by Clara Kensie
Now that we were relatively safe, I ached to go for a jog. It’d been over a week since my last one. I changed into my running gear and went to tell my dad I was leaving the house. I knew where I’d find him: in his office, eyes closed, sitting in a big leather armchair. He’d found the chair in the living room the day we moved in, and he’d had Logan float it into the dark paneled room at the back of the house.
Dad would spend most of his time sitting in that leather armchair, watching over us. He didn’t have, or need, a real job. He used to be an investigative journalist for a prestigious newspaper in Washington, D.C. Between that, my mom’s job as director of special events at a fancy hotel and their stock market and business investments, they’d made a lot of money. We still lived off the cash they’d been able to withdraw before Dennis Connelly had closed our bank accounts, but now my parents had a different occupation: ensuring our safety. It didn’t pay anything, but it kept us alive.
I knocked on the door frame. “Dad?”
He opened his eyes and blinked. “Hi, Tessa Blessa.” His gaze fell to my stomach. My shirt hid my scars, but he never forgot they were there. My hand fluttered to cover my belly.
Dad blamed himself for those scars. If he hadn’t written all those articles exposing the unethical and illegal practices of politicians and top military personnel, the government wouldn’t have sent a killer to eliminate him and the rest of us.
But I never blamed my dad. I blamed myself, for trusting Dennis Connelly’s warm smile and kind eyes, and for not running away to tell my parents a stranger was in our yard.
Thin and pale, a tightness between his eyebrows and a dullness in his eyes, Dad seemed swallowed up by the armchair. And was that— “Daddy, is your nose bleeding?”
“Hmm?” He blinked and sniffled, then pressed a tissue to his nose. “No. Just a shadow. It’s dark in here.” He crumpled the tissue in his palm, then rubbed his temples.
“Let me get you some Tylenol,” I said.
“No, I’m f—” He sighed and sank farther into the chair, his head dipping as if he’d lost the strength to hold it up. “Okay. Thank you.”
I dashed to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and three Tylenol. “Your headaches are getting worse,” I said as he swallowed the pills.
“I’m just tired.”
“Dad. It’s obvious.”
He took a slow sip of water, and another, then lowered the glass to the desk before finally meeting my gaze. “They are getting a little worse. But you don’t have to worry. It’s nothing I can’t handle, and it’s not affecting my mobile eye at all. I can still see Dennis Connelly when he gets close. We left Vermont a full half hour before he got there.”
“In Nebraska it was an hour,” I said. “In Montana we had ninety minutes. At least.”
“The important thing, Blessa, is that we got away in time.” He straightened his posture and plastered a smile on his lips. “Look at that. I’m feeling better already. What do you have planned for today?”
“I wanted to go for a run,” I said, “but not if you’re—”
“I’m fine. Go for your run. Do you have your new phone?”
“Yep.” I tapped my new black cell phone, clipped to the waistband of my running pants. Our cell phone rules were simple: keep them charged, keep them on us at all times and answer on the first ring. My parents had Logan program them so we could make and accept calls only from each other.
“I’ll peek in on you to make sure you’re okay.” He smiled even wider.
“Good. Thanks, Dad. I’ll make it quick.” I backed out of the office, watching him carefully. He turned on the television and clicked through the channels, humming a cheerful tune.
* * *
My parents insisted we were safe until Dad saw Dennis Connelly coming, but I still hated going anywhere alone. Logan, usually, was sympathetic about this, so I went to his room, where he was composing a song on his saxophone. “Want to help me find a new jogging trail?” I asked.
He sighed, then floated the sax into its case. “Let me change. I’ll be down in a minute.”
Our new house was near a park, so Logan and I headed that way. As we rounded the corner, a police officer rolled by in his shiny white cruiser as he patrolled our quiet neighborhood. I ached to flag him down. Ask him for help. Beg him for protection.
