Gifted Touch (2 page)

She stuck out her foot and turned her ankle back and forth, setting the beads on her denim clogs bouncing. Although with the tremors that were zipping up and down her legs, they’d probably have started bouncing, anyway.
See, you’re fine,
she told herself.
If
you’re going crazy, you can’t cover up that you’re
going crazy. So you’re not going crazy.

Rae led the way across the cafeteria to the frozen yogurt machine, grabbed one of the jumbo cups, positioned it under the French vanilla nozzle, and pulled 8

down on the silver handle.

/It will be okay if I skip dinner and get on the treadmill the
second/

A rush of dizziness left little dots of light exploding in front of her eyes. Rae squeezed her eyes shut. “Okay, stop it, just stop it. I’ve never even been on a treadmill.”

“What?” Lea asked as she reached for one of the cheap plastic spoons.

Rae kept her eyes shut a second longer, then forced them open. She took in all the ordinary sights of the cafeteria, the tall windows overlooking the manicured lawns, the rah-rah banners made by the cheerleading squad, the same groups of people sitting at the same polished wooden tables, chewing, talking, laughing, harassing, studying, flirting—acting your basic normal.
Yep, everything is normal,
Rae told herself.
You’re normal.

“I didn’t hear you,” Lea said.

“I was . . . um, just talking to myself,” Rae answered.

“You’re losing it,” Lea told her, carefully turning her cup in a circle as she pulled the handle on the yogurt machine, making a swirling mountain of fro-yo.

“You’re right. I’m losing it,” Rae agreed quickly, forcing her lips into a smile. She reminded herself that Lea wasn’t trying to be sadistic. She didn’t know 9

about Rae’s mom. Yeah, Lea was her best friend. But if Rae had told Lea the truth, Lea would be walking around with this armed nuke she could use against Rae whenever she wanted. Rae didn’t plan to let anybody have that kind of ammunition against her. Ever.

Lea grabbed a handful of napkins and headed toward their usual table. Rae plucked a plastic spoon out of the metal container, then followed her, braced for the next moment of . . . She didn’t allow herself to name the phenomenon she’d been experiencing.

But it, whatever it was, didn’t come. As she followed Lea over to the usual table, all her brain murmurings felt . . . organic. Just regular Rae stuff.

Whatever the weirdness was, it’s over,
she told herself. She focused her gaze on Marcus. She always liked watching him when he didn’t know she was looking. It made her want to grab a brush and try and capture the sprawl of his long legs, all the shades—

from wheat to cream—of his close-cut blond hair, the perfect shape of his mouth, everything.

As if he could feel her staring at him, Marcus looked up, his green eyes locking on to her immediately. As soon as she was in reach, he snagged her by the waist and pulled her down on the bench next to him. Rae gave him a fast kiss. Their lips touched for only a second, but it brought back every sensation she’d felt lying on that bed at the party last night, giv-10

ing her this sort of full-body blush.

“My parents have this cocktail thing after work, so the house is all ours tonight,” Marcus murmured in her ear. His breath was hot against her earlobe as he waited for her response.

Except what should her response be? Rae wanted more of what she’d felt last night when they snuck away from the party. But more and the whole enchilada weren’t the same thing.

“Actually my dad needs me home tonight,” Rae lied. “Some kind of faculty get-together at our house, and he wants me to play hostess. You know, an end-of-the-spring-semester thing.”

Marcus nodded, but his smile faded and he glanced away, turning his attention back to his lunch.

Great—he was probably sitting there wondering how he’d gotten stuck with the immature girlfriend who couldn’t just relax and—

“Hey, Do Rae Mi, did you remember to bring my lipstick?” Jackie asked from across the table.

“Got it right here.” Rae dug around in her big straw bag until her fingers found the tube.

/
Rae thinks she’s so special
/

The thought brought a bitter taste into her mouth.

A bile and fro-yo blend. That was
not
her own thought about herself. This time she was sure. It had come from someplace else. But—

11

“Well, can I have it?” Jackie asked loudly.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure.” Rae realized she’d been in some kind of suspended animation, staring down at the lipstick in her fingers. She tossed the tube to Jackie, who caught it expertly, her light green nail polish glistening under the fluorescent lights.

