Gifted Touch (11 page)

/Carrie White/door—puerta/

—and started down the hall, blinking rapidly. It was one thing when they were all treating her like some little kid that practically needed to be spoon-fed.

At least she still felt like they cared. But to hear them sitting there coming up with excuses to keep her out of their social life—that was too much.

Maybe she could eat in the art room. She could hang out there, do some work on her painting. Rae jerked to a stop.
Yeah, working on that painting would
really help your appetite,
she thought.

She’d just started another one of those paintings where her hand did what it wanted. Big mistake.

She’d ended up with the beginnings of a face that she absolutely knew would become Anthony Fascinelli.

Anthony Fascinelli, looking at her like he wanted her dead.

God, how much did she wish she hadn’t said anything to Mr. Rocha yesterday? All she could think about now was those not-her thoughts that felt like 115

Anthony, the thoughts that kept trying to convince her that he was innocent.
If he is or if he isn’t, there’s nothing you can do about it now,
she told herself.

A couple of girls from her English class passed her, giving her semiweird looks.
Could it be because
I’m standing in the middle of the hall like I have no
idea where I should go?
she asked herself. Rae headed toward the stairwell. She could eat there without anyone looking at her or being nice. No, not nice.

Fake
nice.

Pretty pathetic,
she thought as she opened the door.

/will she be here?/

She pulled a notebook out of her backpack, letting the not-her thoughts roll on by, and put it on the top step so she’d have something to sit on.
I’m not
going to walk around all day with a dirty butt,
she thought.
People are staring enough as it is.
Before she could even retrieve her burrito, the door swung open behind her.

Oh, great. Probably a couple looking to make out.

Please don’t let it be Dori and Marcus.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw Jeff Brunner standing there.

“Hey,” he said, looking a little embarrassed. “I saw you come in here and . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

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Rae raised an eyebrow. “You just
happened
to see me come in here?”

“I was looking for you in the cafeteria,” Jeff confessed, one of his adorable blushes coloring his face.

Rae bet he hated being a blusher. “I saw you leave,” he continued. “Then I sort of followed you, and that’s when I happened to see you come in here.”
Oh my God. Is he actually
interested
in me?
Rae searched his face, looking for any hint that he was doing his good deed for the day or getting his jollies by hanging out with the school nut job. But his smile was just a nice, normal, slightly shy smile. And he had no problem with meeting her eyes; well, except for when he did one of those fast guy eye drops and checked out her body.

Rae allowed herself a quick body scan on Jeff. He was tall and lean, with a swimmer kind of build ver-sus the football-player type. Nice.

“So, um, what do you think of Sanderson so far?” Rae asked. She got her foil-wrapped burrito out of her backpack and unwrapped it, ignoring the blurry thought.

“I’m liking it more all the time,” he answered, looking right at her.

Rae laughed in his face. His blush got a little deeper, but he laughed, too. “Smooth, huh?” he asked.

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“Oh, yeah, real smooth,” she answered. He was flirting with her. And she was actually kind of flirting back. How bizarre was that? Rae Voight was actually having a basically normal encounter at Sanderson Prep. Yeah, it was in the stairwell, but still. She took a bite of her burrito, suddenly starving. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“Eat. Right,” Jeff said. He sat down next to her and pulled a sandwich and a bag of pork rinds out of his backpack. “Want some?” He shook the pork rinds in her direction.

“I’m a vegetarian,” Rae answered, wrinkling her nose.

Jeff hurled the pork rinds down the stairs. “So am I. Those things disgust me.”

Rae actually giggled. How long had it been since she’d done that? She was surprised she hadn’t forgotten how.

“Some sicko put them in my backpack,” Jeff told her. “You believe me, right?”

“Of course I believe you,” Rae answered with mock sincerity.

She couldn’t help thinking of Anthony. Who could have put the pipe bomb stuff in his backpack?

