by Cory Clubb
Kate giggled again. “I just thought you were one hell of a con man,” she said. She threw her head back, laughing some more. I knew she’d say something like that—Kate had to be convinced.
“Fine. I’ll do it right now. Prove it to you,” I said, playfully cracking my knuckles.
Kate pushed her laptop to the side, clearing the space between us and resting her chin in her cupped hands, finally somewhat intrigued.
“Okay, do it.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Read my mind.”
She scooted her chair closer to me. I could smell her perfume. Her reaction had been quick; I hadn’t expected it.
“Wait,” she said. I leaned back a little as if I’d run into an invisible bubble. “If you’re going to read my mind, I want you to tell me something that only I would know.” There was a challenge in her voice as she arched an eyebrow at me. “We’ve known each other for a long time and I know everything about you.”
Not this, I thought and narrowed my gaze. She was way too into this. I figured she was humoring me—she had no idea what she was about to discover.
“Okay, but you can’t cry or something if it’s super personal or whatever,” I said.
She gave me a look that said “Oh, please,” and said, “Yeah, yeah, make with the mind reading, Mr. Day.”
I leaned in close to her, and for the first time I noticed small freckles on the bridge of her nose. She made them scrunch as she looked back at me, almost giddy.
Here goes nothing.
I jumped into her mind.
The first thing I did was let out a low whistle. If I thought the Weekly Beak staff room was messy… And of all places, Kate’s mind was a comic book store—of course it was. Racks and racks of long, white boxes lined six-foot-long tables; comics stacked at waist-level sat in piles on the carpeted floor. Everybody from Batman, Daredevil, The Hulk, Wonder Woman, Punisher, Green Lantern…and that’s just to name a fraction of the titles surrounding my feet. This was a collector’s dreamland. Not to mention a pretty messy arrangement of items of certain nerd value.
I wondered if she physically had all these comics or if these were just some kind of projection, an internal wish list of some kind. Overhead, scrolling on the wall, something like a ticker bar flowed out red words. You know, one of those things that usually spits out stock market prices in Times Square. Instead, I knew these words were Kate’s current thoughts; they were moving pretty quickly. I picked up something about an article she must have been reading. It was something about brain damage. Then the words switched to something about school and a pep rally for the next issue of the school newspaper.
I pointed my attention to a few giant movie posters that hung on the walls around the room: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Terminator, Cloverfield, and All the Pretty Horses, just to name a few. Whoa, I didn’t expect All the Pretty Horses to be up there. I walked around the room a little more. I had never been in here before. I had a fear nothing would jump out at me and I wouldn’t be able to find Kate’s secrets. Nobody ever came to me wanting dirt on Kate.
A stack of comics spilled over behind me. I turned around as fast as possible. I could feel my heart rate quicken; I was still on edge. Was I in there alone? I stood silently for a second. It was pretty quiet and I didn’t see anyone—nobody else but a community of heroes and villains.
I passed a table and glanced down inside a box filled with comics. A Thor comic book was upside down amongst others. It looked old—from the ’70s, maybe. I righted it and thumbed through a few others behind it. All dated from the 1970s. It triggered an idea.
Using both of my hands, I started combing through the comic box to my right. Captain America, Flash, X-Men—all the comics on that table were from the ’70s era. I went to the next table and found that the comics inside these boxes were from the ’80s. I was starting to catch on. The room looked like it was a mess, but it was an organized mess. Well, somewhat.
On the next table I found a Star Wars comic book published in the ’90s. I was getting closer. On my way to another table, I accidentally knocked over another thigh-high stack of comics piled on the floor. Geez, these things were everywhere. I was never going to find anything useful.
I kept searching each table by date, but what was I looking for? All that was there were comic books. Focusing my attention now on the pillars I’d seen when I arrived, I noticed that not everything in there was super-hero related. I found old issues of the school newspaper, celebrity magazines, and then, toward the back of the room, I found a few thick volumes that seemed out of place. A hardcover brown dictionary and thesaurus on a little shelf caught my attention.
