This is a Gift

What if I did that? No, I couldn’t have done that. I don’t know how to do that. Liadan was frozen to her spot, the only one not moving in the frenzy in front of her. People were spilling out of the school and crowding around on the curb. Someone thought to stop and help the young woman the car had almost hit, helping her with her bag and all its spilled contents. The driver was still staring at his car, his hands on his head and elbows out wide; his face was a mask of bewilderment. Blood trickled down his forehead - he must have hit it hard on the steering wheel with the sudden way the car stopped. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a little voice asked, did you hurt someone else by trying to do the right thing?

“Lia? Liadan? Are you there?” Ana was almost yelling through the phone. Liadan’s eyes moved first, looking all around her like she was a snitch scared for her life. Immediately she threw her arm behind her back, shielding it from all of the witnesses. Surely someone saw her do that. They wouldn’t know how, but she felt so exposed she couldn’t think straight. She clicked her phone off without replying, a cold sweat breaking out all over her body. Ana was going to be angry with her, but she couldn’t think about that now. She slid the phone in her book bag and stepped through the chaos of people. She could hear a siren in the distance. All she wanted to do was get out of that parking lot, the heat instantly not a comfort to her anymore. She felt like she couldn’t breathe and she wanted to leave before somehow, some way, someone connected the car stopping back to her; and they would because who else had stood there yelling like a maniac? She backed her way through the crowd, moving away from the pandemonium, leaving the paper on the ground to be trampled.

On a patch of grass, just on the other side of the building, Liadan dropped to her knees. Her fingers intertwined with blades of grass, and she focused her attention on taking slow deep breaths.

In and out. In and out.

She’d never had a panic attack before, but the signs were all there. Her left hand still tingled, though perhaps that was now because the short-clipped greenery was poking her palms and scratching the skin in between her fingers. It wasn’t possible, right? She had ordered the car to stop with a single thought, and it had. She was unnerved beyond a way to talk herself out of it. She sat there for what felt like forever, sirens blaring in the distance but steadily getting closer.

In and out. In and out.

She repeated the mantra until her breathing slowed and she felt safe to drive. No way did she want to stay at this school a moment longer than she needed to.

--

Standing off to the side, near some picnic tables, a young man with short, messy blonde hair watched the scene, but unlike the woman he had his arm around, he wasn’t surprised by the events. It wasn’t the first time he had seen something of this magnitude, but it was the first time he had seen the person who caused it look that shocked. He watched as she half walked, half ran to her car, her pink and white lace top sticking out like a sore thumb against the mostly black and tan cars in the parking lot. Her long brown hair was beginning to fall out of the hair pin holding it back, and she managed to drop her car keys twice before climbing into her car.

“Isn’t that freaky?” His girlfriend’s voice interrupted. “Aaron?” He looked down at his girlfriend, her dark hazel skin standing out against his lighter tones.

“Sure is. Like something from a movie,” he said, giving her a grin.

--

Another young man stood by the school door, mixed in with the crowd that came outside. He, like everyone else not in class, had witnessed the whole event. Unlike everyone else, he was disappointed the car had been stopped. His spot in the commons area inside the school was near a window, and he had watched the whole event happen like a personal show. He found it amusing that the one who had stopped the vehicle hadn’t intended to, but it also intrigued him. He stooped and picked up an abandoned English paper under his foot. The girl had dropped it when she extended her hand, an unnecessary motion for one as powerful as she appeared to be.

“Liadan Ryan,” he read aloud to himself. “You could be far more special than you realize.”

