I Know How You Feel

Of course, there was more questioning, but luckily, this time it was in an infirmary and with Sam. There weren’t a dozens of ugly fluorescent lights. Just one that they kept flashing in my eye.

“Who do you work for?” the Head of the FBI asked.

“No one. I’m a student at John Cabot High School,” I stated for the second time. He didn’t bother to hide his skeptics. My hands clenched into fists.

“How about you?” he nodded to Sam who was sitting in a chair next to me.

“I…um… work in my step-dad’s office on weekends sometimes but he’s not a terrorist--I don’t think,” Sam offered with her usual unsure tone.

“So then how do you have information about a top secret organization that even the CIA can’t get?” he asked.

“I told you… I’m a telepath. I ran into him and it all just kind of flooded in,” I said.

The skeptics appeared again.

“What’s your wife’s name?” I asked trying to hide my annoyance.

“What?” he snapped. Her name appeared in his thoughts and I smiled.

“Nancy. That’s a nice name.”

There was ten seconds where the surprise showed blatantly on his face. I smirked and the nurse put a cold stethoscope on my chest. My wince was enough to bring him back. He stared at me and a million questions and thoughts boiled through his mind.

“Before you ask, no, I’m not an alien,” I said.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Fourteen.”

“Have you had this… ability your entire life?” he asked visibly struggling with the words.

I wanted to sympathize but he’s the one that had me kidnapped and assumed a terrorist. There was no room for emotion.

“No.” I decided one-word answers would suffice.

“When did you get it?” he asked curiously.

I smirked and thought back to April. It seemed so long ago when it was only, “A few months ago,” I answered.

“How?”

“No idea. I thought you’d be able to explain that to me,” I grumbled.

I wasn’t really suspecting answers from them, but they were rumored to have off-world encounters and records of everyone on the planet. You’d think they’d know.

“Oh, wait, that’s right”, I remembered, “I’m the only one.”

I swallowed my disappointment and waited for the next question.

“Anything?” he asked the nurse.

“Well, she’s definitely a human,” the nurse snickered teasing him. “But everything seems normal.”

“Ha, normal”, both the Head and I thought at the same time. I listened to his thoughts to see his plan.

“She’s a telepath. This isn’t possible. A person can’t read another person’s thoughts. I wonder how she does it. What does it sound like in her mind I wonder? Her mind! We need to do a scan of her brain. Maybe that will give us the answers we need. I can’t believe we’ve never encountered this before! There has to be more like her out there. She can’t be the only one. I should get Kasey to set up a MRI and a CAT scan.”

I slowly slid off of the chair and stood up. The nurse noticed but the Head was still too deep in his thoughts. I nodded to Sam and she shook her head. Without letting the nurse speak a word, I ran towards the door with my hands out.

The Head yelled in his booming voice but I wasn’t listening. I wouldn’t let them do their experiments on me. An MRI is harmless, but what if that’s not enough? Would they going to cut me open to find the truth? I wouldn’t stay long enough to find out. Of course I wanted some answers, but I wasn’t willing to be pierced with needles and steely knives to get them.

The men grabbed me and I flailed sending them all back with my force. Purple color filled the room as the doctors went on high alert.

“What did you do?” the Head asked looking at his men who were up again but freaked out.

“Oh I forgot to tell you, I have telekinesis too.”

“Be precise; don’t let her see you.” I heard a thought mutter. Before I could turn around to see the person, a needle was being jabbed into my arm. A quick haze covered my thoughts and the last thing I remembered was the horrible look on Sam’s face.

I woke up in darkness but the whirring of machinery that quickly helped me realize where I was. So instead of slitting throats like I had originally planned to do when I woke up, I stood still and listened. I could hear faint voices over the continuous electronic noise.

“I think she’s awake! Turn on the machine,” a lower tenor voice ordered.

I guessed this man was Kasey. He had science running through his brain and he thought of me as a patient to be analyzed. He didn’t know what I really was. He thought I was just unstable because I was a prisoner.

The machine lit up and I found myself moving into a small tunnel. I closed my eyes and decided to let them do it. I probed the doctor’s mind a little more and found that I could channel his visual and auditory parts of his brain while both blocking out his annoying scientific thoughts.

In other words: I could see and hear what he heard and saw. So don’t say I have no idea how you see things because, for all you know, I could.

I first found this pretty awesome until my brain popped up on the screen. That’s when his mouth formed the words, “That’s not possible.”

The Head blinked. He obviously had no idea what he was looking at but in this case, neither did I.

Kasey stared at the screen and then checked all the controls.

“Unbelievable,” he breathed when he found that they were correct.

“What exactly am I looking at, Kasey?” The Head grumbled.

Kasey was lost looking at the glowing diagram. Red seemed to fill it to the brim but with keen eyes he could spot small pockets of orange and yellow. His wide-eyed awe made me feel like that maybe I was an alien.

“Kasey?”

“We’re looking at eight-five percent brain power here. This is unbelievable. What do you think she’s doing with that much power?” he asked.

“Wait, I thought you told me the whole ten percent of our brain theory was a myth,” he said tapping his fingers impatiently.

“It’s true that we do use a lot more than ten percent but we don’t use all of the brain at one time. Not only that, the electrical impulses in the patient’s brain are higher than any I’ve ever seen! This is very intriguing. I need to look at this further,” he shuffled papers and began to click on the screen.

I don’t know what I was thinking or how I even did this but I found the shut-off button through the doctor’s eyes and cut the machine’s power. Hoping a millisecond later that the act to preserve my dignity didn’t kill me.