Forever Freaky (11 page)

A few months ago, I discovered that there was
a new addition to my paranormal abilities: telekinesis. I could
turn light switches on and off with my mind. I could move around
small objects. At first I was despondent that there was yet another
weird thing for me to endure. I tried to ignore this latest
ability, but during bored moments—and I had quite a few of those in
the course of a day—I would amuse myself by twirling a pencil or
levitating an eraser. I soon discovered that moving objects around
with my mind required a great deal of focus, and while I focused
on, say, arranging kitchen utensils neatly on a tabletop, my other
freaky abilities became inert. I could not see random visions, most
of which were dark and gory. I could not read minds and the sick
thoughts people keep to themselves. It was a good trade-off,
really; if I began to see or hear something disturbing, I just
concentrated on moving something and all the bad things in my head
went away—at least for a while. It was a great way to deal with
stress.

One Saturday afternoon in early May, I found
myself sitting at the kitchen table at home. I was balancing a
pencil on the tip of my finger. I made the pencil slowly turn,
which made a tickling feeling on my skin.

My mom sat across from me. She was still
alarmed at my latest “gift.” She was aware of my other abilities,
of course, but really those she couldn’t actually see. This was
much more visual, and therefore much more disturbing.

“Do you have to do that?” she asked.

“It’s very relaxing.”

“I’m trying to talk to you.”

“I’m listening,” I said. “Just because I’m
not looking at you, don’t think I’m not hearing you.”

Mom was trying to have one of her heart to
heart talks with me. Every now and then she felt compelled to sit
me down and encourage me to try to blend in better with my peers.
It was her way of being supportive; she knew that my having strange
abilities isolated me from other people. She was always afraid that
I would end up being some kind of weirdo old lady who scared all
the neighborhood kids—in other words, she didn’t want me to turn
into my grandmother. But even now, as she attempted to convince me
I could be pretty much like everybody else if only I applied
myself, she didn’t see the irony.

“Mom, I’m moving a pencil with my mind,” I
said. “Exactly how much do you think I can blend?”

She sighed. “Julie, you’re impossible,
really.”

“And yet here I am.”

“Can we talk?”

“We are talking,” I said.

“I mean, without the—whatever you call
that.”

“Telekinesis.”

“Whatever. Can you put your hand down?”

I lowered my hand. The pencil remained
suspended in the air, still turning slowly around.

She gawked at the pencil for a moment.

“Julie, really!”

I snatched the pencil from the air, and
slapped it down on the tabletop.

“There! Better?” I asked, feeling a little
hostile.

“Thank you.” She took a couple seconds to
compose herself, to pick up her train of thought. “Look, maybe I
haven’t been expressing myself so well. I understand that you will
always be different from other people. There’s nothing you can do
about that. But you are still a human being.”

“If you say so,” I said.

“You are,” she said. “Your dad and I have
been talking.”

“You need to stop that. The marriage will
last longer.”

“Julie, please.”

I didn’t stay anything. I figured it was best
to let her say what she was going to say, and have it over
with.

“We’ve been concerned with a few things about
you. And this has nothing to do with your gifts. Your abilities,”
she amended after I’d rolled my eyes.

“Then what?”

“It’s just that you’re so—I don’t
know—emotionally detached.”

“Yeah?” I said dully.

“I mean, look, I’m a nurse, right? I got into
the field because, basically, I care about people. I have sympathy
and understanding. Your dad, too. He’s a fireman and, sure, that’s
a good job but you can’t want to become a fireman without caring,
without wanting to keep people safe. You see where I’m going with
this.”

“No, really, I don’t,” I said. “You and dad
like your jobs?”

She sighed. She seemed uncertain what to say.
Then she blurted out, “Julie, your dad wants you to see a
psychiatrist.”

I was horrified. “Uh-uh. No way.”

“He thinks you may be sociopathic.”

“What! No, I’m not…. What’s sociopathic,
anyway?”

“That’s when a person has no feelings for
others—no feelings at all. Some sociopaths end up, you know,
killing people.”

