by Robin Benway
I just continued to glare at April, who was glaring right back. “I guess we all have our secrets,” I said.
“Guess so,” April shot back.
Great big globs of greasy …
I gave her one last dirty look before going to get my iPod and my bag. It was too small to hold all my books, which meant that I had to carry a couple of extra texts. “You know,” May said as she watched me gather them up, “they make these things called backpacks now. You should check them out.”
“And look like Miss Dork over here?” I said, nodding towards April. “No, thanks. I’d rather stagger.”
“Of course you would,” April laughed. “May, you wanna ride?”
May’s thoughts flitted towards me. Probably should walk with June, but …
“I’m fourteen, not four!” I snapped. “You don’t have to watch out for me!”
“Stop reading my brain,” May replied calmly. “There are terrible things lurking in there. Some people don’t make it out alive.”
“You are so weird.”
“Thanks.”
April cleared her throat. “The bus? Is leaving.”
“Bye,” I said pointedly.
“Vaya con Dios,” May told me, then grabbed her bag.
April shrugged. “Suit yourself, June. Have fun limping to school.”
I hate when she’s right.
A painful twenty minutes later, I hobbled into my first-period bio class with all the grace of a wounded moose. Supermodels do this all the time, I thought to myself as I eased into a chair. You gotta smile through the pain. Make it work.
If there was one thing I could do, it was make it work. I hadn’t suffered through two lame sisters for nothing, after all.
The whole class was boring, even for someone with special gifts like myself. Reading the teachers’ minds was starting to get repetitive, especially when all they thought about was mundane things like grocery shopping or picking their own kids up from school or how to bisect two parallel lines. Sometimes people’s thoughts feel like a dusty room, especially at eight o’clock in the morning, and I yawned and sat back in my chair, writing down the notes a minute ahead of the lecture and probably violating every one of April’s stupid “do no harm” rules. Whatever.
That’s right. For once in my life, school was easy. Big fat hairy deal, though. I’d take excitement over easy any day.
By the fifteen-minute break, I was ready for the day to be over. Maybe May would take me off-campus with her, or at least forge a note saying I went home with a stomachache or something. I could always read her mind and get some blackmail material. It would be—
—outta here.
I turned around, nearly hitting some sophomore in the face with my hair. “Oops, sorry,” I said to her, then realized that it was Avery, the Best Buy employee that had almost been impaled on the hood of our minivan. The one with the black hair that could seriously use some deep conditioning. She looked sort of shocked that I was even talking to her, but I guess I couldn’t blame her. “Uh, that whole thing was my sister’s fault,” I said quickly, but then I saw Mariah disappear out the door and I ran to catch up.
I hurried down the hall and around the corner to where she and Jessica and Daphne were standing outside under a eucalyptus tree, passing a bottle of water among the three of them. Jessica’s hair was in such a high ponytail that it looked painful, and Daphne had overplucked her eyebrows, which made her seem like she was in a constant state of surprise.
It was an unfortunate look for both of them, I’ll just say that.
I was trying to decide if I should go up to them or not when I got Mariah’s thoughts again. Hey, it’s Calendar Girl.
She recognized me.
Game on.
“Hey,” I said, walking over to them and not even looking at Jessica and Daphne. Their thoughts were already in my brain and, to be honest, they didn’t warrant repeating. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” Mariah replied. “How’s your calendar sister?” She looked at Jessica and Daphne. “Her sisters are named April and May. How lame is that?”
I let that comment slide, only because it was pretty lame. My parents had a lot to answer for, as far as I was concerned.
“Who are you? March?” Jessica asked. It was a pretty lame joke, considering she already knew my name. But then again, she always had a nasal sound to her voice that made everything she said sound snide. Even her thoughts had the same tone, which was annoying as all hell.
“No,” I said, then stood up a bit taller. “I’m June.” I looked at her coolly, the way May looks at people when she wants to scare them. “I’m sorry, remind me who you are again?”
Daphne snorted a laugh and Jessica flushed a bit before recovering. She tugged on the cap sleeve of her T-shirt, the one that Alexander McQueen designed for Target. I recognized it because I had the same one. “I’m Mariah’s friend,” she said to me, then added in her thoughts, Even if she is a total bitch.
I had to laugh. “Sure you’re her friend. If you say so.” Then I turned back to Mariah before Jessica could say—or think—anything else. “So what are you up to?”
Mariah gestured over her shoulder down the hill, where roads and cars and freedom existed. “We were just talking about maybe leaving early. You know, taking a personal day?”
I had managed to tune Daphne and Jessica’s anger down low enough so that they sounded like snippy little bees in my ear. No actual words, but plenty of emotion. (I had fine-tuned this skill the past three nights in a row with the homeless guy down the street from our house. I had to do something if I was ever gonna get any sleep), but Daphne broke through first. “We were talking about it,” Daphne interrupted. “We were. The three of us.”
“Four’s a crowd,” Jessica added.
“Actually, it’s three’s a crowd,” I corrected her. “Besides … Jessica, right? I thought you hated Mariah.”
