Chasing Power (Hidden Talents)
Chasing Power
Hidden Talents Book 1
By Genevieve Pearson
Copyright 2011 Genevieve Pearson
Cover art designed by Paul I. Rodriguez.
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To my family.
Samantha could say, with 98.7% certainty, that she was not crazy. The 1.3% deviation came from the fact that most insane people did typically think they were sane. But in this case, Sam felt reasonably certain she was right.
Her problem lay in convincing the woman standing in her doorway of that fact. The man hovering in the background didn’t bother her. He was a larger man of forty some odd years, actually pretty fit for an on-campus security guard and fairly tall. His prematurely gray hair had been shorn short—definitely a man who took his job seriously. Muscle, Sam thought. He was no threat.
No, the person that she should and would have to focus on today was the one who had knocked on her door, the African-American woman wearing a nice pink blouse. Pink was meant to be a reassuring color, subconsciously disarming aggressive tendencies. Samantha remembered this from the psychology course she’d been forced to take as part of her General Education credits.
This woman introduced herself as Dr. Carson, the head of the university’s mental health facilities, or Beth as she asked Samantha to call her. Samantha preferred to take comfort in formality:
“How can I help you today, Dr. Carson?” she asked.
“Can we come in?” Dr. Carson said, her voice level, nonthreatening.
Sam pulled the dorm room shut behind her with a desperate smile. “I’d like to, but ah, it’s a bit messy in there. Maybe we could talk in the rec room?”
“We don’t mind a little mess.”
This was not a little mess. Sam’s room could technically be classified a disaster area. Broken glass littered the floor along with remnants of coffee mugs and light bulbs. Even her own roommate had decided to take refuge with a boyfriend until Sam could get things under control.
But they didn’t know that. Probably didn’t know that. She hoped to hell they didn’t know that.
“Well, I don’t want to be embarrassed.” Or placed under observation. “Let’s step outside, shall we?” With a smile of her own, Samantha led the woman down the hall to a relatively private area set up for students to gather. She was a senior, but this would be the first time she’d ever used it. Samantha didn’t exactly enjoy company.
She sat down on the stiff campus couch, and Dr. Carson sat across from her, again with a smile.
“Ms. Gibson, this is just a routine check-in. Nothing to be worried about. Very typical.”
It was easy to tell when someone was lying: they stated the obvious. They held their hands out and declared that they were honest; they smiled and told you how religious they were. If it was routine, Dr. Carson wouldn’t have had to say so. The fact that she was telling Sam there was nothing to be worried about meant the exact opposite.
“I understand what happened last week was traumatic for you. It’s not often we are faced with the prospect of death, of our own mortality. And it’s not easy.”
Sam nodded along with the sentiment. Yep, more stating of the obvious.
“So it’s understandable that you may be having troubles readjusting in class. But I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about what happened.”
“I’d rather not,” Samantha said. The woman’s face darkened. Crap, wrong answer. Samantha smiled, looked for the right buzzword: “I mean, I’m still processing everything, you know. Trying to figure out how I feel.”
“It’s a tough time, Samantha. I can work with you, and your teachers, to come to an agreement on what we should do next.”
“How?”
“Well, we can maybe try some anti-anxiety medication. Or maybe,” seeing the distasteful expression on Sam’s face, the doctor hurried on, “just talking about it would help. It seems possible that you could be suffering from post-traumatic stress. I just want to let you know, if you need help, you can always come by the counseling center.”
Post-traumatic stress. That sounded plausible, but it required follow-up appointments, possibly a regular visit. She didn’t have time for that.
“Sure,” said Samantha, “I’ll think about it.”
#
Samantha closed the door with a sigh of relief, feeling like she had dodged a grenade. Now she could focus on bigger problems. Like her room. Sam was normally a neat freak, but in the past day or two, she’d started slipping. Or rather, things had started breaking, and she just couldn’t keep up with them.