---

When Liadan pulled into her driveway, somehow making it home in one piece, she sat in her car for a good five minutes. The Ryan household was in an older neighborhood, full of trees and elderly residents to match. It was the type of normal life Liadan had grown up with, and it felt absurd to be dealing with it now, in the wake of a startling example of how not normal she was. Lawn mowing services managed to put their children through college on the funds received from homeowners in this neighborhood alone and the current whirring sound of the lawnmowers graciously made sure that she could not sit alone with her thoughts. She just stared straight ahead, the panic still too fresh in her mind, her heartbeat picking up speed any time a single thought of what just occurred entered her mind. One of the men mowing the lawn passed by her window, mowing the neighbor’s yard; Liadan’s family didn’t employ them. The man ignored her presence as he went by, and she knew she should climb out of the car, lest she make those four wheels her home now. She wanted to make sure she was completely calm before she walked inside her home; she hadn’t given her mother the memo she’d mutated into her very own version of one of the X-Men yet. She hadn’t given anyone that memo. She could hear the buzzing in her messenger bag and instinctively knew it was Anna. She wasn’t going to answer the phone until her insides solidified from the jello they had turned into. Pulling down her visor, she wiped away any remnants of tears that had escaped her eyes. They didn’t look bloodshot and her skin wasn’t puffy yet. She could pull off being completely fine for the five minutes it took to yell “hello!” and run to the safety and solace of her bedroom. Her phone started buzzing again, but she was still choosing to ignore it. How could she tell anyone about this when she was just so confused? It wasn’t that she was all for keeping her secrets exactly, but how, really, does one break something like this to anyone? Just bringing it up at dinner didn’t seem ideal. It played out in her mind like a flashback on a sitcom:

“Can you pass the gravy? By the way, I can move things with my mind. You know what? Never mind, I’ll get that gravy myself.” Neither did mentioning it in passing:

“Headed to class now. Oh, and I heard what you were thinking about for dinner. I vote for the chicken. See ya!”

And anyway, she couldn’t explain it, and her mother would worry, and then there’d be a whole to-do over what they should do about it complete with constant check-ins about how she was doing and if things had gotten better. Secrecy? Sounded like a plan.

Liadan took a deep breath and opened the car door. Her home was the most eclectic on the block: it was a one story home, painted a cheery yellow. The orange Mexican tiles that made up the roof made it look like a sunflower. It had a bungalow style drooping attic, with a three paneled window in the middle of the house that faced the street. It could have been a room, except her parents did what most everyone did and used the attic for storage. The front porch was long and extended the length of the front side of the house. Planted in front of the porch, half to obscure the view of the bench that sat there, half because her mother actually used them, was a row of aloe vera and elderberry. The only other botanical feature of the home was one, lone palm tree in the front yard, located right by the mailbox. It made the Ryan household even more of an outlier, since trees lined most of the neighborhood.

The last architectural standout was one solitary window in the front of the house, located just on the other side of the front door. It was a modern square design, and if the curtains were open and you could stare into the house, you would be able to stare down the hallway that took you to the bedrooms. The hallway Liadan planned to immediately dart down and disappear into. She repeated the plan to herself as she grabbed her bag and walked towards the house: she’d say hello to her mother, tell her briefly how class went, and then run to her room. That was the intended outcome. She should have known that wouldn’t happen.

“Oh, good. You’re home. Ready to go?” Her mother sat on the front porch bench, smiling brightly at her daughter. She swung her sandaled feet cheerfully, breathing deeply in the warm early Autumn weather. Her mother was a hippie at heart; she neither hid nor denied it. She was just too young to be a part of the counterculture that coined the term. Dressed in a flowing sundress with tye-dye colors, she wore bracelets up and down each arm that clanked with every gesture and sunflower sunglasses already sitting on her face.

Liadan nearly dropped her bag. “Say what?”

Her mother looked a little dismayed. “The book sale. You promised you’d go with me!”

She really didn’t want to go, but in phase one of lying to your parents, you don’t decide not to go on trips you usually would have gone on. “Oh! Right! That one!” Liadan gave an overly dramatic response, arms spread wide before pretending to hit herself on the head. “I..tch..about…that…” She searched her mind for a way to get out of it so she could be by herself, but she came up short. “All right, let’s go.” Defeated, she turned on her heel, bookbag still swinging on her shoulder; off to the bookstore it was.

