But one particular day, I was more aggressive and far more specific about one of my visions because I wanted my friend Darlene Cork to be happy. I thought that if I could help her, she would become an even closer friend.
“If you really want Todd Wells to pay attention to you, Darlene,” I told her as casually as I could at lunch, “then let your hair down. Stop pinning it up so severely, and wear something red all the time, even if it’s just a ribbon in your hair.”
She froze, a forkful of mashed potato hovering in her wide-open mouth.
“What?” Ginny Lynch said, sitting back with a smile of amazement rumbling through her pretty face. Her almond-shaped, stunning hazel-green eyes brightened. “Wear something red all the time in order to catch Todd Wells’s attention? How do you know he likes that color? What do you really know about Todd Wells, Sage? He’s in the eleventh grade. When do you even speak to him? You just entered this school. And what does wearing red have to do with any of it anyway?”
All four of my friends waited for my reply. It wasn’t the first time I had suggested something for one of them to do, but before this, it was something less interesting for them. Mostly, they were logical suggestions, like what I told Mia Stein two days ago. “Ask Mr. Brizel to change your seat in math class. Becky Potter is cheating off you when we have a test, and she’s going to get you in trouble. He’ll think you’re letting her do it. It’s going to happen.” I didn’t go so far as to tell her that the exact scene had flashed before my eyes recently.
Fortunately, Ginny, Darlene, and Kay Linder agreed with my suggestion. Mia asked Mr. Brizel to change her seat. It was easy to tell that he was already aware of what was happening and had his suspicions. It could have been trouble for her, but in the eyes of my friends, predicting something like that was nothing like this thing with Todd Wells. That was boring classroom stuff. They were all looking at me strangely. Butterflies panicked in my chest. I didn’t want to lose my new friends so soon after I had made them.
“I haven’t spoken to him at all. You’re right,” I said. “But things come to me instinctively sometimes. Don’t they come to you?”
They all continued to stare at me, and I realized that I had to produce a better answer and produce it fast.
“I do see him occasionally,” I continued, “and I noticed that he talks more with girls who have their hair down at least shoulder-length, and whether it’s a coincidence or not, every time I saw him looking like he was interested in a girl, she was wearing something red.”
“You notice that kind of detail about people?” Ginny asked.
“I guess,” I said, shrugging. “Colors have an effect on us, you know. Who would like to have her room painted all black or all red? And we all choose colors we think look the best on us and make us feel the best, right?”
I hadn’t been to anyone’s house yet, but I knew none of them had a completely black or red room. Faces relaxed.
“Maybe she’s right,” Kay said. She was probably the best student of the five of us. Tall and stately, with amber-brown hair and blue-green eyes, she looked and acted older than any of us.
Kay’s family was one of the richest in Dorey, and maybe because of that, she came off as more sophisticated, even a touch arrogant at times. Her family had attended a private event for the governor recently, and she let us all know it. Her father owned ten different auto dealerships, and she had told us he might even run for public office one day. I didn’t need her to tell me. I knew her father would become mayor. The first time I saw him, when he picked her up after school one day, I envisioned him being sworn in. Her older brother, Carey, was already in his second year at Yale.
“I hate orange. I’m indifferent to pink, but I love turquoise,” she said.
“I don’t see how letting her hair down and wearing red will make that big a difference,” Ginny said. “It’s like falling in love with a book because of its cover and not what’s inside. He has to get to know her first, doesn’t he?”
“Love isn’t logical sometimes, most of the time,” I said. Again, they all stared at me. Kay sat forward. She was focusing on me the way my mother did sometimes. I would be a liar if I said it didn’t make me nervous.
“It’s one thing to talk about colors people favor. That’s logical, but as my father’s always asking me, from what well do you draw all this wisdom?” Kay asked me. “Especially when it comes to boys. When you told us about your social life at your old school, you didn’t mention much experience with boys. At first, from the way you talked, I thought you had been at an all-girls school, or maybe,” she added, batting her eyelashes, “you aren’t into boys.”
Someone else might have been so shocked that she would either start crying or look like she would any moment, but I simply shrugged. “Things come to me,” I said again, and smiled at them. “You know, like I said, instinct. Sometimes I’m wrong, and sometimes I’m right. I’m sure the same is true for everyone.”
For a long moment, the staring continued, and then Mia laughed and broke the silence.
“Maybe she has a crystal ball that works,” Darlene said. “She did tell us about her uncle the magician,” she added.
But Kay wasn’t giving up. “Yes, but now that I think about it, you never mention any one boy here you especially like,” she continued. “You’re always giving everyone else advice about boys. What’s your story, Sage? If you’re not gay, are you wearing your hair and dressing especially for anyone in particular and not telling us? Did you have your eyes on Todd Wells for a special reason, perhaps?” she asked, rolling her eyes.
They all looked at me in anticipation. I could feel the tension building.
“No, but I know Darlene fancies him.”
