This is a Gift

We all want to be special. What happens when we find out we are?

Will be the title of my biography, Liadan Ryan thought ruefully. She would be perfectly clear about it, too: absolute terror. The pencil between her fingers wiggled up and down like a spastic see-saw, her attention on the floating stapler in front of her. No, the unusual “qualities” she had acquired since starting college were not cute. She used her other hand to reach up and fiddle with the long peace sign earrings that hung from her ears. Her peculiarities were not exhilarating and it was not the huge adventure everyone thinks it would be. Still, her professor’s eyes remained down, words streaming from his mouth explaining what was wrong with her paper but they were lost to the inner monologue in her head. The feeling of constant adrenaline running through her veins wasn’t a pick-me-up. It made her jittery and tired. She didn’t eat anymore. She ended up in panic-stricken situations like standing in front of her teacher feeling like she had coffee in her veins instead of blood, jumpy and focusing on multiple things at once like a crack addict. If her eyes were twitching it would complete the scene. The pencil flew from her fingers and her gaze whipped to follow it. It froze, midair over her professor’s desk, perfectly horizontal, the lead tip pointing at her accusingly.

Five minutes before, the scene Liadan had been in was very different. English class, second week of September, Fall semester. The class had just been given their papers back with grades. The bright red seventy-eight at the top right of the sheet – in fresh ink with the indentions left from a heavy hand and sharp pen – just stared up at her, a million distraught butterflies suddenly infecting her stomach. All around her, fellow classmates were packing up their various school accoutrements, as unconcerned with her as her grade was about the panic-induced tummy insects. It was a typical, normal, scene in a college classroom. Long tables lined the walls and there were two long ones in the middle, pushed together so that the students would have faced each other, except computers were set up at each station for the various math labs that the room doubled for. Liadan chose to sit at one of the spaces up against the wall.

“Don’t forget to read chapter seven!” Her professor announced to the class as most of them began to pour out of the room, Liadan getting lapped by snails. She usually sat in the middle of the classroom, so as not to seem like a teacher’s pet, but close enough that she could still listen. Her freshman mind had conceived the sentiment that her education was part and parcel with how her cohorts perceived her, though realizing that she was a community college student and that a good portion of her classmates were much older than her maybe hadn’t been a factor. She moved slower than honey pouring from a jar packing her items, her thoughts elsewhere. If this was adulthood, she wanted a refund. A hefty one, too, thank you very much; college tuition wasn’t cheap. Her mind flicked back to the grade. C’s get degrees, but A’s are the few morsels that make getting a higher education seem worth all the debt. Or bragging rights. Or maybe made her feel like choosing to attend college when she still didn’t know what she wanted to major in wasn’t a poor choice. Soon, the honey jar that she was began turning into a tea kettle that was about to start screaming.

Liadan walked up to her professor’s desk, knowing she was more upset with her circumstance than the grade. Her professor, Maximillian Craven, had his attention not on the classroom but instead on the board behind his desk. His name was as elaborate as Liadan’s, and superbly unnecessary. But, she supposed he was a victim of ‘extra’ parents just like she was. He was an older gentleman, his still-full-head of hair completely white. He was of average height and build for a man his age (which Liadan guesstimated to be somewhere in his mid-sixties), with a thin frame, but a small bulge in his middle section that indicated he had enjoyed many meals in those years. His choice of clothing quintessentially indicated English professor; today it was a pair of ironed tan slacks and a brown patched blazer. He was very neat and orderly, and his desk only furthered that image. Pencils sat primly in a cup at the corner of the table, and his copy of the textbook lay open in the very center of the desk. A stapler sat at the corner of the table opposite the pencils and just below it was the stack of in -class homework that had been turned in for the day.

“Okay, why?” Liadan demanded, her voice shriller than she wanted it to be. Yep, she was a tea kettle now.

“Excuse me?” Her professor turned to look up at her, blue eyes curious behind his spectacles. His voice was calm, as if a student coming up and raising her voice when there hadn’t been another sound in the whole room was something he was prepared for.

“This.” Liadan thrust the essay towards him. Arm fully extended, holding only the top of it with her thumb and forefinger. Someone take this kettle off the stove, she silently begged. “It’s the second test of the semester I’ve failed.”