Okay, so the—she couldn’t stop herself from naming the phenomenon this time—so the insanity spell isn’t over yet.
Just hang on,
Rae coached herself.

Ride it out.

Rae forced herself to eat a little yogurt. That’s what those who were not sanity challenged did at lunch. They ate.

“Could you pass me the salt?” Vince Deitz asked from the other side of Lea. He smiled at Rae, giving her a peek at his chipped front tooth.

“Not a problem,” Rae answered. She could spoon yogurt into her mouth. She could pass the salt. No problem at all. She grabbed the yellow plastic shaker and—

/
know I got a D on that Spanish quiz, maybe even an F
/

—shoved it into Vince’s hand. Her eyelid began to twitch again. She rubbed her eye fiercely.
Stop it! Just
stop it! You don’t even take Spanish, so you can’t be
freaking that you got a D.

Her eye started to water, and she could feel her mascara beginning to streak. But the lid kept on twitching. And a tiny nerve on one side of her nose 12

was twitching, too. And one in her lower lip.

No one can see,
Rae told herself.
You can feel it,
but they can’t see it, so just hang on. Take a few more
spoonfuls of the yogurt, then calmly stand up and go to
the ladies’ room. From there you can go home if you
have to, but for now, just hang on.

“Are you crying?” Jackie asked.

“Of course not,” Rae snapped. She’d forgotten that her jumping nerves weren’t her only problem. She probably had mascara down to her chin by now. “I just got something in my eye.” Something like her own stupid fingers. Why had she rubbed so hard? Rae reached out and hauled the metal napkin holder toward her.

/
My mother knows that I
/

“My mother doesn’t know anything!” Rae blurted out. “My mother’s dead!”

The table went silent.

Rae’s heart was pounding so hard, the sound filled her ears. The little twitches in her eyelid, nose, and lip began jerking in time to its thundering.

“Sorry. Um, I just . . . Sorry.” What else could she say? There was no sane explanation to give.

“That’s okay,” Lea reassured her. “No biggie.” Rae yanked a napkin free and started dabbing her weeping eye. But that didn’t stop her from seeing that everyone at her table—the whole freaking crème de la crème—was still staring. And Lea, for all her “no big-13

gie,” looked faintly repulsed.

It’s because she knows,
Rae thought.
They all
know. That’s why they’re staring at me. They can see it
happening. They can see me becoming like her, like my
mother.
Her breath started to come in short pants, as if her lungs were shrinking, as if her whole chest were shrinking.

Rae shoved herself to her feet. The napkin holder clattered to the floor. Automatically she climbed over the bench, bent down, and picked it up.

/
My mother’s going to kill me if
/

“Why do you keep talking about my mother?

Weren’t you listening?” Rae shrieked. Now everyone in the cafeteria was staring. Whispering. They were saying she was just like her mother. Rae knew it.

A nerve in the back of her hand began to twitch in time with the others. Rae gave a howl of frustration and hurled the napkin holder away from her. It bounced twice on the linoleum floor. No one glanced at it. They kept staring at her. Because they knew the truth.

Marcus sprang up and started toward her. “No!” Rae screamed. “Stay back. All of you, just stay back.

I don’t know what I’ll do if you come closer.” She tried to pull in a breath, but her ribs felt like they’d wrapped her lungs in a tight, tiny cage. And her heart—how could it beat so hard without exploding?

“Rae, it’s just me. It’s Marcus,” he said. He took 14

one hesitant step closer.

“Get back!” Rae screeched. She saw Ms.

O’Banyon running toward her. “You, too! Everybody just get back. I don’t want to hurt anyone.” The way her mother had.

Marcus obediently backed up. Ms. O’Banyon stopped where she was, one hand reached out toward Rae. Everyone else just stared. Because they could see it. They could see the truth.

They knew Rae had gone insane.