I stared at her. I couldn’t believe what I
was hearing. I honestly didn’t know what to say. My parents weren’t
really concerned that I wasn’t quite normal; they actually feared
I’d turn into a mass murderer or something.

“It’s just that you never show us anything,”
she continued, uncomfortably. “You know, like kids usually show
their parents.”

“Oh, I see,” I murmured. “Well, you know me:
I’m not going to go around hugging everybody.”

“I understand that,” she said.

“I do love you guys,” I said. “I just do it
in my own way.”

“Well, Dad doesn’t understand why you are the
way you are.”

“Maybe you should explain it to him,” I
suggested.

She looked aghast. We had never told my dad
about my abilities, so he couldn’t possibly understand the affects
that possessing them had on me.

“You can’t be serious. He’d have you in a
mental hospital in about two seconds. And I’d be right there with
you. He’d never accept it—not in a million years. The guy doesn’t
even believe in ghosts,” she added wryly.

I grinned. “I could prove it to him.”

“Uh, no,” she said. “No, we’re not doing
that.”

“Well, then talk to him,” I said. “Tell him
something he will understand. Make him see that I can’t be fixed.
This is the way I am. I’m never going to be the perky, loving
daughter that other people have. He got stuck with a freak.”

“Oh, Julie,” she murmured, but that was all
she could say. She could never find the words to make things better
for me, because there were no such words in any language.

I pushed away from the table. Before I left
the room, I paused at the doorway for a long time. “Mom… I love
you,” I said, but the words didn’t sound very convincing, not even
to me.

***************

At school Monday all anybody could talk about
was how some dude on the baseball team had burst into flames.

I sat across the lunchroom table from Melody,
my best friend. She always got caught up in school gossip, every
little tidbit that was floating around. She could go on for hours
about how so-and-so had broken up with her boyfriend. Or how
somebody got suspended for doing something stupid. It was hard to
shut her up—she just babbled on and on. Today she was twice as bad,
because of the guy on the baseball team who caught fire last Friday
during a game.

“Can you imagine that!” she said, between
bites of her pizza slice. “Suddenly, it’s like, poof, you’re
burning. I wonder what that would be like.”

“If you want, I’ll find some lighter fluid
and matches. We can experiment,” I said.

But it was as though she couldn’t even hear
me. “I wonder if he felt it burning first, or did he see the flames
first. Your dad’s a fireman, right? What did he say about it? I
mean, about what might cause something like that to happen.”

Before I could answer, Jack Kilgore set his
tray on the table.

“Spontaneous human combustion,” he said,
sitting next to Melody.

“Oh, hey, Jack,” Melody said, running her
fingers through her long hair. She had a crush on Jack for weeks
now. It would have been nice if they could get together. At least
that way Jack would leave me alone. Sadly he found Melody boring
and shallow, which showed at least he had a good grip on reality as
far as Melody was concerned.

“I said it weeks ago,” Jack said to me, as
though Melody wasn’t even there, “after the first Mount Olive guy
got torched.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I droned. Since I met
him, and told him my secrets, Jack’s purpose in life seemed to be
to convince me I should use my abilities to help people. And my dad
thought I needed to see a psychiatrist?

“I saw a cable show on that—spontaneous—you
know… what you mentioned,” Melody said to Jack, playing up to him.
“I was wondering why it was when people burn up like that they are
always alone. It’s always some old lady, sitting in her lounge
chair, watching game shows. Or some old guy locked in the bathroom,
getting ready to take a shower. Why doesn’t a newscaster burst into
flames on live television?”

“Hey, I’d like to see that,” I put in.

“Or a baseball player in front of a couple
hundred spectators?” Jack said.

“Exactly,” Melody piped. “Oh, that really did
happen, didn’t it. You think it was that spontaneous human
combustion?” she asked Jack.

“What do you think?” Jack asked me.

