Open Minds Read online

  When the final bell sounded, students flowed through the hallway toward the school entrance and their release for the day. I clung to the edges, fighting the current to reach my locker. At least I had survived the day and hadn’t injured anyone. And I had a real chance of doing well this year.

  I dug around in my locker and decided to leave my running gear behind, since I needed to bring home my e-slate and all my scribepads. Satisfied I had everything, I slammed the locker door closed. My heart lurched when I saw Simon only a foot away, leaning against the wall of grated metal doors.

  I let out an awkward sound.

  “Did I scare you?” He seemed to be struggling to keep his face straight.

  “No.” It sounded unconvincing, even to me. “You just startled me.” There were no sounds around us, no hints of anyone nearby. The other students must have cleared out while I had been fussing with my locker.

  He dipped his head and peered at me through his lashes, which were deep black like his hair. “I was hoping you’d come to the chem lab.” A smile curled up one side of his face.

  Spasms roiled through my stomach. “I… I need to get home, so I’ll just be on my way, all right?” I turned slowly, determined not to run. I would simply walk at a measured pace along the shortest possible route to somewhere safe. Somewhere he wouldn’t terrify me into doing something awful. Before I took a step, he grabbed my elbow.

  “Let go!” I twisted out of his grasp and restrained the urge to smack him.

  He threw up his hands. “Okay!” That he would openly touch my bare arm confirmed my worst thoughts. Maybe I could outrun him, at least to the office. But a strange look of concern on his face overrode any common-sense thoughts I had of running fast and hard.

  “I understand why you’re nervous.” He dropped his voice. “Why you’re afraid.”

  “I… I’m not a-afraid.” I cursed inwardly and wished I had said nothing at all. I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid of Simon or of what my brain might do to him.

  “I know you are.” He leaned closer and whispered. “Because I’m the same as you, Kira. And I remember how it felt.”

  His words shocked me out of my trance of terror.

  “What are you saying?” I glared up and down at his Cantos Syn t-shirt and nove-fiber jeans. He was toying with me. “Did you suddenly turn into a zero?” The acid in my voice was enough to give him third-degree burns.

  His lips drew into a thin line that was not quite a grimace. “I’ve always been one.”

  I blinked and took a step back. The words fell out of my mouth, “You can’t be. Why would you say that?” Simon wasn’t popular like Raf, but he had a crew of friends and plenty of girls who liked his brand of gritty. It wasn’t possible for him to be a zero.

  He searched my face, for what I didn’t know. When he found it, the taut lines of his face softened. “Come with me.” He tilted his head toward the back door of the school. “I’ll show you what I mean.” He clasped his hands behind his back and waited for my answer.

  If I ran, I could see he wouldn’t grab me again. Somehow that made a difference. I had to be demens to go anywhere with Simon Zagan, but curiosity burned in me, and the choice dangled like an elixir sparkling in his dark, intense eyes.

  “Okay.”

  Simon held the door as I slipped out into the soul-crushing heat.

  We crossed the parking lot in silence and crunched across the dead, scraggly grass toward the bleachers. Simon kept casting glances at me, as if we were on a secret mission. His mischievous looks made him seem younger, not a nearly eighteen-year-old senior, just a boy about to break the rules and confident he could get away with it.

  My sandals and shorts left my skin exposed to the waves of scorching, metallic heat coming from the bleachers. Clusters of students either watched the soccer players practice in the blazing dampness or mindtalked amongst themselves. I quickly scanned the field for Raf, but couldn’t find him in the blur of jerseys skillfully dashing in and out of range of each other.

  Of course, no one on the bleachers noticed me. But Simon usually had the same vacuum effect as Raf, sucking in all the female attention in reading range. Yet today we were both invisible as we snuck up the bleachers. Did Simon’s zero status flip on and off? How did that work?

  When we reached the top, he motioned for me to sit to his right. Two students sat several rows below us, within thought range, but ignoring us. The girl was reading one of Mr. Chance’s ancient paper books, and the boy pretended to watch the soccer scrimmage, while stealing peeks at her.

