Clarity

by Kim Harrington

  “Thank goodness you’re here. Have I got news for you.” Milly pushed her way past Mom and into the room.

  “We’re in the middle of a reading, Milly,” I said.

  “This can’t wait.”

  Mom said, “This better be a matter of life and death.”

  Milly grinned. “Oh, it is.” Then she scratched her head. “Actually, not both. Just death.”

  I wasn’t too surprised. Every morning, Milly read the paper’s obituary section first.

  “Well, go on then,” Mr. Bingham said. “You’re taking up time we paid for. This better be good.”

  Milly widened her eyes. “There was a murder at King’s Courtyard!”

  My hand flew to my chest. I’d expected Milly to have gossip about some hundred-year-old person passing away in his sleep. Not a murder. So that explained the police and ambulance earlier. My heart beat wildly under my hand.

  Perry sank back in his chair. The interruption had torn his medium connection to Mrs. Bingham’s mother, no doubt. “How do you know?”

  “Well, Ed Farmington had one of his garden gnomes stolen again so he went down to the police station to file a report. They wouldn’t even talk to him! They told him to come back tomorrow because they were too busy right now. So, naturally he stuck around for a while to get some information.”

  “Eavesdrop,” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever.” Milly paused for a moment to catch her breath, then continued. “A teenage girl was found murdered in her room at King’s Courtyard. Shot!”

  I felt my insides squeeze. Someone around my age. Killed. Here.

  Perry nervously rubbed his palm back and forth over his chin. “Do they know who did it or why?”

  “Not as far as I know. Rumor has it her wallet was right there on the nightstand with money still in it.”

  “Was she a local or a tourist?” Mom asked, worry creasing her forehead.

  “A tourist,” Milly said softly.

  Perry and I shared a glance. The ramifications were now much bigger. Anxiety burned in my stomach.

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” Mrs. Bingham said.

  Mr. Bingham said, “Hey, you guys are supposedly psychic. Why didn’t you see that coming and warn the girl?”

  Mom sighed. “Again, we don’t see the future.”

  “Yeah. You’re a bunch of frauds.”

  I’d had it. My frustration boiled over. I turned to Mrs. Bingham. “Do you know a Jane Sutherland?”

  Confusion swept over her delicate features. “Yes, she used to be my husband’s secretary before he was laid off. What about her?”

  “He wasn’t laid off. He was fired. The company has rules against boinking your secretary, even though your husband apparently has no qualms with the matter.”

  “Clarity!” Mom screamed.

  Mom pulled on my arm while my brother tried to pull her away from me. Mrs. Bingham ran out in tears with Mr. Bingham following and yelling about us being liars and frauds. Milly snuck out on her tiptoes. Our next appointment — a young couple — walked in, gazed openmouthed at the chaos before them, and walked out. It wasn’t even eleven a.m. yet. I hadn’t even had breakfast. But this is my life.

  Welcome to the freak show.

  THREE

  AROUND THE AGE WHEN MOST MOTHERS SIT WITH their kids to talk about how babies are made, my mom sat my brother and me down and warned us about our impending freakdom.

  “There’s no guarantee you’ll be blessed,” she’d said, rubbing her hands together in excitement. “But considering your lineage, I figured it’s time to tell you what to look for.”

  My mother and father were originally from a small town in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts that calls itself a “spiritualist community.” Everyone in town claims to have some sort of paranormal ability, and the most gifted families are encouraged to interbreed to keep the genes strong. Some marriages are even arranged.

  My mother and father came from “good stock” — meaning the freakage went back several generations. There was no way to predict how my twisted DNA would reveal itself. The only constant from our people seemed to be the fact that abilities emerged in puberty.

  I’d always known about my mother’s gift. I couldn’t get away with anything, for one. When I was little, Mom would always know when I was lying. Perry, being two years older and wiser, filled me in on some of his Mom-blocking tricks before I could get myself into too much trouble. So when Mom told Perry and me that we may have special abilities, too, it wasn’t anything kooky to me. It was just a fact, like any other inherited trait.