---

“We have a very serious problem,” he announced, by way of greeting. Aaron Glassner was young, blonde, and everything a high school jock would look like, the only hitch being that he wasn’t in high school nor a jock any longer. Still, the Abercrombie t-shirt and faded strategically in all the right places jeans were something of a throwback to his bygone lifestyle, if nothing else. He was standing in Professor Craven’s classroom, staring at the older man as he gathered his own things. The professor regarded Aaron before responding. Aaron was not a man of patience, as to-the-point as someone could possibly be, and overreactions were not far from the realm of responses Aaron was likely to give.

“What is it?” The professor finally asked. He continued to pack the items he needed, sitting in his desk chair.

“That girl,” Aaron replied, using his head to gesture towards the door. “The one in your class. She did something just now.” He adjusted his backpack strap on his shoulder, clearly agitated.

The siren noises had long since faded but the emergency lights still illuminated the windows. Max hadn’t seen what happened to cause their arrival, but passing colleagues told him that there were rumors of a car stopping by itself. The physics teacher had been the most intrigued by that, but figured it could have been a fortunate malfunction of an electric vehicle – though the car in question had been a 2015 Mazda.

“I have many girls in my class, Aaron, you’ll have to be more specific.” The professor replied, clasping his briefcase.

“The one you told me to follow.” Aaron gritted his teeth. “With the earrings.” He gestured towards his ears, waving his hand exasperatedly. “Max, she’s got more than one power and she seems skittish. I think she’s a new Channel.”

“She is not a Channel, and you know that.” Aaron frowned in response, so the older man continued, “Don’t you think I would know if a Channel was in my classroom?”

“Max, come on. Why else would she…” A pause. “You don’t think?” His eyebrows furrowed in thought before they deepened in frustration. “Is that why you have me following her? Did you know about this?”

Professor Craven lifted an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t respond to Aaron’s questions. “Your faith in me is precious little if you think I would have you trail a Channel and not at least warn you.” The professor stood up and put a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “You know what you need to do.”

---

The distance from people, sitting in a back corner of the store, her nose in a book about feminism and the internet: it was doing more for Liadan than anything else had – that is, until she became very aware of someone watching her. This, just like all the other freaky things that had been happening, were beginning to have a sense of distressing familiarity. It brought all the memories of the first time she had had this sensation.

First day of classes, standing in line, trying to figure out where her class was, when she thought she heard the girl next to her comment on Liadan’s perfume.

“I’m sorry?” The girl had said, when Liadan told her thank you. The girl stared at her. “How did you know I liked your perfume?” It was then that Liadan had become aware of everyone around her in that moment staring at her, something that she realized, in hindsight, was getting a little too common. She caught eyes with a guy still wearing his high school letterman jacket across the lobby watching her. After Liadan had shrugged and played it off as a good guess and tried to hurriedly get to her class, she’d stopped in front of his table by a mixture of coincidence and also because of its proximity to her first class. She took calming deep breaths to make sure she didn’t look like a total idiot when she walked into her classroom. She’d felt his eyes on her and she’d turned to say something to him, but he was gone. There was no way he could have left without her feeling his passing or seeing him go, and just moments before she knew he’d been there in her peripheral vision. She’d looked all around, but by then he was nowhere to be seen. After that, the sensation of being watched came and went. Retrospectively speaking, it was the least weird thing to have happened since school started.

Now, in this obscure mom and pop used bookstore, Liadan was feeling it again. She gave herself a little shake, feeling the peace sign earrings hit her chin briefly. It’s my imagination, she thought, and the guy with the devotion to his old high school who crossed her path once a day was merely coincidence. Coincidences, however, don’t happen that often, and even her frenzied mind was having a hard time playing this off. The more she thought about it, the more uncomfortable she began to feel. The serenity she had found in her corner with a book was no longer the safe space she had felt it was. If this was a precursor of things to come, she wasn’t so sure how much longer she could live like this. She felt her skin begin to crawl, and an electricity filled the air – like a television was left on. She shifted her position and briefly glanced around; hardly anyone was in the small building except her mother and an older woman looking at the stationary by the register.