“Just leave me out of it, huh?” I was already
stressing. I nibbled at my garden salad. The only other things on
my tray were a hunk of corn bread and a large cube of green gelatin
that was so solid it would probably bounce like a rubber ball. I
started to play with the green cube, with my mind, pressing down on
the top of it so that its sides bulged out and then letting go so
that it went back to its original shape. I continued to do that,
and I started to feel better. Not even Jack could bother me
now.

“Jules, stop playing with your food,” he
said.

But I kept pressing down on the cube and
letting go, press and release, press and release. Pretty soon I
felt like giggling. It just seemed so funny—I didn’t know why.

“Just don’t try to con me into something,” I
told him.

“Come on, it’s getting creepy,” he said. “It
looks like your Jell-O is breathing.”

I stopped flexing my gelatin, and looked at
him.

“We were talking about a guy who started on
fire,” Jack said.

“Which I really don’t want to hear about it,”
I said.

“Jeremy’s a major tool,” Melody cut in.
“Everybody hates the guy. His own teammates probably did
something—maybe they soaked his jock strap in gasoline. But I don’t
even know if even he deserved something like that. Does anybody
even care about how he’s doing.”

“He’ll be fine. They have ways of treating
serious burns,” Jack said.

“They use maggots,” I said.

Melody stared at me. “Maggots?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They put maggots all over
the dead skin, and the maggots crawl along and little… by… little…
they nibble the dead skin until it’s all gone.”

Melody turned white. She got a panicky look
on her face, clamped a hand over her mouth, and then got up and ran
from the lunchroom.

I looked at Jack. “Did I say something?” I
asked.

He shrugged his shoulders, and slid over to
take Melody’s seat, right across from me.

“I wasn’t trying to con you,” he said.

“Oh?”

“No.”

“You talk about weird stuff, and start
looking at me in a certain way. I get a little paranoid, I
guess.”

“Go ahead and play with your Jell-O, if that
makes you feel better.”

“No, I’m good,” I said.

“I doubt you could do anything about
spontaneous human combustion, anyway. Nobody knows what causes it,
so how can anybody stop it from happening?”

“And given that it’s happening only to jocks,
who would want to stop it?”

“You really have a hateful side to you,” he
commented.

I grinned, and then tried to eat some more
salad.

“Hey, you need to do something!”

I looked up, and saw that Jessica Harper was
standing at the end of the table, looking down at me. Jessica was
Adler’s queen of mean. She was tall, slim, and blonde, but had the
personality of a rabid pit bull. Right behind Jessica, her friend
and number-one lackey Amy Nicci stood with her arms crossed, her
dark eyes trying to bore holes through me.

Jack looked at me, like What’s all this
about?

“You hear me?” Jessica asked, when I didn’t
say anything.

“Yeah.”

“You need to do something,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You need to tell Eloise nobody likes
her.”

“I do? Why? Why don’t you tell her.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m not going
to tell her. I don’t like her, right? I wouldn’t be caught dead
talking with that lump.”

The girl she was talking about was Eloise
Parker, who had transferred to Adler earlier this year. She was
homely, hopelessly awkward, and weighed about two hundred
pounds.

“Why does somebody have to tell her that?”
Jack asked.

“Because she needs to know everybody hates
her,” Jessica said. To somebody like Jessica, that kind of thing
was important.

I glanced over to where Eloise was sitting, a
couple tables away. It was the only table in the lunchroom that had
open seats. In fact Eloise was the only one sitting at the table,
which was about eight feet long and could have seated several other
people.

“Uh, I think she knows that,” I said.

“But she needs to be told, so she knows for
sure.”

“And why me?”

She looked at me as though I were stupid.
“Because if a weirdo like you tells her, she’ll know how thoroughly
despised she is.”

Jack started to object, but I waved him
off.

I looked from Jessica back to where Eloise
sat, and then I pushed away from the table.

“You’re not really doing this?” Jack
asked.

I ignored him. I walked over to Eloise. She
really was quite the mess. Her face was moon-shaped and constantly
wore a dull expression. Her clothes looked like they had been
bought at the thrift store. Her hair was nicely styled, but that
only made the rest of her look worse.