Post by Beelzebibble on Oct 15, 2018 12:56:32 GMT -5
APP'MT MAIN 303D 4:30
Suite 303 of the main hall was a windowless but brightly lit space so small that Deandre had to step around one of the two cushy chairs flanking the bookcase as he walked in. It wouldn't have been a very comfortable place to wait, but he could see that the door to room D was already open. This was an even smaller room dominated by the desk where a white man of about thirty, with short brown hair and thin features, sat at his computer. Again there were no windows, but the wall opposite the door had a whiteboard with a single symbol on it: a short, rounded trident.
"Hey…" With an appraising eye, the man pointed at Deandre in the doorway. "Not Dee-ander."
The boy shook his head. "Day-ondray."
"That's what I thought." The man smiled and extended a hand, and Deandre took it. "Nice to meet you, Deandre. You can call me Sai, everyone around here does."
Deandre wrote that down on the same line—
APP'MT MAIN 303D 4:30 SAI
—but the man interrupted. "Sorry, I couldn't help but notice – that's P-S-I." And he nodded toward the rounded trident on the whiteboard.
As Deandre quickly crossed out and corrected the mistake, Psi went on: "So okay, we've got each other's names right. Have a seat!" Deandre settled into the office's other chair, letting the notebook lie open on his lap, while Psi pulled his chair around to bring them face-to-face. "How's it going so far? Finding your way around? Well, you made it to this hole in the wall, you must be doing okay…"
"Yes, sir, it's not too hard."
"Oh, please—" (the man waved a hand) "—no need, with that! Just 'Psi' is fine." With a glance out the door, he added, "I mean, don't get me wrong; we've got a couple of teachers here way more into the 'sir' thing… But I'm not the guy to stand on ceremony. I'm just a guidance counselor. Not gonna go calling you 'young master Clarks'! Unless you prefer that—"
The boy laughed a little. "You can stick with 'Deandre'."
"So really, how's the day been? Interesting afternoon? I'm sure the presentations were cool."
Surprised by this, Deandre asked, "You weren't there? Sir?" he added, before he could stop himself.
Psi's lip twitched but he didn't comment on the addition. "Wish I could've made it, but we were really busy setting up in here. Didn't get a chance. No one's loss, though, I'm not exactly… the show-off type." And here he met Deandre's gaze with an expression the boy found strange. It seemed to be pitched halfway between sympathetic and scrutinizing. In this moment Deandre realized he couldn't guess whether Psi had been informed that he'd cancelled his power demonstration in front of the entire assembly. He wasn't sure he felt up to broaching the subject.
So he resisted the obvious reply of "Me neither." Instead he forced his mind from recalling the room's disappointment at his own wretched little nothing of a display, and reflected over the others: the beauty of Claire's whirl of shimmering shapes, Titus' storm of petals, and little Mica Howard's kaleidoscopic mandala; the terror of seeing Talia's demonstration almost go wrong and the horror of watching Nessa's go right; and the sheer brain-contorting cosmic splendor of Garth's impossible performance. Marvels and ordeals enough to fill half a notebook in an afternoon, if he'd had time to take them all down entirely. A few very dense pages, instead; the first pages he'd transcribe on the laptop that evening, or else he'd wear them out over the year from revisiting. He wasn't planning to forget. "You missed a lot of really good ones," he said.
"Oh I've read the files, some of these kids are gonna be a handful. I mean – I say that with affection, you know." Psi stood up briefly to take a thick purple binder off the shelf next to the computer. Flipping it open and sitting down, he resumed, "Seem like a good bunch? Any friend material in there?"
For a senseless second Deandre thought Psi was about to offer the book to him to browse through – the book which, he was sure, could only be a register for the students' files. The prospect of holding in his lap a complete account of all their abilities, their backgrounds, their aptitudes, filled him with a momentary thrill of excitement. But rather than hold out the binder, the guidance counselor busied himself flipping to a middling section and, mercifully, missed Deandre's reaction.
Thinking of Garth, affable in his put-upon way, and of poor Dalisay Salazar, and of – well – that other one, he said, a little quickly: "Yes, sir, I like them. I didn't know what to expect, but… They're welcoming. They didn't want me to feel left out."
He didn't realize his mistake until afterward, but Psi shook it off.
"Everybody's got their own kind of weird, huh?"
"That's right."
"Well, listen, Deandre," said the counselor, "if you ever feel like you're in rough waters – like socially, then you can always talk to me. This is going to be a pretty crazy environment and I want to make sure you're in good shape. Job description says, you know, 'academic and career planning' but really, if there's anything at all about life that's getting you down… I'm here." Psi scratched his head and grinned. "In the field of social mishaps, I speak from experience. Think my record is something like twelve screwups at once."
This would have been a good opportunity for Deandre to come clean and speak his mind, but he was distracted by the feeling that he'd heard something like that last part earlier in the afternoon.
Psi had arrived at the file he was looking for. He looked over it with a serious expression. "It did seem like, from your letter, you were hoping for a fresh start."
Deandre swallowed, then nodded. "I could use one, I guess."
"Do you mind saying anything more about that…?"
The boy hesitated. The humming of the flourescent light overhead seemed to have gotten a notch louder.