“Hmm,” Professor Craven took the essay, an exasperating serenity to him. “A seventy isn’t a failing score, need I remind you, Miss Ryan,” he said, one hand lowering his glasses, the other holding her paper as he sat down. He’d briefly mentioned in the beginning of the term that he’d had a limited foray into writing and when that had turned up little profit, he’d gone back to school to become a teacher because the one thing he’d ever shown a skill for was helping others. What he was not supporting was the worth of her collegiate career. Liadan forced herself to take calming breaths; she could feel the dangling peace sign earrings on her neck as she tilted her head downward to stare at her teacher. Perhaps he could feel the simmer she was trying to force her mood to be. To distract herself, she started wiggling her pencil between her forefinger and thumb.

“Well, Miss Ryan, it looks like a fine essay altogether,” her professor said, glancing up at her briefly. He didn’t react to her more-of-a-glare-than-a-stare expression. “But I can see why you got the low score.”

“And?” Heat was rising. She was not simmering anymore. It seemed such a silly thing to be this upset over – what job recruiter paid attention to your GPA? – but she was already in this deep, and now wondering if she made the right choice was just adding to her anxiety. The pencil wiggled up and down more rapidly. The internal shriek of her tea kettle started sounding as the professor’s stapler began floating over his desk. She watched it, unnerved being an understatement, as the stapler rose into the air. It was a wobbly ascent, almost like it was testing the air, as disbelieving as she was that this was really happening. This way and that it teetered, rising almost two feet above the desk. The alarm that swelled in her throat made her mind start narrating the autobiography she was never going to write: If you find out you are, in fact, different, will you want everyone to know? Should you let your professor see the floating item and claim it was you, or shall you both play it off and claim the building must be haunted?

Liadan glanced at Professor Craven; his focus was still on her paper. He might even have been talking, but the pounding in her ears blocked out other noises. She glanced at the stapler; it was still floating. She began to squeeze the strap of her book bag with her other hand and looked back at her professor. Stapler. Professor. Stapler. Professor. Stapler. Rapidly moving pencil she almost forgot she was holding – er, wiggling.

“….and see down here? You wrote ‘actually’ twice, and then you refer to the issue of whether or not you feel the school should use the money for extracurricular courses as ‘it’ at the beginning of a paragraph and the computer isn’t sure how to read that. What is ‘it’?”

“Oh. Right.” Liadan replied, but not actually taking in what he was saying. Was he still talking about her essay? Had it been that bad? Focus, Ryan.

Liadan’s eyes maintained a steady switch between the stapler and the professor, sending all her energy into hoping he wouldn’t look up and see what was happening to it. So much energy that the forgotten pencil flew from her hands. The widening of her eyes and the stiffness that went to her neck with the shock and movement simultaneously hurt and made her feel like time stopped.

“But you’re a good student, so I’m going to let you retake the test, because I don’t really think computers grading papers is very fair, anyway,” Professor Craven raised his head, signifying time did not stop. Desperation swept through her mind, drowning out all other thoughts as Liadan’s hand shot out from her book bag to swat the stapler out of the air. The pencil was on its own. The stapler fell to the ground with a clatter, hitting the desk as it went. Liadan went down with it, the wind of her hurried descent causing her long dark hair to fly behind her. As soon as she was on the ground and out of sight, she gripped the hand that had hit the stapler with the other, letting out a completely silent moan of pain; hitting a stapler with her bare palm had hurt a lot more than she’d expected. Her professor stood up, startled.

“I’m so sorry,” Liadan said in one breath immediately at the sight of his shadow, hoping it seemed she accidentally bumped the stapler off. She scooped it up and stood, placing it back on her professor’s desk, an awkward twisting movement because she was trying not to use her still stinging left hand. She saw the pencil laying on the desk, but until Professor Craven mentioned it, she sure as hell wasn’t going to. Behind her she heard a crash – followed by a succession of slightly smaller crashes – and looked back just in time to see that the window blinds had pulled themselves up, and one of the pictures on the wall was now hanging lopsided.

