This was a fantasy--it couldn't be happening. People like this, people with strange powers--they belonged in movies like X-Men, or Japanese cartoons. How could she have ever guessed that there were people like this at Meadowbrook Middle School? Forget about Meadowbrook--these people weren't supposed to exist anywhere in the real world.
Psychos. Freaks. Monsters. She didn't know what
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to call them. Ken was one of them ... and Sarah Miller. What kind of powers did they have?
And ohmigod! What kind of psycho freak was Tracey Devon?
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CHAPTER FOUR
JENNA WAS HAVING TROUBLE keeping her eyes open. As she went through the motions of Madame's breathing exercises, she used every intake of breath as an excuse to yawn. This meant that she always breathed out a second or two after the others in the class, which resulted in a frown from Madame aimed in her direction. Not that she cared what Madame thought of her--but there was something about the teacher that always made her cringe a little. It was almost as if Madame could see what was going on inside Jenna's head, which was ridiculous, of course. Only Jenna could see what was going on inside the minds of others. Strangely enough, however, she could never completely penetrate Madame's head. Not that she ever really wanted to. After all, what sort of interesting thoughts could a teacher be having?
Madame took her attention away from Jenna as she offered a sullen Charles some advice about the rhythm
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of his breathing. Jenna took advantage of this and closed her eyes. She could fall asleep so easily ...
There were two reasons for this. She'd been up very late the night before. She wasn't exactly sure what time she'd drifted off, but she'd thought she could see the first rays of sunshine from her bedroom window. So she hadn't had much sleep, and that alone justified her yawning.
The other reason was the fact that she was bored, but that wasn't an unusual state of mind for her, especially here. Her classes were boring, her teachers were boring, and what was the point of being there anyway? She just didn't care what went on at school.
This class was the worst. It was too small and she couldn't hide. In other classes she sat in the back, where the teacher wouldn't notice her. There, she could tune out and amuse herself by listening to her classmates' thoughts. They were never especially amusing or even mildly interesting--other people's daydreams could be as dull as dirt. But in this class, she couldn't even do that. Madame knew her gift, and she was always watching Jenna's face for telltale signs of mental eavesdropping.
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Of course, there were times when Madame was occupied with other students, like right now, and Jenna could concentrate on reading the minds of others. But these so-called gifted kids weren't any more entertaining than her usual classmates. Charles, for example, thought only about stuff like what he was going to demand for dinner that evening or what he'd make everyone watch on TV. It seemed to her that he totally ruled at home.
Madame was helping Ken breathe now, so Jenna turned her attention to Emily. When she'd first learned about Emily's gift, Jenna had hoped to find something interesting inside her head. But Emily was a total space cadet--she had no control over her gift at all. At this moment, all Jenna could see was a vague image of a raging forest fire. Somewhere, at some time in the near or distant future, a bunch of trees would burn down. Maybe. It was impossible to tell whether Emily was having visions or simply daydreaming.
Jenna focused on Martin's thoughts, but she knew there would be nothing remarkable there. Martin's head was packed with memories of all the times he
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had felt like a victim. The only moments when it could be intriguing to read Martin occurred when he was angry. Then Jenna could see a brilliant display of sparkling lights in lots of different colors, something like fireworks.
Sarah's thoughts were pretty boring. You'd think that a girl who could control other people might have some interesting ideas in her head, but Sarah was so not into using her power that she refused to even think about it. It was like she was in some sort of zen state all the time.
Jenna didn't bother to try Carter, the youngest student in the group. She knew there would be nothing inside his head. Sometimes she wondered how the strange boy could walk and eat and put on his clothes when it seemed to her that he didn't even have a brain.
Tracey was almost worse than nothing. Her thoughts were formless, just a big, thick black cloud of misery. Whatever bits and pieces Jenna could decipher were usually too depressing to read ...
She frowned. Something unfamiliar was coming from Tracey's mind. There was a light ...Jenna stared
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at her and tried to concentrate, to see into the light. But before she could make any sense out of it, someone else's thoughts broke in.
She murdered me, and now she's getting away with it! She has to be arrested! Help me! Tell the police!
There was only one head that could produce a thought like this.
"Hey, Ken," she whispered. "Someone's calling you."
Madame heard her. "Jenna! What did I tell you about eavesdropping?"
"It's okay, Madame," Ken said wearily. "You can't really blame her. This guy is so loud."
"No kidding," Jenna said. "I didn't even have to try to listen."
"Would you like to share this problem with us, Ken?" Madame asked.
Ken sighed. "He pops in about once a week or so, and he's really annoying me. Supposedly he was killed in an accident--he fell down some stairs and hit his head. But he claims his wife murdered him, and he wants me to call the police."
"So why don't you just do what he says?" Jenna suggested. "Tell the cops, and then he'll stop
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bugging you."
Ken shook his head. "I don't want to get involved. Besides, what am I going to say? 'Hello, Mister Policeman. A dead man asked me to give you a message'? They'll think I'm nuts!"
"Class, we've talked about this kind of problem before," Madame said. "What do we do when our gifts intrude on our lives? Martin?"
