Gifted Touch (3 page)

“I’ll be right here when you’re done,” he said, giving her arm an awkward pat.

Rae noticed he’d been touching her more since she got out of the hospital. She wondered if that was something Dr. Warriner had encouraged him to do in one of their private sessions. Rae wished her dad wouldn’t bother. They’d never been touchy with each other, and now it just felt weird.

“See you in a bit,” Rae answered. She climbed out of the car—

/What’s the point?/

—and started to shut the door. Her father reached over and held it open.

“I was thinking . . . or wondering . . .” His blue eyes looked hopefully up at her. “Maybe afterward we could stop off at The Wiz and pick ourselves out a television.” He sounded like he was offering a five-year-old an ice-cream cone after a trip to the doctor for a booster shot.

But this was big. Her father was hugely, fero-ciously, adamantly anti-TV. Rae’d been begging for a set—just a little one for her room—for years. And now . . . Rae felt a lump form in her throat.

21

“TV is the opiate of the masses,” Rae said, quoting him. “There will be no TV in my house.” She turned and headed for the main doors before he could answer. Six months ago she’d have been ecstatic over the chance to be completely and fully TV literate and to get her daily dose of impossibly cute boys. But now

. . . It would just be another sign of how much things had changed.

She hesitated when she reached the doors.
Got to
do it,
she told herself.
Going to group will show that
you’re committed to your mental health.
Rae snorted.

Maybe
committed
wasn’t exactly the word to use. She shoved open the doors—

/
What a crock
/
sweater too tight
/
Charmed on tonight
/

—and stepped inside, letting the hum in her head die out. Sometimes her bizarro thoughts came with this staticky hum. It was like having an electronic bee-hive in the brain or something. Other times the bizarro thoughts were loud and clear—no bees. Rae wasn’t sure which was worse.

The middle-aged woman behind the reception desk smiled. Rae smiled back since that was what normal people did, and she wanted to look ultranor-mal. “I’m here for Ms. Abramson’s group,” she said.

“Down the hall, take the first left, then second room on the right,” the woman answered.

Rae nodded, then checked the clock over the 22

woman’s head. She had ten minutes, and she did
not
want to spend them sitting around with the losers. She spotted a bathroom as she started down the hall.

That’ll do,
she thought. She stepped inside just as a girl with extremely short brown hair stepped out.

Fashion choice? Or a grown-out hack job? Rae wondered. A couple of girls at the hospital had taken scis-sors to their heads.

She wandered over to the closest sink and stared into the mirror over it. This place was definitely lower security than the hospital. No way would they have allowed a patient in the same room with anything as potentially dangerous as a mirror, which could be broken to create knife-sharp blades.

“Looking good. Looking normal,” she told herself. “Except for the talking-to-yourself thing.” She washed her hands and dried them carefully with one of the rough brown paper towels, just to kill time.

No point in stalling anymore. If you’re late, you’ll probably have to talk for hours about what you think it meant that you were late. Could you have been experiencing some internal resistance? And blah, blah, blah.

Rae strolled over to the bathroom door and opened it.

/hate this place/

She snorted at the staticky thought. It wasn’t hers.

23

But it might as well have been. This was definitely a place that was easy to hate. And it did have that cheap disinfectant smell. She headed down the hall, trying to ignore the way her stomach was folding itself into some kind of origami creature. Way too quickly she reached the door of the room where her group therapy was going to be held. She walked through the open door without hesitation, head up, making eye contact with anyone she noticed looking at her, smiling back at the losers who bothered to smile.

Possibly I shouldn’t call them losers, considering,
Rae thought.
Maybe they’re just like me, coming here
because somebody said they had to, trying to get back
to some semblance of regular life.

She sat down in the closest empty chair—gray metal folding, of course—in the ragged circle, shooting a glance at the guy next to her.
Now, I’m sorry, but
he
is
a loser,
she thought.
A Backstreet Boys T-shirt,
and he has to be, like, sixteen or seventeen. Please.

“Looks like the gang’s all here,” a thirtyish woman with black hair in dozens of tiny braids said as she strode into the room and shut the door behind her. “Except Jesse Beven. Know where he is?” she asked the Backstreet Boys fan.