Liadan’s mouth opened to an O shape. Alarmed, she quickly scanned the whole room, her earrings hitting her neck with every rapid turn of her head. She whirled like she was trying to use an invisible hula hoop, book bag swinging, and quickly grabbed her paper back from Professor Craven.

“Thanks, Professor,” she said in a hurry and then left the room before anything else could go haywire. She could hear her professor calling her name, but she didn’t stop.

The scary thing was that wasn’t the first time that had happened to her.--

Liadan Clare Ryan wasn’t a child of prophecy. She didn’t grow up in a magical realm, she hadn’t lived her whole life knowing “what was really out there”, she hadn’t been tested on by the government in recent weeks, and she most certainly was not from planet Jupiter. No, Liadan was just a normal girl from a normal neighborhood, albeit with a less than average name. She lived in suburbia with her mom, dad, and brother. She grew up as any regular run-of-the-mill girl would, complete with dance class and playing until bedtime (and reading under the covers with a flashlight after that), and in her world, when something started floating of its own accord then it was probably on a TV screen. That, however, all changed when Liadan began her first semester of college.

At first, things had gone as expected for any freshman: classes, tests, stress; but then Liadan had begun hearing things. Specifically, people’s thoughts. When it first happened, she had assumed it had been a misunderstanding. She’d been standing in line at the cafeteria. When she finally got to the counter, she noticed her shoe was untied and bent down to tie it.

“No, it’s cool. I’m paid by the hour, take your time.”

Liadan looked up sharply at the young girl behind the counter. She had her hair in braids, ball cap facing forward with the café’s logo emblazoned on the front. Pointy face, bored expression. “Excuse me?”

“Yes?” Suddenly the employee’s face was a grin reaching across to touch her two braids. “Can I take your order?”

“Did you just say something?” Liadan stood, shoelace double knotted and crisis averted.

The girl’s smile became a confused frown. “I asked to take your order…”

Liadan shook her head, the day’s white feather earrings swishing. “No, I mean, about working by the hour, it was a little catt…” She trailed off when the girl gave her a bizarre stare, as if Liadan had shown up without her head: her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly parted, nostrils flared. Liadan became aware of the fact that everyone in line behind her started staring; a true feat when just a moment prior everyone was absorbed in their phones, and after that she left without ordering. Dealing with college was hard enough and making a name for herself as the weird girl at school didn’t seem like fun, either. It was a small campus, after all.

From there, the voices in Liadan’s head had come and gone, but they were slowly becoming harder and harder to ignore. Dismissal was the route she’d taken until she’d essentially been given every answer to a math test via brain power from the class geek who’d been concentrating a few seats over. She’d had no choice but to assume something weird was happening then, and after that things started to pick up. Literally.

First it was just little things, like when she was making herself breakfast and danced a little too flittingly close to the milk carton. It tumbled from the kitchen counter and it stopped when she wished she wouldn’t have to clean it up. Liadan walked over and stared at the container, tilted on its side and dangling as if held by an invisible spider web. The milk was even half pouring from the plastic and frozen midair. There wasn’t much rationalizing she could do for that, but she’d tried. When books began falling off the shelves during arguments with her brother, Liadan started to worry. The final stroke that broke her resolve at being normal came, after watching her cat knock a wine glass to the ground, she saw it shatter and was horrified then awestruck to see it immediately fix itself just because the thought that “if it could, her life would be so much easier” had occurred to her. She stopped denying something weird was going on then but wondering got her nowhere, except realizing how much she regretted mistakes immediately. And thus, it was early September, and she had nothing. No ideas as to whether or not she actually had some famed destiny, no little green men telling her she was really a Jedi, and so far, hadn’t found out her parents had sold her soul to the devil. She was getting more and more frustrated, and when she got frustrated staplers hovered over her English professor’s desk. Maybe she hadn’t had the right motivation (or know-how) to find out what was going on. She had searched ‘sudden telekinesis’ on the internet, but only got song lyrics, and when she typed in ‘I can hear other people’s thoughts’ she was directed to peoples’ various psychics’ websites. Questions of legitimacy aside, she wasn’t sure they could necessarily help her, but she’d gone ahead and tried that, too. Madam Moreau’s: Mystic Comprehension had talked a good game, but being left $20 short and smelling strongly of patchouli and bergamot had only revealed to her that there, in fact, was a way to wear too much purple.

