Mindspeak (27 page)

Jack leaned back against the bench
behind us, and I snuggled into his arm. As he watched the start of the movie, I
studied his profile—the crookedness of his nose, like it had been broken before,
his eyes so dark they appeared black here in the darkness, and the small amount
of stubble to his face after a long day.

He turned and caught me staring at
him. His eyes warmed when they met mine. Our relationship had definitely taken
a sharp turn somewhere along the path into something different. Something
overwhelming.

He leaned in and kissed me, pressing
hard. His hand slipped behind my neck. His fingers laced through my hair. When
he pulled away, he said, “You learned to control your thoughts rather quickly.”

“Hmm.”
I figured I had to
.

“I wish you didn’t hide so many of
your thoughts from me. I enjoyed having you inside my head. Even when you were
moody.”

“Moody?” I slapped at his arm. He
caught my hand and squeezed it, pulling me closer.

We sat there in silence and watched
the movie. From time to time, I glanced at him. As I stared at this beautiful boy
beside me brushing his fingers up and down my arm, I knew there were many
things that could separate us.

I leaned my head against his
shoulder.

He turned his head and kissed my
hair.
I might not be able to hear your thoughts right now, but I sense your
fear of something. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll always be here to protect you
.

But what if
I
was going
somewhere? I only hoped he wouldn’t be too mad.

~~~~

Seth and I entered the nursing home
after ten p.m. Strangely, the nurses outside my grandmother’s room only waved
at Seth and me, barely lifting their heads from their gossip session and
late-night chocolate binge.

“They’re used to me coming in at
strange hours to sit by my mom’s bed,” he said in answer to my unspoken
curiosity.

They weren’t used to seeing
me
here this late. I was still in shock that I had just snuck out of Wellington in
the back of Seth Whitmeyer’s SUV. Jack was going to be irate.

“Why do you come so late?”

He pushed open Gram’s door, and
allowed me to pass through first. I had yet to think of him as a gentleman. He
had saved my life last week, though.

“I’m a doctor. I work long hours.”

My grandmother slept soundly on her
back. Her face looked relaxed and peaceful.

“Sit,” Seth ordered.

I evil-eyed him, then scooted the
chair closer to Gram’s bed and sat. “Hi, Gram,” I whispered so as not to wake
her.

“Now, I don’t know what we’re going
to discover. Or why you’ve never experienced something before now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your abilities should have
been apparent before now. Jack knew he could heal a bird’s broken wing when he
was five.”

I thought about the little white
pills that I hadn’t taken since the day Jack arrived at Wellington—the same
pills Jack tossed into the swimming pool. “Maybe I don’t have these abilities
you think I have.”

“For Jack’s sake, I hope you’re
wrong.”

“Why for Jack’s sake?” My stomach
tightened. Guilt churned there. I had lied to Jack—told him I was too tired to
stay out when Dean Fisher granted an extended curfew.

Two kids in love are never too
tired to be together. Jack didn’t question me, though.

“Jack has a lot riding on what we
hope you can do. We’ll get to that. Now, I want you to concentrate on your
grandmother.”

I stared at Gram’s beautiful face.
The woman who raised me had been confined mostly to a hospital room for the past
six years.

“She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
seven or eight years ago, right?”

I nodded.

“Do you understand how Alzheimer’s
works?”

I nodded again. I understood my
grandmother gradually began to forget where she left her glasses, and
eventually where she left me. And then who I even was.

I’d done a paper on Alzheimer’s
when I was in Advanced Human Anatomy so I knew what happened to the brain of
someone with the disease. The cerebral cortex shrunk. The ventricles enlarged. Among
other things.

“I want you to think about what the
brain is supposed to look like. I know you know the brain well, Lexi, from the
classes you’ve taken.”

He was right. Was my life an open
book to him?

“Now, touch her head. Press your
fingers gently into her temple. Or her forehead. We might have to try different
things.”

My arms, legs, back tensed. I had
touched Gram a hundred times. Somehow this was different.

