SPECIALS

Chapter One: Charmian

Storm clouds and thunder. How fitting for the first day at a new school. In a new city. In a new state. Practically in a new world. I shook my head and tightened my bag against my side. Getting mugged was so not on my to-do list for our first week in Ivanelle City. I glanced around me at the masses passing us by. The intense buzz of hundreds of blocked minds was giving me a migraine. They always did. But blocking them hurt less than the panic of having a million different voices yelling in my head everywhere I went. Telepathy totally sucks.

I glanced briefly at my brother. He looked like he thought he was king of the planet, just like always. Nothing fazed him, it seemed. Moving from Almira to Ivanelle City did nothing to quell his cocky ocean of excitement and enthusiasm. A new city meant new friends, new sports, and new food. Nothing much else. What did I expect? He was a fourteen year old boy. Food was his life. Sports and friends were appetizers.

A new place meant a new start for me. No one knew my name. No one knew who I was. What I’d done. If they knew what I could do to them- what I will probably end up doing- they’d hate me. Just like the kids back home. I flinched at the memories. The things that had happened last summer… if it wasn’t for my control issues, we wouldn’t have had to leave. Hundreds of minds had to be wiped. The government had to relocate our family, deal with collateral damage, put thousands of dollars into repairing the sleepy little town of Almira- because I messed up. Again. My parents tried to reassure me. Say they didn’t blame me. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ ‘I couldn’t help it’.

Lies like that didn’t work on me anymore. When I was little, it helped quench the guilt. But I knew about their worried, late night talks about me.What to do with her. We can’t keep running away. She’s getting dangerous. Every time it’s worse. Can’t go on like this much longer…

I steadied myself against the brick wall surrounding R. L. Avenlon Academy of Ivanelle City. Big name for a big school. I squeezed my eyes shut and practiced blocking out unwelcome thoughts. Memories always hit me hard. My mind was wired differently than an average human being, obviously. If I thought about something too hard, I would relive it inside like it was happening all over again. Like a front row seat to a traveling, flashback horror show. I rubbed my temples and breathed, remembering our family therapist’s advice.

“Hey, dorkface. You okay?”

I peeled open one eye to glare at my brother. He gave me that confident half-grin all the girls back in Almira thought was “so dreamy”. Their words, not mine. He might have been a butthead, but he had stuck by me all this time. Didn’t treat me like a science experiment gone wrong, like most people who found out about my ‘gifts’. Probably because he had a certain gift of his own. Though he, admittedly, had better physical control than I had. Lucky jerk. Yet, he really was the only one I was myself around. The only person who probably understood that Charmian Stone was not actually a robotic answering machine, or, more commonly, a pyscho.

“I’m fine, hothead.” I replied, digging around my bag for the pills Dr. Arnolds prescribed for my “condition”, as he liked to call it.

“You sure? You have that ‘hold on, I’m having a psycho moment’ look on your face.” Jett retorted, crossing his arms and staring at me like he was waiting for me to rip someone’s head off. I narrowed my eyes at him, taking the cap off the medication bottle and downing two of the large, blue cylinders. He grimaced as he watched me swallow the big pills without water. Jett hated pills. I had taken so much stress-relieving headache crap over the years, pills of any size didn’t bother me anymore.