The scrawny little wimp murmured the standard response. "We're supposed to ignore them."
"Exactly. And if they persist? Charles?"
The boy slumped in the wheelchair spoke. "I dunno."
Madame looked at him reprovingly. "Nonsense, Charles! You know what you're supposed to do, even if you don't always do it."
Charles mumbled something.
"What did you say, Charles? We can't hear you."
"You push them away!" Charles snapped. The vase on Madame's desk quivered.
Madame glared at him. "Charles!"
The vase was still.
"Thank you, Charles. Yes, you're correct. We
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concentrate on forcibly pushing away the gift."
"I'm trying to lose him, Madame," Ken declared, "but this guy's really persistent."
Madame nodded sympathetically and addressed the group. "Class, Ken needs our help. Let's try to come up with some ideas for him."
Jenna hadn't meant for the groan to escape from her lips quite so loudly. Now everyone was glaring at her.
"Jeez, Jenna! Why do you have to be such a--" Ken caught himself. "Well, you know what I mean."
"We're all in this together, Jenna," Emily added softly. "We have to care about one another."
Madame joined in. "We need one another's support."
Not me, Jenna thought, but she managed to keep this to herself and tried to stop her expression from showing what she was thinking. What a hunch of losers! I don't want to hear any of their opinions about anything.
Happily, the bell rang just then, so she didn't have to.
"We'll continue this discussion tomorrow," Madame said. "And your assignment for tomorrow's
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class is to report on a moment when you successfully controlled your gift."
As Jenna moved to the door, she passed Tracey, and once again she got a glimpse of something unusual from her. But wh
en their eyes met, Tracey let out a frightened little squeak and scampered away.
Jenna didn't really care. Even if there was something new going on inside Tracey's dull little head, what difference would it make? They were all nerds, these so-called gifted kids, each of them living a sad, pathetic, boring life.
Not like her life ...
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Chapter Five
AMANDA WAS WATCHING THE clock. For a while now, she'd wondered if maybe, when the final bell rang, her nightmare
would be over. She had no real reason to believe that this would happen. Her transformation hadn't begun with the first bell at school, so why would it end with the last bell?
Still, she harbored a hope. After all, that last bell held a lot of meaning, not only for her but for all the students at Meadowbrook, and maybe for the teachers, too. It was a big deal: it meant the end of the school day, dismissal, escape, freedom from authority. So maybe, just maybe, that bell would signify her own freedom, her escape from the prison of Tracey's wretched body.
But at 3:45 that afternoon, Amanda Beeson walked out of Meadowbrook Middle School in the same
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condition she'd entered it that morning: as Tracey Devon. So Amanda revised her expectations. She'd woken up that morning as Tracey, and she wouldn't be herself till she woke up the following morning. Somehow she'd have to get through the rest of the day and the night as the number-one nerd of the universe. She planned to go to bed very early.
Meanwhile, there was no place for her to go other than Tracey's house. So she went over to the place where the kids who took the bus were supposed to wait. This time, she recognized one of the travelers-- a boy who had been in Tracey's social-studies class. Amanda couldn't remember his name, but she thought he was kind of cute, so she decided to strike up a conversation.
"Hi."
The boy didn't even turn in her direction. She raised her voice. "Hi." He glanced at her. "What?"
Clearly, this boy had no conversation skills. So Amanda plunged in with a safe, sure-fire remark that was bound to get him to talk. "Can you believe how much homework Ms. Dailey gave us?"
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She waited for the expected response-- wholehearted agreement, a grumble, something like that. Instead, the boy backed away and started up a conversation with another girl.
Well, what did she expect? He thought she was Tracey Devon. If only that boy knew who was really standing right by him, who was actually speaking to him, he'd be thrilled; he'd fall all over himself, showing off, trying to impress her. That knowledge gave her a tiny bit of satisfaction, but she still felt down.
Her bus arrived, and Amanda saw that the driver was the same man who had picked them up that morning. This time, she made sure she was at the front of the group so that she could get on first and grab a front seat. She didn't want to have to go down the aisle, where someone could trip her.
But once again, when the bus doors opened, she was shoved out of the way and pushed to the back of the group. And again the bus doors closed in her face.
She moved to bang on the doors, but this time she got there too late. Someone at a window saw her, but
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he didn't tell the driver. He just grinned and stuck out his tongue as the bus took off.
Amanda stood there, fuming. Was the man blind or something? What was he doing driving a school bus? Maybe she should tell her mother--no, Tracey's mother--to make a complaint to the school.
And now she'd have to walk to Tracey's house. She tried to recall the route that the bus had taken that morning, and she thought she had a pretty good idea how to get there. But she was unfamiliar with the neighborhood, so of course she made a couple of wrong turns and had to backtrack twice. A trip that took ten minutes by bus took her more than an hour.
As she turned onto Tracey's street, she imagined the scene that would take place when she arrived at the house. Tracey's mother would be worried. When she, Amanda, came home later than expected, she sometimes found her mother on the verge of tears, ready to call the police and report her as a missing person.