My fingers hovered just above her
hairline. Shaking. “I’m scared,” I whispered.

Seth, surprisingly, said nothing as
I dug deep inside my gut and searched my heart for the courage. Suddenly the
love I felt for Gram took over. The shakiness in my fingers subsided. I stood
straighter. I stared down at my sleeping grandmother and gently placed my hand
on her head.

The coarseness of her silver hair
tickled my fingertips at first. I pressed harder and concentrated, pulling up an
image of the brain.

The picture of a normal brain
inside my head morphed and twisted into a different picture. The cerebral
cortex—the squiggly tube on the outside of the brain—contracted. As did the
hippocampus. The ventricles grew to more than twice their normal size.

Suddenly, I was looking at the
brain of someone with advanced Alzheimer’s.

I pulled my hand away with such
force that I stumbled against the chair, missing the seat altogether, and fell
to the ground, hitting my head against the bathroom door behind me.

“Whoa.” Seth stepped to my aid. “You
okay?” He knelt beside me.

I rubbed the spot where I knocked
my head. “Oh, my.” I stared up at the bed where Gram lay. “I saw
her
brain.” I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice. “I saw what was wrong
with her brain, didn’t I?” I turned my gaze to Seth.

He nodded, smiling, proud of
himself. Or something.

I pushed myself up. “What does this
mean?”

“It means, I think, if you wanted
to, you could heal your grandmother’s brain. Rid her brain of the Alzheimer’s.”

“What?” I pulled my arm away from
him, and pushed with my feet in a crab walk until I was as far away from him as
I could get. Backed into the corner of the room. “Heal her brain of Alzheimer’s?”
But there is no cure for Alzheimer’s.

I braced the arm of the chair and
pulled myself up. The room spun, and not from the knock to my head. Bile rose
to my throat. Suddenly, my senses were heightened. I saw Gram’s hand lotion and
imagined the smell as if it were right under my nose. A car alarm blared
outside the window on the other side of the room, like a distress signal inside
my head.

“If you wanted to. Yes, you could
heal her.”

If I wanted to…

Yes. I wanted to. Why wouldn’t I
heal the only family member I had left of a horrible disease? “What makes you
think I could heal her? Just because I could see the problem?”

“Because that’s what you were
created to do.” Seth backed up and leaned against Gram’s dresser. “And
everything else that my sister claimed has turned out to be true.”

“I’m like Jack?” I asked.

“No. Not exactly. Your ability is
different from Jack’s. You were created to complement him.”

A different reality began to seep
into my thoughts. My eyes sprung open. “I’ll get really sick if I do this, won’t
I?” Like Jack.

“Probably. There seem to be
consequences to the powers you have.” Seth cupped his chin with his hand. “But
we have no idea. And you’re not equipped to heal your grandmother at this
point.”

“What do you mean? You just said—”

“Well, it’s one thing for Jack to
see a break in a bone. It’s like sewing up a cut. There’s a separation of skin,
and that separation needs to come back together. Same with a bone. But with a
disease that has affected so many other parts of the body…”

“Where do you begin?” I finished
for him. I turned my eyes back to Gram.

Besides, what would Gram be coming
back to? A deteriorated body? Her daughter was still long-gone. The loss of her
son-in-law? Six years of her life gone. Confusion.

Me. She would come back to me. I
could take care of her. She’d have a granddaughter who loved her. “The Program…”
I searched Seth’s face. “You could teach me what I need to know, right?”

“More or less. It’s a matter of
practice and trial and error.”

Trial and error? How could I even
consider this? This was exactly why Dad’s research was so controversial. The
errors. At what cost were doctors, researchers, scientists willing to extend
the lives of others? There was still no guarantee of forever.

I glanced again at my sleeping
grandmother. A tear fell down my face. Oh, what I would give to hear my name on
her lips again. To see recognition in her eyes.

“Does Jack know about this—my
ability?”

“That you were engineered to
diagnose and heal matters of the brain?” Seth crossed his arms and one leg.
Relaxed compared to the nervous energy pulsating through my veins. “Yes.”

I squeezed the bridge of my nose.
