Vibes (20 page)

"I'd rather she spend at least part of the time outside, hon. It'll cut down on the dander. And it's more fair to her."

I'm about to launch a protest, but the phone rings like a bell signaling the end of round one and she jogs around the house to answer it.

I go over to the weathered furniture on our lawn. We've neglected it too long, so now stripes of mold are growing up the legs of the chairs and table, making patterns on the wood grain. I kind of like how it looks. I also like the tiny spiders that hide in the table. I've learned over the years to sit with my legs out to the side so they won't crawl on me. Though it wouldn't matter if they did. They're just babies.

Maybe it isn't such a bad thing if I'm not psychic. I always thought I was kind of special, but I never felt good being psychic. I just felt freakish and hurt most of the time. What worries me, though, is this: What the hell are all those voices inside my head? Am I nuts?

Mom comes back, walking slowly across the lawn. There are two deep worry lines between her eyebrows. She glances at me with her dark eyes, trying to read me, and I realize what that phone call was probably about.

"So you can read minds, huh?" Mom sits down across from me very slowly, as though a sudden motion might make me dangerously psychotic. "Your science teacher says he's concerned."

"David's an idiot, Mom. You shouldn't listen to him."

"I didn't speak to David. Brian's the one who called."

This bums me out. Does the entire faculty know what happened now? "Great. What did Principal Bri-bri have to say?"

"He said David was concerned about your mental health, but he apologized for that. He said, 'Not everyone is open to the paranormal.' I thought that was weird."

Somehow I'm not surprised Brian would be open to my psychic abilities. He seems like the type.

Mom's eyes study me. "What's going on here?"

"Nothing. A little argument with Hildie is getting blown way out of proportion." I shift my eyes onto Mom's reflection in the sliding glass door. It makes her look whispery and vague, but I can tell from her posture she's not happy.

"Should I be worried here?"

"No." I laugh, but I know I seem nervous and fidgety. The truth is, maybe Mom should be worried. I'm a little worried myself.

"Kristi, do you really believe you can read minds?"

I look into her eyes. She's giving me her best doctor deadpan, but I can still tell she's worried that I'm crazy. "
I'm
not sure I'm psychic, but my invisible friend is."

She smirks. "Big pink bunny?"

"Oh, you've met?"

Mom chuckles, shaking her head. "Gammy would love this."

"Who?"

"Your great-grandmother. She claimed she could hear thoughts," Mom says. "Honestly, I always thought she was a little nuts. But I loved her."

I remember that day she and I stood over my great-grandmother's casket, the way my mother kissed her cross and how she didn't cry.

"You know the last thing she said to me? She told me never to smoke. It was emphysema that killed her. At the age of ninety-three." She laughs as she takes out a cigarette. She holds it up to the sky and says something in Greek before lighting it.

"What does that mean?"

"It's a Greek saying. Uh—
The fox is one hundred years old, the child one hundred and ten
." She smiles, and I notice how smiling makes her pretty. "Whatever that means. She used to say it about you."

"What else did she say?"

"She told me to watch after you because you were special." Mom shakes her head. "I let her down on both counts."

I look at Mom a long time. She is staring at the blades of grass at her feet, her thoughts very far away, though I can catch just the tip of them. She's thinking:
I thought I'd be a better mother.
But maybe I didn't hear her thoughts. Maybe it's just an intuition, like Aunt Ann says. "Mom, you know"—I wait until her large olive eyes fix on mine—"I didn't want you to watch me."

"I know." She nods. But I can see it doesn't help her feel any better. "So, Kristi, are you a nut-job or not?" She's only half joking.

I think about it. Really think. It's not as though I hear voices telling me to jump off bridges. Thoughts sometimes occur to me, and sometimes I believe those thoughts belong to other people. So what if I sometimes get it wrong? Maybe that makes me less psychic than I thought I was, or maybe not psychic at all, but does that make me nuts? "No, Mom. I'm not a nut-job. I'm confused maybe, but I'm not crazy."

"Okay." She nods again, and I can see she believes me. "This is a confusing time for both of us, honey. It's okay to be confused."

