Gifted: Finders Keepers (2 page)

And each of them dealt with their gifts in different ways. Space cadet Emily sometimes acted like her gift frightened her. Amanda wasn’t too crazy about her gift, and Sarah absolutely refused to use hers. Only whiney, wimpy Martin and Charles who was stuck in a wheelchair seemed like they enjoyed the powers their gifts gave them. And what about Carter? Who could have anything in common with a total mystery? The strange, silent boy was little more than a zombie.

As far as Ken was concerned, the only thing they all shared was this class. The gifts – and the students who had them – didn’t have any connection at all.

Sometimes, like now, he wondered if Madame had a gift like Jenna’s. At that very moment she was looking at him, and she could have been reading his mind.

‘I realize that you might not think of yourselves as a team, but that may well be how our enemies think of us. Surely I don’t need to remind you of your most recent adventure?’ When there was no response to that, she shook her head wearily. ‘Or maybe I do. Amanda, would you please refresh our memory?’

Martin piped up. ‘Why are you asking
her
? She wasn’t even there!’

‘Yes, I was!’ Amanda snapped.

Martin glared at her. ‘Hey, I ’m not stupid. I would have noticed if you were there. It was me, Tracey, Emily and Sarah. Oh, and Carter was there for a while at the beginning.’

Sarah spoke gently. ‘I wasn’t really there, Martin. Amanda had taken over my body. I didn’t get there till the very end.’

‘I can’t believe you didn’t know that, Martin,’ Tracey declared. ‘Didn’t you notice Sarah wasn’t acting like herself?’

Jenna snorted. ‘Are you kidding? Martin never pays attention to anyone but himself.’

Charles laughed. ‘I’ll bet Martin was too scared to notice anything.’

‘I wasn’t scared,’ Martin replied hotly.

‘You sure acted like you were,’ Tracey said.

‘
Tracey!
’ Madame said in a warning tone, and the other students frowned at Tracey too. Teasing Martin was a big no-no. That was when his ‘gift’ came out, and nobody was eager to see mass destruction or suffer personal bodily injury, which might easily happen if Martin’s super-strength kicked in. Of course, Tracey wouldn’t have to worry if Martin went on one of his rampages. She could always disappear. Personally, Ken thought she had the most interesting gift of all of them.

‘Let’s get back to the subject,’ Madame said. ‘Amanda, could you give us a brief synopsis of what happened to some of you?’

‘We were kidnapped,’ she said, ‘by this woman named Clare and two men.’

Tracey supplied the names. ‘Howard and George.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Amanda said dismissively. ‘They were just flunkies. Clare was in charge. Anyway, they wanted us to rob banks for them. They took Carter first, then Tracey, Martin and Sarah. And Emily.’

Madame nodded. ‘And they chose each of you for a reason. Emily could predict the scene at the bank, Martin could break down doors, Tracey could sneak into the vault without being seen. And Sarah could force people to do whatever the robbers needed them to do.’

‘Except they didn’t really have Sarah,’ Emily noted. ‘They got Amanda instead.’

Jenna laughed. ‘I almost feel sorry for the bad guys. Can you imagine getting stuck with Amanda? It’s not like she could help anyone rob a bank.’ She paused. ‘Actually, I take that back. Maybe she would have helped with the robbery if she thought the vault contained shoes. Or handbags. Otherwise her gift is pretty worthless.’

Amanda’s obsession with fashion was well known, and everyone laughed – except Carter, of course, who never smiled or laughed or showed any emotion at all on his face. Which made Ken think about something that had puzzled him ever since the kidnappings.

‘Why did they want Carter?’ he asked out loud.

The room fell silent, and everyone turned to look at the figure sitting right at the back. As usual, the pale, round-faced boy wasn’t perturbed by the sudden attention. His expression was as blank as it always was. Ken knew everyone had to be thinking the same thing: did Carter even have a gift? Or was he only in this class because he was – well – weird?

