Uncanny Day (9 page)

I moved from my locker. The eyes were still on me. I couldn't track them, but I didn't need to—I could feel them. I jerked my head to the left as I walked, trying to pinpoint whose they were. I saw a girl, but she quickly looked away and caught up with a group of others. Had I read her mind before? Did they know my secret? My business paired me up with dozens of people all over school. It was hard to keep them all straight. A mind room flashed in my head. Whose mind was that?

I singled out a guy wearing a letter jacket tracking me. I turned to get a better look, but when I did, he was talking to someone else. I wanted to scream. The eyes on me were beginning to become worse than the voices.

I needed an escape closer than Dean and the cafeteria. Up ahead of me was the newspaper staff room. I prayed Kate would be inside. I felt something tingle behind me—more eyes. I turned around and just about jumped out of my skin when a hand slammed against the locker in front of me. It was Trent. Out of all the people in school, it had to be Trent.

“What up, Uncanny Day?” he said.

“I don't need this right now, Trent,” I said. “I've had a messed-up day.”

His fractured grin told me he didn't care.

“I want to be very clear with you,” he said in a firm whisper. “I want you to stay away from Dean Mitchell.” His finger pointed at my chest.

“Dude, you do know I live with the guy. That's going to be sort of hard,” I said.

Trent laughed. What was the joke? He suddenly turned serious again. “Get out. Run away. I don't care,” he said flatly.

“What? You're psychotic.” Surprisingly enough, I inched my body past him.

“You had better listen, man!” he said, half yelling.

Entering the school newspaper room, I shook my head. I had no idea what Trent was talking about, although at least he had taken my thoughts off the craziness for a little bit. But it was just replaced with even more helpings of crazy.

The newspaper room was…well, let's just say it was messy. I wasn't sure I'd been in there before. Old issues of the Weekly Beak sat laid out, some in piles. A six-foot-long table held a collection of books, notebooks, papers, and pens, as if somebody had spilled everything on top of it. A few chairs dotted the outside. A string of computer stations clothed in bright-colored sticky notes sat empty on the far wall against a set of windows. On a wire that stretched across the width of the classroom, photos hung from clothespins. They looked like sports pictures from some playoff. I caught Dean in one of them.

I released a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding when I saw her. Nobody else but Kate seemed to be in the room. “What's up?” I asked, ducking under the hanging photos as I made my way across the room. Kate was behind a huge desk, her nose buried in her laptop screen, the back of which was covered in stickers. One of them read REBEL with the Star Wars logo next to it.

Without looking up, she answered, “Researching Stephanie's death for an article.”

I let the silence stick. I slumped down in a chair across from her and hung my head. We had both been in on this case, and we were both hit hard with the news.

Kate looked up at me, her face solemn. “Sorry,” she said and offered a friendly smile. “I knew even before they announced it this morning.”

“Me too,” I said, quickly clamping my mouth closed. She squinted at me. Why was I acting so casual with Kate lately? I fired a question back to put her on the defensive. “How did you find out?”

She waited a moment before she answered. “I left my number with the hot guy nurse. How about you?” Her reporter side was poised to pounce. Figured—I was talking to Muddy Huddy. What was I supposed to say, that I'd been there? Could I trust her? I had come into that room for a reason, right?

I did have a crush on Kate. I knew at some point that I'd have to tell her that much, but for right now I was only ready to tell her one of my secrets. I'd needed help, and with everything going on, she was the only person who might have some kind of idea. This had been a long time coming. I looked deep into her waiting eyes and answered.

“I read her mind.”

Chapter Twenty-two

MOST OF THE TIME it was cute to hear a girl laugh. Maybe you told a joke, or maybe you did some hilarious impression. Me, I told the truth. I felt like I'd just condemned myself, but what choice did I have? Kate was probably the only person I could trust right then. Of course, there was Dean, but Dean was more like a mentor than a sci-fi geek. I needed a sci-fi geek, someone who would actually believe the crazy. Dean just sympathized with me.

“What, you're serious?” Kate asked. I thought I'd be ready for this, although I might have been rushing it. Maybe I should have slept on it. Scratch that—maybe I should have tossed and turned over it. I gave her a nod, trying to be as firm as I could.

“Doesn't it make sense?” I continued. “All this time I've been pulling secrets from people, using the student body as clients to create an information business to funnel a cash flow into my pocket.”

Kate giggled again. “I just thought you were one hell of a con man,” she said. She threw her head back, laughing some more. I knew she'd say something like that—Kate had to be convinced.

“Fine. I'll do it right now. Prove it to you,” I said, playfully cracking my knuckles.

Kate pushed her laptop to the side, clearing the space between us and resting her chin in her cupped hands, finally somewhat intrigued.

“Okay, do it.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Read my mind.”

She scooted her chair closer to me. I could smell her perfume. Her reaction had been quick; I hadn't expected it.

“Wait,” she said. I leaned back a little as if I'd run into an invisible bubble. “If you're going to read my mind, I want you to tell me something that only I would know.” There was a challenge in her voice as she arched an eyebrow at me. “We've known each other for a long time and I know everything about you.”

Not this
, I thought and narrowed my gaze. She was way too into this. I figured she was humoring me—she had no idea what she was about to discover.

“Okay, but you can't cry or something if it's super personal or whatever,” I said.

She gave me a look that said “Oh, please,” and said, “Yeah, yeah, make with the mind reading, Mr. Day.”

I leaned in close to her, and for the first time I noticed small freckles on the bridge of her nose. She made them scrunch as she looked back at me, almost giddy.

Here goes nothing
.

I jumped into her mind.

