Mr. Frame was still in the front of the room, so I closed my eyes and concentrated on pushing the drone of thoughts out of my head. I had almost done it when I felt a tap on the shoulder.
“Hey,” Cara whispered. “Are you okay? I wondered where you were at lunch.”
I hate getting in trouble for talking in class, particularly in a test-taking situation. But I also knew I couldn’t be rude to Cara. I leaned my head back slightly, keeping my eye on Mr. Frame’s progress.
“Sorry, sometimes Michael and I eat outside,” I murmured in answer. “I’ll talk to you after the test, all right?” Without waiting for a response, I moved forward again and pulled out a pencil.
The test was challenging, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I finished about ten minutes before the end of class, and then I spent the rest of the time trying to listen to Nell carefully. It was hard to hear her when so many other people were thinking so loudly, I observed crossly. Every time I lowered my mental block, all I could hear were complaints about the test, people mentally hyperventilating about questions they couldn’t answer and the meanderings of those who had finished or already knew that they didn’t have a chance of passing. I sighed in frustration.
Nell was bent over her desk, and I couldn’t tell whether or not she had turned in her test. I closed my eyes and focused on her boldly this time.
…Casey is poking her nose in where it doesn’t belong. She’s really beginning to annoy me. They all have to see that I’m in charge, I’m the one who knows everything. Maybe she’ll be the next one. She wants to know why we bother with Amber. She has no idea. And I saw her talking with Marica, trying to turn her against me… ah, soon they’ll understand.
The bell rang, making me jump and effectively ending any chance of hearing more from Nell. Instead I was overwhelmed by the sudden noise of twenty-two students thinking loud thoughts of relief, dread and resignation as the test ended. Nell was up and out of the classroom so quickly that I hardly saw her leave.
I nearly forgot to finish my conversation with Cara. She was looking at me expectantly as we moved to the door.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “I’m paranoid about getting yelled at for talking in class.”
Cara raised her eyebrows in amusement. “Does it happen often?”
“Not for good reason. I’ve gotten in trouble for answering people who asked me for a pencil or whatever, and that annoys me.”
She laughed. “I know what you mean. Sorry. I just wondered about where you were at lunch.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t warn you. Every once in a while we eat outside, especially when we need to talk.”
Cara’s eyes were unreadable as she asked me, “Is… everything all right with you two? I mean, I hope nothing is wrong.” I felt mostly curiosity coming from her, even though I found her questions a little odd.
“No, everything’s fine. We just sometimes like to have a little privacy. The lunch table crowd is fun, but it can get a little loud!” I laughed.
“I guess so,” Cara agreed. “But I really like them. Did you know I’m going to the dance Friday with everyone? Dan told me they usually go as a group.”
“I’m so glad,” I told her, and I meant it sincerely. “I hope you have fun.”
“You’ll be there, too, won’t you? You and Michael?”
I smothered a sigh and nodded. “Yes, we’ll be there,” I replied, trying to keep the note of grimness from my voice. “I’m heading for Math. See you later!”
I spent most of my Trig class brooding over what I hadn’t learned from Nell. So I knew she was miffed at Casey. That didn’t help with anything. What was interesting, I realized, was Nell’s reference to Marica. I knew she was thinking of Ms. Lacusta—there weren’t two of that name in a small town like King—but it was the context, the jealousy once again, that struck me. Michael had been right. It was Ms. Lacusta’s attention to me that had enraged Nell this morning, and in History she had been annoyed, remembering that Casey was chatting up the teacher.
I thought about Nell’s mother, deserting her young and vulnerable child. Maybe she hadn’t seen it as such, in the grip of her madness, but in effect, she had chosen her obsession with the married doctor over the needs of her small daughter. I had seen enough afternoon talk shows to recognize that Nell would still have abandonment issues. I wondered if those issues could have anything to do with her current relationship with Ms. Lacusta. And that relationship seriously creeped me out.