  Simon scooted close, his lean, bare legs nearly touching mine. He rested his arm on the railing behind us and whispered, “Do you see that couple down there?” I nodded my assent, eyes glued to them, because Simon was entirely too close.

  “He likes her, but she’s not very interested. She’s thinking about someone else, although she’s trying not to. She knows it annoys him.”

  I leaned away, giving him a skeptical look. “So you are reading their minds.” I kept my accusation low so it wouldn’t carry over the whistles and muscular grunts coming from the field below.

  “No.” His mischievous smile had returned. “Now watch. I’m going to tell him to take her book.” The couple seemed too far to hear his whispered voice, but the boy immediately snatched the book and held it aloft out of her reach. She smacked him on his t-shirt-covered shoulder.

  I shrugged. “Big deal, so he read your mind. Just proves you’re not a zero.” I wondered why we were playing this stupid game.

  “He didn’t read my mind,” he said. “I jacked into his.” My body froze at the word jacked. When I told Raf to stop in his tracks and fall to the ground like a stricken puppet, it had felt like he was obeying my command.

  Simon leaned close and whispered in my ear. “Try it. You know you can.”

  There was no way I could do that again. I clenched the fire-hot bleacher with my hands to force myself to stay in my seat while crackles of alarm sang through my body.

  “It’s not that bad,” he said. “It’s even kind of fun…”

  Fun? Simon’s idea of fun made my pulse pound like I had sprinted up the bleachers. What if I hurt them? It was insane.

  As if reading my thoughts, he whispered, “It’s okay. You won’t hurt them, not if you go slowly. Reach toward them with your mind.” My head twitched back and forth. The girl below retrieved her book and gave the boy a dirty look. I couldn’t hear her thoughts, like every other day of my life as a zero.

  But I wanted to.

  I leaned forward, as if I could project my mind by pitching toward them.

  Simon encouraged me. “Go on. Tell the girl to give him the book.”

  My mind sizzled, like a short circuit pulsing through my brain, only less powerful than before, with Raf. No phantom stars swam before my eyes, but the space between me and the girl narrowed, as if a vacuum had formed and sucked the air out between us. As I got closer, the sizzle strengthened and then I was touching her, pushing through a barrier into her mind.

  I heard her thoughts. Think you’re so funny. You’re just making my life difficult, Jeremy. I thought: give him the book. Give him the book, she instantly echoed. Her hand shot out and shoved the book into his chest. He recoiled from her, and I heard his thoughts of surprise only as a faint echo in the thought waves she picked up from his brain. Because I wasn’t in his mind, I was in hers. Her thoughts continued to echo, repeating like a cavern lined with endless tunnels, each a different length. Give him the book, him the book, the book, book.

  A smell, rich and flowery, filled the back of my throat and caused me to choke. I drew in a sharp breath and yanked back to my own head. My whole body shook in one violent pulse.

  I mindjacked her. And no one got hurt.

  The couple was now arguing further about the book. Simon’s smile was a mile wide, but he waited for me to speak.

  “All this time… you’ve been doing this?” His grin was his only answer. “Does she know? That I—” />
  “Shhh!” he said. “She doesn’t know. I’ve been doing this for years, and no one’s known. Until you.”

  The idea that Simon had been mindjacking people for years made my stomach turn sideways. The bleachers started to tip, and the heat painted sweat all over my face. Simon caught me right before I fell over.

  His dark eyebrows pulled together into a straight line of concern. “Are you okay? I think maybe the heat is too much…”

  I nodded. I couldn’t form coherent words if I tried. Maybe I had electrocuted my brain. Maybe I jacked the girl and somehow zapped myself at the same time. A crooked smile broke out on my face, but I tried to stop it, afraid of looking like an idiot. Simon’s frown pulled tighter. He slid his arm under mine, pulled me to standing, and half carried me down the bleachers. My head floated above like a tethered balloon that Simon kept pulling down, jerk by jerk, to the bottom of the steps.