Liadan jumped when her phone beeped. It was a text message from an unknown number: A little deep reading? I see you.

Immediately she clutched the phone to her chest, as if hiding that she saw the text erased the fact that it had been sent at all. No, she definitely couldn’t live like this much longer.

---

Going to work after the day she had was a cruel torture. Liadan would have called out, had she not been dependent on her hourly wage and if she had had a reason other than “Hey, yeah, really weird day I’m having with thinking I might be a freak of nature. You really don’t want me around kids! Also, I think I’m being stalked?” The extra sprinkling of painful was her job was after-school childcare, and while listening to children explain the ever-changing rules of games they made up required a lot of attention on a good day, it was excruciating when half of her attention was on looking over her shoulder, checking her phone anytime it vibrated, and making sure she didn’t accidentally set a kid on fire or whatever else power she might suddenly develop and then not have a clue how to turn it on and off. Eventually, she solved one problem and just turned her phone off.

Later, after she got home from work, Liadan stood in her bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror. She leaned across the counter, over eyeshadow palettes and foundation brushes, so that right up close she was looking at her face and studied her reflection. She certainly didn’t look like an alien. Her gray eyes didn’t seem any different than they had before, albeit with the remains of black eye liner she hadn’t been so thorough about removing from under her almond shaped eyes. She wiped at it, the skin pulling lightly underneath. Her coloring still had the vampiric, never-seen-the-sun pallor she’d come to associate with herself, and the skin was clear but lately had begun to look more tired and unexciting. She used a finger and poked at her cheek, too, pushing the skin up so that it scrunched her eyes. The flesh bounced back into shape. Nothing seemed unfamiliar there. Her hair was a disaster in itself, but that was business as usual. She had always considered herself rather feminine, but not much could be done for the wavy chestnut strands that hung around her face like indifference personified. She had started the day with a few strands pinned behind her ear. It had given her a nice girl look, which she had counteracted with the black winged eyeliner. A little mystery to the innocence. Maybe that had become her life now: a little (addendum: a lot) perplexity to her inexperience.

That sounded ridiculous. This was exactly why she didn’t get an A on her paper. Liadan pulled away from the mirror in exasperation and her cat jumped up where she had been on the counter, knocking off some stray lipsticks and eyeliners. Absently she began stroking him, still looking at herself as if eventually she would find the answer to her current predicament. Her dark hair wasn’t standing on end from her radiating electricity, and it wasn’t changing color. Her reflection wasn’t telling her anything except that she looked the exact same on the outside as she did last month. She left the bathroom and walked down the hall, past her brother’s bedroom, and entered hers. She sat down on her bed with the plan to work on math problems; but who could think about math when you could stop cars with your mind? Ironically, she couldn’t wrap her brain around the concept, and yet…. And yet she had seen it with her very own eyes. Had watched as the car sped towards that woman, watched as all three of them stopped, the car, the woman, Liadan; watched as the car’s back wheels went into the air as the force of its sudden stop sent it up. Now it was playing over in her mind like a motion picture, and she could feel her heartbeat increase as the anxiety from that moment started to kick in.

“Okay, STOP,” she said out loud, squeezing her eyes tight and startling the cat that lay at her feet. “Think about your schoolwork, and the things that really matter, like not failing all of your classes,” she told herself firmly, but was startled by her phone suddenly ringing. Rock music filled her room, breaking the not so quiet silence, and she jumped up to grab it, reading the caller I.D.

Ana.

Liadan frowned; she’d never called Anna back. She was probably wondering what the hell was going on. I’ll tell you, Liadan thought to herself sardonically. I’m cursed. That’s the only logical explanation. Someone has put a spell on me.

“Hello?”