For example, she owned exactly four mugs. Three of them were now in pieces. One in the trashcan, two on the floor. She’d replaced the light bulbs five times in the last two days, and stray pieces of glass still managed to elude the dust buster. Two dinner plates lay shattered across her desk, though heaven knew how that had happened since she could have sworn they were intact when she’d gone to sleep.
She stared bleakly at the wreckage, wondering where to begin. Her head was starting to ache, a dull throb. No, no, no, she thought, not again. Maybe a nap would help.
Next door, a neighbor blasted Pink Floyd. Sam sat down at her desk heavily, covering her ears. The screechy violin of a music student joined the cacophony, a fourth chair practicing Vivaldi.
Why couldn’t these people just be quiet? Shouldn’t they be packing for summer vacation? Sam clutched the pillow over her ears. What had she been thinking when she decided to live in university housing? No amount of money saved could be worth this torture. In the hallway outside, a guy stumbled past her door and paused to throw up in the hallway, three steps short of a bathroom.
As she shifted again, Sam elbowed the mug of tea on the desk—her last one—spilling black liquid all over her schoolbooks. She leapt up with a mutter of disgust just as the light bulb in her desk lamp exploded, spattering her with tiny shards of glass.
“Damn it!” Doggedly ignoring the voice in her brain that asked what drove light bulbs to spontaneously explode, she brushed the glass off her books, embedding most of it in her arm. Wincing, she groped under the bed for something soft, found an old sweatshirt, and hurriedly mopped up the mess. It was only when she was sure her schoolbooks were safe—she couldn’t sell back ruined books—that she turned her attention to her arm, gingerly picking out the glass splinters.
When she finished, she sat back and stared at the broken lamp. One broken light bulb was no reason to lose it, but this was the sixth this week.
No longer able to handle the constant clamor and howl of the students, or the apparently endless number of things breaking, crashing, and exploding around her, Samantha grabbed her coat and headed for the door. She needed peace and she needed answers, and she could only think of one place to find both: the library.
#
Samantha kneeled in the dusty stacks of Doheny library, in between two of the countless rows of stainless steel Gorilla shelves filled with non-fiction books and Masters’ theses on just about every subject existing. What seemed to many a dreary labyrinth was to Sam a haven. There was something magical about the smell, the press and weight of so many words and ideas. Here, with possibilities and solutions within reach, her headache at last began to ebb.
Rubbing the back of her neck, Sam pulled a promising title off the shelf—wedged in so tightly she almost pulled the rest of the books off the shelf with it—and rocked back on her heels. She looked through the gap on the shelves.
Only to see someone staring back at her from the other side. The eyes locked with hers. They were the prettiest man eyes she’d ever seen, kind of a light green color. And with the contact came a feeling of something, relief almost. Like a piece of her life had just clicked into place. The suddenness, the completeness, of the connection held her there for a second.
Then Sam remembered where she was: crouched in the windowless fourth floor of Doheny stacks—whose shelves were so maze-like, lines had to be drawn on the floor to guide students back to the elevators—far away from anyone else, having eye sex with a total stranger.
She leapt to her feet, stumbling backwards in her eagerness to escape the connection. Abandoning all the books except the one in her hand, she ran down the row, made a few abrupt turns, and slipped out the emergency exit.
Ten minutes later, safe and sound in the reading room, basking in the warm glow of the tall, stained glass windows, Sam began questioning her rash decision. It wasn’t the connection she missed, she told herself, but the books. There had been some good ones there, darn it. Maybe if she waited long enough, the guy would go away and she could go back and collect those books she’d left behind.
“
Advanced Theories on Electromagnetism and the Human Brain
. Sounds interesting. Or like a headache waiting to happen.”
Glancing up, Sam found herself looking into those green eyes again. Only now she could see the rest of him. She gasped. Out loud. Embarrassed, she tried to cover herself and wound up choking on her own spit.