And it had changed. Now she rarely saw things before they happened. Or take moving stuff around. When she was six or seven, she could have concentrated on her pile of schoolbooks and lifted them all the way to the ceiling. Nothing to it. Easy as knitting kitten-britches, as Momo liked to say. Now, even if it was only a single book, she could concentrate until it felt like her brains were going to come splooshing out her ears, and she might only be able to shove it a few inches across her desk. That was on a good day. On many, she couldn’t even flutter the pages.
But there were other things she could do, and in many cases far better than she’d been able to as a little kid. Looking into people’s heads, for instance. She couldn’t do it with everyone—some people were entirely enclosed, others only gave off intermittent flashes—but many people were like windows with the curtains pulled back. She could look in anytime she felt like it. Mostly she didn’t want to, because the things she discovered were sometimes sad and often shocking. Finding out that Mrs. Moran, her beloved sixth-grade teacher, was having AN AFFAIR had been the biggest mind-blower so far, and not in a good way.
These days she mostly kept the seeing part of her mind shut down. Learning to do that had been difficult at first, like learning to skate backwards or print with her left hand, but she had learned. Practice didn’t make perfect (not yet, at least), but it sure helped. She still sometimes looked, but always tentatively, ready to pull back at the first sign of something weird or disgusting. And she never peeked into her parents’ minds, or into Momo’s. It would have been wrong. Probably it was wrong with everyone, but it was like Momo herself had said: You can’t blame human nature, and there was nothing more human than curiosity.
Sometimes she could make people do things. Not everyone, not even half of everyone, but a lot of people were very open to suggestions. (Probably they were the same ones who thought the stuff they sold on TV really would take away their wrinkles or make their hair grow back.) Abra knew this was a talent that could grow if she exercised it like a muscle, but she didn’t. It scared her.
There were other things, too, some for which she had no name, but the one she was thinking about now did have one. She called it far-seeing. Like the other aspects of her special talent, it came and went, but if she really wanted it—and if she had an object to fix upon—she could usually summon it.
I could do that now.
“Shut up, Abba-Doo,” she said in a low, strained voice. “Shut up, Abba-Doo-Doo.”
She opened Early Algebra to tonight’s homework page, which she had bookmarked with a sheet on which she had written the names Boyd, Steve, Cam, and Pete at least twenty times each. Collectively they were ’Round Here, her favorite boy band. So hot, especially Cam. Her best friend, Emma Deane, thought so, too. Those blue eyes, that careless tumble of blond hair.
Maybe I could help. His parents would be sad, but at least they’d know.
“Shut up, Abba-Doo. Shut up, Abba-Doo-Doo-For-Brains.”
If 5x - 4 = 26, what does x equal?
“Sixty zillion!” she said. “Who cares?”
Her eyes fell on the names of the cute boys in ’Round Here, written in the pudgy cursive she and Emma affected (“Writing looks more romantic that way,” Emma had decreed), and all at once they looked stupid and babyish and all wrong. They cut him up and licked his blood and then they did something even worse to him. In a world where something like that could happen, mooning over a boy band seemed worse than wrong.
Abra slammed her book shut, went downstairs (the click-click-click from her dad’s study continued unabated) and out to the garage. She retrieved the Shopper from the trash, brought it up to her room, and smoothed it flat on her desk.
All those faces, but right now she cared about only one.
7
Her heart was thumping hard-hard-hard. She had been scared before when she consciously tried to far-see or thought-read, but never scared like this. Never even close.
What are you going to do if you find out?
That was a question for later, because she might not be able to. A sneaking, cowardly part of her mind hoped for that.
Abra put the first two fingers of her left hand on the picture of Bradley Trevor because her left hand was the one that saw better. She would have liked to get all her fingers on it (and if it had been an object, she would have held it), but the picture was too small. Once her fingers were on it she couldn’t even see it anymore. Except she could. She saw it very well.
Blue eyes, like Cam Knowles’s in ’Round Here. You couldn’t tell from the picture, but they were that same deep shade. She knew.
Right-handed, like me. But left-handed like me, too. It was the left hand that knew what pitch was coming next, fastball or curveb—
Abra gave a little gasp. The baseball boy had known things.
The baseball boy really had been like her.
Yes, that’s right. That’s why they took him.