The Gifting (9 page)

I laugh.

“Not funny,” she says, putting her hand against her chest. “That scared me half to death.”

I look up at the towering redwoods that climb into the gray sky overhead and use my stick to poke at a few nearby bushes. “I don’t see any Yeti babies in here.”

“You joke, but I’m not kidding. There have been bona fide reports.” As if to prove her braveness, she takes a few steps ahead of me. “So what do you think?”

“About Bigfoot?”

“No, the party.”

The idea is not appealing. Parties are about as high up on my list of favorite things to do as football games. But I’ve learned that when it comes to Leela, the stronger I object to something, the more determined she becomes to convince me otherwise. It’s best if I don’t say anything.

“Maybe Pete can come.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Twigs snap beneath our feet. I let Leela walk a couple bumbling steps ahead of me when a loud hiss stops me cold. Not more than ten paces up the path, there is a snake—a large, coiled, red-eyed snake. “Leela, stop!”

She freezes.

The snake slithers closer and stops right in front of my friend. I stumble backward, my heart lurching.

“What? Tess, you’re freaking me out.”

With paralyzed vocal chords, all I can do is point. She whips around, following the direction of my finger, but she doesn’t move. Why doesn’t she move? Has fear frozen her too? Is she going to stand there while the snake sinks its fangs into her? What if it’s poisonous? The thing is huge.

Leela’s shoulders relax and she turns back around with a smirk. “Ha, ha. Very funny. You saw Bigfoot.”

“Snake,” I manage to rasp.

“Oh my gosh! Where?” Leela’s voice is shrill as she jumps over to me and clutches at the shoulder of my sweatshirt. “This is exactly why I don’t like coming outside. Where is it?”

“Right in front of us!”

Leela jerks around, looking to the right, the left, behind her, and then straight ahead, at the hissing, fanged serpent poised to strike. “Okay, you’re freaking me out. I don’t see anything.”

How can she not see it? It’s right in front of us, slowly slithering forward with those blood-red eyes. My heart beats against my eardrums. The snake rears back and I do the only thing I am capable of doing. I grip the stick in my hand and swing at the serpent with every ounce of strength inside of me.

“Tess!” Leela grabs my arm.

I wheel around. “Run!”

She stares at me with eyes rounder than I’ve ever seen. My attention flies back to the path, toward the snake I just whacked. Only nothing is there but another stick—slightly larger than the one I wield in my hand.

A stick.

I search the forest floor, unable to believe the snake is really gone. “Where is it?”

“Where is
what
?”

I do a full three-sixty. No way did a simple swing of my stick make that snake dart away. But when I come full circle, there’s nothing. It can’t be possible. Seconds earlier, a large frightening snake had been ready to sink its teeth into me and my friend. But all that’s there now …

Leela lets go of my sleeve. “Jeez, Tess, you never told me you were such a good actor.”

“I wasn’t acting. I …” I blink several times, dumbfounded. “You really didn’t see it?”

She shakes her head slowly.

Dread fills the empty space my fear left behind. And for the first time in several weeks, the word
psychosis
flashes in my mind. Seeing things other people don’t see. Is that what just happened? Before Leela’s concern turns into suspicion, I let out an uneasy laugh. “I thought that stick was a snake.”

“Wow. You must really be afraid of them.” Leela looks at the inanimate stick on the ground. It doesn’t resemble a snake at all.

I’m suddenly very tired. Very cold.

“So why in the world do you like being outside so much?”

“I don’t know.” I drop the walking stick and shove my hands into the front pocket of my hoodie. “Do you mind if we go home?”

“You don’t have to ask me twice.”

We head back to the house, quiet at first, but then Leela starts talking about the pet snake one of her brothers had in junior high. Apparently, it got loose in the house once and her mom hyperventilated.

I have a hard time listening. Because that was no aura. I have no migraine. I either saw a huge, hissing snake that Leela somehow didn’t see, or I just had a hallucination.

*

The next day at school, Leela acts like nothing weird happened. Apparently, freaking out because a stick looks like a snake isn’t all that unreasonable to her. She seems to have forgotten about the episode altogether. But I cannot. The scene is stuck on repeat in my mind. Over and over again through all eight periods, until the bell finally rings and I am released to go to my sixth appointment with Dr. Roth at the Edward Brooks Facility.

I sit in the red, cushy seat and jiggle my leg.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

My leg continues its frantic jiggling as I replay—for the millionth time—what happened in the woods. Dr. Roth waits patiently. Finally, I stop my fidgeting and sit up straighter in the chair. “What would you say if you had a client who swore she saw a snake, but it turned out to be a stick?”

“That seems like an easy enough mistake to make. Sticks look a lot like snakes sometimes.”

“What if that client told you she saw the stick slithering and hissing with fangs and red eyes and was about to strike her and one of her friends?”

He steeples his fingers beneath his chin. “You’re positive it wasn’t a snake?”

I nod.

Pushing his glasses up his nose, he leans forward. With each passing appointment, his interest in me has slowly waned. Now, however, I see a tenuous pulse of intrigue flicker to life in his eyes—like the twitch of a dying man’s finger. This latest bit of news has resuscitated his interest.

“Does having hallucinations make me crazy?” I ask.

He raises one of his eyebrows. “Are you sure you didn’t fall asleep?”

I don’t miss the tone of sarcasm in his voice. He’s referencing the séance, of course. Something we haven’t discussed since our first meeting. Dr. Roth clearly doesn’t believe my nightmare theory any more than I do. “For people who suffer with psychosis …”

“Psychosis?”

“It’s just what came to mind.” I grip the armrests on either side and pin my gaze on his framed degrees. I really don’t want to watch the flicker of interest in his eyes turn into a flame, but I have to know more. I have to know what is happening to me. “Do they usually … are people with psychosis … are they aware of having it? Do they know what’s happening to them?”