Eventually, he admitted: "The last couple of years back home… My parents were trying to put me in every school in the county. I got careless… Once the teachers at my old school found out I was a Power, they wouldn't trust me. They said it was too easy for me to cheat off other students, even cheat off the teachers themselves. They told me I'd need private lessons, and my parents couldn't find anyone to make it work. I don't think anyone really believed I couldn't control it. They thought I could just read minds…"
He was staring down very fixedly at the pattern in the carpet, a grid of interlacing beige and white diamonds. There was a pause, in which his eyes did not move, before he spoke again. "But it was my friends," he went on. "That was the worst. Once they figured out what I can do… They'd still talk to me on Facebook, texts… but they wouldn't tell me anything real anymore. And they kept making excuses not to see me in person. And then after a while, there wasn't even that."
A sudden tightness in his chest made him stop off abruptly. He looked up, feeling the awkwardness of the silence, to find Psi gazing at him intently but not unkindly, with a hand to his mouth and his lips pinched shut between index finger and thumb.
At length, he asked, "Could you tell me what your power is?"
The boy faltered. Psi added: "Uh, sorry, I mean – I do already know, it's in your file, but I'd rather hear you describe it in your own words if that's okay."
Deandre, who usually found it annoying to hear a question asked when the answer was already written down in a book somewhere, but who could understand the significance in this case, chose not to protest it.
"I trade memories with people."
Psi nodded, turning a page. "Yeah? Go on…"
Deandre shrugged, shaking his head. "I know when I want to use it, and I can decide who to use it on. And I get – I see one of their memories, or hear it, or whatever it is. I don't choose what, but I get something. And I'm sure they get one of my mine in return, because I know I've forgotten things afterward. Sometimes when I was young, and I didn't know better and I kept using it on my parents, they would tell me things about myself I couldn't believe they'd ever heard. Names I gave to my toys once, when I was playing alone in my room…
"It's not sharing. It's trading. I…" Deandre looked down at his notebook. "I lose things. And so do the people I use it on. Every memory of someone else's I ever saw, I took it from them. I didn't share it with them. I've got memories of my mother from before I was even born, things she doesn't remember – the name of the captain who took them sailing on their honeymoon, on Harbour Island—"
Psi nodded again, more slowly, but said nothing. Deandre wished he would. The words didn't want to stop now.
"That's my power, taking from people – stealing things out of their past like they never even happened – and the kids here, that's how they're going to see me – how can they trust me?"
Psi's brow furrowed and he half-raised one finger. "I don't – Uh, don't take this as me telling you you're wrong about your own feelings, please, but… you did say you felt welcomed by the other kids."
Deandre shook his head, his eyes shut.
"I didn't tell them."
"…No?"
"I didn't tell them about my power," he said, a little loudly. When his eyes opened again they were slightly watery. "I didn't demonstrate. Miss Russell said I could skip it. So all I did was stand up there in front of everyone and then sit back down. And she said – she said something about 'mistrust' – she knew what they would think. I know it too. Everyone thinks it's cool, says my power's awesome, until they realize I could take anything away from them – not just if it's embarrassing or it could get them in trouble, anything. Happy things, sad things… Things that mean the world to them."
His face was feeling very hot. A drop or two had stained the open notebook.
"And I want to know!" he admitted. "That's what's horrible about it… I want to know all about them. If I really could just read minds, without stealing memories from anyone, and without losing a memory of my own… then I would do it all the time. I'd be learning everything about everyone…"
He searched Psi's face for something, some contortion that would tell him whether the man already knew that he'd skipped his demonstration or was hearing it for the first time, but it was that same confounding expression, measured sympathy without revealing anything substantial at all, and for an instant Deandre hated it enough to use his power on Psi then and there – not for this answer, but just so he could have the satisfaction of getting any answers at all out of that inscrutable face, which was why it caught him somewhat off-guard when Psi spoke up next:
"Do you think you'd mind demonstrating on me?"
Deandre blinked his vision clear.
"What…?"
"I mean, you don't have to, totally up to you – but I'm curious what it's like! Anyway, I'm a pretty good guinea pig. No reason for you to worry about taking stuff from me…" Psi tapped his temple. "I've got backups."
He settled back in his chair.
"Actually," he added upon further reflection, with a grin, "I guess you could say I'm the backup."
Deandre said nothing. He couldn't shake the feeling that the white man was still being strangely reticent, but saw that there was really no way for him to take the moral high ground of getting annoyed by it. If Psi didn't feel like rushing to explain his power, Deandre was the last person here with any clout to insist he do so. "Psi": some kind of psychic ability? It would be rude to ask…
He wiped his eyes with two quick strokes of his finger.
"All right," he said.
"Awesome, thanks!" said Psi, closing the binder and laying it aside. "Okay, g— oh wait. You said… you don't get to choose?"
"Um, I can choose when to use it, and who to—"
"Oh yeah yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear – you don't choose the memories that get swapped? It could just be anything, right? Drawn from a hat?" When Deandre nodded, Psi winced briefly and continued: "Okay, so… just in case – I mean, I'm not saying it's likely, but if you see anything in my memory that's not, like, PG-13… Maybe we could agree that it was an accident and outside either of our control and I'm not legally culpable for CORRUPTING THE YOUTH?"
Deandre huffed, working off the last impulse to tears, and gave a weary grin.
"Oh no; I might find out what sex is."
At this Psi laughed outright. "Whoa, okay!" he returned. "All right! Sarcasm! This is new, Deandre. I like it." He pushed his chair back and leaned forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees, looking steadily at Deandre. "Okay. If you're not worried about it, you can go ahead and try."