By the end of the day, Michael had determined that the scientifically real full moon was in fact on Friday night. That didn’t help us too much, since we still weren’t sure whether or not Nell would know that and my generic calendar showed three other possible dates when the moon would be considered full by us non-scientific folk.
Through deceptively casual questioning of Anne, Michael had also learned that Amber, Nell and company were all going to the dance together.
“So,” Michael announced to me on the way to school the next day, “this means that not only can we go to the dance, we must be there. We are morally obligated to attend, in order to protect Amber.” Whatever reservations or concerns Michael had had earlier, he seemed to be much more relaxed today.
I, on the other hand, was grumpy and frustrated. My listening the day before hadn’t netted us any more hints on exactly what Nell planned to do or when she planned to do it. I knew I would have to spend more time today trying to tune everyone else out while I tried to hear only Nell’s thoughts. I pushed out an aggravated sigh.
Michael shot me a sympathetic glance. “You do know, right, that if something happens and we can’t stop it, this doesn’t fall on your shoulders. Amber isn’t your responsibility—and neither is Nell, for that matter. If you didn’t have your—ability, your gift, we wouldn’t know anything about this.”
He wasn’t helping my state of mind. “But I do have the ability. I did hear what Nell’s planning. Like I said to you before, what if this is why I can do what I do? What if it’s not just a fluke, a weird anomaly in my brain? What if it’s got a purpose, and I’m supposed to use it to help people?”
Michael frowned. “You’re not a fluke, and you’re not weird. And I don’t know that you’re that far off in what you’re saying—aren’t we supposed to use all our gifts for the betterment of ourselves and others?”
I stared at him. “Well, that’s deep.”
He shrugged. “I do read, you know, even if I’m not quite up to your caliber of books.”
“So if you agree with me that I should be using my extra hearing to help other people, and I’ve heard—not by seeking it out, but just by accident—that someone is in very real danger, doesn’t that mean that Amber is my responsibility? And Nell… well, no one has taken responsibility for her for a long time, I think. That’s part of the problem.”
“But Nell has chosen this path. Which means that we’ll do our best to make sure no one gets hurt, but you are not going to beat yourself up about any of this.”
“Easier said than done,” I muttered as we pulled into the parking lot.
We were quiet as we walked into the school, each preoccupied with our own thoughts. I could feel Michael’s worry, and I understood it. But at the same time, I knew that I had to everything in my power to be prepared for what Nell was going to do.
We were at my locker, and Michael stood close to me as I exchanged books.
“So let me ask you something,” he said abruptly. Uncertainty wavered around him. “You said before, and then again just now, that maybe you have your abilities for a reason. We’ve never talked about why you can do what you can. Do you think there’s a higher purpose?”
I closed the locker and leaned against it. “I’ve thought about it quite a bit. You know, I’ve had plenty of time, before we moved here, to consider stuff like this. I believe we’re all given gifts, and maybe some of those gifts are just different than others. So you have a way with plants, you can make things grow. And my mom can draw and pain
t. And I can hear extraordinarily well.
“You and my mom can use your gifts in a more open way, to make a living even. I can’t do that, but maybe I can—and more than that, maybe I’m supposed to use it to help make the world a better place.” I glanced at Michael sheepishly. “Does that sound incredibly corny?”
“Not at all. I get what you’re saying. But you keep saying that you were given this talent—who do you think gave it to you?”
I tilted my head thoughtfully. “If we had time to get into a long discussion about this right now, I could tell you how I came to this conclusion. It’s not really that interesting, just a lot of soul-searching and long hours to mull things over. But we don’t have time—the bell is about to ring, I think—so I’ll just say that I consider my talent just as God-given as yours and my mom’s. And since I believe that God does work all things for the good, if He gave me my gift, He must expect me to use it for something good. Does that make any sense?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, it does. But I want to talk about this more when we have time. I’ve got lots of questions for you.”
