think I’m going to get the quarter pounder combo meal, with a medium drink and medium fries,” said Sally.

“Nine and five sixths,” said Franco.

“Maybe I’ll change the fries to a large, and extra mayo on the burger.” Sally looked to Franco and smiled impishly. “Want anything?”

“Just a coke.” Franco had a miserable look on his face, his eyes dark and his lips tight, the same look he had worn all afternoon, all the previous day, and all of last week. Sally didn’t let it get her down, though. Franco had his blue moods, but he always snapped out of them eventually.

“Come on,” said Sally, “cheer up. Order whatever you want, I’m treating.”

Franco sighed, heavily, like a hair dryer. “Make it a strawberry shake then. Small.”

Sally paid the bleary eyed man behind the register with wadded up bills from her orange change purse with the double snap metal clasp. She kept the purse buckled to her left thigh, at least she had for the past two months. She couldn’t wear pants with it buckled there, only shorts and skirts, but that suited Sally fine. It had been a hot summer, and it was shaping up to be a September of memorable heat, heat that mothers wouldn’t let their children out to play in for fear they would evaporate before evening. It was so hot that Sally had re-shaved her head this morning, even though only an inch of blond stubble had grown back since the last time.

Sally liked to come to Best’s Burgers on these hot days. Best’s was a stand, with only outdoor seating, so no one else was there on days like this. But the tables had a great view of the mall parking lot, where the typs all left their cars as they scurried off to hide in the air conditioned mall. Shopping for costume accessories at the Gap, picking their logos from the decals at Hot Topic. Typs made Sally gag.

Sally grabbed a fistful of ketchup packets from bin on the counter, more than twenty, and stepped outside into the blasting heat. Franco had picked a table and was nursing his shake mournfully. Sally sat across from him, laid down her tray, and made a stack of four napkins on it. She began opening the ketchup packets one by one, squirting them on top of the pile of napkins.

“It won’t work,” said Franco. He stirred his shake with the straw.

Sally lost count of the packets at thirteen, but kept going until she had squirted the last drop of ketchup from each and every one.

“It doesn’t matter how many you open, I just know how many you’ll eat. And it was nine and five sixths, none of this changes it.”

Satisfied with the glistening red mound in front of her, Sally opened the bag with her combo meal. She unwrapped her burger, lifted off the top bun, removed the wilted lettuce and slice of tomato, then took a single fry and used it to spread a gob of ketchup onto the patty. The ketchup mixed with the mayonnaise, leaving swirls of red and pink in a puddle of condiments. Sally dropped the fry into the mix, replaced the tomato slice and lettuce, put the bun back on top, and took a bite from the burger.

“Jesus, can’t you just believe that I’m right?” said Franco. “There’s nothing you can do about it. I wish I could be wrong, but I can’t. I’m so sick of being right about this stupid thing that I could scream. I wish I didn’t have a power at all, it would be better than this crap.”

“Every person has a unique power, and every power has a purpose,” said Sally, raising her voice to sarcastically quote their fifth grade ethics teacher. “And everyone’s responsibility is to find that purpose, and apply themselves to it as best they can.” Sally snort. “What a crock of shit.” She took another bite of her burger, getting nearly half of it in her mouth.

“The most depressing thing,” said Franco, “I looked it up online last night, and I can’t even be Ketchup Packet Boy. It’s already taken.”

“By who?” Bits of ketchup and mayonnaise mixture flew from Sally’s lips when she talked.

“Some kid in Minneapolis, a few years older than us. He shoots exploding ketchup packets out of his eyes.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, and his costume looks like a foil ketchup packet, ingredient listings written down his pants, the whole bit. He had pictures of it on his myspace”

“Christ, how typ. I bet his mom made it for him. I’m sure people take him seriously.”

Franco shrugged, mournfully.

“Who wants to be Ketchup Packet Boy anyways. Why not just spring for Ketchup Packet Man, invest in your future. Or go more general, Captain Ketchup or some shit.”

