'You couldn't afford them.'
'Try me.' She was pale in the sunlight, almost ethereal in her thinness. Her eyes were black storms in the calm of her face.
'Okay.' Freeman looked across the water. Could he read the minds of fish?
'Of course you can't, silly. There's nothing there to read.'
Freeman drew back as if she had drenched him with a bucket of the frigid lakewater.
'I mean, do you think they dream of worms or something? It's just 'swim, swim, swim.'' Vicky crossed her arms.
'You're not in here. Because I'm thinking that I want to see what you're thinking, but I can't.'
'Because you think you're so freaking special. That you're the only one with problems, or with gifts.'
'I wasn't thinking that.'
'I wouldn't even have to read your mind to know that. It's written right across your face. 'Don't mess with big bad Freeman Mills, or there'll be hell to pay.' And this macho Clint Eastwood fixation is really pathetic.'
'Why don't you dry up and blow away?' Freeman focused on the water until his tears made the surface appear to shimmer.
'Why don't you quit lying to yourself for a change?' Vicky turned and walked away, had reached the large rocks and was about to slip down the path between them when at last Freeman broke through her mental shield. At least a little.
'Keep moving, lard-ass,' he shouted after her.
She froze, turned, and lowered her head.
'Your father called you 'lard-ass,' didn't he? When you were a little girl.'
She knelt. Her shoulders trembled. Freeman wiped his own tears away, feeling guilty at the jab, yet pleased he'd been able to penetrate her shield. He thought if this were a movie, he would go to her now, hug her, show her he was strong and kind and understanding, like George Clooney in practically anything. Instead, he picked up the penny and held it to the sun.
'I'd almost forgotten that,' Vicky said. 'I think my first shrink got me to remember it, but the best things get buried deep. I guess you win.'
One of the staff members passed by, Allen, the mousy guy, and waved at them from under the shade of the willow tree, letting them know they were safely under watch. No funny stuff. If Allen only knew.
'When did you quit eating?' Freeman asked. 'Was it a gradual thing, or did you just wake up one morning and discover that oatmeal tasted like the sole of a tennis shoe?'
'I haven't quit eating. I still eat way too much.'
'Yeah. You're, what, seventy pounds soaking wet?'
'Sixty-eight pounds and probably eleven-sixteenths of an ounce, if the two tablespoons of lunch have digested properly.'
'A girl as tall as you ought to weigh at least ninety, maybe a hundred.'
'If you believe the charts. But who cares about the charts? All I know is what I see in the mirror. A big fat buttery tub of lard.'
'You're nothing but a sheet of skin stretched around a stack of bones.'
'Bet you say that to all the girls.'
'No, really. You're way too skinny.'
'I'm a total lard-ass.'
'Don't believe everything Daddy says. Daddies have been known to be wrong. Or psycho, in some cases.'
Freeman stood, found a flat stone, and skimmed it across the water. It bounced six times before sinking. He walked over to Vicky and knelt beside her. He tried to concentrate, but he could smell her hair again.
'I'm sorry I was mean to you,' he said. 'I just get a little jumpy when it kicks in like this and I can read too many people at the same time-'
'Wendover causes it. Kracowski's little treatments. I used to read books with titles like Mysteries of the Mind, Secrets of the Unknown, parapsychology and ghosts, that kind of thing. I even practiced ESP every night, scrunching my face until I thought my eyeballs would pop. But I never got any good at it. Then I come here and, boom, I'm practically Miss Cleo overnight.'
'Did Paula and Randy take you to the little room with the table and chairs?'
'And the deck of cards? Yeah.'
'And Paula held up one at a time, showing the back of the card, and you had to guess what symbol was on it?'
'Yeah. A circle, a square, a plus sign, a five-pointed star, and a set of three wavy lines. Pretty corny. I mean, the Rhine Research Center was using that eighty years ago. Most parapsychologists use machines these days.'
'Machines make it harder to cheat.' Freeman flipped the penny and caught it, peeked, and held it flat inside his fist.
'Tails,' Vicky said.
Freeman opened his palm. Tails.
'How many cards did you get right?' she asked.
'Twenty-two out of twenty-five.'
'I got three.'
'Three? You can do better than that by guessing.'
'You think I want those nuts to know I can read minds? Are you crazy or something?'
' 'Crazy' doesn't exist in the twenty-first century,' Freeman said. 'Only science and blame. This place is just a cover for whatever Kracowski is up to. Have you seen the Wendover fundraising brochures yet? 'Give from the Heart to Society's Child.' We're the products of everybody's collective guilt.'
'Then what are you acting so guilty about?'
Jesus Henry Christ, Freeman thought. Don't let her get into that secret little spot in my head. The one where I've hidden you-know-what. The big troll.
'I'm not guilty,' Freeman said quickly, before his thoughts ran away to those shadowy cracks. 'And I've done much better on the card reading. I used to get twenty-five out of twenty-five, back when I was six.'
'Six? You could read minds when you were that young? Before Kracowski?'
'My Dad was into it.'
'Whoa. When you said 'Dad' I felt some bad vibes. What's up with that?'
'Nothing. You think too much for a girl.'
'You haven't known many girls, have you?'
'Well, sort of.'
'Don't bother lying to somebody who can see inside your skull, Freeman.'
'Okay, okay. I've never kissed one, if that's what you want to know.'
Vicky sighed with dramatic flair and shook her head. 'I meant being empathetic with a girl. Caring about one. Having a friend.'
'Don't need any damned friends.' Beyond the lake, beneath the stone face of Wendover, the other children played. Freeman tried to learn the score of the soccer match in progress, but whatever juice had allowed him to jump his mind across the grass was now drained. Maybe he'd used it all up trying to sneak past Vicky's defenses.
'Sorry I called you a lard-ass,' he said.
'That's okay. I'm sorry I jumped into your head with-out permission. Or, what do you call it, 'triptrap'?'
'My Dad's name for it. Did you have a treatment recently?'
'Yesterday. Those mirrors creep me out. And the humming, like a hive of metal bees in the walls.'
'That's what causes it. The mind reading, I mean.'
'Yeah,' Vicky said. 'I could read real good yesterday. Like in the lunchroom. I believe that if I had concentrated, I could have read every mind in the room. Or maybe not by concentrating, but its opposite. Shutting down, meditating, going blank.'
'Letting the thoughts in.' Freeman flipped the penny again, glanced at it. Heads. 'Sometimes when you