But I kept my hands at my sides and my mouth shut. Dennis Connelly worked for the government, and the two times my parents had sought help from law enforcement—a police detective in Utah and an FBI agent in Pennsylvania—he had gotten wind of their investigations and learned where we were hiding. My dad had seen him coming and we’d fled, but despite our warnings, each of our protectors were killed soon after. I would never forget my father’s horrified expression as he used his mobile eye to watch Dennis Connelly slice those innocent men open, right down the middle. His message was clear: his reach was long. He would kill anyone who got in his way. And there was nowhere to turn for help.
Since then we depended solely on my family’s powers to evade Dennis Connelly and stay alive.
The Twelve Lakes cop drove past Logan and me without a glance in our direction. I wouldn’t ask him for help, and he would live to serve and protect the citizens of Twelve Lakes another day.
The park was another block down. Beyond the baseball diamond and playground, we found a jogging trail that wound around the tennis courts, into a forest preserve and back again. Perfect. I turned onto the path and quickened my pace until I was in a full-out sprint. Logan kept up for a short while, then fell behind.
Trees and wildflowers blurred as I zoomed past them. My feet pounded rhythmically, left-right-left-right. Always on the lookout for anything suspicious, I kept an eye on the other runners as I zipped down the path. Ahead of me a woman speed-walked in black yoga pants, hips swinging and arms pumping. I passed her quickly. Running toward me on the other side of the path, a man pushed a little girl in a three-wheeled jogging stroller. Behind him ran a boy about my age, a royal blue T-shirt stretching across his broad shoulders, the cords of his earbuds bouncing with each step.
After the first lap my lungs started to burn, so I pushed myself for three hundred more steps, then slowed so my exercise-hating brother could catch up. Looking over my shoulder to find him, I stumbled. Before I fell, though, my arm was caught in a strong grip. The boy in the blue T-shirt steadied me, his blue-eyed gaze as warm as his smile.
I realized I was smiling back.
With a gasp, I yanked my arm away and fled.
Once I rounded the bend I waited for Logan. “Slow down a little, would you?” he grumbled. I didn’t argue. I ran at his pace, keeping him close by my side. The broad-shouldered boy came up the path again and nodded at me. We ran the loop twice more, passing the boy each time. At the entrance to the path, we stopped, Logan panting and gasping with his hands on his knees while I stretched.
“Clockwise, huh?”
I turned to the voice, deep and confident. The boy in blue ran in place, his sandy-brown hair reflecting gold in the sun. “You were running in a clockwise direction on the path,” he said. “I’ve always gone counterclockwise. I’ll have to try it your way next time. You were going pretty fast.”
I suppressed the urge to run again.
His feet slowed to a stop. “Sorry if I scared you back there.”
Immediately Logan stiffened into bodyguard position, stepping between me and the boy. “He scared you?”
I started to nod but stopped. It wasn’t his fault I was scared. “I tripped and he caught me.”
Logan relaxed, but when I said nothing else, the boy shrugged. “Okay, then, see you around.” He put his earbuds back in and jogged off down the path.
From the corner of my eye I could see Logan watching me watching the boy. “Maybe,” he said, “you’ll actually make a friend this tim
e.”
The boy disappeared around the bend.
I blinked, then turned around and headed for home. “Don’t count on it.”
* * *
Two glasses of ice water hovered by the front door for Logan and me when we returned home. A pile of large shopping bags sat on the table. “Your new clothes,” our mother greeted us from the linoleum floor, where she was on her knees with a bucket of sudsy water and a scrub brush, her hands covered in yellow rubber gloves. “Oh, and Tessa, look what I bought for us.” Three glossy cookbooks rose from one of the shopping bags.
“Ooh!” I leaped over to inspect the recipes and plan the dinner menu, something we did together every week, but she held up her gloved palm.
“Study first, Babydoll. Classes have already started and you need to catch up.”
She didn’t tell Logan that he needed to catch up.