“Hey, kid. What happened earlier?” Liadan could tell from the sound of Anna’s voice she wasn’t gonna let it drop so easily. Such were best friends. Anna continued. “You answered and then there were gasps and screams and tires screeching in the background and your school was all over the news. I’ve been worried sick.”

“Oh, uh…..nothing. My phone accidentally dialed you,” Liadan offered weakly, trying to think of a quick lie.

“I called you.”

Damn.

“Did you…? That’s weird, I didn’t even hear my phone ring.”

“You are the worst liar ever.” Analise’s voice seemed amused but Liadan was sure she was not. “Lia. Come clean. What really happened? You were there, weren’t you? You saw it.”

Liadan didn’t respond to that. She really didn’t know what to say. “Liadan?”

“Yeah?” “What’s going on? You’re acting kind of strangely, and I’m seeing posts on social media about your school. People are saying it’s a prank, or a malfunction with a car dealer, and all sorts of weird things. Fill me in. You were there, weren’t you?”

Liadan’s heart beat fast in her chest. To tell or not to tell? She needed to get all of this off her chest to somebody because it was completely affecting her life.

“I may or may not have something on my mind right now,” she decided on saying, which was just vague enough to get Anna curious and ask to know what; and she did. “It’s kind of hard to explain, okay? When I know something, or when I’m ready, I’ll tell you. Can you just trust me on that?”

“You’re scaring me, Lia.”

I’m scaring myself.

---

Liadan didn’t know why she didn’t tell Analise. An hour after the phone call had ended, and she just sat on her bed, a simple twin size bed in the corner of her bedroom, staring at nothing at all. In truth, she didn’t want anyone to know she was a freak. Or to be as terrified of her as she was of herself. Telepathic. Her. Yeah, sure. Despite the doubt and denial, there was the nagging feeling tingling the back of her brain telling her she couldn’t deny it any longer. In all her classes when she had heard people talking when clearly nobody had been, and what about all those times when she knew what someone was going to say before they said it? No, she shook her mane of not curly, not straight hair. No – another shake, because shaking herself multiple times a day would shake the crazy out of her – no, it had to be an elaborate joke at her expense. Somehow. By someone. She didn’t know who.

Telekinesis, what about that one? The power only seemed to work when she wasn’t trying, just thinking about something happening for her. Maybe she should practice, but the shiver of panic she felt immediately told her not to. Although, being able to do her makeup without her hands would make the morning rush not so much of a rush… All doubt disappeared from her mind as her jewelry box arose into the air. It was sitting next to her, atop the dresser. It was just a simple brown box, with drawers and a dinky little mirror. It started to turn in the air, and the drawers began sliding out. Her eyes went wide and she was sure she stopped breathing. The jewelry box abruptly dropped, and so did Liadan onto the back of the bed. That night, she slept with the lights on.

---

A few days later, Liadan was in her math class. Jotting down notes, trying to memorize formulas, be normal. A regular college student because that’s what she was: a regular college student. Right? Right. She looked up to read the chalkboard, where the foreign language that was algebra formulas was displayed. Her eyes flickered to the door. It was the typical classroom door, wooden with a small rectangular window with a view to the hallway. The same blonde, by-gone jock she’d seen so many times around campus walked by. He was looking in as he went, his eyes entirely on her. There was a moment when their eyes met that he tried to pretend he wasn’t looking for her by glancing around the rest of the room, but Liadan knew; it was too much of a coincidence that wasn’t really a coincidence. Class ended thirty minutes later without another walk-by, so Liadan picked up her books and left the classroom in a hurry, deciding to look for the man herself. Since most classes began and ended around the same time, there was a crowd of students in the hallway. She kept walking, searching all the different faces, hair, and clothing, not paying any attention to where she was going: and walked right into someone. A very tall and slender someone. She fell backwards, her books falling to the floor with loud claps, and her purse slid off of her shoulder, hitting the floor at the same time she did.