"Sure," said Deandre, though, feeling that Psi might be overthinking his role in this, he added: "You don't really need to be in any special posture…"
"Got it," said Psi, leaning back in the chair without breaking his gaze at Deandre.
"Actually – you don't even have to be looking at me."
"Roger," said Psi, who immediately swiveled his chair around and returned to browsing at his computer as if the office were otherwise empty. He pulled up a new window and started typing, and for a few minutes the tiny clamor of plastic was the only thing in the room fighting the hum of fluorescence. Deandre watched his eyes flicker around the screen, watched the fingers skip across the keyboard, and narrowed his own eyelids: The other man's mind was there, a shapeless and teeming host of motions, just discernible beyond the curtain of conscious view… If he reached out just a moment with his thoughts, he could nudge that fellow mind, scrape against it in passing…
There was a rush of blood to his brain, and lights danced in his eyes.
The man didn't seem to have noticed at first, but he turned back to Deandre when the boy slouched slightly in his chair, pressing a hand against his leg. "Did it work?"
Deandre didn't answer right away. He was still clutching at the back of his calf, nonsensically trying to soothe a pain that wasn't there. When he shut his eyes, he could see the attacker again, standing below him: a rough, thin yet muscular white woman with long hair bound up in a ponytail, brown with streaks of – it had to be a trick of the uncertain evening light – no, definitely streaks of green. That was a strange touch for someone whose clothing was otherwise so unremarkable and functional, a plain tee-shirt and jeans, with no other self-consciously showy additions. Unless of course you counted the flexible, whip-like sword in her hand, tipped with an unmistakable stain of red. With a flick of her wrist, the blade retracted out of sight.
"Hurts like hell, doesn't it?"
Deandre stared at the man in the office, who was fixing him with a neutral, expectant smile.
"It worked," he said cautiously, after a moment. "I saw a memory of yours. I… felt you get stabbed in the leg."
Psi's smile dropped slightly, and his eyebrows flattened, but no glint came into his eye.
"Um… really?" he asked. "Huh."
He crossed his legs and patted his own calf, on the same side as Deandre's, clearly checking. He shook his head. "Can't think when that would've been," he admitted.
There was a faintly mounting sense of urgency nagging at Deandre (Psi had been attacked, clearly this was a crucial event in his life, not something that should be forgotten) which impelled him to add more details: "It was at night, and it felt like you were floating in midair – and the woman who did it had green and brown hair—"
Startling him, Psi began to laugh again.
"Oh my god," he chuckled, "Natalie?... Yeah, I can see that."
"Who is she?"
"She's sort of…" Psi cocked his head. "What's, like, the opposite of a friend? But not an enemy. Just the opposite of a friend." (Deandre found the question interesting, and would've liked to place a name for it since it was a concept very much familiar to him from his own schooling days in the States, but failed to answer in time.) "Don't recall her ever stabbing me, but believe me, buddy, I'm not surprised it's happened by now. I can accept this historical fact.
"That was 'Natalie', by the way," he repeated, seeing that Deandre had begun writing down a description of this memory in the notebook. "And Emily Schwartzwald's got this kind of girl crush on her – or maybe an actual crush, you know, I dunno, nothing wrong with that – so, just stay on Emily's good side, is my advice. She'll look out for you if you ever come face-to-face with Miss Charming." With another moment's thought, Psi added, "Honestly I don't think Emily even has a bad side, so you're probably fine?"
That certainly tracked with Deandre's own impression of the girl's dean. Having finished writing out a rough impression of the memory, to be transcribed in more detail later, he dashed off CF. SCHWARTZWALD at the bottom. Then he drew a box around the entire paragraph and marked it with the sign of the rounded trident.
He turned his eyes back up to the guidance counselor. "Do you mind my asking, sir, or – Psi… what you saw?"
"Oh, of course! God, uh… let's see." Psi fell silent and stared up over Deandre's head at the doorframe. Though his lips moved almost imperceptibly over the next few minutes, he said nothing, giving Deandre time to wonder, with a muted dread, which memory he had just lost. He tried to cycle through his recent thoughts: he could still remember the name of the captain at Harbour Island, and the perilous but beautiful cliff face over the beach, and the gallery of gnarled and monstrous chairs in red and black – and, for that matter, everything he had seen in the auditorium that afternoon, or at least he thought he remembered all of it, which was the infuriating uncertainty that hounded him at every use of his power… But Psi was frowning now, and soon he spoke.
"I don't understand… You didn't say anything wrong."
Deandre gave him an inquiring look.
"I'm pretty sure this was your memory, not someone else's." Psi rubbed his forehead, looking outright frustrated by what he was envisioning. "It was in a bookshop, and you were looking through one of those big volumes of old newspaper comics. And there's this old white lady, I guess she's the owner, standing over you and she asks if you like it when your mother reads to you. And you told her you can read them yourself. And she got weirdly, like, mad at you. I don't understand! She got all snappy and said it was her store and you'd better be careful with that book. Which, I mean, come on, what?" Psi shook his head. "Either you said something else that you forgot, or she was just a jerk, man. Wow."
If he'd been expecting a laugh on that last line, he would be disappointed, because Deandre's mind was racing too fast to reply. He couldn't remember that. Of course he couldn't. He couldn't picture any of it. But he could remember reading something like that. Yes – it was transcribed somewhere already. Marked with a star. It was his. It was yours. Only don't panic. That's what you write them down for. But he'd lost it – it was his own memory and it was gone. He'd lost it. He would never see that bookshop and the old comic strips again.