“No dice. Ketchup Packet Man is Ketchup Packet Boy’s uncle, they’re a duo. And there are five Captain Ketchups in the lower 48 alone.”

“Ick. Fucking typs.”

“You want to talk about purpose, just look at Larry Best over there.” Franco pointed to the sunburned man working the counter of the burger stand. He was leaning against his cash register, white cook’s hat pushed down over his eyes. “His power is to be the fastest short order fry cook in the state. He can make a dozen burgers, three orders of chicken nuggets, and a batch of fries faster than you can cough. But what good does that do him? He hasn’t even got enough business to buy a place with indoor seating when it’s a hundred and four degrees out. Pathetic.”

Sally dipped the fry she was holding in ketchup, working it around until it was smothered. She put it in her mouth and sucked the ketchup off, not biting the fry, took it out, and dipped it again. She had done this three times already with the same fry.

“Okay, so you’ll be the Ketchup Packet Kid. Whenever someone needs to be told how many packets of ketchup they’ll use on their fries, the Ketchup Packet Kid is there! Whenever, um,” she paused.

“That’s it,” said Franco. “That’s all I can do. There isn’t any more.”

“Have you ever tried mustard?” Sally asked.

“Yes,” said Franco. He sighed deeply. “Nothing else works. Just ketchup. I could have been able to fly, to spit acid, to breathe hurricanes, but instead I got ketchup.”

“That’s life. Fucking typ, that’s what it is.”

“Have you told your parents yet?”

“Hell no.” Sally ate a couple of fries dry, watching the still large mound of ketchup hopelessly.

“They’re going to realize that you switched the aptitude results eventually. You can’t stay fifteen forever. They’ll want you to get a job using your power, and they’ll expect you to do, to do, what was it the kid you switched tests with did?”

“Bicycle repair,” said Sally, laughing. “His power was to bend bicycle spokes back into shape with his mind.”

“So what if someone actually comes and asks you to fix a bicycle?”

“I’ll tell them to go fuck themselves, won’t I?”

Franco slurped the last of his shake. The afternoon sun was feeling hotter on his forehead every minute. “At least your real power’s useful.”

Sally held up her hand, and they both watched as she made each of her fingers in turn change into a different car key, then back into fingers. She grinned. “Useful enough to get me on the most wanted list in thirteen states for grand theft auto by the time I’m twenty one.”

“You don’t have to steal the cars, you could just go on jacking people’s CD collections to pawn, like some small time crook.” Franco gave his first smile of the day, a tight grin that spread across his muscular little face like a forest fire: after it was gone, everything looked a lot worse than it had before.

“Don’t badmouth pawning people’s CD collections. Some typ’s Barry Manilow is what bought you that shake.”

They sat for a moment, watching the heat fuzz rising off the asphalt. Sally sized up the cars, trying to decide which might be worth ripping off. She liked SUV’s and Hummers, mostly. You had too wait a bit and watch, though. People who had been inside for about twenty minutes were the least likely to come back out: it was too long for them to be popping in at just one store, way too short to finish browsing or to catch a movie. They were typs, all of them, predictable, and Sally hadn’t been busted yet.

Sally pushed her half finished fries away. “I can’t eat any more,” she said. “I’m so fucking sick of ketchup.”

“You think you are,” said Franco. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“How many did I eat?”

“Nine and five sixths.”

“Bullshit.”

“Think whatever you like.”

“I hate you sometimes.”

“I know. I hate me too.”

Sally stood up, brushed off her shirt, ran a finger around the clasp of her change purse. “Lets rip off a couple of minivans, and then I want to key my next door neighbor’s windshield. He’s always revving the engine at four in the morning. Fucking typ.”

Franco looked around. At the counter, Larry Best was fully asleep, clutching the cash register like a teddy bear. Franco shook his head. “Every power has a purpose,” he said.

“Fucking A,” said Sally. Together they walked to the parking lot.