“Hold onto them, and after we make the world safe again, we’ll have a long talk. But this morning, I’m a woman with a mission. I’m going to possibly sacrifice my budding Chemistry career on the altar of doing-good.”
Michael looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. “Huh?”
I shook my head impatiently. “I’m going to concentrate on listening to Nell during Chemistry class instead of paying attention to Ms. Lacusta. C’mon, try to keep up with me, okay?”
He rolled his eyes and pulled me alongside of him as we walked. “Whatever. Just be cautious about the superhero bit, okay? We don’t have any indication you’re invincible, and I kind of like you upright and walking around.”
“Right.” I gave his arm a light squeeze as I broke away from him to head for my classroom. “See you later.”
To my utter frustration, I wasn’t able to pull anything constructive from Nell during Chemistry. She was concentrating completely on the lesson Ms. Lacusta was teaching. Her only stray thoughts involved her obsession with impressing our Chemistry teacher and being annoyed with a variety of people around us. As far as I could hear, she didn’t think about me at all, nor did I hear anything about Amber.
After the lesson, Ms. Lacusta handed out a worksheet for us to work on during the remainder of class then complete at home. I stifled a sigh, thinking that not only had listening to Nell instead of the teacher been a bust, but now I had homework and no idea how to do it. I was counting on Michael to help me out with it, science whiz that he was.
As I sat at the table, trying to look busy even when the numbers and letters on the paper in front of me were gibberish, I glanced up and noticed Ms. Lacusta sitting at her desk, gazing around the classroom. And it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to listen to her, especially if I wasn’t getting anything from Nell. While I was almost positive that she didn’t have any knowledge of Nell’s plans for Amber, hearing her thoughts might give me some insight somewhere, particularly if she happened to be thinking about Nell.
It was harder to tune her in than it was to hear the thoughts of those around me. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, using my hands to shield my face, so it looked as though I was just concentrating hard on my worksheet. At first the buzz of student thoughts grew louder, and I struggled to push them down, mentally moving closer to the front of the room and to the teacher.
Again I was hit with that same uneasy feeling. Whispered thoughts in a language I couldn’t understand swirled around me. I caught Nell’s name here and there, but I couldn’t comprehend the context. And then I froze, as I heard my own name surrounded by that unfamiliar tongue.
I forced myself not to pull away from Ms. Lacusta’s mind. I realized that I wasn’t going to understand the thoughts I heard from her—obviously, she still thought in her mother tongue, which wasn’t unusual. But if I could pick up an image or two, it might help me in some way.
I concentrated harder, pushing my mind even closer to hers. The foreign words grew louder and clearer, and suddenly something clicked. This language was the same as the chant I had heard from Nell last week. Knowing that the two were connected shouldn’t have surprised me, but feeling the link ran a chill up my spine. Nell must have learned the words from Ms. Lacusta, although I supposed it was possible that she had taught herself in an effort to please her idol. The bigger question was why?
As I considered all of this, suddenly an image from the teacher’s mind appeared in my own head. It was Nell, and she was standing somewhere—it was outside, part of me realized I could see trees—and there were other girls standing apart from her in a loosely grouped cluster. But Nell was not with them. She was looking up, and I saw an eagerness and joy in her expression that was so foreign to me it was startling. Of course, with the picture coming from Ms. Lacusta’s thoughts, it must have been Nell looking at the teacher. And this supported my suspicion that Nell saw Ms. Lacusta as the mother-figure she had been missing.
The image shifted, and Nell’s expression had changed. The eagerness was gone, and in its place was a desperation, a need. I wondered if this represented a different time, or if Nell’s mood changes were this mercurial. The pictures were accompanied by feelings, which from past experience I knew came through Ms. Lacusta. She was annoyed with Nell, almost bored by her. At first Nell’s infatuation had flattered her, and she had used it. Why? That wasn’t clear. But once Nell had moved from simply appreciating her attention to demanding it, Ms. Lacusta had pulled back. And now her feelings toward Nell were… I forced myself to probe deeply. Impatience… anger… perhaps a small bit of fear?