There must have been something registering on his face, because Psi looked concerned again. "I'm sorry, Deandre. There's no way you can… undo it?"
Despite privately feeling that he was the one who should apologize, having taken a genuinely serious and heavy memory away from Psi and having given up such a trifle in return, more an embarrassment than anything, Deandre only shook his head.
Psi drew a deep breath and looked up at the doorframe again. "It's so vivid," he said. "I can see everything. The colors on the spines… My own memory's not as sharp as this!" He smiled at Deandre. "You're some kind of millennial muse. How many people you think cracked open their laptops and became Starbucks authors after you swapped memories with them? Huh? I bet there are short story blogs all over the internet thanks to you shuffling these images around. Did you ever think of that?"
Deandre appreciated, but didn't exactly credit, the attempt to lift his spirits. His face was feeling warm again. "I guess so," he forced out.
Psi pressed on. "Listen, Deandre, thank you for sharing that with me. I know it took courage… And I totally get it now, one hundred percent, why you're worried about it. And why it's legitimate to think some of the other students might stress out about it, too. There really wouldn't be a 'wrong' side to that debate – right? Everybody's anxieties would be on the line…" Psi trailed off in time to catch a reluctant nod from Deandre. "Please don't let me go heaping a bunch of condescending advice on you before anything even comes up. But do let me say this. A lot of these other kids had experiences not too different from yours, before they came here. So it's a pretty sure bet that some of them are more open-minded than you think. You get to decide when you tell them your power, that's your business, and I'm promising right here never to tell another student before you do. But maybe think about giving them a shot… They might surprise you."
Deandre returned his gaze for a long moment. His heartbeat was returning to normal, and the rush to his brain had faded. Then he nodded, and smiled.
"Yeah, all right," he said.
"Oh, here – maybe this'll help—" And Psi pulled the purple binder off the desk and opened it in his lap again. This time he leafed to one of the earliest pages. "I was looking over the rooming assignments, and it looks like you're bunking with one young master Garth Firbolg."
"Really?" Deandre asked. "I met him this afternoon. He's nice."
"Yeah, he's a good kid! I knew him before all this started up, actually. Summer intern at a company I've done some work for. But here's the good part. I don't know whether it's got something to do with that amulet of his, or what, but…" Psi gave an exaggerated shrug. "The guy is just immune to mindreading."
Deandre's eyes went wide.
"He is…?"
"Oh big time. Really got on one of my coworker's nerves. And let me tell you, I'm pretty jealous." Psi patted his chest, underneath the thick of his necktie. "If sticking a little metal right in here like Iron Man meant not getting any more of Nopcha's fucking sly looks every time my mind wanders, I'd say, cut me open, pal." Then, realizing his word choice, he hastily added, "Sorry, sorry…"
But Deandre couldn't possibly have cared less that Terminer Academy's guidance counselor had just said a rude word. He felt a great weight lifting off him. "My power won't work on Garth?"
"I welcome you to try – with consent – but I don't think it's going to happen. He's a closed book. It's hard to imagine him lying awake at night terrified that you'll plunder the memories of his favorite stuffed seal, Mister Slippy Dunkandflips."
Deandre had broken out into a huge smile.
"That's awesome," he got out at last.
"Yes, I'm pretty sure you've got Miss Russell to thank for that masterful bureaucratic touch," Psi said breezily.
Deandre immediately flipped back a handful of pages to Garth's entry and added two new lines:
WEEDY BOY – GARTH FURBOLG <-FIR
THIN
FIRE CONTROL – DIFF COLORS – FIRE RING: WINDOW?
SPACE – COMET!! MS RUSSELL WAS N/JOKING
CLOSE PORTAL – CHUNK OF COMET!
IMMUNE TO TELEPATHY – MY POWER??
ROOMMATE! VIA MS RUSSELL
He could admit to having felt betrayed by Miss Russell earlier and her too-revealingly delicate way of excusing his demonstration. But it was a mistake, everyone made mistakes, and if what Psi said about Garth was true, then Deandre owed the acting principal his gratitude. He would thank her at the first chance he got. His heart felt lighter than it had all day.
"It's perfect," he breathed.
"Great! Well, Deandre, I think we can just about wrap this up." Psi made some notes as well on a page in the binder. "I am going to put a recommendation on the books, if you agree, that you make appointments to come see me on a semi-regular basis. It's up to you whether you choose to use your power on anyone else at this school, and I'm not about to say you can do this or you can't do that – but if you want to practice it with me, I bet we can figure out how to refine it a little. And I'd love to keep up with you about everything else. Schoolwork and friends and such."
"That sounds fine, sir – Psi. Thank you so much," Deandre replied, shaking the counselor's hand again. And then, feeling that it was still lingering and that he'd miss the opportunity if he didn't speak now, he added, "But I'm sorry for taking that memory…"
"What did I tell you? I am seriously the last guy here who's worried about losing memories." He shook his head. "It's no big deal. I'm sure I'll get around to remembering it later."
Deandre frowned. "I don't think that's possible."
But Psi smiled. "Now those are some words you're going to have to retire from the lexicon, around here."
On his way out of the suite, Deandre happened to glimpse through a crack in the door to room 303B and saw another man sitting at a computer who looked very much like Psi.
