once they were all together, and hoped there would not be a sense that he was now excluded in some small way from their group. Knowing glances and winks and smirks might abound, but Hana planned on attributing them to their karaoke duet if Henri asked any questions; now that the fun was over and she was fully readjusted she looked forward to another ordinary day.
Hana and Henri parted with her sister once they reached the school and went straight to their homeroom class. When they arrived, all of their classmates swarmed Henri to ask him about his black eye, and he answered their questions as plainly as always, never leaving any room for mystery. Hana had to respect that.
Everyone quickly settled into their seats when the teacher arrived. James was late as always.
When lunch came they sat in the shade of a short but fat tree and ate sandwiches from the vending machine. Henri went into great detail about the game last night and James listened attentively, nodding or cracking a joke depending on what Henri said. Whenever James looked at Hana it was as he had always looked at her, with none of the knowing glances or winks or smirks she had expected, and she almost felt embarrassed by this. In fact she blushed; it was as if nothing had really happened between them after all, and she was not sure if she wanted to lose that.
‘You know, I was hit, too,’ Hana said after Henri had reached the point in his story where he was hit by a baseball. ‘Right here,’ she said as she pointed to a dandruff-speckled area of her head that looked the same as every other area. ‘James threw a microphone at me in karaoke.’
‘They say when a guy and girl go to karaoke together it means they’re dating,’ Henri said flatly. ‘I guess they’ll have to change the rules since I don’t think anybody could ever see you two together.’
‘Why not?’ Hana asked, seeing it as a challenge. Once she realised what she had said she bit silently into her tuna fish sandwich and pretended nothing had happened. James nervously rubbed the back of his head and Henri changed the subject back to baseball.
‘The only one who’s still optimistic is the coach,’ he stated. ‘Let’s just say morale isn’t the highest it’s been.’
‘You know, if they had picked me instead of you, we would’ve won,’ James said, prodding Henri with the remains of his sandwich.
So everything went back to normal. Lunch ended and they stretched loudly before heading off to their non-compulsory classes: Henri went to his baseball history class, James went to his guitar class and Hana went to her gym class. Gym allowed a reprieve from her school uniform with a white t-shirt and shorts, and was especially enjoyable as the class took place outside to take advantage of the sunny and breezy day.
While her classmates were doing stretches she managed to sneak past her teacher and jogged towards the window of James’ guitar class, where she spotted him by the blackboard tuning his guitar; she tapped on the glass and, when James looked up with a pleasantly surprised look on his face, waved. Then she pulled a small object from her hair and set it on the sill before jogging back to her own class.
Although James would never mention it to Hana, at the end of his guitar class he ended up going to the window and opened it to see what she had placed there, lifting an eyebrow at what he saw: sitting on the sill was a guitar pick, made out of dandruff and in the shape of a heart. James was both disgusted and touched at the same time.
The breeze that came in through the open window was more than welcome after spending an hour in the stuffy room, so he lingered and looked up at the calm white clouds moving against the cerulean sky overhead. Then he looked back to the guitar pick and tried to blow it away, but when he saw that it would not budge he flicked it off instead.
To Be Continued In Episode Two: Kappa Attack!
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13
Episode 14
Episode 15
Volume 2
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