“Ouch,” she muttered, thinking that this school was never going to see her as anything other than a loser, and looked up to apologize to whomever she had walked into. “I’m sorry,” she managed to spit out, looking up at the guy she’d collided with.

He laughed in response, but it didn’t seem to be a happy laugh. There was something wrong with it, as if he was an actor trying to do it on cue but not because he felt it. He squatted and began helping gather her books. This close she could see his eyes were an unusual shade of brown: a vivid golden hue. His outfit was well put together, with a button down white and sage green shirt, the sleeves rolled to just below his elbows. His pants were a pristine shade of white, and his short dark hair was perfectly coiffed. He had loafers and a rolex as finishing touches.

“No problem. I should know to move out of the way when pretty girls are coming my way.”

Now it was Liadan’s turn to laugh. “Wow. Aren’t we a flirt.” She tried to take her books from him and ignore the fact that her hands were stinging from crashing into the rough carpet of the hallway.

The guy nodded in response and offered his impeccably manicured hand. “I’m Julian, and you are?”

“Liadan,” she replied, and took his hand to shake. Like his laugh, there was something wrong with his touch. It wasn’t a warm nor cold touch. It just was; and it made her hand tingle. “It’s a pleasure, Liadan. I consider meeting you an accomplishment. Really.” Julian smiled at her, giving her an intense look, and suddenly her head felt foggy, as if every thought she’d ever had was enveloped in smoke. Memories started to surface as if someone else had pulled them from her very mind, from riding her first bike to when she first heard other’s thoughts. The car accident came floating back. Liadan closed her eyes tight, still sitting on the floor, hoping that would rid her of the feeling, and as she opened them again to look up at Julian to offer him an explanation (if she could even think of one), the sensation just as suddenly stopped and Julian gave her a broad grin. She realized she was standing. She looked around her at the floor, as if somewhere down memory lane there was one she missed for standing up. There was something about this guy she didn’t like; something that didn’t fit just right. She stared at him, trying to figure out exactly what it was, and didn’t even realize someone else had walked up until Julian looked up. “Do you need help?” The blonde stranger from outside her classroom was there, unwelcome touch on her elbow even though she was not firmly on two feet. Julian grabbed her other elbow, just as unwelcome. She might have been flattered that two eligible young males seemed determined to be the one to help her, except that she didn’t need help, didn’t ask to be touched, and from the glares they were giving each other it seemed she was only an object caught in the middle of a silent rivalry. There was even a moment that the three of them stood there, both men still holding her elbows, too intent on the other to recognize she no longer needed their assistance. The tension between them was astounding; it was like crackling electricity. All Liadan could do was stand there and wonder how exactly she had gotten herself into this situation and how exactly she was going to get herself out. She could force her arms free, but neither one was very light in their grip. As she looked between the two of them, they both let go of her at the same moment and maintained their glares, their eyes locked on the other as if they were willing the other to fall to the ground in convulsions.

Finally, Julian broke the stare down. “I’ll be sure to remember you, Liadan Ryan.” He said, raising his eyebrows in a quick, flirtatious movement, and walked off. Liadan nodded slowly in response, and then turned to address the blonde guy, about to ask his name. His wavy hair half covered his eyes, his square jaw set in a grimace, his attention following Julian as he left. His shoulders were broader than Julian’s, hidden though they were under a letterman jacket. If it had come down to a fight, her money would be on him; his hands were not nearly so high maintenance. In fact, though his fists were clenched, they were shifting in and out of focus. At first she thought it was just her imagination, but then his hands disappeared completely for two whole seconds before reappearing. “Hey, what’s wrong with your hand?” She asked, unable to tear her eyes away.

The young man jerked his hands up, looking at them in alarm, and then mumbled something about not feeling well before jogging down the hallway and around the corner.

“Hey, wait!” She called, but he was gone before she even had a chance to blink. She sighed, dismayed, and then realized.

She never told Julian her last name.