Suite 303 of the main hall was a windowless but brightly lit space so small that Deandre had to step around one of the two cushy chairs flanking the bookcase as he walked in. It wouldn't have been a very comfortable place to wait, but he could see that the door to room D was already open. This was an even smaller room dominated by the desk where a white man of about thirty, with short brown hair and thin features, sat at his computer. Again there were no windows, but the wall opposite the door had a whiteboard with a single symbol on it: a short, rounded trident.
"Hey…" With an appraising eye, the man pointed at Deandre in the doorway. "Not Dee-ander."
The boy shook his head. "Day-ondray."
"That's what I thought." The man smiled and extended a hand, and Deandre took it. "Nice to meet you, Deandre. You can call me Sai, everyone around here does."
Deandre wrote that down on the same line—
APP'MT MAIN 303D 4:30 SAI
—but the man interrupted. "Sorry, I couldn't help but notice – that's P-S-I." And he nodded toward the rounded trident on the whiteboard.
As Deandre quickly crossed out and corrected the mistake, Psi went on: "So okay, we've got each other's names right. Have a seat!" Deandre settled into the office's other chair, letting the notebook lie open on his lap, while Psi pulled his chair around to bring them face-to-face. "How's it going so far? Finding your way around? Well, you made it to this hole in the wall, you must be doing okay…"
"Yes, sir, it's not too hard."
"Oh, please—" (the man waved a hand) "—no need, with that! Just 'Psi' is fine." With a glance out the door, he added, "I mean, don't get me wrong; we've got a couple of teachers here way more into the 'sir' thing… But I'm not the guy to stand on ceremony. I'm just a guidance counselor. Not gonna go calling you 'young master Clarks'! Unless you prefer that—"
The boy laughed a little. "You can stick with 'Deandre'."
"So really, how's the day been? Interesting afternoon? I'm sure the presentations were cool."
Surprised by this, Deandre asked, "You weren't there? Sir?" he added, before he could stop himself.
Psi's lip twitched but he didn't comment on the addition. "Wish I could've made it, but we were really busy setting up in here. Didn't get a chance. No one's loss, though, I'm not exactly… the show-off type." And here he met Deandre's gaze with an expression the boy found strange. It seemed to be pitched halfway between sympathetic and scrutinizing. In this moment Deandre realized he couldn't guess whether Psi had been informed that he'd cancelled his power demonstration in front of the entire assembly. He wasn't sure he felt up to broaching the subject.
So he resisted the obvious reply of "Me neither." Instead he forced his mind from recalling the room's disappointment at his own wretched little nothing of a display, and reflected over the others: the beauty of Claire's whirl of shimmering shapes, Titus' storm of petals, and little Mica Howard's kaleidoscopic mandala; the terror of seeing Talia's demonstration almost go wrong and the horror of watching Nessa's go right; and the sheer brain-contorting cosmic splendor of Garth's impossible performance. Marvels and ordeals enough to fill half a notebook in an afternoon, if he'd had time to take them all down entirely. A few very dense pages, instead; the first pages he'd transcribe on the laptop that evening, or else he'd wear them out over the year from revisiting. He wasn't planning to forget. "You missed a lot of really good ones," he said.
"Oh I've read the files, some of these kids are gonna be a handful. I mean – I say that with affection, you know." Psi stood up briefly to take a thick purple binder off the shelf next to the computer. Flipping it open and sitting down, he resumed, "Seem like a good bunch? Any friend material in there?"
For a senseless second Deandre thought Psi was about to offer the book to him to browse through – the book which, he was sure, could only be a register for the students' files. The prospect of holding in his lap a complete account of all their abilities, their backgrounds, their aptitudes, filled him with a momentary thrill of excitement. But rather than hold out the binder, the guidance counselor busied himself flipping to a middling section and, mercifully, missed Deandre's reaction.
Thinking of Garth, affable in his put-upon way, and of poor Dalisay Salazar, and of – well – that other one, he said, a little quickly: "Yes, sir, I like them. I didn't know what to expect, but… They're welcoming. They didn't want me to feel left out."
He didn't realize his mistake until afterward, but Psi shook it off.
"Everybody's got their own kind of weird, huh?"
"That's right."
"Well, listen, Deandre," said the counselor, "if you ever feel like you're in rough waters – like socially, then you can always talk to me. This is going to be a pretty crazy environment and I want to make sure you're in good shape. Job description says, you know, 'academic and career planning' but really, if there's anything at all about life that's getting you down… I'm here." Psi scratched his head and grinned. "In the field of social mishaps, I speak from experience. Think my record is something like twelve screwups at once."
This would have been a good opportunity for Deandre to come clean and speak his mind, but he was distracted by the feeling that he'd heard something like that last part earlier in the afternoon.
Psi had arrived at the file he was looking for. He looked over it with a serious expression. "It did seem like, from your letter, you were hoping for a fresh start."
Deandre swallowed, then nodded. "I could use one, I guess."
"Do you mind saying anything more about that…?"
The boy hesitated. The humming of the flourescent light overhead seemed to have gotten a notch louder.
Eventually, he admitted: "The last couple of years back home… My parents were trying to put me in every school in the county. I got careless… Once the teachers at my old school found out I was a Power, they wouldn't trust me. They said it was too easy for me to cheat off other students, even cheat off the teachers themselves. They told me I'd need private lessons, and my parents couldn't find anyone to make it work. I don't think anyone really believed I couldn't control it. They thought I could just read minds…"
He was staring down very fixedly at the pattern in the carpet, a grid of interlacing beige and white diamonds. There was a pause, in which his eyes did not move, before he spoke again. "But it was my friends," he went on. "That was the worst. Once they figured out what I can do… They'd still talk to me on Facebook, texts… but they wouldn't tell me anything real anymore. And they kept making excuses not to see me in person. And then after a while, there wasn't even that."