Jessica’s eyes widened, and Mariah looked at her. “What?”
I shrugged. “Just something I heard. I don’t know, maybe it’s not true. Rumors can be so nasty, I know.” I tried to look sympathetic. “Lies can do terrible things.”
Oh my God, I had never had this kind of power in my life! I totally understood why superheroes sometimes turned evil and got the crazy eyes. Jessica and Daphne’s minds were already going haywire, and I couldn’t sort out their thoughts quickly enough to figure out who hated me more.
But like I said, I’d take excitement over easy any day.
“So you’re ditching?” I asked Mariah as the two other girls shifted their shoulder bags uncomfortably. “Cool.”
“Yeah, guess so.” She looked down at my boots, and I swear to God, I would have walked fifty more miles in those boots if it meant that she would notice them. “You wanna come?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. Play it cool, June, I told myself. You are not a puppy in a pet store. Don’t look eager. “I guess so.”
Mariah grinned. “Cool.”
My heart swelled when she said that, almost like it was pushing against my ribs. This was it—this was the start of my new life without my parents or crazy sisters trying to tell me what to do. It was freedom like I had never had before, and I already wanted more.
“Wait, she’s coming with us?” Daphne glared at me. “Who the hell is she? She’s just some stupid freshman.”
I have to tell you, after reading Daphne’s mind for the past three minutes, that was the nicest thing she had said about me yet. And besides, she and Jessica were only sophomores, the same as Mariah. They weren’t even a full year older than me. Puh-lease.
“Whatever,” I shrugged, then turned to my brand new friend. “But Mariah? You should know that Daphne told everyone that you stuffed your bra last year.”
Bull’s-eye.
All three girls looked like they had swallowed a bird or something, their eyes were so panicked. Mariah was the first to recover. “You did what?” she snapped at Daphne.
Daphne held up her hand
s just like people do when they’re being robbed at gunpoint. “I didn’t say anything!” she cried. “I swear, ask Jessica!”
Jessica looked like she wanted to throw up, and she started to squeeze her empty water bottle so it made this really loud cracking sound, like bones crunching. Not a pleasant soundtrack to the conversation.
“Well, how would I have known, then?” I asked innocently. “I’m new here. All I know is what I hear.”
Mariah glared at both of her now ex-friends. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a fourteen-year-old girl, it’s that entire social structures can be dismantled and rebuilt in less than thirty seconds. It’s kind of like playing Jenga every single day, only with people’s lives instead of wooden pegs.
“You two can go to hell,” Mariah said to them. She looked taller and stronger now, and I felt a bit of a rolling sensation, like I had gotten on a roller coaster that I hadn’t meant to ride. Her brain kind of sounded like the inside of May’s when she was mad, all swear words and swirling anger wrapped up in shrillness.
I made a note to never piss Mariah off … and to not read her mind if I ever did.
“So are we still ditching?” I asked, eager to get off campus so that Jessica and Daphne didn’t decide to stab me with their ballpoint pens in the middle of fourth period. I would have to figure out a way to ask April if she saw me bleeding on the floor at all in the near future, and I was gonna have to figure out how to ask that question delicately. “I think the bell’s gonna ring soon,” I continued. “We should probably go.”
Mariah didn’t take her eyes off Daphne. “Yeah,” she said tightly. “We’re going.”
“June!” A voice rang out, and I didn’t even have to turn around to know that it was April.
“Oh, great,” I muttered, then turned around and glared at my sister. She was stalking towards me angrily, her backpack slung over one shoulder and her shapeless cardigan flapping around her like wings.
“It’s my sister,” I told Mariah. “Give me a minute, I’ll be right back.”
The minute I was close enough, April grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me away from the three girls. “Excuse me for a minute,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “I need to borrow my little, innocent sister here.”
“What are you doing?” I hissed as soon as I was away from everyone. “What is your problem?”
“Those are both excellent questions!” April said, dropping my arm and putting her hands on her hips. “In fact, they’re so excellent that I was going to ask you the exact same ones.”
“Well, I asked you first!”
“June. Don’t even.”
“What?” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“You totally turned those girls against each other! I saw you do it!”
“You were spying on me?”
“Look,” April huffed. “This is not my ideal situation, either, okay? But it is what it is and you cannot—you absolutely cannot—play with people’s lives this way! We talked about this!”
“But they did say those things—!” I started to protest.
“No, they didn’t!” April said. “You heard them think those things! There’s a huge difference! You’re lying to get what you want, and that is so wrong that there isn’t enough time in the day to tell you how wrong that is!”
“No, I told the truth,” I countered. “I said that I heard it from somewhere. I can’t help it if I heard it from Jessica’s and Daphne’s minds! And Mariah shouldn’t be friends with girls like that!”
“And by the way,” April continued like I hadn’t said anything, “you are definitely not ditching with Mariah.”
“What are you, my second mother? I wasn’t even going to!”
April rapped herself in the head. “June? Don’t lie to me, too.”
