by Marilyn Kaye
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
CHAPTER ONE
THE BOY KNOWN AS Carter Street was dreaming.
In his dream, he was in an empty space. There were no windows, no lights, but it wasn’t dark, just a dull, bland grey. He was standing because there was nowhere to sit – no chairs, no sofa. He couldn’t even sit on the floor because there didn’t seem to be a floor. Maybe it wasn’t a room at all. He could have been hanging in the air. Or he might have been inside his own head.
But the room, the space, wherever he was – it wasn’t completely empty. There was a big television. And an unseen hand turned it on.
What he saw on the screen was vaguely familiar, like a rerun of a programme he’d seen before. A young boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, was riding on a roller coaster. He was accompanied by two shadowy, larger figures sitting on either side of him – the boy’s parents? The boy was laughing, throwing his arms up in the air as his car went into a steep descent.
The vision on the screen dissolved, and was replaced by another image. The same boy, with the same shadowy figures, at a dining table. Then he saw the boy splashing in a swimming pool. And now the boy was running round a baseball diamond. Then, abruptly, that unseen hand switched off the TV and the screen went dark.
That was when he woke up. For a moment he just lay in the bed very still and stared at the white ceiling above him. That boy in the dream . . . Did he know him? Maybe, maybe not. But there was definitely a connection. Whoever he was, the boy had been turned off, and Carter Street could relate to that.
He sat up and looked around. There was no television in this room, but it wasn’t dark and empty. Light streamed in from a window. There was a desk, a chest of drawers, a basin with a mirror over it. There was even a picture on a wall – a small brown puppy lapping water in a bowl. Did the boy in his dream have a dog? No, because his mother was allergic to dog hair.
But he couldn’t have known that, could he? Not if he didn’t know the boy. Anyway, it was just a dream. He shook his head vigorously as if he could shake out the memory of it, but he knew it would linger. They always did, those dreams.
He didn’t want to remember dreams – he had to concentrate on the present. His name, for example. Carter Street. At least, that was what everyone called him. And his location . . . He wasn’t in the home of his foster family, the Grangers. And he wasn’t in Madame’s ‘gifted’ class at Meadowbrook Middle School. Then it came back to him: he was in a place called Harmony House, a special place for teenagers who were in trouble. Was he in trouble? He didn’t know and he didn’t care. He wasn’t in danger, that much he knew for sure, and that was all that mattered. He wasn’t cold, he had a roof over his head and a bed to sleep in. He wasn’t hungry – well, maybe he was, just a little, but he knew that he’d be having food very soon. So everything was OK.
He got out of bed, went to the basin and filled a plastic cup with water from the tap. He took the cup over to the windowsill, where a plant was sitting. The plant hadn’t been there when he arrived. It had been sent by his teacher, Madame, with a note that read, ‘We miss you.’
The words didn’t make much sense to him. How could anyone miss him? Even when he was physically in that class, he wasn’t really there. He barely existed, no matter where he was. He made no impact on the class, and no one paid any attention to him. They wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t there.
Another paper had come with the plant – instructions on how to take care of it. He had to keep it warm, and he had to give it water every day. It had no other needs, just shelter and nourishment. Just like Carter Street.
After watering the plant, he continued with the same routine he’d been following since he arrived three days ago. He washed his face, brushed his teeth and got dressed. Then he left the room, closing the door behind him. He turned to the right and walked to the corner. He was aware of other boys coming out of rooms and moving in the same direction, but he didn’t speak to any of them. He couldn’t, even if he’d wanted to.
He descended a flight of stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, he went into the room on his left. At the entrance, a smiling man said, ‘Good morning, Carter.’ It wasn’t a question or a demand, so Carter didn’t have to do anything. He walked on to the serving area.
He joined a line of residents to pick up his breakfast tray, and when he received it, he took it to a table and sat down. There were others at the table. On his first day, a couple of them had spoken to him, but now, after three days of no responses, they’d stopped. He didn’t particularly want to look at them, but they were in his range of vision so he couldn’t avoid seeing them. A tall boy, light brown hair, glasses. Another boy, darker hair, wearing a green shirt. A girl, blonde hair. She had tiny sparkling stones in the lobes of her ears. None of this was important. He just registered the facts. They were talking, but their words meant nothing to him. Not until the boy in the green shirt spoke directly to him.
‘Could you pass the salt?’
He understood this as a question that demanded an action. He picked up the salt cellar and handed it to him.
‘Thanks,’ the boy said.
He knew what that meant – the boy was expressing appreciation for Carter’s effort. But the word wasn’t important, it didn’t require a response, and now he could address his food. Food was important. He knew what was in the bowl – cereal, milk, fruit – but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the fact that he could eat it and then he wouldn’t be hungry.
When he finished eating, he remained in his seat and watched the big clock on the wall. When it displayed a particular time he rose, carried his tray to a conveyor belt, and left the dining room. He couldn’t go back to his room, though. He had an appointment.