My eyes darted up to the ticker bar of thought as I threw the two books on top of the nearest table. Kate’s mind was on the Fall Ball. At least she hadn’t forgotten about it. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed. How had all this happened at once? I ran my hand through my hair. There I was, looting Kate’s mind for clues to prove to her that I could read minds, and I hadn’t even given myself time to grieve over the death of Stephanie Daniels.
With the sleeplessness, the fight Dean and I had, the nosebleeds, and even Trent’s insane warning, I felt things starting to slip away. Was I losing my own mind? Stephanie’s face flashed before me. How could I forget the thing that had been inside her? What was it? Why was it there? Had it always been there and I just never saw it? I needed answers, and the only way I was going to get them was if somebody believed me.
I opened the thesaurus and found myself in the H section. The word “hot” jumped out at me. After it ran a string of about a dozen different ways to describe the word “hot.” I realized this volume was doing me no good. I closed the thesaurus and flipped open the dictionary. The pages were significantly thicker than the ones in the thesaurus. It was no ordinary dictionary.
The page I was on had Batman’s bat symbol on it, but not only did it have one version, it had—geez, at least two pages’ worth of different bat logos from years past. I thumbed a new section in the volume. This time I found an entry titled “The Edge Hemisphere.” I read the description.
The Edge Hemisphere: The working title of my first screenplay. A sci-fi paranormal story about a group of space explorers racing to prevent our world from colliding with that of a supernatural prison dimension bent on escaping into ours.
Whoa, she’d been reading way too many comic books. This wasn’t just a dictionary of all Kate’s nerd knowledge; it was also her book of secrets. Then a thought struck me. I had to know. I paged to the letter “L.” Using my finger, I scrolled down to “LO” and then, turning to the next page, I stopped my query.
There it was. It was the first thing I saw on the page. A small photograph of me. Not as I was then, but a school picture taken in fifth grade. I couldn’t believe it. My light brown hair stuck up a little, and my eyes were filled with eagerness and spunk. Or I guessed it was spunk—I couldn’t remember that far back. The photo was secured by a single piece of tape. I loosened it from the page and flipped it over. There, drawn on the back in pink, was a little heart. I couldn’t help it, I felt myself blush, although for the first time in a very long time, I felt joy. Something I sorely needed.
Chapter Twenty-three
KATE’S BIG GREEN EYES were still staring at me when I fell back into my own head.
“Okay,” I said.
“What? That was only like two seconds.”
I bugged my eyes out at her. “Yeah, and probably two seconds too long—you’ve got a total mess in there,” I replied, running my fingers through my hair. Kate stuck out her tongue at me as if she knew it to be true.
“All right then, tell me my deep, dark secret,” she said, a smirk on her face.
I laughed a little and said, “No, it’s just going to embarrass you.”
Kate leaned back in her chair and let out an exhausted breath. “You’re ridiculous, Nolan, you know that? Oh, and you’re a horrible liar.” She reached for her laptop.
Knowing what I knew then, I was feeling a little ridic
ulous. All those years, and Kate was in love with me. My own secret crush on her seemed minuscule and harmless. How was I going to play this? I decided to just come out and say it.
“You’re in love with me.” You would have thought I did late-night stand-up on the weekends after Kate’s boisterous laugh at the statement. Then I followed with, “Ever since the fifth grade.” Kate quieted her giggling like an engine being keyed off. Something in the comic store clicked and then she gave me her stink eye.
“I’m telling you the truth, promise,” I said, holding up three fingers in a Boy Scout salute. Not that I was in the Boy Scouts. Kate didn’t think it was cute. She flipped me just one finger and stood, turning her back to me. Her whole body seemed to change character. I’d hit something sensitive, which was rare with Kate. She always acted so strong and bold; maybe she was starting to believe me.