It's nice to know that Mom can trust that I'm okay, even if the rest of the world thinks I'm crazy.

I look around at our faded lawn furniture and the high wooden fence. There are certainly plenty of places for Minnie to hide. I imagine her weaving through the blades of grass, stalking a defenseless bird. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to let her out every so often. She might like it.

The next day my body attends class, but my mind keeps turning everything over. I thought I always knew what people were thinking. Now I can't be sure. As I walk through the halls I catch snippets of thoughts—
She's so psycho. Why does she look so sad? He'll never forgive her.
—but I no longer know if the thoughts are mine or someone else's. How am I supposed to go through life like that, not knowing what people are thinking?

I felt so safe when I was sure of my powers. I had everyone figured out, and that way they couldn't hurt me. But really I didn't have anything figured out. And I still got hurt anyway. I got hurt a lot. By Hildie, Gusty, Dad. And I hurt other people, too. Mom, and Jacob. And Mallory especially.

Is it okay to let other people be a mystery to me? Should I believe my eyes more and my head less?

I wish I could know for sure. Am I psychic? Do I want to be?

Thinking about this makes my palms sweat, and I have to stop before I make myself crazy. Slowly I start concentrating on my classes, and slowly the jumble of everyone's thoughts fades into white noise.

I run into Brian just as I'm coming out of the Bistro after lunch. He pounces on me and, hooking a talon over my shoulder, says, "Let's talk."

"I have class in ten minutes."

"I'll okay it with your teacher," he says, and pulls me down the hallway without giving me time for another excuse.

He leads me outside, across the lawn, and we sit under the same tree where he'd talked to Mallory. He leans his fat back against the skinny trunk, and I can hear the little tree groan under his weight. I sit across from him, Indian-style, and press the ends of my fingers together to await his words of wisdom.

"I thought we should talk a little about what happened yesterday in Explorations of Nature."

"I think that whole thing has gotten blown out of proportion, Brian."

"You're probably right, but we should still talk about it." He takes a deep breath. He seems unsure about something, as if he's trying to figure out what he can tell me and what he should keep private. Finally he launches into it, his voice low and frank, addressing me as an equal—very different from the Brian of Morning Meeting. "When I was seventeen years old, I had a terrible nightmare that my childhood buddy was trapped in a cave under the ocean. He kept calling my name from under the waves and I tried to dive down to save him, but I couldn't fight the current." He squints at me, pausing long enough to let me guess how his story ends. "The next morning we learned he'd been killed in a flash flood."

"That's awful," I say. Stories like this freak me out. I've never had a premonition about death, and I don't want to.

"If you talk to people, most of us have had experiences like that. Some more than others." He waits for me to volunteer something, but I keep quiet, so he goes on. "How long have you suspected you were psychic?" he asks.

His manner is so straightforward, it sort of brings out my honest streak. "I guess it hit a couple years ago."

"What was your first experience?"

I'm quiet for a second because I'm not sure I want to talk to him about this, but something in the way he's quietly waiting helps me feel it's okay to talk. "A couple weeks before my dad left, I knew he was going to leave us."

"And you're the only one who knew?"

I nod.

"That's a heavy burden."

"But I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm not as psychic as I thought."

He shrugs, his eyes wandering over the clouds above us. "We all have to live with a measure of uncertainty in our lives," he says. He leans his head back against the tree. "What would it mean if you weren't psychic?"

"I'll have to go through life guessing."

"Guessing what?"

"Whether I can trust people."

"That's true for everyone, Kristi." He smiles at me very warmly, which makes me nervous, so I focus on the ground in front of me. A little red beetle is crawling up a blade of grass, which bends under its weight, so the beetle just ends up back where it started, on the ground. Brian says: "Trust isn't a black and white thing, you know. Everyone has the capacity to let you down at one time or another."

"Then why should I trust anyone?"

"Because if you can't trust, you can't love." His good eye is on me, and he's giving me this look as if he's really trying to
reach
me. It's so annoying.

"Gee, Brian, if you put that to music maybe Barry Mani-low will record it."

