Taken By Surprise

by Jessica Frances

  Chapter Eighteen – The White Van

  Gillette, Wyoming

  Tuesday, April 9th

  “What’s wrong?” I walk over to the kitchen bench where Mom is looking over paperwork and sit on the stool across from her. She’s worried and lately, every time I see her, she appears to have aged another few years.

  “Nothing, Blake.”

  “Are those bills?”

  Mom turns and gives me a warning look. I get them a lot when I speak to her about money. “No, and I don’t know why I have to keep telling you that. If we’re having problems, I would tell you. Your sister and you are fine, you don’t need to worry.”

  She goes back to looking over the paperwork as I grab an apple from the bowl of fruit sitting between us on the bench. I know she’s looking at bills. I can see it in her eyes, read it in her face. She is struggling to make ends meet and within months, we’re going to be homeless. I feel the pressure and strain she’s under, but she refuses to confide in me.

  Dad is away on business. He used to go away for a couple weeks and then come home for a couple, yet lately, he’s been gone longer and at home a lot less. Basically, his work is making cutbacks and, hoping he won’t be one of them, he is putting in extra time. It’s hard on Mom to be alone so much. I can see it in her. It also doesn’t help that Nicole is causing problems continuously.

  Nicole is my twin sister. We look incredibly similar and yet, we are polar opposites. I have a girlfriend who I’ve been with for almost a year while Nicole can’t stay with a guy longer than a week. I’m acing school and she is failing. I have a good group of friends; she has a bad group. I want to study to be a doctor, however Nicole is most likely going to end up a drug addict. It’s harsh, I know, to think that about your own sister that way, but it’s different for me.

  They say twins are close, that they can share a connection. Nicole and I share DNA and that’s about it. All of the things you hear, that twins share with each other, don’t apply for Nicole and me except for what I share with everyone else.

  For some freak reason, I’m able to sometimes read people’s thoughts. I’ve been able to for as long as I can remember. When I was little, Nicole and I fought all the time and we would drive Mom crazy. The first swear words I learned were from Mom. She never said them in front of us, of course, but they would simply scream in my head. They used to make me cry and Mom always blamed Nicole for upsetting me. I didn’t know it until later that no one was screaming in my ear, that in fact, I was hearing what they were thinking. It was only angry things at first because they had to be booming for me to hear and usually when Mom was angry, her thoughts grew louder. Then as I grew up and knew Mom, Dad and my sister better, I could hear the quiet things, too.

  I once told Mom I heard voices and all that got me was a trip to the doctor’s. I could hear the fear in her voice and even her thoughts. Thinking I was different or weird worried her. I remember scaring the doctor silly by repeating his thoughts back to him, but when I realized I was scaring Mom, too, I stopped doing that. I said I made it up and since Mom couldn’t afford the constant doctor trips anyway, we never went back.

  Now I’m seventeen and things are still the same. I can glimpse people’s thoughts and the more I know them, the easier they are to read. It’s a lot harder to read the thoughts of a stranger on the street than it is my own family. I can also tell easily whose thoughts I’m reading. When I’m in a crowd and picking up thoughts, I mostly can’t tell whose they are. A person’s thoughts don’t come through to me like the sound of their voice, it always sounds different, softer. I know the sound of my family’s thoughts better than their actual voices. I can also sometimes hear them in separate rooms. I have tried once to hear their thoughts from a separate location, but it never worked and, apart from a situation where one was in trouble, I doubt I’ll ever want to do that.

  My gift did help steer me towards ideas of becoming a doctor. When some patients won’t talk or aren’t willing to tell the truth, I’ll know. I’ll be able to use this to save lives. I feel I have to save lives with it, that I’ve been given this for a reason. My conviction to become a doctor is what first got the attention of Sophie, my girlfriend.

  When we first met, there had been a few rumblings in town about a white girl dating a black boy. It isn’t that they’re racist exactly, but rather, unaccustomed to seeing such a thing. I thought that would be our biggest obstacle, I was wrong. My gift is a huge problem. It’s definitely wrong to be reading your girlfriends mind and I feel like what I do read is a minefield. She will want one thing, but if I do that, suddenly it has the opposite effect. In the end, I realize girls don’t actually know what they want and I try as best as I can to stay out of her head. The problem is, it isn’t always voluntary what I hear. Nicole is a prime example of that, I want nothing more than to steer clear of her thoughts, but for some reason, I’m always able to read hers. I hear all about her boyfriends, the late night sneaking out and often drug use. At first, I wanted to try to save her, now I think there isn’t any saving her. The more I try to help her, the more she pushes away.

  “Can you get your sister up? She’s going to be late for school,” Mom distractedly asks me, going back over the bills in her hands. I need to get a job. Any extra money around here will help. Mom and Dad don’t want me to work, they want me to focus only on school, yet I know I can handle it. They’ll realize that, too.

  Waking up Nicole turns out to be quite difficult since she isn’t in her room. Her bed doesn’t even look slept in. Nicole always leaves her covers on the floor in the morning, where they remain until it’s time for her to go to bed or until Mom gives in and fixes it up for her. Right now, her covers are neatly over her bed, which means she didn’t sleep here last night.

  “Blake, is she up?” Mom calls out from the kitchen.

  What do I do? Do I cover for her or tell Mom the truth? I don’t have to worry about figuring it out because I see Nicole standing outside her window and then she opens it and climbs in. It’s something she has done more times than I can count.