It was all so unfair that I felt like I could explode. “Oh, whatever,” I shot back. “You with your creepy visions that you won’t tell me about! Well, I know lots of things, too, more than you do! I also know that May ditches all the time, and you never tried to stop her before! It’s not my fault you have to be the goody-goody sister! If I wanna be friends with Mariah, if I wanna ditch with Mariah, I’m going to, and you can’t stop me.”
April narrowed her blue eyes. “Try me.”
I took a step closer to my oldest sister. “Try me back,” I said quietly, “and I’ll tell Mom that you’re gonna sleep with that guy.”
That did it. April blinked twice, and she looked at me. “You would, too.”
“Maybe.” The roller coaster I had gotten on was still ascending towards the sky, making me feel a bit nauseated, but there was no going back now.
“Look, Junie,” April said. “I’m telling you, please do not ditch with Mariah. Please.”
“Tell me why.”
“I-I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You know what, April? That’s my job now. I’m the one who hears the ideas, not you.”
And I turned in my beautiful boots and went back to Mariah. Jessica and Daphne had slunk off to wherever ex-communicated friends go (probably into the library like all the other losers), and I shook my hair and smiled at her. “Sorry,” I said. “My sister gets all weird sometimes.”
“So does my brother,” Mariah agreed. “So you’re up for it?”
I could feel April glaring into me, thinking, Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.
“Of course I am,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Junie, don’t do it, don’t—
I tuned her out. “C’mon,” I said to Mariah. “Let’s get out of here.”
chapter 10
“I should be wearing yellow CAUTION tape, I’m that bonkers.” april
The night after June ditched school, I slept terribly. I couldn’t even tell if I was seeing the future of a bunch of strangers or just dreaming. The red light kept returning again and again, flashing quietly in the back of my brain, and I hoped that it wasn’t a brain tumor. I wasn’t sure if I could go to a doctor and explain the problem without being sent off to the loony bin. “Hi, doctor, yes, I’ve been seeing the future and for some reason I have an imminent sense of dread following me around everywhere, and it’s not just because I’m sixteen years old and worried about college applications. Should I just take some Tylenol?”
Yeah. No.
Sometimes I wondered if June went through the same thing, lying in bed and listening to a million voices all around her. Sometimes I wished I was the mindreader so I could know what the hell my sisters and everyone else were thinking all the time so I wouldn’t have to guess at it.
I suppose I had power envy.
I was even more annoyed because I had been so busy worrying about my sisters that I was too distracted to write my paper for English. We’re reading The Myth of the Cave, the thing that Plato wrote, and I had read it the night before, but couldn’t remember a thing about it other than there were some shadows and people were chained together.
Here’s the thing: I know I’m supposed to be the smart one. And it’s true, I like school and all that, but sometimes I wish I could just fail. I wish I could stand up and scream, “Why are we even reading this? Why does Plato always use metaphors? Why can’t anyone just say what they mean?!”
I realize I might be letting my personal issues crowd the situation, but still. June has it so lucky sometimes. No one expects her to be brilliant, and of course what can she do? Read minds and be brilliant. The irony just kills me.
(Of course, I already knew that I was gonna get a 94 percent on the paper that I had yet to write, but that was beside the point.)
My mom was already up and having her tea by the kitchen window when I tiptoed downstairs early that morning. She always gets up way before the three of us—she says it’s her “me time”—but that only started after my dad moved out. I guess she had a lot more time after he left, and she had to organize it somehow. Otherwise the day just gets too long.
When I saw her, I did what I had don
e every day since I first started seeing the future: I looked through my mom’s day, waiting for something terrible to pop up. I searched for aneurysms, strokes, sharp objects, fired employees who came back to the office for one last shot at revenge. I looked for anything I could find and once again, came up with nothing.
I do that every day with my sisters, too. I know I can’t see everything that happens, but damn it, I’m trying. The only thing I don’t know is what will happen when I do see something terrible. I’m trying not to imagine it.
But my mom’s day was mundane, the same as all the other days. Work, grocery store, bills, and when she saw me and smiled, I smiled back, relieved to have something to smile about.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re up early. Want some tea?”
“Is it caffeinated?”
“Nope. It’s herbal and all-natural and good for you.”
“Pass. It tastes like goldfish food.”
“I thought so.” She sipped again before setting the cup down. “April? Can I talk to you about something?”
Shit. Why did this not come up when I scanned for potential problems? I was in no mood to have this conversation, the are-you-girls okay discussion. I had already had it a few times with my mom and once with my dad on the phone. He had cleared his throat a lot, and I remember wishing I knew what he was going to say because it was so awkward to wait through the pauses.
Be careful what you wish for. That’s what I would advise.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I told her as I started to peel an orange. “I swear. Me and May and June, we’re all fine.”
“No, I know,” she said. “You girls, you’re wonderful. It’s just that … I’ve been noticing that May seems to be disappearing more and more often.”
I dropped the orange as I whirled around in surprise. “What?” I said in a voice barely above a whisper. “You noticed what?”