Graceful

  I shake my head. On the other side of the street, a squirrel scampers down a tree with a pinecone in its mouth. A second later, the dog breaks free from its leash and races into the street toward the squirrel. The dog is short. The bus driver does not see it and isn’t slowing down enough. We are going to hit the dog. Or worse, we are going to hit the dog and the woman about to rush into the street after him. The bus will stop short and all the kids will fly forward, smacking their faces on the seat backs in front of them. This won’t end well.

  Bailey gasps as she sees the dog leap over the curb. She grabs onto the top of the seat in front of us and tries to stand.

  She won’t have time to alert the driver, and she knows it.

  With a wave of both hands, I send the dog and the woman flying back onto the sidewalk and the squirrel back up its tree. The bus keeps moving forward, all but two of its passengers unaware of what almost happened.

  The dog and the woman keep right on walking.

  Bailey sits back down, her hand still gripping tight to the seat in front of us. “Okay,” she says, breathing quickly, “that was insane.”

  I am surprisingly calm about the whole thing. It all felt so natural and instinctive. I saw the scene like a movie unfolding behind my eyes, and then I knew what to do.

  The bus pulls up to the next stop and Amanda gets on. Her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy. Bailey opens her mouth to call her name, but I put my hand on her arm to stop her. I know when someone doesn’t want to talk. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “Let her go sit with her friends.”

  As Amanda passes our row, she gives us a strained smile and heads toward the back, where the other eighth graders sit. I wish I knew what she was upset about and if there was any way I could make it better. I watch as she sits down next to Connor. He greets her with a cheerful grunt, then buries his face in the book he’s reading.

  Bailey is trying to talk to me, but something is happening and it’s hard to hear her. The words filling my ears start off softly, not more than a low murmur. Then the murmur turns almost immediately into a roar. It sounds like someone turned on thirty different radio stations at once. It takes a few more seconds until I realize I’m hearing the thoughts of everyone on the bus!

  I put my hands over my ears and scrunch down in my seat. Bailey starts shaking my shoulder, but I close my eyes and slide lower. The noise only stops when the bus empties.

  I slowly open my eyes and pull my hands away. Bailey is standing over me.

  “This has been a REALLY WEIRD BUS RIDE!” she shouts. “What’s going on now?”

  “Time to get off, girls,” the bus driver calls back to us. Bailey grabs both our bags and pushes me down the aisle ahead of her.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” I tell Bailey as we make our way into the school. With kids all around us, the noise in my head is deafening. “I can hear everyone’s thoughts now. That hasn’t happened since the first few days after I woke up from the coma thing.”

  “You’re kind of shouting,” Bailey says, glancing around us anxiously.

  “Sorry,” I reply in a lower voice.

  She points to a boy pulling a book from his locker. “What’s that kid thinking?”

  I try to focus on one voice, like tuning in one song on the radio still blaring in my head. My brain hurts from the effort but eventually I can quiet all the other sounds. “He’s hoping his mom didn’t see him feed his scrambled eggs to the cat.”

  She points to a girl at the water fountain. “And her?”

  “Worried about a spelling test,” I reply.

  We’re in front of Bailey’s locker now. “What about me? What number am I thinking of?”

  I try to zoom in on her, but I can’t. I widen the range and feel around for Connor and the other Team Grace members. I can sense them in different parts of the building but that’s all. “I can’t read your mind,” I tell her, confused. “Or anyone on Team Grace. I can always see a glow around you, but it’s like it’s more solid now, like a bubble. Oh! Wait! It is a bubble! I put it there when I was doing the forgetting spell. It was supposed to protect you.”

  “Guess it’s working!” she says, grinning. “Even if it’s only protecting us from you!” She twists open her combination lock. “I wouldn’t mind if you could tell my future, though, like you did with the dog running into the street.”