  Mom had explained that our gifts were like any other talent. Some people are born with a great singing voice or athletic ability and they only need to practice and nurture that talent, and it would bloom. Same with us. After our gifts began to emerge, my mother helped us identify, harness, and utilize them, just as her mother did for her. We realized what Perry’s gift was when, at age twelve, he simply told Mom that Grandma said hi. Grandma being dead was the first clue.

  When I was eleven, during a parent-teacher conference, my teacher told Mom that I wasn’t concentrating well lately and she feared I wasn’t living up to my potential. Most mothers would be worried. Mine was ecstatic. She came home and questioned me, trying to get to the bottom of the problem. I admitted I’d been having trouble. I kept finding myself pulled into daydreams, most of which made no sense to me. I had no idea that this could be my ability beginning to emerge.

  I experienced my first vision in front of my entire sixth-grade class. After Cody Rowe completely messed up an easy math problem on the whiteboard, the teacher dismissed him and asked me to come up and give it a try. I hated being the center of attention, but trudged to the front of the room as told. With trembling fingers, I erased Cody’s wrong answer. I uncapped the marker and found myself slightly disoriented from the strong smell and the feeling of twenty stares on my back. I closed my eyes, hoping to calm my nerves, then realized I’d forgotten the math problem I was supposed to solve. I tried hard to remember and then the answer came to me. I wrote it on the board, with my eyes still closed, then stepped back to look at my work.

  First came the snickers, then full-on laughter when the teacher ordered me back to my seat. I’d rewritten Cody’s wrong answer. I was so confused. Math had always come easily to me. Sitting in the safety of my desk, I knew what the right answer was, and didn’t understand why I’d written something different. I didn’t realize that the “answer” my mind retrieved wasn’t my own, but the one Cody had come up with minutes before while holding the same marker.

  Once Mom explained my gift to me, she helped me to control it, and I learned to decipher the real and the now from the visions of the past.

  Right now, though, standing in our foyer with the Binghams gone, I wished we were just a normal family, with normal family problems.

  Mom was on a rampage. She was angry with me for blurting out Mr. Bingham’s secret and breaking our “no bad news” policy. I was too rattled by Milly’s report of the murder to defend myself. I took my scolding from Mom until she turned to Perry.

  “You came stumbling in here after midnight last night. I heard you,” Mom said, pointing her finger at his chest.

  “He’s a man now,” I said, standing up for him. “He’s eighteen, and he graduated. He can stay up past twelve on a summer night if he wants to.”

  “Not if he’s so tired the next day he can barely concentrate on work. This may be a family business but it’s still your job!” Mom was raving, arms flailing through the air.

  Perry didn’t seem tired to me. Mom probably only knew he was from picking up on his thoughts. But I didn’t want to interrupt her tirade further by pointing this out.

  “It’s unprofessional,” she yelled. “Both of you have been totally unprofessional.”

  Mom stormed into the kitchen, accidentally crushing the bag of food I’d left on the floor and was counting on for a late-breakfast-slash-early-lunch. Perry followed her, then came
back a minute later, texting on his phone. When he was done, he took my elbow and led me to the front door.

  “We reached the point of no return with Mom,” he said, opening the door. “She needs some time.”

  “We can’t just leave,” I said. “What about the appointments?”

  “You mean the appointment you just scared away? We have an hour free now, thanks to you.”

  I groaned and buried my face in my hands. Then I grudgingly followed Perry to his car and got into the passenger seat.

  Perry pulled out and joined the line of traffic.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To meet Nate at Yummy’s. I’m starving. Plus, it will give Mom some time to cool off. We’ll eat, chat, and by the time we get back for the next appointment Mom will be chill.”

  I nodded, knowing he was right. We rode in silence past gift shops, a pirate-themed mini-golf course, rose-trellised cottages, and clapboard-sided Capes until we reached the restaurant.