He surprises me by laughing deep from his belly. He laughs so hard, I can't help giggling a little with him. Just a little, though.

During Story as Cultural Artifact I sit in the Contemplation Room, where I'm supposed to be working on an essay about the relationship between Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment
and Nietzsche's theory of the Superman, but I can't concentrate. I hear the whisper of an opening door, and Gusty walks in with a notebook under his arm. When he sees me he pauses for just a second, but then seems to make a decision and walks up to my table. He smiles a hello.

"Hi," I mouth.

He sits down across from me. My blood is pounding through the veins in my ears and I'm shaking. I have so much to say to him, but I don't know how to start.

He scribbles something onto his notebook and holds it up for me to read.
Let's take a walk.

I nod, and we both get up and walk quickly out the door. I don't know if our teachers saw us or not. I don't care.

Gusty leads me out to the front steps of the school and gives me a long look before sitting down. I sit next to him. We're both quiet for a while, but I know it's really my job to begin. "I'm sorry about what happened on Saturday, Gusty."

"You don't have to apologize."

"Just the same, I'm sorry."

He nods, but he still seems troubled by something. I can tell he doesn't really want to bring it up but feels he has to. "I talked to Hildie. About your fight yesterday. A lot of people heard you say some pretty weird things, Kristi."

I feel suddenly cornered. I expected him to ask about Mallory, not about this. "So? You've never said weird things?"

He breathes out hard. "Is it true? Did you say you could read Hildie's mind?"

"So what if I did?"

"Don't you know how strange that sounds?"

His face is carefully blank, but I can see the fear in his eyes.

I hate how he's looking at me. It makes me feel so...
sick.

I want to prove to Gusty I'm not crazy so that he'll never look at me like this again. I probably shouldn't do this because I might not be psychic, but talking to Brian gave me more confidence. Besides, if I have a connection with anyone, it would be with Gusty, right? "Close your eyes," I tell him.

"Why?"

"Close your eyes and think of an image. Think about it hard."

He seems taken off-guard, and I can tell he doesn't want to do it, but then I put my hand over his eyes and he closes them.

I tune out the sound of the trees sighing in the wind and try to focus only on Gusty.

At first it feels as if I'm spinning, and I have to take deep breaths. Then I get an image, but what I see makes me feel shy. I wait to make sure it's real, but then I realize there's no way to know for sure anyway, so I just blurt it out. "You're thinking about the carvings behind the shed in your backyard. The ones you showed me that time." I crack an eye open and look at him. He's looking at me, but I can't read his expression. "Did I get it right?"

His eyebrows crunch together. "I was thinking about that dog we met."

"Oh." I feel crestfallen, but I try to laugh it off. "So much for my psychic powers."

Gusty nods slowly, like he's expecting me to start spouting prophecies about the end of the world. "So you really believe you can read minds?"

I could lie to him and say no, it was all a big joke. But I don't want to. I want him to know the real me. "For a while it seemed like I was unusually ... intuitive. Now I'm not so sure. Do you think I'm crazy now?"

"I don't know
what
to think." He shakes his head, bewildered.

This should make me feel hurt, but it doesn't. Instead, I'm boiling-oil mad. I've had about enough of Gusty Peterson's uncertainty. "Look, Gusty. Either like me for who I am or don't. I don't care anymore, okay?" He bites his bottom lip like he's trying to find the right thing to say, but I don't want to wait around for Gusty anymore. I want to hurt him. "Chicken out a second time. Be my guest."

I stand up and start to pull open the school door, but I feel a hand on my arm. I turn around to see a seriously pissed-off Gusty Peterson. "You know, maybe I chickened out with you, Kristi, but you haven't exactly been easy to approach!"

"So your being a coward is
my
fault?"

I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have called h
im
a coward. His face flushes, and a tremor seems to move through him. When he opens his mouth I expect him to yell, but instead his voice goes very deep and very quiet. "
I'm
the coward? You're completely closed off, Kristi. You sit in an ivory tower, and you pass judgment on everyone else. Because you're the one who's afraid."