  “I think that’s a different thing,” I tell her, forcing myself to focus on just her and not all the background noise. “Stopping the accident felt more natural, like it’s what the vortex gave me the power for in the first place. All this …” I wave my arms wildly at all the people around us. “All this is overwhelming. I feel like my head is going to split open and everyone’s secrets are going to spill out of my ears and onto the floor.”

  “We’ll have to figure out a way to stop it, then,” she says, grabbing her books.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.” I struggle to find the words to explain what I’ve never been good at explaining. “When I first got my powers on my birthday, instead of hearing thoughts, I saw the way everyone and everything was connected to one another. It was beautiful and scary and amazing. But Angelina had to put me in a coma to make it stop before I lost my mind.”

  I can practically see the gears turning in Bailey’s brain as she tries to figure this out. “Okay,” she finally says. “Did you do anything to make it start, whether on purpose or not?”

  I think for a second and am about to shake my head when I remember something. “Right before it started, I thought about how I wished I knew why Amanda was so upset.”

  “Maybe it’s that easy!” she says. “You just wish for something and it happens.”

  I shake my head. “Trust me, I’ve wished for a lot of things these last few months and mostly what I get is pizza.” We’re heading toward my locker now, and the halls are starting to thin out. It’s getting a little easier to think. Might as well give wishing a try. “Okay,” I whisper out loud, “I wish I couldn’t hear anyone’s thoughts anymore.”

  I hold my breath for a second, hoping. But no. I can still tell that Suzy from my English class left her book report on the floor of her bedroom and her dog peed on it.

  “Did it work?” Bailey asks, leaning forward eagerly.

  “No, it did not. And now I have the smell of dog pee in my nose.”

  “I won’t even ask,” she says, making a face.

  “It’s my own fault,” I tell her as I struggle to focus on my locker combination. “I wanted my powers to come back stronger, and now that they seem to be, it’s more than I want. What if this never goes away? What if Angelina experienced the world this way and just never bothered to mention it to me?”

  Bailey reaches over and undoes my lock for me since I seem incapable. “I don’t think so,” Bailey says. “She would have gone crazy. Even crazier than she is already, I mean. But maybe you can train yourself to only see what you want or need to see.”

  Angelina said something really similar about training, but I haven’t done the gratitude offering that she suggested, or tried to find any ways to either increase or control my powers. “You up for a trip to the library after school?” I ask.

  The warning bell rings. “Can’t,” she says, hurrying toward her homeroom. “Mom’s picking me up early for a dentist appointment. Sorry!”

  “That’s okay, Rory’s going to come with me,” I blurt out, surprising both of us.

  She tilts her head at me. “She is?”

  I nod. “I see us walking in together.”

  “Oh,” she says. A flicker of jealousy crosses her face, but she quickly turns it into a smile. “Okay, gotta go! Don’t tell anyone their future today.”

  “Scout’s honor,” I say, holding up two fingers.

  “You aren’t a scout,” she says, running off in the opposite direction. “And no, being a Sunshine Kid when you were six doesn’t count.” She gives a final wave and turns the corner.

  I feel a little better. It helps that the
hallways are almost empty now, so I get a break from the noise and images filling my head. I take a deep breath and walk toward my classroom. You can do this, I tell myself. You can get through this one day.

  Except, I totally can’t.

  I can’t focus on anything my teacher is trying to teach, and I feel like I’m eavesdropping on everyone and invading their privacy. It helps if I keep my eyes closed, so at least that way I’m not focusing on any one person, but I can’t do that in class without getting sent to the principal’s office, and I’ve been there enough for this lifetime.

  If I can’t find a way to control this, I’m going to wind up hiding under my blanket for the rest of my life with only Green Bunny for company. He has his good qualities, but he isn’t a great conversationalist.

  By the middle of math, I have reached my breaking point. I raise my hand and ask to go to the nurse. The teacher writes me a pass and tells me to take my books with me.

  I walk slowly down to the nurse’s office, grateful for the silence of the hall again. The nurse has a bed in a private room behind her office, and I’ve seen kids resting there while they wait for their parents to pick them up. But I don’t want my parents to pick me up. I can’t worry them all over again.