“You’re just making that up,” she finally said. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I needed to heat things up. “Okay, how about the movie All the Pretty Horses?”
She shrugged her shoulders and leafed through some papers on the table as if my comment didn’t even make a dent.
“That was a lucky shot in the dark. So I’m a Matt Damon fan—it still doesn’t prove anything.” She was talking faster now. She moved to a computer station, sifting through some more papers there, but she dropped them.
I began to wonder if or when she was ever going to tell me that she liked me or loved me. I couldn’t be fully certain which; experience told me the tiny pink heart could symbolize either/or.
Was this what it felt like when you were struck with knowledge that maybe you weren’t supposed to know? Basically, something I dished to people almost every day while reading minds for my business?
“All right, fine,” she said. I had my eyes on the floor, thinking, but I looked up at Kate as she started to pace, her arms crossed over her chest. “Let’s say you’re right, I do like you. It doesn’t prove that you can read minds.”
I waited a moment to speak my next piece of evidence. Her floundering was kind of cute.
“I can tell you about The Edge Hemisphere,” I said.
Kate stopped pacing. Her eyes grew huge, and she walked straight up to me. I stood, holding my ground to meet her. It was perfect freckle-viewing height.
“Okay, Nolan, that isn’t funny. How do you know about that? Did you hack my laptop or something?”
I tapped her forehead with my finger. She blinked and looked like she wanted to punch me.
“Kate, I’m telling you the truth,” I returned.
Her expression dropped to seriousness. She slowly shook her head and brought her hand to her mouth. “No way.”
I imagined her ticker of inner thought flying at quantum speeds.
“So, you can just…what, ready anybody’s mind?”
I answered with a half-smile.
“Okay then, read Principal Muller’s mind and tell me if he’s looking to retire,” she said instantly.
I let the grin go. “It’s not like that.” I took a deep breath. “I have to look into the person’s eyes, like I did yours.”
Motioning for her to take a seat again, I began to describe to Kate the process of my power, mostly the technical stuff. I told her how each person has a mind room and how each one is different, how it only takes seconds, and then finished with how I felt responsible for Stephanie’s death.
“Oh, Nolan, I’m so sorry,” she said, placing her hand on mine. She quickly removed it as her face transformed into that Muddy-Huddy-idea expression. She went on. “I’m blown away—this is freaking awesome. Do you know how much I could…I mean, we could use this to our advantage?”
It was my turn to laugh, and I did, but then the grave realization dawned that I had left out a crucial piece of information when explaining everything to Kate. I watched her ponder the unlimited possibilities she now knew were at her disposal. She was cute that way.
I broke into her train of inner thought (ha, no, not literally). I wanted to relay certain conditions now that she knew my secret.
“Listen, Kate, there are a few things.” This time I took her hands in mine. “First of all, you can’t tell anybody about this.” She looked at me, still in her freak-out mode.
“Kate, hey! Snap out of it. Seriously, you can’t tell anyone,” I repeated.
“Yeah—okay—right.” Her words were like short bursts of machine-gun fire, her attention distant. I leaned into her field of vision.
“You can’t write anything about me. No fictional stories, no character studies, blogs, interviews, or exposés.” She kept her hands in mine, keen on my words. I sighed and bowed my head.
“And there is one more thing, something new.” Her excitement level rose even more now. “Inside Stephanie’s mind, when I read it for the last time…” I took a swallow. “There was something in there with me.”
Kate shrugged her shoulders, unimpressed. “Like?”
I tried to explain as best I could. “No, I mean something wasn’t right. Every mind I’ve read, I’ve always been alone in the room. Last night, something that looked like Stephanie was in there with me. But it wasn’t her. This thing was something else.”
Kate wore probably the most excited-slash-scared face I’d ever seen. That wasn’t good, but at least she believed me.
I finished, saying, “That’s why I need your help—to find out what it was.”
The period bell rang.
