Psychic

By the time lunch rolled around, everyone knew about what Mr. Peterson did to Mandy Dawson. Word spread so fast that even the loners and shy kids knew about it.

I was surprised that the faculty didn’t just cancel school again today, but the PTA probably got behind it and complained about us missing our education or something. The PTA were a force of nature.

Practically anything anyone was talking about was what happened. Their thoughts spoke more truth than their words though, and they weren’t very pretty.

I hope Mandy’s okay

You know what? I bet they were really together and she just called rape

That’s what happens when you’re a slut

I always knew Mr. Peterson was a pedophile

Yeah, it was times like these where you found out the true nature of people.

In fact, all he thoughts above were from the table that Mandy Dawson usually sat at. You never really knew who your true friends are, do you?

Bella thoughts focused more on Bryce than anything else. They hadn’t been dating long, but her thoughts claimed that she was falling head over heels for the boy. Bryce’s thoughts were more scatter brained than anything else. It seemed like he was thinking of everything to distract him from something else. I didn’t really want to go digging through his brain, so I just ignored whatever he was avoiding.

I was thinking far off from everyone else. My thoughts didn’t lie on Mandy Dawson anymore. The events of the night before and this morning were still fresh in my mind.

Victoria had cleared up a ton for me and somehow made it more complicated at the same time. And this morning scared me a bit more than anything. I was thinking like I was Victoria. I was vengeful and angry. And then I hurt Mrs. Lynch just because she said something rude about me.

(In all honesty, I was scared of myself more than anything)

I was thinking like I was the person Hawthorne believed me to be. I was acting like I was the villain.

I hadn’t even told Magnus about Victoria’s impromptu visit. I had totally blinded sided him. I lied to him, right to his face! I was no better than Victoria.

Magnus had basically told me everything he knew before Victoria explained the rest. He warned me that Hawthorne was after me. He told me what I was. He talked about this whole other world full of magic. I even told him about what happened at that one home, with the disgusting foster dad, something I hadn’t even told Bella.

And then I just ignored him.

When Victoria came along, it was like I chose her over him, all because we were the same. All because she was the only other psychic left.

Maybe it was that feeling that the Doctor felt about the Master in Doctor Who. I mean – sure, they were enemies, but they were the last of their kind. The Doctor, in the end, couldn’t imagine killing the Master, he even wanted to befriend him after everything he did.

I feel like maybe there was a special connection between them, like there was with me and Victoria. Sure – she was the enemy, but she understood who I was. She was just like me.

The bell rang to release us to our next class, but I was sure Bella was too busy to hear it. She was literally fawning over Bryce too much to have noticed it.

I wasn’t purposely trying to be bitter, but my patience with Bryce had thinned considerably, and, therefore, my patience with Bella had also thinned. I was worried that Bryce might’ve been getting between us.

But I headed over to Chemistry with new thoughts in my mind. Mr. Peterson was our teacher in there, and Mandy Dawson had been in there as well. The whole class would be talking about it.

And, as if I predicted the future, the entire class was fidgety and talked in hushed whispers. We had a substitute, of course, but no one did the work. I took the free day to talk to Magnus, or at least try to explain why I’d been so . . . vague.

“Hey.” I smiled his way, setting my stuff down at his table and sitting in the chair next to him.

“Hi.”

“So, have you had any updates on Victoria?”

Why? Why, Liv? Why did I have to ask that question? What if he knew that she’d visited my house? What if-

“Nope, she’s been a ghost. Maybe you’re right, maybe she did get as far away from Hawthorne as possible.”

I nodded and almost let out a sigh of relief. He didn’t know.

“Yeah, that’s just what I would’ve done if I was – you know – running form the law or something.” Gosh, that sounded so stupid.

He nodded, the awkwardness of the situation growing.

“So,” I start, attempting to build up the courage to tell him about Victoria, “remember how I told you about the dreams Victoria sent me about you and Hawthorne?” He nodded. “Well, she sent me one other dream as well, but it was a bit different. She appeared in front of me and told me that I had other powers, like you said when you explained this whole psychic thing to me. She also said not to trust you.”

I was bending the truth a little, but she had technically said both of those things, but only one of those was from the dream.

He sighed. “I do know that psychics are supposed to have other powers as a result from their mind reading abilities, but I’m not sure what. As I said before, education about your kind has been sparse since the whole Victoria incident. I assumed that it was just something connected to seeing through magic. As for not trusting me, she’s the enemy, remember? Why would she want you to trust me? She’ll do anything she can to gain power, even if that means using you.”

I nodded like I understood, but I could tell that he wasn’t telling me everything. He must’ve known more about what I could do. But if he was lying to me, did that mean that Victoria was right? Was I wrong to trust Magnus?