A sudden blast of unintelligible thought assaulted my inner ears. I sucked in a breath and with effort stopped myself from clamping my hands over my ears, as if that would help. The language was the same that I had heard earlier, but the words were whip sharp and so fast they blended together. My mind was being pulled into the storm, and for a terrible, terrifying moment, I wasn’t sure I could escape. With real, painful effort I yanked myself away, and the ensuing mental silence was deafening. There was no baseline buzz of thoughts, no underlying murmur. The relief was palpable but short-lived.
My heart was pounding. I kept my head down and tried to slow my breathing. I was amazed that the whole room hadn’t noticed my distress, but even Liza, sitting next to me, continued to scribble on her worksheet, somehow solving the problems I couldn’t even understand.
I was afraid to look up and meet Ms. Lacusta’s eyes, in case somehow she knew what I’d been doing. And in fact when I was brave enough to shift my hands away from my face and look up, the teacher was gazing at me with interest. She didn’t look angry or suspicious, only curious. When I didn’t immediately look away, her lips curved into a slight smile. I acknowledged her with a small nod, as I would if any of my teachers had caught my eye. And then blessedly, the bell rang, ending the class period.
It took me all of the forty-nine minutes of Speech and Debate to settle down my heart and jumpy mind. Something—either the stress or Ms. Lacusta’s frightening brain—was playing havoc with the volume control on the thoughts I heard, and all during class, they went from a nearly imperceptible murmur to a loud roar. I took deep breaths and tried to pull up my increasingly-hard-to-control mental wall.
Michael’s friend Jim, who sat at lunch with us, was the only person I knew in that class. I saw him looking at me with concern, and when the teacher was occupied elsewhere, he leaned toward me from his desk.
“Are you okay? Are you sick?”
I shook my head. “Thanks, no. I just have a headache.”
Jim nodded, looked at me unconvinced. He was a good friend to Michael, and because he knew Michael cared about me, he did too. While I didn’t know Jim as well as I did some of the others in the group, I was aware that he had a wicked sense of humor. And of course, I also suspected that he had more than simple friendly feelings toward Anne.
> Thinking about that distracted me from the Ms. Lacusta after-effects. I wondered if Anne realized how much Jim cared for her. And I toyed again with the idea of saying something to her about it. I wouldn’t even really have to listen to Jim, since I could tell just by watching them together that he wanted to be more than just another friend. Considering all of these possibilities kept my mind busy until the end of Speech.
When I walked into English class, I could feel that Mrs. Cook was unhappy about something. She was uncharacteristically brusque with all of us as we straggled into the room, and I heard her think, Not in the mood for this today. Should have just stayed home… I’m not worth much right now anyway. Mrs. Cook was one of my favorite teachers, and it worried me that something might be really wrong. Of course, it was also entirely possible that she was just having an off day. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
Whatever the cause, she announced that instead of discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets today, she was putting us into pairs, and we were to work together to re-write a sonnet in modern language.
I hate group projects, and I stifled a groan. The rest of the class seemed to share my sentiments, but Mrs. Cook ignored us all as she counted everyone off into twos.
“Joe, with Kevin. Amber, with Tasmyn.” She moved through the rows, pointing at each of us in turn.
I saw Amber stiffen. I wasn’t surprised. Given her new and treasured close friendship with Nell as well as her talk with Michael last week, I imagined that being paired with me for anything was a worst-case scenario in Amber’s eyes. But I was also fairly confident that it wasn’t in her personality to buck the teacher’s instructions.
And I was right. Slowly but quietly, Amber moved out of her chair and back toward my desk. The girl who sat next to me had gone to sit with her own sonnet partner, and Amber slipped into her seat just as Mrs. Cook came by again, this time to give us our assigned sonnet, number twenty-nine.
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