15

Chapter 1

“Is there anything you need for school tomorrow?” Rae’s father asked as they drove down the freeway at precisely fifty-five miles an hour. “We could swing by the mall after your, uh, meeting. I’d be willing to give you control of my AmEx for, say, twelve or thirteen minutes.” He took his eyes off the road long enough to give her something that she knew was supposed to be a smile, although it came out more like a grimace. Just way too many teeth showing.

That was your cue, Rae,
she told herself. Her cue to launch into a long and elaborate whine-protest that would convince him just how key the right clothes and accessories were to having the kind of school year she’d want to look back on fondly when she was his age.

17

“What do you say?” her father asked. He rubbed the little mole on his right cheek, the way he always did when he got stressed.

“I’m good,” Rae answered. She was sure there were some things she
should
want for the start of her junior year. A shirt in one of the “new” colors or a backpack upgrade or something. But she had no idea what the things she should want were. It seemed safer to stick to the stuff she already had. She could trust that Rae, the pre-freak-out Rae. But the only-days-out-of-the-hospital Rae—that was not someone who could be trusted with something as delicate as picking out appropriate clothes.

Her father’s smile-grimace faded. “Well, if you change your mind . . .” He let his words trail off and studied the freeway stretching out in front of them with unnecessary intensity. Rae stared through the windshield, too, letting the waves of heat rising off the asphalt and the white lines flying past mesmerize her.

Her happiest times, happiest post-freak-out, were moments like this—when she could blank out, her mind quiet. Which was pretty pathetic. She could just imagine her first day of school.

Hey, Rae, what did you do this summer?

Oh, I had a nice, long rest in a kind of . . . resort.

And I took a lot of baths, which was fab because in the
tub, my mind actually seems to work fairly non-psycho-ly. What about you?

18

And that was if anybody was even willing to talk to her at all after her meltdown in the cafeteria last spring. She’d seen Marcus only once since that day—

hospitals gave him the creeps—although she’d gotten a couple of sweet cards from him. Lea had actually shown up at the hospital a couple of times—with a few other friends in tow—but she’d been better about sending an endless stream of little gifts. Not that Rae could blame her. A day at the hospital wasn’t exactly the definition of summer fun.

“Could you hand me my sunglasses?” Rae’s dad asked.

“Sure. You should always wear them when it’s this bright. We blue-eyed types are so sun sensitive,” Rae answered, doing her look-how-normal-I-am routine.

She opened the glove box.

/
What am I supposed to say to her?
/

The thought was followed by a vicious wrench in the muscles between Rae’s shoulder blades. A tiny gasp of pain escaped her lips.

“Are you all right?” her father demanded, his voice filled with needles of anxiety.

“Yeah, fine. Just banged my elbow on the door handle,” Rae answered quickly. She’d managed to convince her dad and her doctor that the strange thoughts that had started slamming into her brain without warning were gone. And she wasn’t going to 19

give either of them any reason to suspect that she’d been lying; otherwise she’d be on the express train back to squirrel city.

“Sunglasses?” her father reminded her, sounding a little more normal. Neither of them sounded completely normal anymore.

“Oh, right.” Rae snatched up her dad’s dorky, geek-professor-attempting-coolness mirrored shades—

/
a bald spot
/

—and handed them to him, absentmindedly stroking the top of her head. She didn’t try to figure out where the thought about a bald spot had come from. She’d given up on searching for explanations months ago and accepted the fact that this was her life now. All she could do was deal—and try not to foam unattractively at the mouth.

Rae focused her attention back on the heat waves and the white lines. But just as she was starting to reenter the blank zone, her dad changed lanes and moved onto the off-ramp. Three turns later the sign for the Oakvale Institute came into view. It was more low security than the hospital. No fences or anything. But Rae still bet it had that smell, that bargain-brand-disinfectant smell.

“I don’t know why I even have to do this. I’m fine. Dr. Warriner said I was fine,” Rae said.

“And you
are
fine,” her father answered, his voice a little too loud. “You’re doing great. The group 20

sessions are just to help you keep on track, especially with starting back to school tomorrow.” He pulled into the institute’s parking lot and maneuvered the old Chevette into a spot almost in front of the main doors.