The guy, helpfully, shrugged.

The woman shook her head as she turned to Rae. “I’m Ms. Abramson. And you’re Rachel 24

Voight.”

“Rae,” she corrected automatically.

“Okay, Rae,” Ms. Abramson answered. “You’ll get a chance to meet everyone in a little while when we go around the circle. But I want to start with an exercise.”

There were a few muffled groans. Ms. Abramson ignored them. She turned her attention to the door, which was opening very slowly. “Glad you could make it,” she said as a gawky redheaded kid who looked about thirteen sidled through the door, clearly hoping not to be noticed. Rae assumed he was the missing Jesse. He muttered an apology in Ms.

Abramson’s direction and took the seat on the other side of the Backstreet Boys guy.

“I want you to pair up,” Ms. Abramson said as she headed toward the other side of the room. “And not the usual pairs, please. Anthony, you and Rae work together. Jesse, you team up with Matt. Nobody with anybody you’ve paired up with in the last three sessions. Are you listening, David and Cynda?” she asked a guy and girl across the circle from Rae. The two practically had
we’re-a-couple
tattooed across their foreheads.

Ms. Abramson paused by the cupboards under the row of windows that lined one side of the room. She opened the center cupboard and pulled out a bunch of 25

drawing pads and some boxes of crayons, then began handing them out to everyone in the circle to more groans, not so muffled this time.

Backstreet Boy—Anthony, Rae supposed she should start calling him—reluctantly hauled his chair around to face her. She scooted hers toward him, then shoved it back a little so their knees wouldn’t touch.

“What I want you to do is draw a family portrait,” Ms. Abramson continued. She reached Rae and Anthony, handed them supplies, and kept working her way from pair to pair. “And then draw a significant object in each person’s hand—something important to that person. And no, Rebecca, I won’t give you an example,” she said to the hack-head girl Rae’d seen earlier. “There are no rights or wrongs. Just go with your gut instinct.”

Cake assignment,
Rae thought. She selected a couple of crayons—

/
LIKE BLUE
/
blister driving me nuts
/
call Dan
/

—ignoring the flicker of random thoughts and the buzz underneath them, then handed the box to Anthony.

He clearly had no interest in talking to her, which was a bonus. Rae decided to do her father first. High forehead. Nose with a bump. Bad posture. Thinning blond hair. She’d drawn him lots of times, and the sketch came out fast and easy. Choosing his significant object was a no-brainer—a book for the English prof.

26

Now me,
she thought. That was harder. She wasn’t into self-portraits.
You’re not doing this for Ms.

O’Banyon,
she reminded herself.
Just get something
down on paper, be the good little group therapy girl so
you’ll be able to stop coming sometime this century.

Rae started to draw. Curly, reddish brown hair—

lots and lots of it. Nose with a bump, like her dad’s.

Stubby eyelashes. Blue eyes.

Anthony reached over and took the brown crayon out of her fingers without asking. Rae ignored him, switched to another crayon, and kept drawing, so caught up, she hardly registered the alien thoughts.

Mouth like Angelina Jolie’s.
Like Mom—
the unwelcome thought flashed through her brain uninvited.

Basic bod. And she was done. Now all she needed was her significant object, which was as much of a no-brainer as her dad’s—a paintbrush.

“Can I get that brown crayon back, please?” she asked Anthony. “Just when you’re done. Take your time,” she said with pointed politeness. He immediately thrust the crayon at her.

/AM I LIKE HIM?/

A wave of yearning swept through Rae, and she felt the sting of tears in her eyes. She blinked rapidly.

No way was she going to have a crying jag in her first day in group.
It’s just one of your brain hiccups,
she told herself.
No biggie. Nothing to freak about. That
27

feeling has nothing to do with you.
She forced herself to return to her drawing. The handle of the paintbrush came out too long. It ended up as a root wrapped around Rae’s ankle in the sketch.

“Just two or three more minutes, gang,” Ms.

Abramson called.