The first thing I did was let out a low whistle. If I thought the
Weekly Beak
staff room was messy… And of all places, Kate's mind was a comic book store—of course it was. Racks and racks of long, white boxes lined six-foot-long tables; comics stacked at waist-level sat in piles on the carpeted floor. Everybody from
Batman, Daredevil, The Hulk, Wonder Woman, Punisher, Green Lantern
…and that's just to name a fraction of the titles surrounding my feet. This was a collector's dreamland. Not to mention a pretty messy arrangement of items of certain nerd value.

I wondered if she physically had all these comics or if these were just some kind of projection, an internal wish list of some kind. Overhead, scrolling on the wall, something like a ticker bar flowed out red words. You know, one of those things that usually spits out stock market prices in Times Square. Instead, I knew these words were Kate's current thoughts; they were moving pretty quickly. I picked up something about an article she must have been reading. It was something about brain damage. Then the words switched to something about school and a pep rally for the next issue of the school newspaper.

I pointed my attention to a few giant movie posters that hung on the walls around the room:
Raiders of the Lost Ark, Terminator, Cloverfield
, and
All the Pretty Horses
, just to name a few. Whoa, I didn't expect
All the Pretty Horses
to be up there. I walked around the room a little more. I had never been in here before. I had a fear nothing would jump out at me and I wouldn't be able to find Kate's secrets. Nobody ever came to me wanting dirt on Kate.

A stack of comics spilled over behind me. I turned around as fast as possible. I could feel my heart rate quicken; I was still on edge. Was I in there alone? I stood silently for a second. It was pretty quiet and I didn't see anyone—nobody else but a community of heroes and villains.

I passed a table and glanced down inside a box filled with comics. A Thor comic book was upside down amongst others. It looked old—from the '70s, maybe. I righted it and thumbed through a few others behind it. All dated from the 1970s. It triggered an idea.

Using both of my hands, I started combing through the comic box to my right. Captain America, Flash, X-Men—all the comics on that table were from the '70s era. I went to the next table and found that the comics inside these boxes were from the '80s. I was starting to catch on. The room looked like it was a mess, but it was an organized mess. Well, somewhat.

On the next table I found a Star Wars comic book published in the '90s. I was getting closer. On my way to another table, I accidentally knocked over another thigh-high stack of comics piled on the floor. Geez, these things were everywhere. I was never going to find anything useful.

I kept searching each table by date, but what was I looking for? All that was there were comic books. Focusing my attention now on the pillars I'd seen when I arrived, I noticed that not everything in there was super-hero related. I found old issues of the school newspaper, celebrity magazines, and then, toward the back of the room, I found a few thick volumes that seemed out of place. A hardcover brown dictionary and thesaurus on a little shelf caught my attention.

My eyes darted up to the ticker bar of thought as I threw the two books on top of the nearest table. Kate's mind was on the Fall Ball. At least she hadn't forgotten about it. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed. How had all this happened at once? I ran my hand through my hair. There I was, looting Kate's mind for clues to prove to her that I could read minds, and I hadn't even given myself time to grieve over the death of Stephanie Daniels.

With the sleeplessness, the fight Dean and I had, the nosebleeds, and even Trent's insane warning, I felt things starting to slip away. Was I losing my own mind? Stephanie's face flashed before me. How could I forget the thing that had been inside her? What was it? Why was it there? Had it always been there and I just never saw it? I needed answers, and the only way I was going to get them was if somebody believed me.

I opened the thesaurus and found myself in the H section. The word “hot” jumped out at me. After it ran a string of about a dozen different ways to describe the word “hot.” I realized this volume was doing me no good. I closed the thesaurus and flipped open the dictionary. The pages were significantly thicker than the ones in the thesaurus. It was no ordinary dictionary.

The page I was on had Batman's bat symbol on it, but not only did it have one version, it had—geez, at least two pages' worth of different bat logos from years past. I thumbed a new section in the volume. This time I found an entry titled “The Edge Hemisphere.” I read the description.

The Edge Hemisphere: The working title of my first screenplay. A sci-fi paranormal story about a group of space explorers racing to prevent our world from colliding with that of a supernatural prison dimension bent on escaping into ours.

Whoa, she'd been reading way too many comic books. This wasn't just a dictionary of all Kate's nerd knowledge; it was also her book of secrets. Then a thought struck me. I had to know. I paged to the letter “L.” Using my finger, I scrolled down to “LO” and then, turning to the next page, I stopped my query.

There it was. It was the first thing I saw on the page. A small photograph of me. Not as I was then, but a school picture taken in fifth grade. I couldn't believe it. My light brown hair stuck up a little, and my eyes were filled with eagerness and spunk. Or I guessed it was spunk—I couldn't remember that far back. The photo was secured by a single piece of tape. I loosened it from the page and flipped it over. There, drawn on the back in pink, was a little heart. I couldn't help it, I felt myself blush, although for the first time in a very long time, I felt joy. Something I sorely needed.

Chapter Twenty-three

KATE'S BIG GREEN EYES were still staring at me when I fell back into my own head.

“Okay,” I said.

“What? That was only like two seconds.”

I bugged my eyes out at her. “Yeah, and probably two seconds too long—you've got a total mess in there,” I replied, running my fingers through my hair. Kate stuck out her tongue at me as if she knew it to be true.

“All right then, tell me my deep, dark secret,” she said, a smirk on her face.

I laughed a little and said, “No, it's just going to embarrass you.”

Kate leaned back in her chair and let out an exhausted breath. “You're ridiculous, Nolan, you know that? Oh, and you're a horrible liar.” She reached for her laptop.

Knowing what I knew then, I was feeling a little ridiculous. All those years, and Kate was in love with me. My own secret crush on her seemed minuscule and harmless. How was I going to play this? I decided to just come out and say it.