  We hobbled across the grass and the parking lot because my legs weren’t working right. They kept getting tangled with the ground. Simon moved faster and when he pulled open the door to the building, a wash of frigid air swept over us. The air-conditioned hall was like a freezer, and my full-body shiver snapped my head back onto my shoulders. I stumbled, then managed to stand upright, bracing my hands against Simon’s chest.

  “Are you okay?” He held me as though I were a child that might fall down.

  “Y-Yeah.” My jaw chattered with the cold. “Thanks.”

  He smiled, and it stole my breath. It wasn’t that annoying smirky thing, but a blaze of happiness. And he was gorgeous when he smiled, his long lashes fighting their way outward from his sparkling black eyes.

  I gulped and looked away, needing to sit down. He helped me find a spot, leaned up against the cold, metal lockers. My mind was a complete blank, like I was a computer coming back from a hard reboot.

  “I need some time,” I finally said, “to think about this.”

  He didn’t say anything, but there was a glint in his eyes.

  “How did you know?” I asked. “That I could jack into people’s heads?”

  A smile flitted across his face. “I didn’t,” he said. “But you’re the only person that I couldn’t jack, so I figured there was something special about you. Your mind barrier is like nothing I’ve felt before.”

  I shrunk away from him. Of course he had tried to jack into my mind. Like he did to that boy on the bleachers. Like he had done to everyone else. For years.

  A surge of adrenaline made my hand twitch. I scrambled up from the dingy industrial carpeting, and a shadow crossed Simon’s face as he climbed to his feet.

  “Aren’t you afraid,” I said slowly, contemplating how I could escape if I had to, “that I’ll tell someone?”

  Simon loomed over me, his dark look solidifying into an icy mask. “No one would believe you, Kira.”

  I swallowed. He was right; no one would believe a sim like that, especially from a zero. I hardly believed it myself, and I had just jacked into another girl’s head.

  “I won’t, you know,” I said. “Tell anyone.”

  My words seemed to erase Simon’s cold look as quickly as it had appeared. “I know.” He touched my hair, smoothing it back from my face. “We’re the same, Kira. Now that we’ve found each other, we’re in this together. Just you and me.” He gently swept his thumb across my forehead. We weren’t readers, so there was no surge of emotions between us when he touched my bare skin. But it still sent a shiver through my body.

  When he stepped back, I teetered, not sure if I should run or stay. “Take some time to think,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Without another word, he turned and strode down the hall.

  I stumbled through the walk home, my skin slick with sweat.

  I told myself it was only the heat, not the traumatic after-school events with Simon, but I was so distracted thinking about my newfound mindjacking ability that I nearly ran into the garage door. I slid in the passkey, and it opened to reveal our red hydro car. Mom was already home, and I searched my brain for a plausible reason to be late.

  As I hiked up the stairs from the ground level, the cool air of the house prickled my skin. Mom shuttled back and forth between the kitchen and the living room in a flurry of activity, and the acrid smell of glass-cleaning solution followed her. She had hauled out Grandma O’Donnell’s crystal plates, the ones Gram claimed were hand-cut by our distant relatives in County Kerry during the potato famine. She also said Big Foot crashed her eighteenth birthday party.

  Gram could make up stories like that, and no one could tell if they were true memories or sims because she was a zero, and zeros were liars. Even a truth magistrate couldn’t read her thoughts, in spite of their skin-to-skin questioning.

  I wished Gram were still rambling around the house. Given what she had been through—being a zero, having her dad in the camps—she might have understood what I was going through. But my mom… she was always trying to be like everyone else, even with her semi-heremita lifestyle.

  And I was about as far from fitting in as possible.

  Mom shuffled back from the living room and carefully set another sparkling crystal plate with the others on the kitchen table. “How was school?”

  “Um, okay,” I said, stalling. “The, uh, hearing aid worked great.” Her face broke into a picture of relief. She must have expected a heinous story related to the tiny ear bud that still sat in my ear. I popped it out. “See, I forgot to take it out. Hardly noticed it.” That earned me a smile. I edged toward the stairs. “I’ve got a ton of homework to catch up on. I should get started.”

