Awash in Talent (7 page)

Carlos’s wife must have called the police as soon as she saw me, because they were already pulling up. I expected the same two guys from the crazy night that set all this in motion, but two different officers got out of the car. They seemed to know of us, nonetheless: they approached with knowing grins.

“Don’t arrest me. I’m a law-abiding Brown student. Arrest her. She’s an unregistered telekinetic.” I tried to gesture toward Beth.

“I just registered at school,” she said to an officer.

“You mean they took you as a student?”

“That, too, but the director also helped me register legally. As of five minutes ago, I’m an official, government-recognized, Other-Talented Healer, telekinetic.” She pulled a cardboard slip out of her pocket with “temporary” emblazoned in red across the top. I’d never paid enough attention at the registration centers at the mall to realize that they received actual licenses or identity cards.

While I was musing on that, they placed the cuffs on me rather more roughly than was necessary and forced me into the back of the police car. It was a more welcome feeling than the strange half-paralysis my sister had had me under. I guess they read me my rights, but I didn’t hear them. I looked out at Beth and Carlos’s wife placing him back into the wheelchair like a life-sized doll, and my elbow smashed awkwardly into the door as I reached futilely toward the object of my affection. The car started up. “Wait,” I shouted. “Isn’t my sister coming with me?”

She lowered her face to the window and my life took on a distant quality, like I was watching a scratchy videotape of it long after the fact. I heard her muffled voice tell me something about working on my case and getting me out soon. I had to let her get away with such a lame explanation because I didn’t have a different option, and also I was going into shock. Only moments before, my life had been on the verge of a fairy tale ending. True love and happiness forever had been on my horizon, and I had been on the cusp of grabbing it with both hands. Now, my freedom hung in the balance of a scale apparently controlled by my unremarkable little sister.

They put me in a cell by myself, probably because Beth had said I was sociopathic. It was antiseptic and uncluttered, and I had the notion that this was what it had been like for her to grow up in that plastic-encased, sanitized room in our house. “How can this be? How can this be?” I howled all night long.

In the morning, feeling sheepish, I asked the woman who brought me my breakfast whether such night howling didn’t happen all the time here.

“I’m sorry, miss, I’m not allowed to talk to you.”

That left me speechless. Was I meant to spend who knew how long in this place with nothing to do and no one to talk to? I wasn’t sociopathic, but I soon would be.

No one rescued me that day or the next. I was becoming accustomed to my new life, which consisted of pacing, crying, and imagining Beth going to the mall and doing all those stupid things she liked with Carlos and his wife, earning A+ grades at her new school, and learning the latest in fourth dimension design possibilities at RISD. My camera-ready tears gave way to clenched fists and a low, constant growl I couldn’t seem to suppress by the time they let me out and handed me a plastic bag with my personal objects.

I walked out to the foyer and found that my rescuers were, improbably, my parents. They looked shabbily extravagant, wearing bright colors but with drawn faces and fast-blinking eyes. I suddenly preferred the blank austerity, the clean slate, of my jail cell. Through no fault of their own, the faces of these people only reminded me of everything I’d tried to leave behind when I came to Providence. I don’t think my face even registered recognition. When my mother embraced me, my growl reverberated in her necklace.

“I think she’s still in shock,” she whispered to my father.

Still? More like, constantly bombarded with new shocks. They loaded me into what I guessed was a rental car without saying anything to me. As we made our way up College Hill, I studied the upholstery in the back seat and recognized a stain I’d made grinding beach sand into the floor when I was twelve.

“Did you drive out here?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” said my mother. “It was the best way to bring everything we needed.” She held my hand in a reassuring manner and I realized she was sitting in the back next to me. My dad was concentrating very hard on driving. I couldn’t blame him for that. Californians often have a hard time adjusting to the Rhode Island rules of the road, which are nonexistent when you really come to understand them.

“What all did you need to bring?” I asked.

“Everything,” said my mother.

I pulled my hand away and reached for the door handle, only to be thwarted by my mother’s surprising grip.

“Beth isn’t old enough to be your legal guardian, so we’ve made arrangements and moved into the apartment across the hall from you,” she explained.

“What?”

“We thought it was an arrangement that would make everyone happy,” said my mother.

In the driver’s seat, my dad said, “Well . . .”

“Remember what the counselor told us,” snapped my mother, in a way that sounded like “Loose lips sink ships.”

I could tell Dad was more receptive to reason than my mother, so I appealed to him. “Dad, what’s happening?” We pulled up to the apartment and the first change I noticed was a green neon sign stuck into the patch of grass at the front of our window, reading “Free Clinic.” “Dad,” I repeated, raising my voice, “what’s happening?”

They said nothing, so I got myself out of the car, and somehow and a power larger than my reluctance opened the door only to show that my worst imaginings had come true. Our front door had a purple sign warning, “No Aluminum, Please.” I pushed it open and found our living room transformed into a waiting room by means of two rows of plastic chairs strikingly similar to the ones in the hospital in Ethiopia. Six of the ten chairs were occupied by patients variously injured and occupied watching our TV or leafing through the magazines tastefully laid out on our coffee table.

“Beth,” I called in a calm but forceful voice.

“Please sign in and then take a seat,” said a woman I hadn’t noticed near the door. She had a strong Portuguese accent and used a laptop on a folding card table to keep a log of visitors.

“I’m not sick,” I said. “Eu não são enferma.”

I rushed past the waiting people, ignoring all manner of protests, and opened the door to my room. Beth was on my bed, blithely massaging the hand of a woman who looked to be in her fifties. She actually smiled at my entrance.