Why didn’t he tell me? He had to know I’d want to do what I could for Gram. “You
said Jack spied on me for a year. Why did he do that? Why not just come find
me?”

“Jack has told you how John DeWeese
discovered a picture of you in the newspaper, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, Jack knew very little at
that time about what the two of you could do. But when his dad moved him across
the country to be closer to Wellington, he knew it had everything to do with
you.”

“So he spied on me.” That didn’t
explain anything.

“Before moving, all Jack knew is
that he had the strange ability to heal some injuries, but not others. When he
found out the daughter of his father’s ex-lab partner was at a boarding school
known for producing the best pre-med students, he wanted to know if you knew
more than he did. So he watched you every chance he got.”

“And The Program was formed.”

“That’s right. He’s been slowly
learning everything he could about your fathers’ research. And what you might
be able to do.”

“But that doesn’t explain why he
didn’t just confront me. Ask me if I was like him.”

“And what would that have sounded
like?” Seth smiled.

Like Jack was crazy. I got it.

“You said he had a lot riding on my
ability. What did you mean by that?”

“You’ll need to ask him that.”

“I’m asking you. You brought me
here, broke me out of Wellington tonight. I’m assuming to convince me that The
Program is something I need—to learn more about my powers. Because if you
brought me here to convince me to heal my seventy-six-year-old grandmother of
one disease—to play God—only to break her heart that she missed the past six
years of her life—”

“No, Lexi. I didn’t bring you here
to heal your grandmother, necessarily. Unless that was something you wanted to
do. You need additional training first.” This man was a walking contradiction. “You
are very important to the research my sister, your father, Jack’s father, and
others started twenty years ago.”

“Why am I so important to Jack?”

“I told you what I promised. Now,
tell me who this resembles and I’ll tell you why you’re so important to Jack
now.” He held up the picture that looked too much like Briana Howard.

I stared at the picture again. A
cocktail of feelings erupted inside me. Anger at the girl who tormented me at
every turn but protective at the same time of my classmate who might well have
as many family issues and secrets as I do. And devastated that someone else I
knew just might be the result of mad scientists.

Bree was lucky Seth didn’t spot her
earlier that night.

In the end, girl power and lack of
trust for Seth won out. “No deal. I want you to take me back to school.”

I’d figure out why Jack “needed” me
another way.

Chapter
Twenty-Four

I heard the screaming from down the
hall. “Dani,” I whispered.

I ran. Out of breath, I tried to
get the key in the lock. Dropped the keys.

Finally on the other side of the door,
I darted to Danielle’s bedside and gently shook her shoulders. “Dani. Wake up.
You’re having a nightmare.”

Her eyes sprung open. Sweat poured
down her forehead into her hair. “Lexi?”

“Yeah. It’s me. You were having a
nightmare.” I reached behind me and grabbed a T-shirt off the floor. I blotted
at the moisture across her forehead.

She laid her forearm across her
eyes. “Oh, Lexi,” she panted. “I was so scared.”

I crossed to the bathroom that
separated our room from our neighbors’ and wet a washcloth.

Pressing the cool cloth to her
forehead, I asked, “Wanna tell me about it?”

“I couldn’t find you. I was
searching and searching through the halls. It was so dark. And I was terrified.”
Dani took the cloth from me and placed it behind her neck.

I brushed strands of wet hair off
her face and tucked it behind her ears.

She closed her eyes. “What a weird
dream. The other person running with me was the strangest part.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know, but he kept telling
me that I needed to find you. That you were in trouble.” Dani breathed hard.

My back tightened. “I’m not in
trouble. I’m right here, and I’m just fine.” Was it possible for Dani to have
the same faceless man in her dreams?

“It was dark. You know how I feel
about the dark.” Her body shuddered.

“I do.” I continued brushing my
fingers along her hairline.

“But as afraid as I was of the dark
and that I couldn’t find you, I don’t think the guy in my dream meant me harm.”