Psychic

By the time lunch rolled around, the whole school was talking about Magnus. A new kid in a small town was always noticed, especially one like him.

When he walked in, most kids kept eating their lunches, like they didn’t care, but their thoughts said otherwise.

“So, how much of the cafeteria is thinking about him?” Bella asked, curiosity dripping from her voice.

I chuckled. “I think everyone is. Most are wondering where he’ll sit.”

Ahh, yes. The classic high school struggle of the new kid, where to sit at lunch. Most just end up sitting alone, or in the bathroom. I usually sat alone.

Magnus walked straight past all the taken tables and headed straight towards an empty one on the opposite side of the cafeteria from Bella and I. The dark corner and empty table didn’t really do much to help his image.

“Can you try reading him now?”

I sighed. “Well, he’s all the way across the cafeteria. Even if I could read him, I doubt I could get very far into his head.”

Bella huffed and dug into her sandwich, “Ahh.”

I didn’t tell her the whole truth though. I was actually quite scared of being near him again. It would confirm my fears about not being able to read Magnus

By the end of lunch, no one had dared approached him. He had too much of an intimidating stare and rude behavior.

My next class was Chemistry with Mr. Peterson, which I was not looking forward to.

(Let’s just say that his fantasies were graphic and they were all he thought about when we were doing worksheets.)

(I had poor little Mandy Dawson in my class.)

It was one of the classes where I had to survive without Bella, which was a pain whenever he let us do group work. I was always the awkward kid left out who ended up doing the worksheet on my own.

And, who would’ve guessed it, he assigned a worksheet to do in groups about yesterday’s lesson. I got ready to build a mental wall in between me and Mr. Peterson’s brainwaves when he called me out of my stupor.

“Miss Chase, why are you working alone? You and the new kid, Magnus, can work on the sheet together. Catch him up on what we’re learning just in case his old school was behind.”

How had I not noticed his entrance? I looked behind me and I saw Magnus sulking by the corner at an empty table in the very back of the class. I sighed and gathered my stuff so we could sit next to each other for the assignment.

Magnus didn’t say a word when I sat next to him. In fact, he didn’t seem to be even working on the worksheet. I mean, even with no knowledge on the subject he should at least be trying to work out the simple chemistry problems. The stuff on Mr. Peterson’s worksheets were always elementary.

“So, you’re one of those people.” I comment, mostly to myself, scratching down the answer to one of the problems.

“What?” Ahh, so he speaks.

I start to answer the net question on the sheet, not bringing my gaze to his. “I’ll end up doing all the work and you’ll copy my paper at the end of class. Don’t worry, you’re not the only person who’s ever done that to me. Besides, I picked up on your do-nothing attitude in Mrs. Lu’s this morning.”

He was silent for a moment. I could practically feel him searching for something to say in his own defense. No one liked being called lazy.

“No, I can do this on my own. I just don’t appreciate being partnered up with you.” He sneered.

Okay, so this boy goes from panicked about my name to rude and distant. There is no way I’m letting him speak to me that way. I may have been socially awkward, but I could still pull off a mean glare.

I put down my pencil and stared him down. “You know, if you’re just going to be such a jerk, you might as well be silent. I was just trying to be nice before in History. I’m sorry if I insulted you in some way by anything I said. I’m not usually seated next to simpletons.”

He ignored my harsh apology and kept scratching random numbers on his paper.

I turned back to my own work and decided that Magnus was not worth my time. I used my arm to block my paper from his eyes as well, I didn’t want a jerk copying off of me, no matter what he claimed.

The rest of class was spent in silence between the two of us. He hated me for some strange reason and I thought he was being a jerk. But I was gladly able to say that he never got the chance to copy off of me. I’ll see how he survives with a failing grade in here.

By the end of the day, Bella was driving me to her house, convinced that I needed professional help from her father.

“Bella, I don’t even want to read his mind anyways, he’s a jerk.”

She stopped at a red light and gave me a confused look. “I know he seems mean, but when I talked to him in my art class, he was quite nice to me. In fact, he even let me look at his neat necklace. You shouldn’t be so quick to judge people. Maybe he just has a resting bitch face.”

I was in shock. “You’re kidding me. Magnus was nothing but rude whenever I said anything to him the whole day, especially after I even got close to that necklace. Maybe he’s just had a bad experience with an Olivia in the past.”

Bella shrugged. “Maybe he just doesn’t like you.”

I pouted. I had done nothing wrong to the boy and he just had to go and hate me.

“Maybe I can’t read him because he has some sort of brain disorder or something. It would explain his mood swings.” I say, thinking of any excuse.

Bella nodded, “Maybe.”

That was also one of the theories Bella’s father had about my ‘condition’. Maybe I just had a tumor or something that caused me to read minds. That was one of the only explanations we could come up with though. How else are you supposed to explain away my abilities?

When we got to her house, I was immediately bombarded by her dog, Mr. Sprinkles.

Mr. Sprinkles was a bulldog that Bella’s family had rescued four years ago. He tongue was always hanging out the side of his mouth, and he didn’t know how to breathe through his nose. His eyes were bulging and whenever he ran he let out a sound that sounded like a crazed growl.

In other words, Mr. Sprinkles was frightening when he ran at you at full speed.

“Hello, baby.” Bella cooed at her dog, stopping it from tackling me. It changed its course mid-run and jumped in her arms, placing slobbery kisses all over Bella’s face.

Of course I’d always wanted a dog of my own, but foster families didn’t want to get a pet for a child they weren’t going to see after a few months. The Andrews had an old dog though, Buddy. He wasn’t exactly a puppy anymore, he was mostly there to accompany them.

Is that Liv’s voice? Maybe she’ll let me run some tests today. Mr. Barnes’s thoughts said excitedly in my head.