  Yummy’s started out thirty years ago as a breakfast-only diner. After the addition of a large dining room, an outdoor patio, and a bar, it was now Eastport’s most popular eating and drinking establishment. Tourists loved the chowder. Townies loved the bar. Kids loved the hot-fudge sundaes. And teens loved to use Yummy’s as a hangout. It was our Peach Pit, except we didn’t wear designer clothes and drive Ferraris. Eastport was far from 90210.

  As soon as Perry and I entered, Nate waved to us from a booth, and we sauntered over. Yummy’s décor was overwhelming. Lobster traps suspended from the ceiling. Anchors in corners. Giant fish on the walls. Framed bragging photos of deep-sea catches. And, of course, bright blue Yummy’s T-shirts for sale. The tourists ate that stuff up.

  Perry shoved Nate aside, and I sat on the opposite side of the table.

  “How’s it going, Clare?” Nate asked. His unusually bright green eyes twinkled when he smiled.

  “It’s going, Nate.” I nodded toward the menu. “What looks good?”

  He winked. “The waitress.”

  Perry laughed at him. “Dork.”

  As long as I could remember, Nate Garrick had been Perry’s best friend. He lived down the street, and they’d been through everything together: their Star Wars phase, their skateboarding phase, their discovery of girls. But Nate wasn’t quite the womanizer Perry was; he was more the academic type. Nate wrote for the school paper and had done such a good job this year that he’d scored an internship at the local paper for the summer. He was headed off to college in the fall, majoring in journalism.

  I considered Nate as much my friend as he was Perry’s. I’d been hanging out with the two of them even more since I’d broken up with my boyfriend. I didn’t really have friends of my own, but Perry and Nate never made me feel like a third wheel.

  I glanced at the menu, even though I pretty much had it memorized by this point. Yummy’s specialty was fresh seafood, which doesn’t appeal to me. Yes, I live on the Cape and don’t eat seafood. It’s a crime, I know. Thankfully they also served breakfast all day so when the waitress came, I ordered a short stack of blueberry pancakes and hoped the boys wouldn’t order anything too stinky. My silent chant of “no clams, no clams, no clams” must have worked because they both ordered burgers and fries.

  “So what gives?” Nate asked Perry. “When I called you about an early lunch, you said you guys were booked.”

  Perry grinned. “Clare had one of her foot-in-mouth moments that freed us up for an hour.”

  “Well lucky me,” Nate said.

  I leaned back in the booth. “Glad my inability to hold my tongue could bring you boys together.”

  “Did you hear about the murder?” Nate asked.

  I nodded. “Milly busted in during a reading and told us. Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be out there doing whatever it is reporters do?”

  “Gathering information to write a story?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m doing it. You’ll see.”

  The door opened, and a man I’d never seen before came in. Tall and broad-shouldered with tan skin and black hair, he was handsome for an older man. Just as I thought that, his younger clone walked in behind him. The younger guy’s walk oozed confidence and his body radiated heat. He wore low-slung jeans and a black T-shirt that clung just so to his muscular frame. As he walked past our booth, he glanced at me with his dark eyes and then cracked a small smile. I nearly melted right there in my seat.

  “Speaking of yummy,” I whispered.

  “He’s why I’m here,” Nate said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you swung that way, but you’ve got good taste, boy.”

  Nate rolled his eyes. “That’s Eastport’s new detective and his son.”

  I snuck a glance over my shoulder and watched them settle into a booth in the corner.

  “Supposedly he’s some hotshot from New York City, but he’s moved here full-time,” Nate said. “His son will be a senior this year.”

  A new hottie joining my school. Nice. “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “The detective is Anthony Toscano. His son is Gabriel.”

  Gabriel Toscano. Damn. Even his name was sexy.

  “What would a city hotshot want with a small-town gig?” Perry asked.

  Nate shrugged. “I’ll find that out when I talk to him.”

  “So that’s why you’re here,” Perry said.

  “Yep. Our new detective has established a routine already. Grilled cheese and fries for lunch every day at the same time at the same restaurant.”