  While I’m dragging my feet, not sure what to do, a girl steps out of an open classroom door. It’s Rory!

  “Hey!” she says. “Bathroom run. You?”

  “Nurse.”

  She pulls me away from the classroom so no one can hear us. “Is everything all right? Are you sick?”

  I tell her what’s going on as quickly as I can, including all the stuff on the bus and the voices and the library and my plan to hide out in the nurse’s office.

  Rory lets it all sink in, then says, “I used to think Angelina was able to pull these strings that would lead one person to another person or take an event in a certain direction. And I still think that’s true, but more than that, she was able to look at all the possibilities of any situation, and single out which one of those would be the best option at the time. Then, somehow, she was able to pull that one thread and make things happen.”

  I think back to what Rory and Amanda and Tara had told me of their experiences with Angelina, which were all really different. And I think about the things I saw on my birthday, the way it felt like the town was almost a solid blanket made up of people’s lives all woven together. Rory could be right.

  “Do you think I can do that, too?” I ask her.

  “I don’t see why not,” she says. “Why don’t you practice now? You want to quiet the voices in your head. In order to do that, you’re pretty sure you need something that’s at the library. But in order to make it till after school without losing your mind, you need to be somewhere quiet. Sounds like what you need to do is keep the nurse from calling your parents.”

  I nod, following along. “Yes, but how?”

  “From what I’ve seen you do so far, and what you said about the bus this morning, you do your best work without thinking too much about how you’re doing it.”

  I nod. She’s right. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  Rory walks with me toward the nurse’s office. “I’m going to be downtown after school, too,” she says. “If you want some company at the library, I’d be happy to go with you.”

  I smile. Not that I doubted my vision of the two of us walking into the library together, but it’s nice to get confirmation. “That would be great. What do you need to do down there?”

  She grunts. “Phone store.”

  I laugh. “What happened to it this time?”

  “The screen cracked.”

  “It fell?”

  “Not exactly. I kind of threw it across the room and it hit the wall. Not my finest moment.” I notice for the first time how tired she looks, with light purple circles under both eyes.

  “Is everything all right?” I ask, feeling guilty that I have only been focusing on my own problems when other people are going through hard things, too.

  She sighs. “Just Jake stuff. It’s silly.”

  “It’s not silly,” I reply. “It’s your life. What happened?”

  “Well, remember how Jake surprised me with a visit, and we went hiking with my family? Somebody must have recognized him, or been following us or something, and took a picture of him carrying me. Teen Scene Today printed it with this obnoxious interview with Madison who said Jake only likes me because he feels sorry for me.”

  “Ugh, I’m sorry. She’s always been jealous, that’s all.”

  We’re outside the nurse’s office now. “Everyone keeps telling me that,” she says, “and I know it’s true on one hand, but on the other, maybe she’s right. At least a little bit.”

  “She’s not,” I say firmly.

  “I’m not sure if I’m more upset about that part, or the idea of someone lurking behind a tree taking pictures, ya know? What kind of life is that for him? Having to sneak around, wear disguises, hire look-alikes, or just not go out at all to avoid being followed. It’s awful.” She lowers her voice. “He doesn’t really like being this big teen god. He wants to be a director one day, but he’s afraid no one will take him seriously. Plus, if he can’t get out and actually experience the world, he’s afraid he’ll never grow. You know, as a person.”

  “I totally know how he feels,” I say, then wish I could take it back. How am I supposed to know how it feels to be a world-famous teen idol? But I did have a taste of what it feels like when people are always staring at you. I hurriedly add, “I mean, on a much smaller scale, of course. At least he has you, though. He gets to be a normal person with you. He’s never had that before. He loves being with you and your family because you like him for who he is on the inside. You always have. He doesn’t even know you had a crush on him before you met. You make him feel special in a way no one else has.”

  She stares at me. “How … how do you know all that?”

