2 Empath

by Edie Claire

  The shadows disappeared.

  I stood still for a moment, staring at my shoes, which a second ago had been obscured by a dust-caked prairie skirt. The guilt, the fear, the mindboggling fury… it was all gone again.

  Just like that.

  “Are you okay?” Kylee said softly, approaching my side.

  “I’m fine,” I answered mechanically.

  “From the look on your face,” she said sympathetically, “that must have been pretty dramatic.”

  I felt a strange surge of joy. I looked up again. A man three feet away lifted a crown of lacey fabric up and over a woman’s head. Her freckled young face smiled shyly. He kissed her. His blood thundered in his veins with anticipation.

  A wedding.

  They were gone.

  “Kali?”

  I could only shake my head in answer. A church and a school, built in the middle of nowhere and never rebuilt after the fire. So many emotional moments and events crammed into a relatively small area of earth over a relatively short period of time… yet for the entire rest of history, it had been just another patch of ground on the plains.

  It was practically like a time capsule.

  I focused on where I thought desks might have been, searching the air for shadows of students. It felt strange. I wasn’t used to looking for shadows.

  I saw nothing else.

  No students. No abusive teacher. No tying to chairs or beating with lunch pails. No fire. Just one inexplicable catfight and a man who was anxious for his honeymoon.

  “I think that’s it,” I announced. “At least for now.”

  I whirled around with a satisfied smile. Kylee blinked back at me, her dark eyes brimming with curiosity. Tara looked mildly ill.

  “Tell us!” Kylee urged with a squeal. “Tell us everything!”

  And so I did.

  When I finished, Kylee was speechless with awe. Which was a little weird, since Kylee was rarely speechless about anything. But what bothered me more was the fact that Tara looked like something dug up from the cemetery. She always had a fair complexion, but at the moment, she appeared to have no blood.

  “Tara!” I cried, moving over and shaking her arm. “What is wrong with you? Are you okay?”

  Her blue eyes turned slowly my direction. Her lips trembled. “No,” she answered feebly. “No, I am not okay.”

  Kylee came to her other side. “Do you feel sick?”

  Tara took a step backward, stumbled slightly, then dropped down to sit on one of the foundation stones. “It can’t be. It just can’t.”

  “What can’t be?” I demanded. “I told you I saw weird crap!”

  Tara swallowed. “Yeah, you did. But it could have—” her voice broke off. She stared at the former center of the schoolhouse with a glazed look in her eyes. “Only it couldn’t be. You couldn’t—” She stopped herself again. Then after another moment, she uttered a very un-Taralike word.

  “Tara!” Kylee chastised. “What is your problem?”

  “This didn’t turn out like I thought,” she answered. “Kali was supposed to see… you know… what the legend says.”

  “I don’t always see everything that happens in a place,” I explained. “In fact, I usually don’t. Just because I don’t see the shadow of something in particular doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!”

  Tara swung her head around to face me. Her voice steadied. “But it didn’t happen, Kali. That’s just it. The whole story about the kids mutinying against a teacher — it’s not true.”

  “And you know this how?” Kylee challenged.

  Tara frowned. “It’s perfectly well documented, if you make the effort. Striker’s Schoolhouse has been written about more than once in the last hundred years — just not lately. There are archives: local newspapers and magazines. It was even mentioned in one guy’s thesis I dug up from the 70s, as an example of how local legends get started and then assume a life of their own, no matter what the facts.”

  My knees felt wobbly. I dropped down on a stone next to Tara. “So…” I prompted. “If the legend was wrong, what did happen? What caused the fire?”

  “The legend was wrong on several counts,” Tara explained. “The church/school building burned down in 1887, that much is true. It’s also true that a woman’s body was found inside, and that that woman had been the schoolteacher. But that’s about it. There’s nothing in the earliest articles about the fire to show that the school children had anything to do with it. One source mentioned that the kids made wreaths for her tombstone and sang songs at her funeral.”

  “So why was she in the schoolhouse when it burned?” Kylee asked. “Was she locked inside accidentally or something?”

  “That question is what started the mystery about her death,” Tara continued. “They couldn’t find any evidence that the door was locked. Besides, her body wasn’t found by the door, like she was trying to escape. It was found on the other side of the room, where her desk had been.”

  My eyes followed Tara’s to the spot in the foundation where I had just been standing. I felt another chill.

  “You mean,” Kylee suggested, “that she might have been dead before the fire?”

  “That was the theory,” Tara answered. “Because even though the kids seemed to like the teacher just fine, she had issues with the rest of the community. Home-wrecking issues. Rumor had it that she was having an affair with a married man. They didn’t come right out and say that in the papers, of course. But the language about “suspected moral turpitude” made it pretty clear. The guy writing the thesis found evidence that some men in the community had gotten together a few weeks after the fire and debated whether a particular woman should be turned over to the authorities. It wasn’t specific about who or why, but it was clearly related to the teacher’s death. They ended up not doing anything. And that was the end of it. Of the real story, anyway.”