  “What are you doing in my room?” she snaps at me, a tone I’m also accustomed to.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “None of your business!”

  ‘I wish he would just get lost,’ I hear from her thoughts immediately after.

  “How about I just tell Mom about your adventure out of the house then?”

  “Yes, why don’t you? You’ve always been a snitch, so why stop now?” she snaps angrily at me again.

  It’s true, I’ve told on Nicole a lot throughout my life. It doesn’t make me feel good to tell on her, however with Nicole, you can never know how dangerous a situation she’s getting herself into. Sometimes, the right thing to do doesn’t make me feel good.

  “Just tell me where you were and I won’t tell Mom.”

  ‘Yeah right, like you would believe I was walking all night!’

  “Like I said already, it’s none of your business!”

  Walking all night? Why would she be walking all night? “Were you with Josh?”

  ‘Why can’t he just leave me the hell alone? If I tell him we broke up last night, he’ll just laugh and say that he told me so. He’s such an ass.’

  “Seriously get the hell out of my room or I’ll use my connections to make your perfect stupid grades disappear from the records at school.”

  I roll my eyes at her. She’s threatened it before and I know it’s a bluff. She doesn’t know anyone who can do that or at least, that will be willing to do it.

  “Fine, hurry up and get ready.”

  I walk out of her room, feeling happy that she has finally ditched Josh. He gave me the creeps, his friends are bad news and he is twenty-five. Eight years older than my sister.

  I grab my homework that I had finished the night before and carefully place it in my bag, leaving it by the bathroom as I quickly brush my teeth.

  Mom has gone into Nicole’s room and I already hear th
eir voices starting to rise. They can never have a conversation without fighting these days. Mom will say something and Nicole will overreact and then Mom will get defensive and once it hits, you don’t want to be near it. With Dad gone most of the time and having Sophie around a lot, I feel like I’m surrounded by women and their moods constantly. It’s frustrating.

  I interrupt them before they can get into a fight and Nicole stomps out of her room and straight past me. I follow suit, rolling my eyes at her attire. It’s a freezing day outside and she’s wearing tights, a mini skirt and a thin, mostly see-through, t-shirt. The other girls think Nicole is odd for dressing differently. Truth is, if it wasn’t for Sophie, I think Nicole would have seen a lot of bullying going her way. Now that we’re older, I think most people are afraid of her.

  Nicole is beautiful, she could easily be one of the “popular” girls if she wanted to, but she never has. Getting into trouble appeals more to her than having friends and fitting in. I can’t change that, just like I can’t change the way we are with each other. She hates me and a small part of me hates her. She is selfish and rude. If we weren’t so obviously physically related, I would have said someone had switched her with my sweet, caring, real sister at birth.

  Nicole gets into the passenger seat next to me and I pull out of the driveway. Both of us have our license, but only I’m allowed to drive Dad’s car while he’s away. Nicole had been allowed to at first, however after taking it for a joyride when Mom specifically said she wasn’t allowed to drive it and then crashing it into a tree, she is now banned for life. Another thing she has been able to turn around in her head and blame me for. By her screwing up and crashing the car, it’s my fault for showing her up and being a perfect diver. She’s delusional sometimes.

  I turn the car off outside of Sophie’s house and take the keys with me. I know better than to leave them in the car with Nicole.

  I walk up the pathway and knock on the front door. She opens it straight away and I get a look at her first smile for the day. The first one is always the best. I kiss her quickly on the lips, knowing we’ll have an audience from Nicole and hold her hand as we walk over to the car.

  “Morning, Blakey, did you get that English assignment finished last night?” Sophie walks with a bounce in her step and I sort of love to watch her walk. It’s like her walk conveys how happy and beautiful she is.

  “Yeah, did you?”

  “I finished it two days ago, remember?” She lets me open the passenger door for her, which is now vacant of Nicole, who is lying down in the backseat.

  I think back, but don’t remember. When in doubt it’s always best not to admit it. “Oh right. Guess we’re both set then.”

  “Do you want me to read over yours?”

  “Sure.”

  I grab my assignment out of my bag in the backseat and hope Nicole hasn’t done anything to it. I wouldn’t put it past her. She has her eyes closed and I think she might have fallen asleep. It’s how she is for most of her classes, too.

  I sit down in the driver’s seat and pass it to her. She looks over it as I drive and by the time we get to school, she already has several things for me to change. It’s part of why I love her. She always challenges me to do better, to be better.

  As I pull into the school’s lot, I nearly end up hitting a white van head on. It pulls out of nowhere in front of me and I slam on my breaks to avoid crashing into it.

  “What the hell?” Nicole demands from the backseat. The car’s sudden jolt to a stop has woken her.

  I watch two men run out of the van and head straight for us while one person stays in the driver’s seat. They’re dressed in black and are armed. One of the men stands by the van, looking like he’s on guard as he observes around us suspiciously. We’ve gotten to school early and there are hardly any cars around us at the moment. The other man makes it to my side of the car and bangs on my window. It sounds so loud I’m surprised the window doesn’t shatter under the pressure of it. I debate internally whether we should try and reverse out of here, but since the men have guns and this car isn’t overly reliable, I decide against it. I wind my window down nervously and undo my seatbelt. What can this be about? Are we being carjacked?