Charles broke the silence. ‘I want to know why they didn’t kidnap
me
. I’ve got
real
power.’

Charles was known for his bragging, but no one could deny the truth in what he was saying. Being able to make things move with his mind could have made him very useful to someone with criminal intents.

Emily had an answer for him. ‘The house didn’t have disabled access, Charles. The doorways were too narrow for a wheelchair and you wouldn’t have been able to get up the stairs.’

‘Clearly the kidnappers had done their homework,’ Madame said. ‘They knew who they wanted, who they could use. This is what I want to impress upon you. There are people out there who know all about you. And if those people ever got together and pooled their information . . .’

Sarah spoke. ‘You’re saying we’re all at risk.’

‘Exactly,’ Madame replied.

‘Except Ken,’ Charles piped up.

Madame frowned. ‘Why do you say that, Charles?’

‘Dead people talk to him – big deal! How is that going to help a criminal?’

Martin joined in. ‘Yeah, his gift is totally useless.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Madame declared. ‘I’m sure there are people who would find Ken’s gift extremely interesting.’ She looked at Ken, as if she wanted him to back her up.

Ken just shrugged. Because in all honesty, he pretty much agreed with both Martin and Charles on this subject.

Madame continued. ‘Now, I’d like you all to share your thoughts on how you can best protect yourselves from exploitation.’

Several hands went up, but Ken’s wasn’t one of them. As far as he was concerned, he’d rather learn how to protect himself from his own gift.

From the very beginning, when he realized he had this gift, it had been nothing but a headache. At first he thought he could use it to help a certain dead person with a problem left unresolved on earth, and he had tried – he’d really tried – to respond to this person’s needs. But the result had been disastrous, and now he, Ken, had an ongoing problem to deal with. He hadn’t been bothered by it much lately, but there was no telling when that problem would pop up again. Just thinking about the possibility gave him a headache, and he pushed it out of his head.

OK, maybe there had been a couple of times when his gift had been useful. He’d been able to alert Jenna to the fact that the man who claimed to be her father was a fraud after Ken got a message from beyond the grave that confirmed it. And he’d learned the whereabouts of a guy who’d helped kidnap some of Ken’s classmates when the kidnapper’s late mother told Ken where to find her son.

But events like that were rare. Most of the time the voices made demands. And ever since that first demand, the one that turned into a mess, he’d made every effort to ignore them. It wasn’t easy. There were so many dead people, so many sad stories. Many of them wanted him to communicate a message to someone left behind. A man might ask him to apologize to a friend for something he’d done when he was alive. A woman would ask him to tell her husband that she’d loved him. A thief who’d repented might want him to return money he’d stolen, and other people asked Ken to deliver souvenirs. One time, there had been a man who wanted him to tell the police that his death wasn’t an accident – that his ex-wife had killed him.

But Ken didn’t want to get involved. He’d done that once, and he was still paying the price. Besides, how could he do what they asked?

Excuse me, Miss, but your dead grandfather thinks your boyfriend is no good.

Excuse me, Officer, but do you remember the man who died when he fell down the stairs? And you thought it was an accident? Well, I know for a fact that his wife pushed him.

They wouldn’t believe him. How could he possibly explain what he knew without telling them how he got the information? And then they’d think he was nuts. Besides, as Madame was constantly telling them, they should never let anyone know about their gifts.

So if Ken couldn’t do anything with his gift, his only option was to get rid of it, to make every effort to silence the voices. And he’d been getting a little better at it. Pleading, arguing, ordering the spirits to go away and leave him alone was beginning to have an effect. He had to be tough with them, get angry – even nasty sometimes. He hated being rude, but what else could he do?

Ken . . . Hey, Ken, what’s up, man? Are you there? Can you listen?

Ken slumped back in his seat. This was the one voice he could never order to leave him alone.

Yeah, I’m listening.

And as the voice in his head began to talk, Ken’s thoughts went back to how it all began for him . . .