Her friends' parents were like this, too, reacting strongly, but sometimes in different ways. She remembered Britney's mother yelling at her, and Katie
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could even get grounded if she came home late three times in a row.
Maybe Tracey's mother wouldn't be too angry if Amanda pointed out that it wasn't her fault, that the driver just hadn't seen her. In any case, she wasn't looking forward to the confrontation. A few more minutes wouldn't make any difference, so she walked slowly and used the time to examine Tracey's neighborhood.
Amanda lived in an older part of town, where the houses were huge and surrounded by big, leafy trees. This was one of the new neighborhoods, with modern-looking houses--nice, though not as grand as the ones in Amanda's area. It dawned on her that this wasn't where Tracey had lived when they'd been in elementary school together.
How did she know this? Maybe it was being in Tracey's body that made her remember something that she'd long ago forgotten--going to Tracey's eighth birthday party, when they'd been in the same second-grade class. The Devon family was only three people then, Tracey and her two parents, and they'd lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a garden
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complex. They must have moved to this neighborhood when the Devon Seven were born and they'd needed more space.
It was hard to believe that she, Amanda Beeson, the queen of Meadowbrook Middle School, had ever really gone to a party for Meadowbrook's number-one nobody, Tracey Devon. Amanda couldn't remember if her mother had forced her to go. What she did remember was an ordinary birthday party, with the usual games, a cake, and candles ... But now that she thought about it, she had the same notion she'd had earlier--that Tracey had been a regular, normal person back then. Not one of her friends, but not a hopeless weirdo either. Briefly, Amanda wondered what could have happened to Tracey between then and now. An accident? Some kind of brain injury?
She was at Tracey's door now, and she took a deep breath. Then she turned the handle, walked in, and called out, "I'm home!" That was what Amanda always did when she arrived at her house every day after school.
But apparently, this was not what Tracey did. Mrs. Devon shot out of a room upstairs and appeared on
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the landing that overlooked the living room.
"Hush!" she hissed. "The girls are napping!" Then she went back into whatever room she'd come out of.
"Sorry," Amanda murmured to no one, and she ambled into the kitchen. Back at her own home, her mother would have now made her a little afterschool snack or, if she was out, the snack would have been waiting for Amanda on the counter. She brightened when she spotted a box of cupcakes on the Devons' kitchen counter, but before she could help herself to one, the teenage mother's helper came into the room.
"Don't touch those--they're for the girls!"
"What's for me?" Amanda asked, but Lizzie had already hurried out of the room.
Amanda spotted a basket of apples on the table. She did a quick count, saw that there were more than seven, and took one. Biting into it, she went back out into the living room and looked around.
Some framed photos hung in a cluster on the wall, and while she ate her apple, she went over to examine them more closely. There was a traditional bride-and-groom picture of a woman she could identify as a younger version of Tracey's nasty
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mother, and she assumed that the man in the picture was Tracey's father. Then there was another photo of the couple, older, beaming proudly as they stood beside an oversize crib packed with seven tiny babies. The rest of the pictures were group photos of the septuplets on their birthdays and individual shots of each septuplet at each age. One would have been enough, Amanda thought--the little girls looked exactly alike.
And where was Tracey? Amanda finally located another picture, which seemed to be a framed version of the previous year's family Christmas card. There they were, th
e seven little smiling Devon girls standing in a row in front of their parents. Looking more closely, Amanda was able to make out Tracey, half hidden behind the Christmas tree. Funny--it was a good shot of all the others, but Tracey looked kind of fuzzy.
It was clear to Amanda that Tracey wasn't the star of this family or even a featured player. There was absolutely nothing else about her in the room-- nothing like the kind of stuff Amanda could see in her own home and the homes of her friends. There
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were no awards or citations or blue ribbons, no medals, no statuettes of gymnasts or figure skaters.
Despite her previous total lack of interest in Tracey Devon, Amanda found that she was becoming curious about the girl. She went upstairs to the room she'd woken up in that morning. Surely there she'd be able to find some clues about Tracey's life.
She remembered noting in the morning that there was nothing on the walls, and that was strange. Most girls she knew had posters--rock stars, horses, the stars of a popular TV series, stuff like that. Tracey's walls were bare. Amanda looked on shelves, in drawers, even under the bed, but after 20 minutes of searching, she was completely mystified. She'd found nothing that gave her the tiniest clue as to what Tracey Devon was all about. There were no books, no CDs, no magazines.
But ultimately, her search paid off. At the back of Tracey's cupboard, under the laundry basket, Amanda discovered a pink notebook. Scrawled on the cover, in childish handwriting, were the words Tracey Devon, My Diary. Private, Keep Out!
Amanda ignored the warning. Settling down on
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Tracey's bed, she opened the book to the first page.
"Dear Diary, I'm eight years old today! I had a party with all my friends. We had chocolate cake with pink roses on it. I got lots of presents. But Mommy and Daddy say I have to wait a whole month for my biggest present. They are going to give me real live babies! I hope they are all girls. Boys are icky."
Amanda turned to the next page.
"Dear Diary, I got 100 on my spelling test! Mommy took me out for ice cream. Daddy says I'm the smartest girl in the world."