A sudden tightness in his chest made him stop off abruptly. He looked up, feeling the awkwardness of the silence, to find Psi gazing at him intently but not unkindly, with a hand to his mouth and his lips pinched shut between index finger and thumb.
At length, he asked, "Could you tell me what your power is?"
The boy faltered. Psi added: "Uh, sorry, I mean – I do already know, it's in your file, but I'd rather hear you describe it in your own words if that's okay."
Deandre, who usually found it annoying to hear a question asked when the answer was already written down in a book somewhere, but who could understand the significance in this case, chose not to protest it.
"I trade memories with people."
Psi nodded, turning a page. "Yeah? Go on…"
Deandre shrugged, shaking his head. "I know when I want to use it, and I can decide who to use it on. And I get – I see one of their memories, or hear it, or whatever it is. I don't choose what, but I get something. And I'm sure they get one of my mine in return, because I know I've forgotten things afterward. Sometimes when I was young, and I didn't know better and I kept using it on my parents, they would tell me things about myself I couldn't believe they'd ever heard. Names I gave to my toys once, when I was playing alone in my room…
"It's not sharing. It's trading. I…" Deandre looked down at his notebook. "I lose things. And so do the people I use it on. Every memory of someone else's I ever saw, I took it from them. I didn't share it with them. I've got memories of my mother from before I was even born, things she doesn't remember – the name of the captain who took them sailing on their honeymoon, on Harbour Island—"
Psi nodded again, more slowly, but said nothing. Deandre wished he would. The words didn't want to stop now.
"That's my power, taking from people – stealing things out of their past like they never even happened – and the kids here, that's how they're going to see me – how can they trust me?"
Psi's brow furrowed and he half-raised one finger. "I don't – Uh, don't take this as me telling you you're wrong about your own feelings, please, but… you did say you felt welcomed by the other kids."
Deandre shook his head, his eyes shut.
"I didn't tell them."
"…No?"
"I didn't tell them about my power," he said, a little loudly. When his eyes opened again they were slightly watery. "I didn't demonstrate. Miss Russell said I could skip it. So all I did was stand up there in front of everyone and then sit back down. And she said – she said something about 'mistrust' – she knew what they would think. I know it too. Everyone thinks it's cool, says my power's awesome, until they realize I could take anything away from them – not just if it's embarrassing or it could get them in trouble, anything. Happy things, sad things… Things that mean the world to them."
His face was feeling very hot. A drop or two had stained the open notebook.
"And I want to know!" he admitted. "That's what's horrible about it… I want to know all about them. If I really could just read minds, without stealing memories from anyone, and without losing a memory of my own… then I would do it all the time. I'd be learning everything about everyone…"
He searched Psi's face for something, some contortion that would tell him whether the man already knew that he'd skipped his demonstration or was hearing it for the first time, but it was that same confounding expression, measured sympathy without revealing anything substantial at all, and for an instant Deandre hated it enough to use his power on Psi then and there – not for this answer, but just so he could have the satisfaction of getting any answers at all out of that inscrutable face, which was why it caught him somewhat off-guard when Psi spoke up next:
"Do you think you'd mind demonstrating on me?"
Deandre blinked his vision clear.
"What…?"
"I mean, you don't have to, totally up to you – but I'm curious what it's like! Anyway, I'm a pretty good guinea pig. No reason for you to worry about taking stuff from me…" Psi tapped his temple. "I've got backups."
He settled back in his chair.
"Actually," he added upon further reflection, with a grin, "I guess you could say I'm the backup."
Deandre said nothing. He couldn't shake the feeling that the white man was still being strangely reticent, but saw that there was really no way for him to take the moral high ground of getting annoyed by it. If Psi didn't feel like rushing to explain his power, Deandre was the last person here with any clout to insist he do so. "Psi": some kind of psychic ability? It would be rude to ask…
He wiped his eyes with two quick strokes of his finger.
"All right," he said.
"Awesome, thanks!" said Psi, closing the binder and laying it aside. "Okay, g— oh wait. You said… you don't get to choose?"
"Um, I can choose when to use it, and who to—"
"Oh yeah yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear – you don't choose the memories that get swapped? It could just be anything, right? Drawn from a hat?" When Deandre nodded, Psi winced briefly and continued: "Okay, so… just in case – I mean, I'm not saying it's likely, but if you see anything in my memory that's not, like, PG-13… Maybe we could agree that it was an accident and outside either of our control and I'm not legally culpable for CORRUPTING THE YOUTH?"
Deandre huffed, working off the last impulse to tears, and gave a weary grin.
"Oh no; I might find out what sex is."
At this Psi laughed outright. "Whoa, okay!" he returned. "All right! Sarcasm! This is new, Deandre. I like it." He pushed his chair back and leaned forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees, looking steadily at Deandre. "Okay. If you're not worried about it, you can go ahead and try."
"Sure," said Deandre, though, feeling that Psi might be overthinking his role in this, he added: "You don't really need to be in any special posture…"
"Got it," said Psi, leaning back in the chair without breaking his gaze at Deandre.
"Actually – you don't even have to be looking at me."