He doesn’t answer. He simply sits there studying me until I’m boiling in my own frustration and my leg has resumed its jiggling.

“I’d like to try something with you, Tess,” he finally says.

“What?”

“Hypnosis.”

I scratch my patch of eczema. “Hypnosis?”

He gives a single, confident nod. “I think it will help.”

But Dr. Roth is wrong. Hypnosis doesn’t help at all.

Genocide

T
hat night, my nightmares return.

I’m standing in the middle of a crowd of people with angry faces, holding signs I cannot read. Babies cry somewhere off in the distance and standing before the angry mass is a man and a woman. The man wears a white coat and the woman, maroon scrubs. He has fine black hair and slanted eyes and she is petite and fair.

I don’t know why I’m here—in this crowd.

But then I see something. The skeletal man with greasy hair and white eyes. He stands in the crowd, his spindly fingers spread wide, a dark web escaping from his fingertips, only instead of hovering over Pete, the web sticks to an expressionless man wearing a trench coat. He’s like a marionette on a string. The web controls his arms and his legs, moving him away from the crowd, closer to the Asian doctor and the petite nurse.

When the man pulls a grenade from his coat pocket, my throat closes with fear.

I want to yell at him to stop—to shake off the black web and put the bomb away before people are killed. But babies wail and shock keeps me immobile, and before I can do or say anything, the man pulls the pin and there is an explosion of massive heat that sears my skin. I throw my arm over my eyes, but there is no fire. Just me. Sitting up in bed. Panting. Sweating. Blinking. Thinking about Dr. Roth and his hypnosis. Wondering
why
, after weeks of no nightmares, I had one now.

As soon as I catch my breath, I throw off my covers and peel off my sweat-dampened pajamas. The red numbers on my clock tell me that I slept through the alarm. I slip into a pair of ratty jeans with holes in the knees, an Orange Crush t-shirt, and the same hooded sweatshirt I wore outside on Sunday—when I saw an imaginary snake almost attack my friend. I brush my teeth and rinse my face and pull my hair into a ponytail, all the while forcing the memory of that nightmare away. I will not attempt to figure out what it means. I will not let myself worry about it. People have nightmares all the time. They are simply brain activity in the midst of sleep. It’s part of being human.

I hurry down the stairs and find Dad in the kitchen, reading the paper with a furrowed brow.

“Late this morning?” Mom says, dressed and pressed and beautiful as always.

“Slept through the alarm.”

I squish my feet into a pair of unlaced Converse All Stars by the sliding glass door, grab a Pop-Tart from the cupboard, yell at Pete to get a move on, and we hurry out to the car.

At school, I fist my hands in my front pocket, trying to push away the sense of foreboding that has settled over my shoulders while Leela jabbers about Bobbi’s Halloween party on Friday. When I step inside Mr. Lotsam’s classroom, we grab two seats to the right of the horseshoe of tables, directly across from Luka. There’s an empty seat beside him. For a brief moment, I imagine a confident version of myself taking the empty spot and smiling at him. I imagine a world where he is my boyfriend and I am his girlfriend. I envision us walking down the hall together, holding hands while everybody stares.

I blink away the daydream, hang my bag on the back of my chair, and pull out my notebook, prepared to resume our previous discussion about the growing population of immigrants and refugees in America. Students file in, filling up the chairs. Summer takes the one next to Luka. As soon as the bell rings, Mr. Lotsam breezes inside the class with a stack of magazines. He plops one in front of each of us and writes two words on the board.

Fetal Modification.

A collective groan overtakes the shuffle of notebooks and papers. One I silently agree with. I dread this conversation. People never agree. Our entire nation is up in arms over it because of a heated, indignant minority. The government-mandated pregnancy screenings and the dramatic increase of fetal modification over the past decade is one of the few news topics Dad doesn’t even talk about at home. Mom told me once that when she went to school, inclusion was all the rage. I can’t imagine. In all my seventeen years, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve encountered a person with defects. I look down at the magazine in front of me and the one in front of Leela. They are different, but both have relevant headlines.

The Benefits of Government-Mandated Pregnancy Screenings

Anti-Fetal Modification Groups Picket at the White House

My magazine has a picture of B-Trix on the cover, an internationally renowned pop star from England. All the boys are in love with her, all the girls want to be her. People legitimately hyperventilate at her concerts. Like, for real, need-a-paramedic hyperventilate. A couple months ago, she became the official spokeswoman for a pregnancy screening advocacy campaign. The commercials air so often, I can recite each one from memory.

Without saying anything, Mr. Lotsam points a remote control at the television mounted above his desk and a reporter talks inside the flat screen. Another fetal modification-clinic bombing occurred earlier this morning.

“Two people died in this explosion. Dr. Chang and Mindy Lucas.”

The victims’ faces fill the screen and every last drop of warmth drains from my cheeks. The babies crying. The people with signs. The web of black mist. The man in the white coat and the woman in scrubs. The grenade. The explosion. I stare, dry mouthed, at the television. At these two people—Dr. Chang and Mindy Lucas—and blink, as if blinking will make them change. As if blinking will make them not be the people from my nightmare.

As the reporter talks, it’s as if I’m detached from my body, listening from the bottom of a well. Dr. Chang was forty-two years old with a wife and three children. Mindy Lucas was thirty-one and newly engaged. They died in my sleep and now they are dead in real life. I scratch my eczema, hating the burn, and search for an explanation. Like maybe I saw them before bed. Or maybe Dr. Roth planted this into my head as some sort of hypnotic experiment. But the explosion happened this morning.

Mr. Lotsam points the remote at the television. The screen goes black. “This is the fifth fetal modification clinic bombing this year. I think it’s time we engage in a healthy class discussion.”