Our parents required us to get half Bs and half Cs: grades that weren’t great, but not too bad, either. Good grades as well as poor grades attracted attention, and attention of any kind could be disastrous. Jillian and Logan purposely answered test questions wrong so their names wouldn’t be published on the honor roll. I had to study hard to make those Bs and Cs.
Logan chugged his water, and with a wave of his hand, the empty glass zipped off to the kitchen, and his bags of clothes zoomed off to his bedroom. He followed behind them, thankfully not telling Mom about the boy at the park. Mom would get all excited and encourage me to be friends with him. Logan had probably forgotten all about that boy already. And now so would I.
I hooked my bags over my arms and plodded up the steps. Logan was already sitting at his desk with an open textbook, using his hypercognition to absorb a year’s worth of education by swiping his palm over each page.
Jillian’s textbooks were dumped on the bed in her room. She resented that she wasn’t hypercognitive like Logan, but studying came easily to her anyway. This afternoon, instead of studying, she practiced ballet positions while directing her new clothes to hang themselves in the closet.
I put my clothes away by hand. Our wardrobes were expensive, but simple and plain. No trendy fashions, no bright colors, no attention-grabbing labels. Just the way I liked it.
I also liked my new room. The closet door didn’t stick the way the last one had, and this time I had a dresser and a desk, painted glossy white. My bed covered most of the old ink stain on the carpet, and the white eyelet bedspread matched the curtains over the window, which looked out over the front yard. Not that I’d ever risk opening the curtains.
My dad poked his head in. “I saw that you found a nice jogging trail,” he said. “Nice of that boy to catch you before you tripped.”
“Hmm?” I pretended I hadn’t heard him as I stacked my new textbooks on the desk, then changed the subject. “How’s your headache?”
“Gone,” he said, and changed the subject again, to one we were both comfortable with. “I came up to help you study.”
I chose a textbook at random and handed it to him. Dad helped me study every day. I needed it, and he liked it. Dad always said he and I needed to stick together. We were the only members of our family who had to move to put our things away or to get something from a shelf. Unlike the others, we actually had to use our hands to flip a light switch or open a drawer.
But my dad would never understand me completely. He had his mobile eye. No one in my family would ever understand what it was like to be the only one without any talents at all.
Chapter Three
We were homeschooled the first few years on the run. I loved sitting at the kitchen table, safe at home between my brother and sister, while Mom and Dad acted as our teachers. But Logan absorbed his lessons in an instant, and Jillian didn’t take much longer. The long days of boredom and isolation quickly weighed down on them, magnifying their misery until it grew into resentment and disobedience. Our parents were desperate to give us a childhood as happy and normal as possible, and to my mother, that meant school and all the things that came with it: football games, dances and especially lots of friends. So as we got older, they sent us off to school. Follow the rules, they said, and we’d be safe.
Jillian and Logan flourished. I withered.
On Monday morning, Jillian, Logan and I walked the half mile to our new school, Twelve Lakes Community High. A digital marquee at the entrance flashed red letters: Welcome Thunderclouds! You’ll find TLC at TLC!
We paused, then stopped as we approached the building. Tan brick with dozens of narrow windows, it stood three stories tall. Students wandered from the buses, sprawled on benches, tossed footballs back and forth. Hundreds of students. More likely, thousands. TLC was, by far, the biggest school we’d ever gone to.
Jillian chewed her lip and scanned the crowd, the dark apprehension in her eyes slowly turning into bright excitement. New kids. New friends. New boys. Maybe even someone who would make her forget the Nebraska boy she’d fallen in love with. “Come on.” She tugged me forward. “This place isn’t that bad.” She pulled me past a group of thumb-texting students lounging under a tree, gracing one of them, a football-jerseyed boy with dark hair down to his jaw, with one of her silky smiles. He returned it with one of his own.
We hadn’t even stepped foot in the building, and already Jillian was becoming everything our mother wanted us to be—everything she’d wanted to be herself but never was. Even Logan was nodding at a girl who was carrying a flute.
I concentrated on breathing, walking and avoiding eye contact. As we climbed the front steps to the building, a shout rose from the crowd. “Hey! Clockwise!”