Liadan closed her eyes tight at the memory of the stapler as she walked briskly through the school hallway. Students lined the walls, waiting to enter their classrooms. Their thoughts began to infiltrate her own.

“He has the cutest smile.”

“Why do I even bother logging on Facebook these days?”

“Do I smell onions? God, who smells like onions? I hate onions.”

Instinctively, Liadan put her hands over her ears. Of course it didn’t do anything. She still couldn’t block them out. She strolled faster, the messenger bag banging the back of her thighs with every step. She didn’t know what she wanted to major in yet, but she knew being cursed was not on the list. Maybe she needed to see a clinical doctor. Maybe she was legitimately crazy. She hadn’t spent hours in the library researching telekinesis or telepathy. She hoped her newfound talents would just go away. She didn’t want to be different. She wanted to be the same as she always was, and sometimes when she considered the possibility that she would never go back to being same old college student Liadan Ryan, girl who stuck out by name alone anyway, she would start to feel panicked. What if she could always hear what everyone else was thinking and what if she could always move things with a thought? Was she just supposed to go back to regular life and figure out how to incorporate that? How?!

As Liadan passed vending machines and a drinking fountain, the water started spurting out. Soda cans dispensed. A student walking by stopped.

“Hey, cool!”

Walk faster walk faster walk faster walk faster.

Liadan squeezed the paper she had snatched back from her professor, crunching it against her ears. Flyers for the upcoming Halloween party flew off the walls and followed her. That was surely because she was just walking so fast and not because she was the cause of even more chaos, right? Right, Ryan. It’s all science and not this fantasy you’ve got going on.

She was terrified that things would never go back to normal. She was sure that her loved ones were beginning to think she was neurotic. What if she was this bizarre…thing…for the rest of her life? Regardless of the fact that she had no idea what was going on, she began to miss the ability to easily blend with the crowd. She spent her days worried everyone could see there was something wrong that she didn’t understand and couldn’t hide. Walking really fast with paper scrunched against her ears probably wasn’t helping her image, either.

The exit. The sign above the glass doors looked like it was glowing white. Angels could have been humming. “Relief is in sight!” They would have chanted. Liadan was sure that it wasn’t glowing anymore than exit signs normally do, but the sunlight spilling inward did make her hopeful. As she pushed the doors open and stepped out into the warmth of the afternoon, she did have to admit that she felt better. Her phone began to vibrate in her pocket. She pulled it out shakily, not really sure she wanted to speak to anyone. It was Analise, best friend in residence.

Liadan answered. “Hello?” She stopped by the curb, waiting patiently to cross to her car. A car whizzed in off the street and into the parking lot at a speed far greater than the posted speed limit sign. “Hey, girlie,” Anna’s voice came from the other line, but Liadan’s attention wasn’t on it. It was on the rapidly unfolding scene in front of her. It was on the young woman with headphones in, who had stopped in the middle of the road after dropping her bag and its contents spilled all over the concrete. Her attention was on the fact that the woman didn’t see the car coming because she was squatted low, reaching for a rolled away tampon. Liadan could see that the driver didn’t see her, either. Liadan could hear someone yelling just as the young woman in the street looked up. Other people who had been in the lane had run in all different directions and Liadan remained on the curb, only a few feet away. Time seemed to slow down and the hair on her arms stood on end as a sort of static electricity filled the air. She watched as the car abruptly halted right in front of the woman, its back wheels going up into the air at the suddenness of the stop. And then just like that, the hair on her head flew forward as if a gust of wind had blown from behind her. Time went back to moving regularly, but so much louder. People were talking all at once, and the driver was getting out of his car to come around and stare bewildered at the front of his vehicle. It took Liadan a moment to realize that the person that had been yelling was herself; her hand outstretched towards the incident as if that could have helped it. She stared at her hand, feeling it start to throb. She felt weak, watching everything play out around her, and it wasn’t just because it was one of those this-only-happens-on-TV moments. She felt as if something had been taken from her. Some force, some strong thought, something and she nearly dropped her phone. Her forgotten English paper lay at her feet, dropped and ignored by the hand that was still outstretched.