  “Why don’t you work here in the kitchen?” she asked. “I made a snack for you.” Snickerdoodles beckoned from one of Gram’s crystal plates on the table. My mom always cooked up a storm whenever my dad was on deployment, as though she could fill the emptiness with baked goods. I longed to eat cookies and spill out the contents of my day so my mom could help me make sense of my life. But I couldn’t tell her that I had mind controlled a girl at school. That I had become a freak even worse than a zero. I wrenched my eyes away from the solace my mom had laid out for me.

  “I’m totally beat,” I said. “I’ll just study in my room.” I hitched my backpack on my shoulder and slunk toward the stairs. I cast a parting look at the cookies.

  It worked.

  “Well, go ahead and take one,” she said. “You can eat it upstairs.” I snagged two cookies and gave her a smile before I trudged up the stairs.

  I slung my backpack on the bed. A jitter started in my stomach, and my appetite for the cookies disappeared. After dropping them on the nightstand, I sought refuge from the day under my bedspread. Eventually, the shaking calmed to a quiver.

  I jacked into a girl’s head today and told her what to do. And she did it.

  My battered silver phone, tucked in the pocket of my backpack, beckoned to me. I could call Seamus, but then he would want to know: why are you asking about mind control, Kira? And I would have to lie, because I couldn’t tell him what happened on the bleachers. Or in the chem lab.

  Besides, he would insist that I tell Mom, and she might take me to another doctor, like the one that had wanted to image my brain when I was fourteen. Mom had insisted he use the standard thought-wave cap, but the Cerebrus 3D imager had loomed in the corner like a giant bullet, threatening to illustrate in bold, color images precisely what was wrong with me.

  I shivered under the covers, sending a wave of pink sheen down the length of it. If anyone found out I could control thoughts, they’d lock me away in a laboratory. Do experiments. Dissect my brain. I understood why Simon insisted that this had to be a secret. Simon, with his dark eyes and smirky grin. He had passed as a reader for years, and no one knew the truth.

  Because he mindjacked everyone to believe the lie.

  The image of Raf crumpling like a lifeless doll sprang up, and I pulled the blanket tighter under my chin. I was a dangerous, possibly lethal, weapon. Waves of horror at t
hat thought crashed into an upswelling of hope: maybe I wasn’t doomed to life as a zero. Maybe I could control this thing and pass for a reader like Simon. The feel of Simon’s thumb lingered on my forehead. He knew how it all worked.

  Tomorrow I would ask him to teach me.

  I left the house early, hoping to catch Simon before school.

  Last night’s condensation steamed up from the streets, leaving my shirt damp by the time I reached the school. Students walked in synchronized groups through the hall, breezing past me and unaware of the danger standing next to them.

  I watched them, drawn by the new connection between us. All I had to do was reach out and touch them with my mind…. I pressed closer to the lockers, putting more distance between myself and the bustling crowd. Just to be safe.

  There was only one person I wanted to talk to, but he wasn’t in hallways. I sat in the back of first period, as far away from the other students as I could. Between classes, I peered through the crowds, searching for Simon. I fumbled through the things in my locker and grabbed my paper book for English. My hand stopped mid-reach. Raf should be back in class today, and he had an uncanny ability to know what I was thinking, even if he couldn’t read my mind. Would he see the change that was invisible to everyone else?

  I realized that the bell had already rung and whirled to join the stragglers hurrying to class. I stopped dead when I saw Raf had saved me a seat. He smiled, but all I saw was the ugly purple bruise on his forehead, which had spread and turned a sickening yellow. The physical reminder of my freakish new power wrenched my stomach. I took the seat in front of him and busied my hands with my backpack.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’ll live.” I involuntarily shot him a glance and then quickly faced forward so Raf wouldn’t see the guilt in my eyes. Mr. Chance had remembered to wear his mini-mic, but it played like a bad phone connection as he only mumbled about half his thoughts.

  Raf tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  I was the furthest thing from okay, but I couldn’t have Raf asking questions and piecing it together. That I almost killed him. I gave him a short nod and pretended to be fascinated by Mr. Chance’s crackling monologue. Raf didn’t speak again until it was time to break into groups. Of course, no one wanted to be in a discussion group with the zero. Except Raf.