“This is my sister, Emily,” she explained to the patient. “You’ll see her when you come back for your elbows. That’s it for your hands, no more arthritis. Please make another appointment on your way out. Thank you.” She waved as the woman walked out, beaming.

“Why aren’t you doing this in your bedroom?” I asked, reasonably.

“I really need that space to study and to get away from all the ailments,” she said. “But this is still your room at night.”

“What about the daytime?”

“Well, we’re swamped with cases, mild and serious. I’m only one person, after all. You’ll be helping out here in the clinic. Mom or Dad have to take you if you want to go anywhere else. They’re working on a court order, but for now, it would be best if you cooperate. We’re all going to therapy, individually and as a family, and your matriculation has been put on hold while they investigate whether you’re stable enough to return to campus. But I doubt they’ll make that decision before Carlos finishes his degree and gets a job teaching somewhere else.”

At the sound of my love’s name, my gaze went to the desk drawer where I’d kept the secret folder of photos and mementos. It wasn’t there. The entire drawer had been removed, leaving a gaping square in the structure of the desk. I pointed and stared at Beth, attempting to open up a similar fissure in her body with the force of my mind.

She seemed oblivious to the mental destruction I was inflicting on her. “I decided to give the whole drawer to a friend of mine who’s a firestarter. She needs a certain amount of disposable material to work out her urges on.”

I had my own urges to contend with, but just as I was deciding to act on them, I felt that overwhelming sense of powerlessness. My sister pulled the chair out from the desk and sat me in it, folding my hands nicely. I tried to kick and flail and distract her, but her control had already developed leaps and bounds since I’d last seen her. I was completely immobile.

Then she said, “Next.” A man came in cradling his arm as if it were broken or twisted. Beth explained, “This is my sister, Emily. She’s going to be helping out in the clinic, but today she’s observing and training.”

That’s it, Dr. Blundt. You know everything that happened after that, because I started coming to you for my court-mandated psychotherapy sessions. You thought it might “help” to write down what’s happened over the last couple of years with Beth. You said writing might let me be “completely honest” with myself.

So I have been honest, but I doubt you’ll believe anything I wrote because people don’t tend to believe what they don’t understand, and I am 100 percent certain you’ve never been in love. Few have experienced what Carlos and I share. I think you’re an only child, too, so how can you sympathize with the maddening competition between sisters?

Maybe I can explain that part of it. In most families, it would be enough that I have an Ivy League education and have found true love, enough to make me the most successful and beloved offspring for generations. But I have a Talented sister, so blessed that she’s also Other-Talented. And nothing I can do can compare.

September 6

I first saw the Pyrokinesis Management Academy—school for firestarters—when I was ten years old. We drove past it on the way to visit Grandma in the hospital. I couldn’t distinguish the feeling of dread its industrial walls provoked in me from the panic I felt over Grandma’s health at the time. But now I live in the school for control of pyros, and I can attest that my stomach hasn’t unclenched since I got here.

The school is on Eddy Street, which used to be right along the Providence River in the nineteenth century. It isn’t anymore because, apparently, they let the river move wherever it wanted until they built the docks. When the school was established, only a little while after the discovery of these rare Talents in the 1870s, they needed a certain supply of water nearby, because even though the school is in a brick warehouse, everything else was flammable in those days. To further show their strategic prowess, the school is right between a fire station and Rhode Island Hospital. If they couldn’t put out the flames in time from the south, at least the burn victims could quickly receive treatment to the north. Now, of course, the school consists of more layers of fireproofing than brick and mortar, and the techniques for self-control—so they tell us—have improved so greatly that the “last injury due to flame” sign shows a date that stretches back years.

I’m not writing this journal because the counselors think it will be good for me or because it was assigned in English class, but because this little book is the only bit of flammable paper I’ve been permitted. I’ll write all these thoughts on these pages and place this book by my bedside in the hope that it will go up in flames sometime during the night. Because I haven’t learned to calm the fire inside.

September 7

Maybe if I write about the first day here, it will stop crashing around in my head like big clumps of lead.

Actually, I wish I had a big clump of lead to carry around with me instead of this stuff. They give us small patches, like nicotine patches for people who want to quit smoking, but with our kryptonite, to wear against our skin and help control the urges. It does seem to cut down on the incidents—I haven’t made a fire since I got here a week ago. But, God, it itches like crazy. I’m always scratching at mine, I can’t help it, and I have to be careful where I put the new patch of the day because I could look like an idiot scratching my armpits or some other sensitive area all day. They let us take them off at night so we can sleep, because everyone has an adverse reaction to their patch, but not everyone itches. Melinda, the high and mighty, claims it makes her tired so she can’t do PE. Like she’s having her period, all the time. I swear, she’s like a Victorian with the vapors every day at two o’clock. And the teachers
fall for it!
They let her go take a nap in her room most of the time. I wonder what she really does in there while we have to jog laps around the gym and bounce ridiculous balls off stupid things, like one another. And what do laps have to do with
not
setting anything on fire?

Anyway, my first day here, I barely had time to drop my bags before we had a get-to-know-you kind of meeting, which they called “orientation.” They made us all sit in a circle on the floor. Yes, the concrete floor, with no rugs or pillows—what were they thinking? About flammability. I swear that’s all we are to these people—big walking fireballs. Todd, the lanky upperclassman who led the group with a senior girl and one of the teachers, had us go around the circle saying our names and what our kryptonite was. It was probably more to orient them to us, to prepare the patches, than for any other reason.