  I pause. How do I know it? “I guess this hearing-people’s-thoughts-thing works long-distance, too.”

  Her eyes get all glassy. She reaches out and tugs on my sleeve. “Thanks, Grace.”

  “This is your shirt,” I blurt out.

  She laughs. “I recognize it. I wore that shirt the day I tried out to be an extra in the movie. It’s a good-luck shirt.”

  The nurse’s door swings open and a boy walks out with a row of Band-Aids on his arm. “Old war wound,” he says, holding it up proudly as he passes us.

  “Good try!” Rory calls out. “I’ve used that one before.”

  “No idea what that means,” I say, “but I guess this is where we part ways.”

  “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  I shake my head. “I’ll be okay. You should probably get to the bathroom.”

  “I thought you couldn’t read my mind?” she asks.

  I smile. “I can’t. But you’re crossing your legs.”

  She laughs. “Oh! Yeah, I better go. See you outside the phone store at four?”

  “Yup.”

  She hurries down the hall toward the bathroom. It would be nice if maybe the nurse wasn’t in her office, and I could just sneak in and hide in the back room until someone else needed it. But no, she’s at her desk filling out paperwork. She doesn’t look up when I walk in. She is thinking about a date she has tonight with the new gym teacher and wondering what to wear.

  “Um, excuse me?” I say.

  She still doesn’t look up.

  I clear my throat. Loudly.

  Nothing.

  This is getting weird.

  “Um, can I just lay down for a bit in the back?” I ask.

  In response, the nurse sticks her pinky in her ear and roots around in there. Yikes, that’s kind of gross. I hope she washes that hand before tending to any more war wounds!

  It’s slowly sinking in that she doesn’t see me. I look down at my hands. Yup, still here. I do a jumping jack. Yup, still makes a thump when I land, but the nurse doesn’t even flinch at the sound. She just
keeps thinking about whether her red pumps would send the wrong message and digging around in that ear. Must be a lot of wax in there!

  I decide not to push my luck and dart around her desk into the back room. I gently close the door behind me. Ah, it’s as quiet as I’d hoped. The only thoughts in my head are my own.

  Unfortunately, my victory is short-lived. After only an hour, the nurse leads a sixth-grade boy into the room with a tissue held up to his bloody nose. “Sit on the bed and tilt your head forward,” she instructs him. My heart starts racing. He’s going to see me!

  But he doesn’t! He sits down on the bed, only inches away from my face! I don’t dare breathe.

  “But my mom always has me tilt my head back when I get a nose bleed,” he argues.

  “Your mom is wrong,” she snaps. Then she says, “Sorry. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “No, you don’t,” I mutter, sliding down to the end of the bed.

  The boy just grunts and tilts his head forward as told. He’s hungry and annoyed that he’s missing lunch. His being hungry is making me hungry. My stomach growls. I’ve got to get out of here. I slowly climb off the end of the bed and tiptoe around them until the coast is clear. Then I run through the office, nearly toppling a huge bin of Band-Aids.

  I don’t have to wonder if my seeming invisibility will stick with me out in the hall because the second I run out into it, a kid shouts, “Hey, watch where you’re going!” as I barrel right into him. His brown bag lunch goes flying.

  “Sorry, sorry!” I yelp, backing out of the way. Then the voices hit me again, and I want to cower in the corner with my hands over my ears. I don’t think that will go unnoticed, though, and I’m determined not to cause any more unwanted attention.

  Since it’s time for lunch, everyone I pass has food on their minds. What they’re going to eat, what they’re currently eating, what they wish they could eat instead of what’s in their bag. It’s making me hungrier than I ever remember being. The idea of entering the cafeteria is horrifying, but the hunger, oh, the hunger! So I grab my lunch from my locker and join the throngs streaming in.

  I eat my lunch, all the leftovers the kids at my table don’t want, and then buy silver-dollar pancakes, a half pint of chocolate milk, and two hot pretzels. I’m late getting back to class, but it’s worth it.