Turning a corner, he went to a door and opened it. A woman at a desk spoke to him. ‘Hello, Carter. You can go right in, Doctor Paley is waiting for you.’
Carter went through the inner door.
‘Hello, Carter,’ the doctor said. ‘Sit down.’
Carter did as he was told, and waited while the plump, balding man adjusted the video camera on a table. At the first meeting, the doctor had asked Carter if he would mind if their sessions were recorded, and Carter had offered no objection. Why would he? Being recorded didn’t hurt.
‘How are you today?’ Dr Paley asked.
Carter was stumped. He couldn’t deal with questions like that. After three days of meetings, hadn’t the man figured that out? His foster family, Madame, his classmates – none of them asked him this question any more because they knew he couldn’t answer it. And why should he? Surely the doctor could look at him and see that he wasn’t in pain, that he was breathing, that he was physically intact. Nothing about him was any different than it was the day before.
When he didn’t respond, Dr Paley didn’t press the question. He just went on speaking.
‘I don’t know very much about you, Carter. Nobody does. And that’s because you don’t know much about yourself, do you?’
Carter didn’t answer, and Dr Paley didn’t seem to expect him to. He continued talking without a pause.
‘The
big question, of course, is why? It’s possible that you have a condition known as amnesia, an inability to remember. You don’t even seem to know your own name.’ He shuffled through some papers on his desk. ‘According to your history, you were found here in this city on Carter Street, and brought to a hospital. The authorities there needed to give you an identification name, and this was what they decided to call you.’
Carter gazed at him steadily and waited for him to say something Carter didn’t already know.
‘There’s no indication as to how this amnesia developed,’ Dr Paley went on. He picked up another folder and opened it. ‘The authorities finally sent over your medical records, and I’ve studied them. Some cases of amnesia occur when the subject receives a severe blow to the head, but the scans you were given show no indication of any trauma. It’s possible that you experienced some sort of an infection – a high fever perhaps, or a virus that affected the part of your brain that stores memory. But blood tests gave no indication of recent illness.’
He turned a page, and continued. ‘You were given a battery of tests to determine general intelligence and motor skills. You responded appropriately. Your hearing was tested, and it appears to be normal.’ He looked up. ‘But you can’t speak. This puzzled the examiners, since they couldn’t find anything wrong with your vocal cords or your larynx.’
Dr Paley studied Carter thoughtfully. ‘But now we know that you are physically capable of speaking. A classmate witnessed this. You spoke to a woman . . .’ he glanced down at the paper. ‘Serena Hancock.’
The mere sound of the name made Carter want to flinch. Serena . . . yes. She could make him speak. He didn’t know how she did it, but he remembered the ease with which the words left his mouth. He wished he couldn’t remember what he said.
He hadn’t intended to answer her questions, but he didn’t seem to have any control when he was with her. And he wasn’t capable of lying. So when Serena asked him about his classmates, he told her what he knew, despite the fact that the information was supposed to be kept secret. In class, Madame was always telling them not to reveal anything about their special gifts. Carter didn’t have to worry about himself – he had no gift. But they weren’t supposed to talk about each other. That’s what he’d done, and he knew it was wrong. He had disobeyed.
Dr Paley closed the folder. ‘Your teacher has told me that this woman, Serena Hancock, is a member of a group which has a special interest in your gifted classmates. These people have some sort of plan to use the students for criminal purposes. Now, I have a question for you, Carter. Do you want to help these people?’
Want . . . It was one of those words that puzzled Carter. He knew what it meant, because he’d wanted things before : food when he was hungry, water when he was thirsty, warmth when he was cold. But the way Dr Paley had just used the word – he didn’t understand.
Dr Paley sighed. ‘Let me ask you something else. Do you like your classmates? Or do you dislike your classmates?’
Like, dislike . . . Carter just looked at the doctor blankly. What was he talking about? He knew the words, he knew the dictionary definitions, he’d heard people use these words in conversation. But they didn’t apply to him.
‘Carter, I want to know what you’re feeling.’
Feeling . . . Carter knew the feeling of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, pain. He wasn’t having any of those sensations at that moment.
‘Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you sorry?’
Now Carter sort of understood what the doctor was asking, and he knew he couldn’t provide an answer. Dr Paley might just as well have been asking a blind person what he was seeing.
Carter Street didn’t have those kinds of feelings.
CHAPTER TWO
IF AMANDA BEESON WAS forced at gunpoint to say something nice about the gifted class, she’d have to admit that it was rarely boring, unlike geography or algebra. This class was unpredictable. Sure, sometimes Madame would go on and on about how they had to control their gifts, how they shouldn’t reveal the nature of their gifts, blah, blah, blah, but there was always the chance something could happen during the class. Jenna might reveal something truly bizarre that she’d read in someone’s mind. Like the time she told them she’d read the mind of a waiter in a fast-food hamburger place who wanted to pluck a strand of hair from his head and mix it into the ground beef. Or Emily could tell them who would win that season’s American Idol or X-Factor. Something exciting or even dangerous could happen. Charles might decide to rearrange the desks with his telekinetic powers. Someone might tease Martin and he’d respond by kicking a hole in the wall. In a room full of people with extraordinary talents, there was always the possibility of a surprise or two.