"Roger," said Psi, who immediately swiveled his chair around and returned to browsing at his computer as if the office were otherwise empty. He pulled up a new window and started typing, and for a few minutes the tiny clamor of plastic was the only thing in the room fighting the hum of fluorescence. Deandre watched his eyes flicker around the screen, watched the fingers skip across the keyboard, and narrowed his own eyelids: The other man's mind was there, a shapeless and teeming host of motions, just discernible beyond the curtain of conscious view… If he reached out just a moment with his thoughts, he could nudge that fellow mind, scrape against it in passing…
There was a rush of blood to his brain, and lights danced in his eyes.
The man didn't seem to have noticed at first, but he turned back to Deandre when the boy slouched slightly in his chair, pressing a hand against his leg. "Did it work?"
Deandre didn't answer right away. He was still clutching at the back of his calf, nonsensically trying to soothe a pain that wasn't there. When he shut his eyes, he could see the attacker again, standing below him: a rough, thin yet muscular white woman with long hair bound up in a ponytail, brown with streaks of – it had to be a trick of the uncertain evening light – no, definitely streaks of green. That was a strange touch for someone whose clothing was otherwise so unremarkable and functional, a plain tee-shirt and jeans, with no other self-consciously showy additions. Unless of course you counted the flexible, whip-like sword in her hand, tipped with an unmistakable stain of red. With a flick of her wrist, the blade retracted out of sight.
"Hurts like hell, doesn't it?"
Deandre stared at the man in the office, who was fixing him with a neutral, expectant smile.
"It worked," he said cautiously, after a moment. "I saw a memory of yours. I… felt you get stabbed in the leg."
Psi's smile dropped slightly, and his eyebrows flattened, but no glint came into his eye.
"Um… really?" he asked. "Huh."
He crossed his legs and patted his own calf, on the same side as Deandre's, clearly checking. He shook his head. "Can't think when that would've been," he admitted.
There was a faintly mounting sense of urgency nagging at Deandre (Psi had been attacked, clearly this was a crucial event in his life, not something that should be forgotten) which impelled him to add more details: "It was at night, and it felt like you were floating in midair – and the woman who did it had green and brown hair—"
Startling him, Psi began to laugh again.
"Oh my god," he chuckled, "Natalie?... Yeah, I can see that."
"Who is she?"
"She's sort of…" Psi cocked his head. "What's, like, the opposite of a friend? But not an enemy. Just the opposite of a friend." (Deandre found the question interesting, and would've liked to place a name for it since it was a concept very much familiar to him from his own schooling days in the States, but failed to answer in time.) "Don't recall her ever stabbing me, but believe me, buddy, I'm not surprised it's happened by now. I can accept this historical fact.
"That was 'Natalie', by the way," he repeated, seeing that Deandre had begun writing down a description of this memory in the notebook. "And Emily Schwartzwald's got this kind of girl crush on her – or maybe an actual crush, you know, I dunno, nothing wrong with that – so, just stay on Emily's good side, is my advice. She'll look out for you if you ever come face-to-face with Miss Charming." With another moment's thought, Psi added, "Honestly I don't think Emily even has a bad side, so you're probably fine?"
That certainly tracked with Deandre's own impression of the girl's dean. Having finished writing out a rough impression of the memory, to be transcribed in more detail later, he dashed off CF. SCHWARTZWALD at the bottom. Then he drew a box around the entire paragraph and marked it with the sign of the rounded trident.
He turned his eyes back up to the guidance counselor. "Do you mind my asking, sir, or – Psi… what you saw?"
"Oh, of course! God, uh… let's see." Psi fell silent and stared up over Deandre's head at the doorframe. Though his lips moved almost imperceptibly over the next few minutes, he said nothing, giving Deandre time to wonder, with a muted dread, which memory he had just lost. He tried to cycle through his recent thoughts: he could still remember the name of the captain at Harbour Island, and the perilous but beautiful cliff face over the beach, and the gallery of gnarled and monstrous chairs in red and black – and, for that matter, everything he had seen in the auditorium that afternoon, or at least he thought he remembered all of it, which was the infuriating uncertainty that hounded him at every use of his power… But Psi was frowning now, and soon he spoke.
"I don't understand… You didn't say anything wrong."
Deandre gave him an inquiring look.
"I'm pretty sure this was your memory, not someone else's." Psi rubbed his forehead, looking outright frustrated by what he was envisioning. "It was in a bookshop, and you were looking through one of those big volumes of old newspaper comics. And there's this old white lady, I guess she's the owner, standing over you and she asks if you like it when your mother reads to you. And you told her you can read them yourself. And she got weirdly, like, mad at you. I don't understand! She got all snappy and said it was her store and you'd better be careful with that book. Which, I mean, come on, what?" Psi shook his head. "Either you said something else that you forgot, or she was just a jerk, man. Wow."
If he'd been expecting a laugh on that last line, he would be disappointed, because Deandre's mind was racing too fast to reply. He couldn't remember that. Of course he couldn't. He couldn't picture any of it. But he could remember reading something like that. Yes – it was transcribed somewhere already. Marked with a star. It was his. It was yours. Only don't panic. That's what you write them down for. But he'd lost it – it was his own memory and it was gone. He'd lost it. He would never see that bookshop and the old comic strips again.
There must have been something registering on his face, because Psi looked concerned again. "I'm sorry, Deandre. There's no way you can… undo it?"
Despite privately feeling that he was the one who should apologize, having taken a genuinely serious and heavy memory away from Psi and having given up such a trifle in return, more an embarrassment than anything, Deandre only shook his head.