Everyone had been talking about it after the meeting yesterday. She pushed the thought away. For once she had the chance to be . . . the girl she used to be. The 118

girl who could flirt, knowing that the guy would like it.

“Really,” Jeff insisted. “I never eat those things.”

“You better not,” Rae teased. “I could never sit this close to a guy with pork-rind breath.” Jeff moved a little closer, just the tiniest bit, but close enough that Rae could feel the heat of his body.

“How do you feel about peanut butter?” he asked, holding up his sandwich.

“I’m totally for it,” Rae answered.

He started to take a bite. “Strawberry jelly?”

“The best,” Rae said. “You have my permission and my approval to eat it.”

Jeff took a bite, then held the sandwich up to Rae’s lips. She took a bite, too.

Let me spend the rest of my life right here,
she thought.
Right here with this one moment stretching
out forever. That’s all I want. It wouldn’t take one
other thing to make me happy if I could keep on feeling normal. Just normal.

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Chapter 7

Rae headed across her front lawn, eager to get inside the house. She had about two hours of total alone time. No school. No group. No Dad. And no housekeeper, thank God. Her dad had actually wanted to hire someone as a live-in housekeeper, aka baby-sitter, when Rae got out of the hospital, but she’d managed to convince him she could be trusted in the house by herself for the, like, two or three minutes a day when she was there without him.

And they still had Alice Shaffer come in twice a week to clean and freeze some meals for them.

She pulled out her key—

/just let me/

—and unlocked the door, then grabbed the knob.

She gasped when her fingers touched it—

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/that bitch, Rae/

—and she jerked them away. The thought had been like a scream in her mind, so full of hate that it made her nerves sizzle. It hadn’t
felt
like anyone familiar, the way some of the thoughts had started to.

But that almost made it worse. It was like there was a stranger in her head who wanted to hurt her.

Just go get in the tub with some of that Baby Bee
milk bath stuff, put your plastic cushion under your
head, and veg until you’re a prune,
Rae told herself.

You can even get in some fantasizing about that guy
Jeff. He’ll make good mind candy.
She forced herself to open the door—

/that bitch, Rae/

—then stepped inside and closed it behind her.

/if I get caught/

Rae’s heart gave a kick in her chest and started beating double time. That thought had been so full of anxiety that it had affected her body—even though she knew the thought wasn’t really her own.
You’ve
got to let them rush through,
she instructed herself.

They’re mind Muzak, nothing more. Annoying, but
that’s all.

Her little self-lecture didn’t slow down her heart.

She started for the kitchen to make herself some hot chocolate to drink in the tub. Somehow warm water outside and warm chocolate inside really got her into 122

the calm zone, despite the caffeine thing.

Why is the hall light on?
she thought. Her dad had a fit about anyone wasting electricity, so Rae was in the habit of turning off the lights when she left the house. And he never forgot. She veered over and flicked off the switch.

/Rae’ll be sorry/

God, it was the same . . . the same
flavor
as the other not-her thoughts she’d gotten—the ones off the door. That person who hated her. Even with the static she could tell that. Who could hate her so much?

“Not a who. Muzak,” she whispered. “That’s all.” But the little hairs on her arms were standing up. So were the ones on the back of her neck. Rae glanced behind her. No one was there. But she didn’t feel alone. She could swear there was someone in the house with her. A shiver slithered through her, and she wrapped her arms around herself. But it didn’t make her feel any warmer.

Okay, forget the bath,
she thought.
This is way
beyond bath comfort. Call Yana. Invite her over. She
already knows you’re part squirrel. She won’t get
weirded out if you confess that you want company
because you’re giving yourself the creeps.
Rae rushed down the hall to her bedroom and yanked open the door.

/teach her/

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“No,” she whispered. “I don’t—why?” Her brain felt like it was hardly functioning. She pulled in a deep breath and tried to take in what she was seeing.