“These people are just going through their everyday lives like nothing has changed, aren’t they?” Victoria asked rhetorically. “They don’t know that the tables have turned.

It was now after school, and Victoria and I were at the town square. She said that she wanted to give me a lesson on how to control my powers, and if recent events didn’t highlight the urgency of learning how to exactly do that, I didn’t know what did.

I’d never really been to the town square except for a couple of times. It was crowded on afternoons and weekends, which usually meant massive headaches. Plus, I had no interest in shopping for clothes or visiting the grocery store anyways. I had no reason to visit the town square, until now.

“It’s not their fault that they don’t know,” I argue back, “it’s not like they would want to know anyways.” In fact, I’m pretty sure I wish I didn’t know.

She turned to me, “They’re just ignorant, but you can use that to your advantage.”

“How?”

“Like so.” She smiled slyly and focused her attention on a middle-aged woman with blonde hair who was balancing about eight shopping bags in her hand, plus a Blackberry and wearing a business suit. I was pretty sure she was the mother of one of the girls at the school, I’d even seen her at a couple school functions.

“I want you to make her throw her bags on the ground.”

“What?” Was she serious?

She repeated her previous words with the same intensity.

“I’ve never-“

She gave me a harsh look and I shut up. Victoria knew what she was doing, right? She was helping me control my powers, was she not?

I focused my thoughts in her direction. Earlier Victoria had said something about using my powers to dig deep into her mind, finding out everything I could about her and twisting her thoughts into something she might believe.

“You can’t make someone do something that they wouldn’t normally do. You can’t make a pacifist commit murder. Their instinct is a little bit too keen for that. Instead, you can use who they are against them. Make them do what you want them to do based on something they’d believe.”

I took a deep breath and let my walls fall down.

God, why can’t Heather just turn those papers in already? Our revenues are going down too drastically.

Boring. I needed to delve deeper. I needed to see her memories without having her directly think about them. So, I did something a bit different. I opened a door that I normally left closed. I went into her subconscious.

Now, being in someone’s innermost thoughts was quite terrifying. You could see everything they’d ever thought, seen, or fantasized all at once. It was overwhelming and took an intense amount of energy, which was why I normally avoided it.

I saw many things in the woman’s mind, whose name turned out to be Miranda Delmer. She was a single mother, and her business was secretly doing much worse than she’d admit. Her pride was at stake, which meant everything to her after an incident in high school. I dug deeper and found that she thought she was a disappointment to her parents, and that she felt overshadowed by her older sister, a director of a New York law firm. She was deathly afraid of spiders and things that went bump in the night after a traumatizing accident as a child – she witnessed a robbery gone bad at the age of eight and her younger brother used to sneak his pet tarantula on her bed at night.

And then I pulled at her brain. I tugged at the memories and thoughts of fear and never being good enough. I shocked her enough for her to stop all movement and drop her bags. I heard glass break as a smaller bag fell, the sound traveling all the way to where we sat. Miranda looked around in confusion before regaining her composure, picking up her bags, and walking off, shoulders a bit lower than they’d been before.

I let out a huge breath of air that I’d been holding. I’d just done that, hadn’t I?

Victoria let out a sound of approval. “That was good enough for your first try.”

It was then that I realized I hadn’t been in the woman’s thoughts for hours, only ten seconds. I couldn’t help but to compare it to when Victoria controlled Amy and Rick for a moment – it had only taken her a second.

“That was . . .”

“Amazing?” Victoria suggested.

I shook my head.

“Terrifying.”

Over the next two hours, Victoria taught me how to not just tug and pull at strong emotions, but to enforce my own onto someone. It was tiring work, and it often left me feeling sick off of the power I felt when I did it.

But, I had to admit, Victoria was a good teacher. I’d already learned more in two hours about my powers than I had in fifteen year of living with them.

“Can we stop for the night?” I asked, seeing the first signs of sunset on the horizon. I was feeling quite tired from the afternoon of mind reading and controlling.

Victoria nodded. “Sure, but meet me here again tomorrow, and every day after that. You still have a lot to learn about who you are, Olivia, if you want to be safe from Hawthorne.”

I nodded. Victoria wasn’t the enemy. Hawthorne was the enemy, I was sure of it. Hawthorne was the one who wanted to kill me. Hawthorne was the one who’d had my mother – his wife – murdered in cold blood. Hawthorne was the bad guy, not Victoria.

I had no doubt in my mind that I would keep learning from Victoria, and keep meeting up with her. I might not have completely trusted her yet, but she was helping me, and she understood me. It was enough for me.

But why did I still feel so bad about it? Was it Magnus? Had his words of warning stuck with me? Was I afraid of betraying him?

Whatever it was, I pushed it down and swallowed my pride. Victoria wasn’t the enemy, was she?