“Fancies him? You talk like someone from another country sometimes,” Kay said. “Well, what boy do you fancy? Haven’t you picked one out yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I’m still shopping. I don’t believe in buying on impulse.”
That broke the mood and brought more laughter, but Kay still scrutinized me more than the others from that day on. She listened more keenly to my every word and began asking me more questions about my family. Of course, they all knew I was adopted. Just like my parents were up-front about that with everyone, I always was. I thought it was best that I revealed it myself as soon as possible and didn’t make it sound like a big thing, an emotional thing. I was okay with it.
At first, I was afraid they might not be as friendly, thinking I was different, but because I showed no negativity about it and talked about my adoptive parents the same way they talked about their parents, they didn’t make a big deal about it. Naturally, there were all sorts of questions about my biological parents, but I made it clear that neither of my adoptive parents, and especially not I, knew anything specific.
“I think you’re supposed to be able to find that out someday,” Kay said. “If you want to,” she added.
“Not always. It’s complicated. You always have access to health records so you can know about inherited diseases, problems, but identities are often closely guarded at the request of the natural parent.”
“Do you know if that was true in your case?” Kay asked.
“No.”
“So you might still find out.”
“I might,” I said, but not with much enthusiasm. “I appreciate my parents adopting me and giving me a home. And I guess it bothers me that I had a mother who would give me up. If she was so uninterested in me, why should I be interested at all in her?”
They all nodded in sympathy, but I wondered if I was able to hide just how much I really wanted to know my birth mother. For the time being, at least, that put an end to questions and talk concerning my adoption.
Despite how silly the advice I had given Darlene for pursuing Todd Wells at lunch sounded to the rest of them, she had her hair down and wore a red sweater the following day. Between periods three and four, Todd came up to her in the hallway and started a conversation. We all watched her fall back to
talk with him, everyone smiling. Later, at lunch, he was waiting for her in the cafeteria and asked her to sit with him. The four of us sat at our usual table, but all eyes were on Darlene and Todd.
“It’s like he was just waiting for her to look like you advised her to look,” Mia told me, her eyes wide with amazement. “Really, how did you figure that out? You didn’t just observe him accidentally. You knew something, right? You heard he was asking about her or something?”
How could I explain something to them if I couldn’t explain it to myself? I realized that just as it was with my parents, my visionary powers wouldn’t endear me to my new friends. If anything, that could make them suspicious, almost fearful of me, as though I might reveal some great secret one of them possessed. Everyone has something he or she would rather not have revealed. It would drive them away, and I would be just as alone as I had been in my old school.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to make it sound as insignificant as I could. “I guess I did see him looking at her often and sensed he was interested. It was sort of in my subconscious and just came out. She looks better with her hair down, don’t you think?” I asked, trying to change the topic.
“If something like that was all it would take to get Jason Marks coming after me, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Mia said.
The words were out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop them. “He’s not for you. He’s too full of himself. He’d take you out once or twice and then drop you without so much as a ‘see ya later,’ ” I told her. I envisioned this exact scene with her feeling so bad about it afterward.
Describing Jason as arrogant wasn’t a big stretch. He was on the school’s starting five varsity basketball team, and he was student government president. He strutted like a proud rooster.
“How many other girls has he done that to?” I asked quickly to support my comment. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”
“But how do you know these things?” Kay pursued. “I can see where some of us might have those ideas, but you just started at this school, and I don’t recall us talking that much about him.”
“I guess I’m just a good listener when it comes to hearing what’s between the lines,” I said.
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Maybe you should write a psychic love column for the school newspaper,” she said. “What’s in store for me, oh great romance guru?”
I knew what was in store for her. Someday she would start dating her older brother’s best friend, Russell Lowe. I saw that when they came to pick her up after school one day. But that romance wasn’t going to happen for at least another year.
I closed my eyes and pretended to shape a crystal ball in front of me. “Oh, your future is easy to see. Many broken hearts left in your wake,” I said jokingly.
“My wake?”
I opened my eyes. “You know, trailing behind you like car exhaust.”
“That I believe about her,” Ginny said. Laughter returned, but none of them could take her eyes off Darlene and Todd for long.
After lunch, we learned he had asked her out for Friday.
“Don’t stop wearing red,” Mia told her, “or he won’t take you out again.”
She laughed, but I knew she wasn’t going to stop wearing something red, at least for a while.
In a school as small as ours, developing a reputation for something was not difficult, and usually when you had, it was nearly impossible to change it. Mine was shaping up quickly. Occasionally, I overheard one of the others in our knot say something like “She seems older than the rest of us.”
“I don’t mind her giving me advice,” I overheard Ginny whisper to Darlene. “But it just feels funny. It’s like I’m listening to my mother or someone like that.”
“I know,” Darlene replied. “It’s like she can see through stuff or around corners.”