Of course, this didn’t mean Amanda liked the class. Her main objection to it was the fact that she didn’t belong there. She’d known this the first time she was sent into the room, and she became more and more convinced of this every day. Nothing that went on in this class really applied to her.
For example, at that very moment, Madame was encouraging them to participate in a discussion that was completely irrelevant to Amanda.
‘Class, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how you can control your gifts, how you can stop these gifts from emerging and interfering with your own lives. You’ve practised techniques involving concentration, meditation, special breathing rhythms. Some of you have made excellent progress. Martin, you’ve seen changes in your behaviour, haven’t you?’
Amanda glanced without much interest at the wimpy kid she’d never paid much attention to, and it dawned on her that he was becoming less wimpy. He’d grown over the past few months, his face had lost its babyish look, and he hadn’t been whining so much lately. When he spoke, she realized his voice was deeper now, too.
‘Well, yeah. My grandfather nags me a lot, and sometimes I can feel a lot of anger building up inside me. I know I could let it out and really hurt him. But I don’t.’
‘That doesn’t count,’ Ken declared. ‘I mean, he’s your grandfather, for crying out loud. You’re not going to hit your own grandfather.’
‘You don’t know my grandfather,’ Martin retorted. ‘And right this minute, I’m not feeling very kindly towards you.’
Amanda hid a smile as Ken seemed to flinch slightly. Ken was a former athlete, still in great shape, but he knew as they all did that Martin could send him flying out of the window with a single blow.
‘But,’ Martin added, ‘the point is, I can control my gift when my grandfather teases me.’
‘Very good,’ Madame said with approval. ‘There’s another aspect to your gifts that we need to take into consideration. From our discussions, it seems that most of you – maybe all of you – were not born with these gifts. The gifts seem to have emerged as a response to a situation, an experience, or a feeling. Tracey, you understand this, don’t you?’
Tracey nodded. ‘People ignored me, so I felt invisible. And I felt it so strongly, I started to disappear.’
‘Charles, would you like to comment on how feelings brought about your gift?’
Charles shrugged. ‘It’s not a feeling, it’s the situation. I’m in a wheelchair. I can’t walk, so I move stuff with my mind.’
Madame smiled. ‘A lot of people are in wheelchairs, Charles, but they don’t develop telekinetic powers. Do you remember the first time you were aware of your gift?’
‘Yeah, I was in bed, and I wanted this comic book that was on the other side of the room. And I was too lazy to get into my wheelchair, so I made it come to me.’
‘And how did you feel when you realized what you could do?’ Madame asked.
‘Good,’ Charles said promptly.
‘Why?’ Madame asked.
‘Because . . . because I hated not being able to do some stuff for myself. And now I could.’
Madame nodded. ‘You see, Charles, feelings are involved. If you’d been content with your situation, you might not have developed the gift.’
Ken broke in
. ‘Madame, what’s the point?’
Amanda looked at him gratefully. This was exactly what she was wondering too. Thank goodness for Ken – the one person in the class she could connect with.
Madame raised her eyebrows. ‘Excuse me, Ken?’
‘OK, I get it, we got our gifts because we had strong feelings about something. I felt guilty about my best friend getting killed when we crashed into each other on the football field, so I started hearing his voice from beyond the grave. And then all these other dead people jumped in and started talking to me. But I don’t care how I got the stupid gift, I just want to control it so I don’t have to listen to these – these ghosts, or whatever they are.’
‘But you can’t control your gifts unless you understand them,’ Madame argued. ‘You have to dig deeper into your feelings if you want to manage these gifts. And you can’t all do this in the same way. Not only because each gift is different, but also because each of you is at a unique level in terms of control. Some of you, for example, can summon your gifts at will.’
Some students must have looked confused, because she explained.
‘What I’m saying is that some of you can call on your gifts when you need them. Like Charles.’
Charles beamed. ‘I can make anything move whenever I want it to move. ‘ To illustrate this, he stared at Madame’s handbag, which hung on the back of her chair. The bag began to rise.
‘Charles,’ Madame warned.
The bag went back to its place.
‘Others of you are less capable of bringing your gifts out when you want to. Tracey, you don’t have complete control yet, do you?’
‘But I’m getting better at it,’ Tracey said.
Whatever, Amanda thought. This is such a total waste of time.
‘Amanda thinks this is a waste of time,’ Jenna piped up.
Amanda shot her a dirty look. She knew how to block Jenna from reading her mind, but she’d let her guard down.
‘Jenna, you know you’re not supposed to read your classmates’ minds,’ Madame scolded. ‘But this is another example of my point. Did Amanda’s thought just come to you?’