  “So what are you waiting for?” I asked.

  “I’ll let him get his lunch first. No one wants to be bothered by a reporter when they’re hungry.”

  Just then, the waitress brought our drinks. I was about to take a sip of my Coke when I saw something floating at the top that wasn’t one of the ice cubes.

  “I think someone spit in my soda.”

  “What? No way,” Perry said.

  Nate slid my glass over to him and peered in. “Oh, that’s foul, man! Someone hocked a loogie in your Coke. Who would do that?”

  Our waitress seemed nice enough. I didn’t think I knew any of the cooks at Yummy’s. And then it hit me. I turned around and looked at the other waitress who was leaning against the bar. She waved, her hot pink plastic fingernails glinting in the sunlight. Tiffany Desposito. The Lex Luthor to my Superman. The Wicked Witch to my Dorothy. The Maleficent to my Sleeping Beauty. I’m not exaggerating.

  Tiffany Desposito is the queenpin of the Trifecta of Mean: Tiffany, Brooke, and Kendra. All three are blond, though only Brooke was born that way. They’re your typical mean girls, and during the school year, I was their daily target practice. For years it was only your garden-variety ostracism, name-calling (mostly variations of “freak”), and pranks. But this past year, for some reason, Tiffany amped up the torture and made it more personal. And now I was staring at her spit in my soda.

  “That bitch,” Perry said. “Do you want me to go over there?”

  “No, I’ll take care of this.”

  I marched over and slammed my glass on the mahogany bar.

  Tiffany fake-smiled. “A psychic and a medium walk into a bar. The psychic says …”

  “Screw you.”

  She frowned. “That’s not how the joke goes, Clare.”

  “You know where you can shove your joke. Just get me a new drink and try not to include any of your STD-laced body fluid in it this time.”

  Tiffany dumped the soda out and began to repour.

  “I’d like a whole new glass.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me, then grunted as she reached for a new glass. “So how’s Justin?” she asked.

  I wanted to use an upended stool to pole vault over the bar and gouge her eyes out. Instead I took a deep breath and talked myself through it.

  Remain calm.

  Don’t sink to her level.

  You are a classy girl.

  She is a psychotic skankbag.
<
br />   You are the better of the two. Act like it.

  Okay, now I was calm. “I don’t know how Justin is and I don’t care.”

  “Really?” she said. “I thought you cared about him a lot.”

  Maybe she’s suicidal? That’s why she keeps inviting me to kill her? I fumbled with the coaster in front of me to keep my hands busy, since all they wanted to do at that moment was wrap themselves around her neck.

  Then, suddenly, a shadowy flash came to me. Tiffany, taking an order, arguing with a girl. Shockingly, not me. Another flash, of Detective Toscano walking into Yummy’s minutes ago. Tiffany nervously kneading a coaster between her fingers. The coaster I held in my hands right now.

  Tiffany was scared.

  Why was she scared of the cop?

  “Hey! Space shot! You want your Coke or not?”

  I tried to ignore Tiffany’s screeching and hold on to the vision, but it blurred and disappeared. I grabbed my new glass from her outstretched hand.

  “I heard you got into an argument last night,” I said.

  Tiffany paled, which I never thought possible since her skin was so fake-and-bake tan. She nervously twirled a lock of her bleach blond hair around a finger. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Doesn’t matter where I heard it.” I took a chance and added, “But it was pretty juicy gossip, considering who she was.”

  Tiffany’s pale face turned to green and I involuntarily took a step back, half expecting an Exorcist-style stream of vomit to shoot out of her gaping mouth. Instead, she narrowed her eyes and leaned closer. “Get away from me,” she growled.

  And then it became clear. My flash of her argument. Her fear of the detective. She’d argued with the girl who was murdered last night. And she did not want Detective Toscano to find out about it.

  I stepped away from the bar, giddy with my new knowledge. I had the upper hand on Tiffany Desposito. I could torture her with this. Drag it out. Hold it over her head for days, even weeks.