For a while after that, I really tried to keep my mouth shut and just listen, even though I was dying to say something to help one of them. As if she knew something like this was going on, my mother was constantly asking me about my relationships with my new friends. She seemed to want to know the details of our school chatter. I tried to keep it all sounding innocuous and didn’t tell her about giving my friends advice. She would surely come back with “How do you know what advice to give?”
Otherwise, my experience at the new school was going very well. For the first few weeks, my grades were all either As or A-plusses. Nevertheless, I was very nervous about my parents attending the teacher conferences. Obviously, I wasn’t afraid that my teachers would have anything negative to say about my behavior or my efforts to do well, but I had some disturbing feelings. It was like static on a radio. When I saw my parents afterward, I thought everything was fine and breathed with relief, but the moment she had the opportunity, my mother told me about a comment Mr. Leshner, my history teacher, had made about me, a comment that obviously troubled her, although I didn’t understand why it should.
“He says there have been many times when he could see you anticipating his next question. Your hand is always up before anyone else even thinks of raising theirs. He thinks you’re remarkable. Do you always know what he’s going to ask, Sage? Your other teachers didn’t say that exactly, but they implied it. So?”
“I read ahead,” I replied. “That’s all.”
She wasn’t satisfied with my answer. Later, I heard my father and her discussing it. He said, “Ordinary people can enjoy some second sight, Felicia. It’s not unheard of. Ask Wade when he comes to visit next week.”
“She’s too much like I was when I was her age,” my mother replied. “And you know in your heart, Mark, that she’s just like you were, too. She’s developing rapidly now. It won’t be long before we discover to what end, and I hope it’s not bad.”
That seemed to end the discussion but not my curiosity. What was I developing? How was I developing? She wasn’t talking about my physical development. Was it simply my intellectual abilities? How could they be developing toward a bad end? Did she think I might become some sort of mad scientist or something?
It all made me self-conscious about everything I said and did. I started to hold back on anticipating questions in class, and when I saw one of my friends doing something or about to do something that would make her unhappy, I clamped down my mouth and swallowed back my vision. I felt like a policewoman unable to stop a crime she knew was about to happen or like a doctor who knew something would make someone sick but couldn’t take any action, give any advice to prevent it. Was it arrogant to think of myself this way, to think of myself as someone with powers to help others? Was it my fault I had this foresight?
Mr. Malamud got me thinking about all this when he responded to a question Kay asked about instincts in science class.
“Do human beings have instinct, too?” she asked, looking directly at me when she did.
“We say any behavior is instinctive if it is performed without being based on prior experience. It’s a product of innate biological factors. I’ve given you examples of this with animals and insects. We talk about humans having a maternal instinct or a survival instinct. But these examples don’t fit our scientific definition, a pattern of behavior that must exist in every member of the species and cannot be overcome willfully. So I’d say no.”
When he paused, I looked at Kay. She was smiling at me as if she had been validated. I looked away quickly.
Most everyone else in the class wasn’t very interested in Kay’s question. Mia looked thoughtful for a moment but then went back to her doodling. After class, on the way to math, Kay stepped up beside me.
“I guess it’s like you say, you’re just a lucky guesser,” she said. “Maybe you should play poker or something.”
“Maybe,” I replied, trying to make light of it all. “My uncle Wade the magician is a great poker player. He makes more money playing poker than he does performing. At least, that’s what he told me.”
“You should be tested by the CIA,” she
added, but then laughed. She looked relieved that my claim of having good instincts didn’t hold water with our science teacher.
“I’ll let you know when they call me,” I said.
She laughed again and sped up to catch Ginny.
I suddenly saw myself drifting away from my new friends before I had really gotten to do much with them—or, rather, them pulling away from me. It wasn’t going to happen today or tomorrow, but it was going to happen, and what I saw for myself was a new darkness, a new loneliness unlike any I had previously felt. There was something else out there, however, something coming that might make all the difference.
When Ginny invited me to a party at her house the following weekend, I hoped my vision was wrong this time and I wouldn’t lose my friends.
“Darlene and Todd will be coming together,” she said, “and Jason Marks will be there, too. Mia insisted I invite him despite what you said about him and what we all know he’s like. Anyone yet you’d like me to invite?” she asked in a teasing tone. “I know there are boys interested in you. Darlene says Todd told her Rickie Blaine has been watching you and asking about you. You know who he is, right?”
How could I tell her that I was always aware of anyone who looked at me more than others did? It was as if I had some sort of radar that picked up on an intense gaze, a whisper about me, or a smile sent in my direction even before I turned and saw it. “Yes. He’s good friends with Jason, but as they say, if you lie down with dogs, you’ll come up with fleas.”
“What?” She smiled. “Who says that?”
“I heard my uncle say it,” I replied quickly. I hadn’t. I had no idea where I had heard it, but like so many other quotes I could pull out of some dark pocket in my mind, it was just there on the tip of my tongue.
“At least they’re not boring boys,” Ginny said. “You’re not afraid, are you?”
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