  Tara’s pained blue eyes looked into mine. “You saw it, Kali,” she said quietly. “You didn’t know any of that, but everything you saw fits those facts exactly. A vicious attack by a jealous wife. Maybe she strangled the teacher to death. Maybe the teacher hit her head on the way down and was knocked unconscious or something. But the desk would have been right there.” She pointed to the spot where I had watched the scene unfold. “And that’s where her body was found. Her murderer almost certainly torched the place afterward, to cover it up.”

  The expression on Tara’s face was sheer misery.

  I didn’t know what to say to her. “I might have been seeing something else,” I suggested lamely. “The girl who got attacked looked too young to be a teacher. She was our age!”

  Tara turned to face me. “Sarah Plimpton, the teacher in question, is buried in this cemetery, right over there.” She pointed. “She was seventeen years old.”

  This time, it was Kylee who said the bad word.

  “Tell me about it,” Tara agreed.

  “No!” Kylee insisted, dropping down to sit beside us. “I mean, this is like, so amazing! It proves everything! Kali, you’re a miracle. You’re like a human window to the past. How totally cool is that?”

  I couldn’t speak. I was too worried about Tara having a heart attack.

  “I thought it was…” Tara mumbled, looking at the ground again. “But it couldn’t be. If the images were coming from inside your head, you would have responded to Kylee’s suggestions. You would have seen something from the story. But you didn’t. Despite what your conscious brain thought to be true, you saw stuff that didn’t agree. You saw…” her voice cracked. “You saw what really happened.”

  She spoke the words as if pronouncing a death sentence.

  “Passed your little test with flying colors, didn’t she?” Kylee said lightly. “That’s what all this was about, wasn’t it? A test?”

  Tara nodded stiffly. She turned to me. “I’m sorry, Kali. Please don’t be mad at me. I was just so sure… and I thought maybe it would make you feel better if we could find a scientific explanation.”
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br />   “You mean it would make you feel better,” Kylee accused. “Kali is cool with the supernatural. It’s always been a part of her life. How could she not be?”

  Cool with the supernatural, I thought to myself. Was I? Just a month ago, I would have said No with a capital N. But now?

  As much as I shrank from the idea of having some assigned cosmic role that I didn’t want to play, it was equally disheartening to think that everything I had gone through — and still went through — had no purpose at all. Could this sensitivity of mine have some practical use? Clearly, I could not change history. But could my ability to see the shadows affect the present? What if the people in that village in Vietnam had believed the man like me?

  Before Zane faded away from me in Oahu he had begged me to look at my abilities as a gift, to be honest with my family and friends. He wouldn’t even remember saying those things now, but he had been right. Despite the rough reactions from both Tara and my dad, I did feel better now. Less like a freak. Less alone.

  More cool with the supernatural?

  Maybe.

  “It’s okay,” I said, getting up. The shadows might repeat any time now, and despite the new and intriguing thoughts swirling inside my head, I really wasn’t up to that. “Look, guys, this has been fun and all. But could we just, like, go get some ice cream or something?”

  Kylee leapt up with a grin. “We’ll do better than that. We’ll get a quart of vanilla and a bunch of toppings and make suicide shakes in my blender.” She reached down and grabbed Tara’s arm. “Come on, you hopeless skeptic,” she said good-naturedly. “You’ve had a shock, but you’ll survive.”

  Tara rose without complaint and followed us to the car, walking like a zombie.

  “I think I’ll drive this time,” Kylee announced, taking the keys and getting in the driver’s door. Tara shuffled to the back, got in, buckled, and sat staring blankly forward. I slid into the passenger seat next to Kylee.

  “Tara?” I said worriedly. The girl still had no blood in her face. “You going to be all right?”

  “Peachy,” she mumbled.

  “Don’t worry,” Kylee told me. “We’ll throw an energy drink in her shake.” She started the car and pulled back out onto the road. “It is kind of a sad story,” she said sympathetically. “I mean, a teenaged girl takes her first teaching job, and her reward is to get whacked by some crazy paranoid farmer’s wife?”

  “The wife was crazy,” I agreed. “But she wasn’t paranoid.”

  Kylee’s eyes widened. “You mean, the teacher was messing around with the other woman’s husband?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “But how do you know that?”

  I remembered again the girl’s feeling of terror, and how absurdly mixed it was with anticipation and a certain macabre excitement. She felt guilty, but not that guilty. She felt… smug. As if she knew she’d done wrong, but expected to get away with it. Even deserved to get away with it.

  Miss Sarah Plimpton had been a serious piece of work.

  “I can’t really explain how I know,” I answered, marveling at my own certainty. “Some things, you just have to feel.”

  Chapter 6

  My mother watched me with an amused smile twitching at the corner of her lips. “You could always just call him, you know.”

  I slipped my phone self-consciously back into my pocket. Yes, I checked it occasionally, just in case I had gotten a text but didn’t hear the ringtone. Maybe I checked it often. And just maybe I had gotten into the habit of staring at it mournfully every other second of every waking moment of the day. What of it?

  “Mom,” I reminded her with frustration. “Nobody calls anybody anymore.” To give her credit, my mother was reasonably well up to date on the real world, despite the fact that she and my dad were older than the parents of most kids my age. She was a technical writer, so she was computer savvy, and she did text and send pics. But some things, she would never get. Like the fact that it was perfectly okay to go around with your bra straps showing, but that it was not okay — under any circumstances — to wear jeans with an elastic waistband.