“Not today, Mr. Barnes!” I yelled up the stairs at him.

Mr. Barnes came running down the stairs joyfully. He was Bella’s dad, and he never gave up on trying to figure out why I could do what I can. He was a scientist after all.

“Are you sure?” He asked, still giddy on the fact that I read his mind and answered the question before it was spoken.

“Yep.”

Bella frowned at me and held up Mr. Sprinkles. “Mr. Sprinkles and I say that you need to tell him about the new kid.”

Mr. Barnes grinned. “A new kid? Is he like you?”

“No . . . at least I don’t think he is.” I shook my head and got those thoughts out of my head. “I can’t read him. Whenever I try, I get nothing but darkness.”

Mr. Barnes thought for a moment whilst Mr. Sparkles filled the silence with loud slobbering.

Bella pushed me lightly towards her dad. “I think you should answer some of his questions while I go give Mr. Sprinkles a pedicure. He needs a new color, pink is going out of style.” And with that my best friend abandoned me to deal with her father and his theories.

He motioned for me to follow him upstairs, and I did. We went to his office, a place I’d been only a few times before. You’d know why if you saw it.

His office was, to put it nicely, weird. Mr. Barnes brought his work home with him, literally. There were always brain scans hanging on the walls, some of his patients and some he’d found online. He had a mountain of boxes piled on one side of the room, all filled with research about brainwaves and neuroscience. There were even animal heads hanging on the walls, remnants of his and his wife’s upbringings in the even deeper south.

The bookshelf that took up an entire side of the room was filled with all sorts of textbooks and memoirs by famous scientists. The books lining the room were all on the brain, and some were very thick and looked like something you’d find at the Hogwarts library. There was a special section in the middle dedicated to the theory of what the brain might be able to do. For instance, mind reading.

He sat me in the soft fuzzy chair that used to be in their living room until Mr. Sprinkles ran his claws down the side of it and got out his notepad.

“So, tell me again, but in more detail, about this kid.”

I felt like I was talking to a psychiatrist, but I humored him. “He was Punk, something you don’t see often in Chesnutt Falls. He wasn’t very friendly either. When I was trying to read him, I saw he had a red stone on a necklace and I reached for it, but then he suddenly got all panicked and asked if my name was short for anything. When I told him my name was Olivia, he looked strange and started muttering under his breath.

“In fact, after that encounter, he seemed insistently rude towards me. I still never got a read from him. When I actually searched for his thoughts, it was like I came up against a dark wall. It was like his head was empty.”

Mr. Barnes nodded and scratched something on his notepad. “So, are you sure you couldn’t read him? Did you try everything?”

I scoffed. “Well, it wasn’t like I could ask him outright what the hell was wrong with his head.”

“Hmm, what about the walls in your head?”

He knew all about the imaginary walls I put up in my head, as did Bella. If I didn’t, everything prominent everyone around me was thinking would be blasted into my head, which was why I thought I was going crazy as a child. All the experts they brought in would talk about it being the result of the trauma I suffered before I was brought to child services. A trauma of which they never told me. Because craziness wasn’t normal, it had to be the result of some horrific event. Normal people weren’t crazy.

They were wrong, of course, the little voices in my head weren’t imaginary - they were from the people around me.

The walls were subconscious barriers I used to make myself sane. They were kind of like filters that only let in the strongest thoughts. I sometimes took them down if I was trying really hard to listen to someone’s thoughts, but not often.

“Yeah, I even did that, for a moment.” I sighed and rubbed a dull throbbing in my head, “What if he just has some sort of brain disorder? Like, I can’t get into his head because something’s wrong about it?”

He seemed to consider this for a moment. “Maybe, but I need to do more research to be certain.” A pause. “That’s enough questions for now, you and Bella can go gossip or whatever it is you teenage girls do.”

I smiled and left. As soon as I opened the door, Bella tumbled down, she’d obviously been listening in. I’d been so absorbed in the conversation that I hadn’t paid attention to her thoughts just outside the room.

Oh, shit. Bella thought. She caught me. Be cool. Be cool like ice.

I laughed out loud and gave Bella a stare, letting her know that I heard that.

She smiled sheepishly and pickled herself off of the floor, taking Mr. Sparkles with her.

“Let’s go back to my room before you have to leave, I just got some new clothes that I need to show you.”

I grinned and followed Bella up to her room.

First thing you’ve got to know about Bella’s room, it is a shrine to every boy band ever. And every inch of the room that wasn’t merchandise from one of them, was covered in pink. She was your stereotypical girly girl. In fact, maybe that was a reason I liked coming over so much. When you never stayed in one place too long, you never got to decorate a room very much. I was living vicariously through her in this way.

My own room at the Andrews’ was quite bare, even if I had been there for a while. I was used to packing the bare minimum, so I didn’t have much to call my own anyways.

“I need to know your honest opinion, okay?”

I nodded. This happened often. Bella loved to buy new clothes, and I was her voice of reason when it came to the sensibility of her outfits.

She ended up trying on half her closet, but I was okay with that. Bella knew how boring it was at my house, so she loved to keep me over for as long as possible.

Mrs. Barnes came in the room at around seven, “Are you staying over for dinner, Liv?”

I smiled and politely declined. I was probably expected home by this time.

“Okay, you want me to drive you home?”

“No, I’m fine Mrs. Barnes. I only live down the street.”

Another reason that I became friends with Bella Barnes was because she basically gave me no choice. I was the only other kid on the block that was her age, so she took me for her own as soon as she could.

By the time I left, it was already starting to get dark outside. Maybe I should have accepted her offer of a drive home after all.

But the walk did give me time to think. I knew one thing for certain, there was no way I was going to ignore the fact that I couldn’t read Magnus. I needed to find out why I couldn’t read him.