Psi drew a deep breath and looked up at the doorframe again. "It's so vivid," he said. "I can see everything. The colors on the spines… My own memory's not as sharp as this!" He smiled at Deandre. "You're some kind of millennial muse. How many people you think cracked open their laptops and became Starbucks authors after you swapped memories with them? Huh? I bet there are short story blogs all over the internet thanks to you shuffling these images around. Did you ever think of that?"
Deandre appreciated, but didn't exactly credit, the attempt to lift his spirits. His face was feeling warm again. "I guess so," he forced out.
Psi pressed on. "Listen, Deandre, thank you for sharing that with me. I know it took courage… And I totally get it now, one hundred percent, why you're worried about it. And why it's legitimate to think some of the other students might stress out about it, too. There really wouldn't be a 'wrong' side to that debate – right? Everybody's anxieties would be on the line…" Psi trailed off in time to catch a reluctant nod from Deandre. "Please don't let me go heaping a bunch of condescending advice on you before anything even comes up. But do let me say this. A lot of these other kids had experiences not too different from yours, before they came here. So it's a pretty sure bet that some of them are more open-minded than you think. You get to decide when you tell them your power, that's your business, and I'm promising right here never to tell another student before you do. But maybe think about giving them a shot… They might surprise you."
Deandre returned his gaze for a long moment. His heartbeat was returning to normal, and the rush to his brain had faded. Then he nodded, and smiled.
"Yeah, all right," he said.
"Oh, here – maybe this'll help—" And Psi pulled the purple binder off the desk and opened it in his lap again. This time he leafed to one of the earliest pages. "I was looking over the rooming assignments, and it looks like you're bunking with one young master Garth Firbolg."
"Really?" Deandre asked. "I met him this afternoon. He's nice."
"Yeah, he's a good kid! I knew him before all this started up, actually. Summer intern at a company I've done some work for. But here's the good part. I don't know whether it's got something to do with that amulet of his, or what, but…" Psi gave an exaggerated shrug. "The guy is just immune to mindreading."
Deandre's eyes went wide.
"He is…?"
"Oh big time. Really got on one of my coworker's nerves. And let me tell you, I'm pretty jealous." Psi patted his chest, underneath the thick of his necktie. "If sticking a little metal right in here like Iron Man meant not getting any more of Nopcha's fucking sly looks every time my mind wanders, I'd say, cut me open, pal." Then, realizing his word choice, he hastily added, "Sorry, sorry…"
But Deandre couldn't possibly have cared less that Terminer Academy's guidance counselor had just said a rude word. He felt a great weight lifting off him. "My power won't work on Garth?"
"I welcome you to try – with consent – but I don't think it's going to happen. He's a closed book. It's hard to imagine him lying awake at night terrified that you'll plunder the memories of his favorite stuffed seal, Mister Slippy Dunkandflips."
Deandre had broken out into a huge smile.
"That's awesome," he got out at last.
"Yes, I'm pretty sure you've got Miss Russell to thank for that masterful bureaucratic touch," Psi said breezily.
Deandre immediately flipped back a handful of pages to Garth's entry and added two new lines:
THIN
FIRE CONTROL – DIFF COLORS – FIRE RING: WINDOW?
SPACE – COMET!! MS RUSSELL WAS N/JOKING
CLOSE PORTAL – CHUNK OF COMET!
IMMUNE TO TELEPATHY – MY POWER??
ROOMMATE! VIA MS RUSSELL
He could admit to having felt betrayed by Miss Russell earlier and her too-revealingly delicate way of excusing his demonstration. But it was a mistake, everyone made mistakes, and if what Psi said about Garth was true, then Deandre owed the acting principal his gratitude. He would thank her at the first chance he got. His heart felt lighter than it had all day.
"It's perfect," he breathed.
"Great! Well, Deandre, I think we can just about wrap this up." Psi made some notes as well on a page in the binder. "I am going to put a recommendation on the books, if you agree, that you make appointments to come see me on a semi-regular basis. It's up to you whether you choose to use your power on anyone else at this school, and I'm not about to say you can do this or you can't do that – but if you want to practice it with me, I bet we can figure out how to refine it a little. And I'd love to keep up with you about everything else. Schoolwork and friends and such."
"That sounds fine, sir – Psi. Thank you so much," Deandre replied, shaking the counselor's hand again. And then, feeling that it was still lingering and that he'd miss the opportunity if he didn't speak now, he added, "But I'm sorry for taking that memory…"
"What did I tell you? I am seriously the last guy here who's worried about losing memories." He shook his head. "It's no big deal. I'm sure I'll get around to remembering it later."
Deandre frowned. "I don't think that's possible."
But Psi smiled. "Now those are some words you're going to have to retire from the lexicon, around here."
On his way out of the suite, Deandre happened to glimpse through a crack in the door to room 303B and saw another man sitting at a computer who looked very much like Psi.
Should we book anybody else for him, or? What's the general personality type? Right now we've got businesslike (Thyra), giddy (Emily), easygoing (Kilik), militant (Marius), sweet (Belwyn), and megalomaniacal (Silumas). I'm just curious what his demeanor's like, to see if there's any students he'd compliment better than our more prominent faculty.
Close to the easygoing type. Compassionate, but a touch awkward. Makes weak jokes. Good with kids but maybe a little too eager to play the "worldly wise" type when he's actually not the king of confidently navigating this world either.