Damn. She didn’t have time to start over. “Can I have the red?” she asked Anthony, then grabbed it without waiting for an answer.

/NICE HAIR/

Somehow that thought felt a little like the am-I-like-him thought. They felt like they could almost be from the same person.
They’re not from anyone,
she reminded herself. The thoughts were in her own head.

Group therapy is no place to dissect your insanity,
Rae told herself.
Your goal here is to put on the
Look How Normal Rae Is
show. So draw already.

Rae drew a big red flower in the hand of the sketch Rae so the root would be coming from somewhere.

“Okay, time’s up,” Ms. Abramson announced.

“Now, I want you to really study your drawings while you show them to your partner. Who are you standing next to? How close are you? Is one person in the drawing much smaller or larger than the others? What about the significant objects—what do they say about 28

each person?” She gave two sharp claps. “So, talk among yourselves. Partners, don’t be afraid to ask questions and make observations. But as always, no personal attacks.”

Oh, great,
Rae thought.
Why don’t I just install a zipper from my throat to my belly button?
She shot an annoyed glance at Anthony. “You first, Backstreet Boy.” A dark flush crept up Anthony’s throat, but he obediently held up his drawing. “This is me. And this is my mommy. And this is my daddy,” he began in a singsong voice, pointing to one stick figure after the other as he spoke. “This is my half brother Danny.

This is my half brother Carl. This is my half sister, Anna. This is my stepbrother, Zack. This is my stepfather, Tom. This is my previous stepfather, Rob.

There are a bunch of significant boyfriends who were briefly family, or at least who lived with us, but I ran out of room.”

“That’s . . . a lot of people,” Rae said.

“I’m so glad Abramson made us partners,” Anthony answered with mock enthusiasm. He shoved his hand through his sandy brown hair and shot a glance over his shoulder, probably to make sure that said Abramson wasn’t in earshot. “I can see that with your help, I’m really going to learn a lot about myself.

When I leave here, I’ll probably cry a little and then go do some work in a soup kitchen because I’ll have 29

realized there are worse-off people than me. And it will all be thanks to you.”

“What’s your problem?” Rae demanded. “All I did was make a simple observation—That’s. A. Lot.

Of. People.” A loser with attitude. Could there be a worse combination?

“Your turn,” Anthony told her, his dark brown eyes expressionless.

Rae shook her head. “Uh-uh. Not so fast. I get to ask questions.” She studied his drawing. Make that his sticks with big circle heads. They all looked almost alike. But she was asking something. No way was she letting him off the hook. She jabbed her finger at the tallest stick figure. “This one is about twice as tall as the other ones. Which one is that again?”

“My dad,” Anthony answered.

“Is he actually that tall?” Rae asked. “I mean, I know he’s not a mutant who’s double the size of other people. But is he a lot taller than average?” Anthony jerked his chin toward Rae’s drawing.

“Why is that flower so huge?” he countered. He pointed at the red blossom. “It’s bigger than the girl’s head.” Rae automatically glanced at the flower and wished she hadn’t. It was like the ones she’d painted in her landscape for art class that time—somehow more predator than plant.

“When it’s your turn, you can ask what you want,” 30

Rae told him, forcing her eyes back to Anthony’s drawing. “Now, talk. Dad. How tall?” Anthony didn’t answer. The muscles in his jaw were all tight, like he was grinding his teeth.

“So I’m guessing height is a sensitive subject,” Rae said. “Does it make you feel inadequate that Dad is tall while you’re . . . not?” Because Anthony was definitely short, probably shorter than most guys in his class. He made up for it in muscle, though. Rae couldn’t help noticing that.

“Rae, Anthony, how are we doing over here?” Ms. Abramson called before he could answer. She came over and put one hand on Rae’s shoulder and one on Anthony’s.

Anthony tightened his grip on his drawing until the edges got crumpled. Rae considered repeating her significance-of-the-size question in front of Ms.

Abramson. That would force Anthony to cough up some kind of answer, possibly winning some good-observation-Rae brownie points for herself. But her eyes were drawn to Anthony’s clenched fingers, the knuckles white with strain, and she decided to give the guy a break.