S
OME PEOPLE HATED THE first day back at school after a vacation. Not Ken Preston. Why would he be unhappy about it or unwilling to return to the place where he ruled?

Of course, he wasn’t the only king at Meadowbrook. There were plenty of other popular guys. But in all modesty, he had to admit that he was way up there, on the upper rung of the middle-school social ladder.

‘Yo, Preston! Hey man, what’s up?’

Ken saluted the freckled, red-haired boy who strode towards him. ‘Hey, Jack. How was California?’

‘Extremely cool,’ Jack Farrell told him. ‘Not much in the way of surf, but lots of action on the beach, if you know what I mean.’ He whistled. ‘I’m telling ya, man, those California girls are a completely different kind of female species.’

Ken laughed. In this particular way, Jack had always been a little more mature than the rest of the gang. ‘Better not let Lucy hear you say that.’

‘I just looked, I didn’t touch,’ Jack assured him. ‘Not like any of them would let me get close enough to do that anyway. Blondes in bikinis are out of my league. What about you? Did you have any adventures with the opposite sex this summer?’

‘Not really.’ They were inside the building now, and Ken lowered his voice. ‘Well, actually, I kissed Amanda Beeson underwater at Sophie Greene’s pool party last month.’

‘Oh, yeah? You like her?’

‘It was a dare,’ Ken explained with a shrug. ‘I barely know her. And I haven’t seen her since.’

‘She’s pretty hot,’ Jack mused.

‘Yeah, I guess. Not really my type, though. I think she’s kind of a snob.’

They rounded the corner to the hall where lockers lined the wall. A whoop went up from three boys gathered at one of the lockers, and Ken and Jack paused to greet them.

‘Guess we’ll be seeing you two at practice this afternoon,’ one of them said.

Ken grinned. ‘Yeah, we thought we might drop by.’ He and Jack were captain and vice-captain of Meadowbrook’s soccer team that year. ‘See ya there.’

They moved on, and Jack stopped at a door. ‘Here we are.’

Ken opened a notebook and looked at the print-out of his class schedule. ‘Not me. I’ve got homeroom in one-one-eight.’

Jack gave a look of exaggerated dismay. ‘You’re kidding! They’re splitting us up?’

Ken shrugged. ‘Guess so. We had a good run though. Two years in the same homeroom. What else have you got on the schedule?’

The boys compared timetables and discovered they had their lunch breaks and English classes together.

‘Excellent,’ Jack proclaimed. ‘I’ll eat your lunch and you’ll write my essays.’

‘Dream on, pal,’ Ken responded. ‘Later.’ He moved on down the hall to his own homeroom.

At least a dozen students were already seated in the classroom when he entered. A pretty blonde girl perked up when she saw him.

‘Ken, hi!’ She indicated the chair next to hers. ‘Nobody’s sitting here.’

Ken couldn’t remember her name, but he gave her a friendly smile anyway. He’d been getting a lot of attention like this from girls lately. ‘Thanks, but I like the back of the room. Less chance of getting called on.’ He joined the four boys who already lined the wall at the far end.

He was greeted with welcoming smiles and the usual calls of ‘Hey, man!’

Ken slapped hands as he moved to the end of the row. He knew them all. None of them were on the soccer team, but Ken had never limited his socializing to the jocks. Funny thing though – when people knew you were an athlete, they thought your only interest was sports.

‘You gonna get that lousy team of ours out of the dumps?’ one boy asked with a grin.

‘Absolutely,’ Ken assured him. ‘We’re going all the way to the finals this year. Farrell and I have big plans!’

The warning bell sounded and a wave of students rushed into the room, followed by a teacher. Then the final bell rang and the teacher spoke.

‘Hello. My name is Mr Kingston, and—’

That was as far as he got before the intercom on the wall emitted a shrill buzz, indicating that the High and Mighty was about to address them.

First came the voice of the secretary. ‘May I have your attention for the morning announcements?’

In keeping with tradition, the students in the class yelled out, ‘
No!
’ Naturally, this had no effect.