Her comforter had been shredded. Clumps of the cotton batting were lying all over the floor, along with pieces of glass that Rae recognized as the remnants of her perfume bottles. Each breath burned Rae’s throat and lungs, and it didn’t feel like she was getting oxy-gen, just a mix of citrus and musk and flowers.

Don’t just stand there
. Run! she told herself.

But she couldn’t stop staring around the room. The canvas of her newest painting had been slashed.

Rufus, her very first stuffed animal, had been ripped almost in two. Rae knelt down, picked up the worn bunny—

/teach her/

—and cradled it in her arms. Was this some kind of hallucination? Was she becoming even more psycho? What if she called Yana and Yana said the room looked perfectly ordinary? Rae squeezed Rufus tighter.

/teach her/

She walked over to her dresser, the glass crunch-ing under her feet, then leaned down and stared into her mirror, as if looking at herself would tell her whether she was becoming like her mother. More like her mother. Becoming totally, irretrievably insane.

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Her blue eyes looked scared, but not crazy.
As if a
crazy person would be able to make that call,
she thought. She started to straighten up, then froze. There were words reflected in the mirror. Words that had been painted on the wall behind her.

Slowly Rae turned around and read the message that had been left for her:
Keep your big mouth shut
.

She walked over and ran her fingers over the words.

They were still wet.

This would be a very good time to get out of here.

A very, very good time. She took one step toward the door, then froze again. She’d heard something. A tiny sound coming from the bathroom.

Whoever had done this to her was still in the house.

Anthony locked his eyes on the tube, not that he cared which of the idiots on
Ricki Lake
had slept with which of the other idiots. It’s just that he wanted to blend, and shutting up and watching TV was the eas-iest way to do it.

“Did you hear what happened to McGlynn?” one of the guys on the couch asked. Anthony knew the guy wasn’t talking to him, so he didn’t even glance over. This wasn’t a place where you just joined in a conversation.

“What?” some other guy asked.

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“Got sent to Ashton,” the first guy answered.

Anthony tried to actually pay attention to the
Ricki
freaks. The last thing he wanted to listen to was a bunch of crap about Ashton. If things went bad at his trial, he’d be at the youth prison soon enough, and then he’d see it all for himself.

“Fascinelli, your head is in the way,” said Paul, a guy from Anthony’s dorm. Anthony slid over a foot and crossed his legs, trying to get comfortable again on the floor’s thin carpet.

“It’s still in the way,” Paul said.

Anthony didn’t move. Clearly Paul was making a little power play. If Anthony moved again, he knew Paul would keep pushing him, trying to figure out exactly how much Anthony would take. He figured it was better to deal with Paul now instead of letting it escalate.

“Are you deaf?” Paul asked. He gave Anthony a kick in the back. Not too hard, but hard enough.

Anthony shot a glance over at Bible Bob. He was in the middle of an earnest conversation with one of the younger kids. Anthony turned back to the TV, then he reached over and grabbed Paul by the ankle. He gave a hard jerk, and Paul came out of the chair and landed on his butt on the floor. “Now can you see?” A couple of guys laughed. Anthony didn’t. He wasn’t trying to score points. He was just trying to 126

make it through his stretch here without getting the crap beat out of him. And if he had to be a badass to do it, so be it.

Some of the tension drained out of his body as he realized that Paul wasn’t going to try taking things to the next level. At least not this time.

“If you tried that at Ashton, you’d be missing a limb right about now,” one of the guys on the couch commented.

“I’m not going to Ashton,” Anthony muttered.

I wouldn’t be able to survive it if I did,
he thought.

I’d freakin’ die if I ended up there.

If.
Yeah, right. Big
if.
The police would show all the stuff Rocha found in Anthony’s backpack. Rae would say she saw him
inside
the girls’ bathroom.

There was no
if
in this scenario. He was going down.

Should she try to leave? Just run for it? Rae shifted her weight from foot to foot. What if she wasn’t fast enough? What if whoever was in the bathroom caught her? Maybe she should just hide in the closet or something. Wait him out.