Oh no. The boy from the jogging path.
There he was in a khaki collared shirt, taking the steps two at a time until he reached us. My head only came up to his chest. “First day at TLC?”
“Yep,” said Logan. “We just moved in last week.”
“I’m kind of new too,” the boy said. “Moved here in March. I’m Tristan, by the way. Tristan Walker.”
“I’m Shelby Spencer,” Jillian said, using her new alias for the first time. She gestured to Logan. “This is Scott. I guess you already know Sarah?”
“We jogged on the same path the other day, that’s all.” My voice came out all high and squeaky. Discreetly, I pulled her sleeve, urging her to move on. Indiscreetly, she shook me off.
Tristan squinted against the bright sunlight. “So what year are you guys?”
“I’m a freshman,” Logan said, and when I didn’t reply on my own, he answered for me. “Sarah’s a junior.”
“I’m a senior.” Jillian tossed her hair, officially entering full flirt mode.
“I’m a senior too,” Tristan said. “Hey, do you need to get your schedules? I can show you where the office is.”
Before I could say no thanks, Jillian pinched me and gave him a brilliant smile. “That’d be great. Thanks.”
He switched his books to his other hand and held the door open for us. He smelled like soap—fresh and light, like he’d never had a problem big enough to weigh him down. “Where are you guys from?” he asked.
Jillian and Logan answered at the same time. “Oklahoma.” Our stock answer, and a complete lie. We’d never lived in Oklahoma.
“Why’d you move here?”
“Our dad’s a writer. We can live anywhere,” Jillian said. Another stock answer. “We’ve lived all over the country.” That part wasn’t a lie.
My siblings could chat with this boy all they wanted, but I was staying silent. Eventually people stopped seeing someone who never talked.
We reached the front office and Tristan opened the door for us again, then came in, waiting while the secretary printed out our schedules. Jillian handed hers to him. “Are we in any classes together?”
“Yeah. Physics and Trig. Cool.” He took Logan’s schedule and told him how
to get to the band room, then he took mine. “You have Spanish right after American History,” he said. “Those classes are on opposite ends of the building, but if you rush you should make it on time.”
Our fingers brushed when he handed my schedule back. My pinkie on his index finger. Little and big. He seemed like he was waiting for me to say something, but I gave him only a nod.
His cheeks flushed. “Um, I should go meet up with my buddies. See you in Physics, Shelby.” He left the office and disappeared into the crowded hallway.
Jillian watched him leave, and I could tell by her calculating look that Tristan would be her next conquest. Fine with me. Sure, Tristan was friendly. And nice. And okay, hot. But I wanted nothing to do with him, or with anyone at this school. All I wanted was to be invisible.
* * *
And I was. I had my routine: make no eye contact, speak as little as possible, hide behind a textbook. The only good thing about a school this big was that a new student was not exciting news. I did see Tristan a couple times. He walked past my locker after third period, and once when I went down the wrong hall, he was chatting with a girl with curly brown hair. Both times his gaze skimmed over my head without landing on me. Good. I passed Jillian once, and even she didn’t notice me, she was so busy batting her eyelashes at a boy as she asked him for directions to her Social Studies room.
Invisible.
At lunchtime, book bag hanging on my shoulder and tray clutched in my hands, I scanned the cafeteria. The charred scent of burned beef and a thin layer of smoke hovered in the air. The room was packed wall-to-wall with tables, each jammed with rowdy students. Jillian and Logan had different lunch periods, so I was on my own. The only empty table was in the corner by the large window, showing the parking lot behind the school and the corn field beyond it. It was isolated, but I needed to sit near an exit.
There. Two boys, one wearing a blue Chicago Cubs shirt and the other wearing a white one, got up from a table semi-close to the exit, leaving it empty. I rushed over and claimed it, then opened my Spanish notes and pretended to study. Occasionally I’d peek at the other tables, but no one was looking at me. Perfect.