  “Of course not,” she teased. “Why would you call, when you can take six times as long sending short little typed messages back and forth with no nuance or context?”

  “I cannot just call him,” I explained. “It would be too awkward. I don’t have anything to say.”

  My mother gave a shrug. “Maybe he feels like he doesn’t have anything to text. After all, he’s probably not doing much besides physical therapy. I imagine it will take quite a while for him to recover his strength. Oh, look at this one. How pretty!”

  She held up a cream-colored formal with delicate spaghetti straps and an unusual layered skirt that looked like it would float when you moved. It actually was really pretty. And I had been thrilled when my dad — of all people — insisted I buy myself a new dress for the upcoming junior/senior prom. It would be my first real formal dance. So why couldn’t I get excited about it? About any of the dresses we’d looked at?

  My mother hung the gown back up on the rack with a sigh. “Kali,” she said heavily. “For heaven’s sake, I know you miss this guy and you can’t stop wishing he was the one taking you to prom, but you can’t just put your whole life on hold! You should be enjoying these last few months in Cheyenne with your friends.”

  I hated it when my mom read my mind.

  I hated it even more when she was right.

  “So has Dad mentioned anything about… you know?” I asked, changing the subject.

  My mother frowned. “No, I’m afraid he’s still not ready to talk about it. He’s worried about you, and he wants to help, but he doesn’t know how. He can’t wrap his mind around what you told him, and his way of coping with things that he can’t act on is not to think about them.”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. “Maybe it’s better that way. Scientific minds seem to need their happy little cut-and-dried boundaries.”

  “Any improvement with Tara?” she asked, reading me again.

  I shook my head. “She’s the same. Acts like everything’s fine, but doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said sympathetically. “Maybe she’ll still come around. Does she have a date to prom yet?”

  I shook my head again. It was a sore subject among the three of us. Kylee would be going with her current boyfriend, Eric, and she desperately wanted Tara to go with his best friend, Steve. But Tara was less than excited about it, and — perhaps because he could tell that — Steve hadn’t asked her yet anyway. I hadn’t been asked either, but two guy friends of mine had been hinting at it. They seemed to be waiting for some kind of encouragement, but I wasn’t capable of giving any. I didn’t want a “friend date.” Not this time. I would rather go alone. At least then I wouldn’t have to pretend I was enjoying myself.

  I took out my phone and stared at it again. Then I realized I had taken out my phone and stared at it again. I stuffed it angrily back into a hip pocket.

  Sheesh, this was bad. Zane did text, just not nearly as often as I wished he did. I missed him terribly and was always anxious to hear from him, but I had to get a grip on the anxiety of it all. If Kali Thompson did not go postal in seventeen years of seeing dead people, she was not going to lose it over some guy!

  Any guy.

  “I like this one!” I said with enthusiasm, pulling out the first dress I saw. Too bad it was bright orange with full ruffled sleeves, a high neck, and a gargantuan yellow daisy at the waist.

  “Really?” my mom asked, her face pained.

  I laughed out loud. “No. I hate it. But maybe this one over here—”

  My phone made a sound. It was the sound I heard in my dreams all night long.

  Zane’s ringtone. And it was ringing.

  I pulled the phone out so fast my butt cheek got friction burn. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Kali! What’s up?”

  My heart started beating like a jackhammer. The voice o
n the other end of the line was not the hoarse, thin croak I had heard back in Nebraska. It was the beautiful, smooth baritone that had warmed my days in Oahu like sunshine, and hearing it now took me back like a whirlwind to sandy beaches, blue water, swaying palms, and a brisk ocean wind.

  “H-hey,” I stammered back. “I’m just out, looking at… stuff. What’s up with you?” My mom stood four feet away, pretending to be focused on the clothing racks. I grabbed up two random gowns and headed for the dressing rooms.

  “Oh, same old, same old,” he answered cheerfully. “All physical therapy, all the time. I know you’ve been thinking about running your car head-on into a concrete overpass too, but I really wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds.”

  I grinned broadly. “But you know how I idolize you.”

  “Yeah,” he returned. “I know. But maybe you can imitate some of my surf moves instead.”

  “I should probably learn how not to drown, first.”

  “Chicken.”

  I laughed as I swung into a dressing room, closed the door, hung the gowns on a hook, and settled onto the wooden bench in the corner.

  “Seriously, are you feeling better?” I asked.

  “I am,” he answered. “Just bored out of my mind.”

  “Aren’t you studying for the GED?”

  “Oh, I passed that already.”

  My eyes rolled. He would pass the test after studying about two seconds. For all his efforts to act chill, he was obviously wicked smart.

  Call me crazy, but I liked that in a guy.

  “I’m applying to the University of Hawaii for fall term,” he added.

  I smiled. I would be spending my senior year of high school in Honolulu. Perfect.

  “Look, Kali,” he began, his tone suddenly becoming more serious. “We may get interrupted in a minute, but there’s something I wanted to… ask you about.”

  I tensed. “What’s that?”