Chapter Twenty-four
I HAD SORT OF forgotten where I was. Explaining everything to Kate and realizing she had a crush on me was an overload. That, or I desperately needed something to eat. I’d skipped lunch, and it was coming back to get me. Back at my locker, I nabbed a half-eaten bag of Doritos and poured the rest of the contents into my mouth. Wiping the crumbs from my face, I moved down the hall to my next class.
My past day-and-a-half’s existence had been so disjointed and shaken up, I don’t think even Google knew what was going on. I had so many questions and not one of them had been answered. For example, the most outstanding one: why Greg lies.
I turned the corner into my classroom, found my seat, and planted my butt. I was glad that at least this class period would be a breeze.
Mr. Carlson’s speech class was always pretty easy—well, for me. Others loathed it. The best part about speech class was that once you gave your speech, all you had to do was sit and listen to the others. (Hint to those who haven’t taken speech yet: go first. Not only does it show initiative, but the rest of your week is set, and you can glide through the next couple of days.)
Earlier that week, the class had been given the assignment to talk on a topic we knew nothing about. As Mr. Carlson put it, the weirder, the better. “Something that really would get the entire class to stay awake,” he jokingly explained.
Deep down, I wanted so bad to explain my secret power to everyone. Just dazzle them all with the ins and outs of the human mind—along with embarrassing as many people as possible, of course. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t have been an A+ speech!
Obviously I couldn’t make that my topic, so instead I had done a speech on the human eye. Heck, I looked into that all the time—why not do a little research on how they worked? Not only did I speak on eyes in general, but I did tangent stuff like the blind, color displacement, and double vision. Probably not the most interesting subject, but it earned me a B-, so I was cool with that.
The late bell rang. Hunkered down in the back of the room at his desk, Mr. Carlson was engrossed in a magazine article of some kind. He positioned his desk in the back of the classroom to observe us better, keep us on our toes, and it worked—you really couldn’t get away with anything.
Mr. Carlson was a short guy with a baldish head and salt-and-pepper beard to offset the lack on top. He was maybe mid-sixties and unmarried. I guess he was in love with teaching instead. Poor guy. A good teacher, nonetheless.
That day he was r
ocking the light-green sweater vest over a white button-down shirt, and around his neck was a dark purple tie. That guy had to have been a hippie in his day.
The classroom was starting to quiet down after the bell, and finally Mr. Carlson took to his feet. “Okay, who do we have left today?” he asked.
A few hands were raised, and I noticed in particular that Laura Hartman’s thin, perfectly tanned right arm floated into the air. An idea caught me. During her speech would be a perfect time to read her mind. That is, if she made eye contact with the class. For being the most popular girl in school, Laura couldn’t give a speech worth a drop of rain in the desert. She always locked her eyes on her notecards and read about a hundred miles an hour in the highest Mickey Mouse voice possible. Trying to meet eyes with her would be difficult, but it was worth a shot.
Mr. Carlson clasped his hands together. “All right, Zack, why don’t you go?” I saw Laura blow out a relieved breath of air. I wasn’t worried; every speech was only three to four minutes long, so we would get to her eventually.
Zack Zigler—that was way too many Z’s, in my opinion—moved to the front, but I didn’t watch him. My gaze had come upon an empty desk midway across the room. Stephanie’s desk. It hit me that she would never return to school, but what was I thinking? The poor girl was dead, but by what cause? Was it from her injuries sustained in the car accident, or was it that thing inside her mind?
A chill ran down my back as Zack wrapped up his speech on the evolution of skateboarding. While he may have piqued the interest of a few people in class, it sounded like Zack was just talking about a hobby of his. My thoughts still swirled around Stephanie.
Again Mr. Carlson called on those who hadn’t read their last will and testament to the class to raise their hands. Laura lifted her arm slightly, probably hoping to secure another escape.
“Laura Hartman,” he said, marking down something in a notebook. “Oh, and let’s see some eye contact this time, like the rest of us in here exist.”
