John was scared of his dad. He kept seeing his dad’s hard eyes and drawn-back fist. Emily, seeing what he saw, felt a pang.
“If your dad’s hurting you, you should tell Mrs. Robinson,” she blurted.
John went pale. Fear flickered in his eyes. Then his skin grew red and mottled, and Emily’s stomach dropped.
“Leave me alone, weirdo,” he said.
From then on, she stayed as far away from John as she could.
All of those incidents, considered together, made her think her theory was right, though. She didn’t understand why—or why no one had bothered to teach her—but the rule seemed to be that she should speak only when spoken to. In other words, she shouldn’t speak when thoughtened to. Thoughten probably wasn’t a real word, but whatever.
Still, there had to be more to it than that. Emily’s mom, for example, didn’t like it when Emily knew things the way Grandma Elnora knew things, even if whatever it was didn’t come up in conversation.
Maybe it was impolite for a person to let on in any way, shape, or form that she or he knew what another person was thinking? Although again, if that were the case, why hadn’t her mom simply told her so, the way she told Emily to chew with her mouth closed and keep her dinner napkin in her lap?
An alarming idea occurred to Emily. What if certain people, like her mom and Mrs. Robinson and John Blasingame, didn’t have to “pretend” not to know what other people were thinking? What if certain people honestly couldn’t hear other people’s thoughts?
Was it possible?
Some people were good at basketball. Other people—like Emily—couldn’t make a basket to save their lives. From what Emily was stitching together, maybe the same was true when it came to reading people’s thoughts. Maybe Emily and Grandma Elnora had a talent for it, just by luck of the draw. Grandma Elnora also had the talent of seeing the future, like with the brownies and Emily’s ripped dress. Emily didn’t have that talent.
More bits and bobs came together. The dread in Emily’s stomach grew.
Because parents liked it when their kids won basketball games or got first prize in a spelling bee. Parents admired those sorts of talents. So did other grown-ups. So did kids.
Nobody admired Emily’s talent.
As a matter of fact, other than Grandma Elnora, no one understood Emily’s talent, or even seemed to think it was a talent. “Unnatural” was the word Mrs. Robinson had used. “Leave me alone, weirdo!” John Blasingame had spat.
“Dave, it is our responsibility to teach Emily to be normal,” she overheard her mom say to her dad one evening. “We have to encourage her to blend in. What about that don’t you understand?”
“Encourage her or force her?” her dad responded. “Emily is Emily. It is not our responsibility, or even our prerogative, to turn her into someone else.”
Emily didn’t know what “prerogative” meant, but a quick probe into her dad’s thoughts cleared it up. He was saying that he and her mom didn’t have the right to change her into someone she wasn’t. More than that, he was saying that he loved Emily just the way she was.
Her eyes stung. She loved him, too. So much.
“Don’t play dumb,” her mom told her dad. “Maybe Emily doesn’t realize how different she is, but other people certainly do—and one day she’s bound to find out. The world is cruel, Dave. Do you want our daughter to be a social pariah?”
Pariah, another new word. From her mother, Emily gleaned that it meant an outcast, a person everybody hated.
Hated?
Her lungs constricted, but she stayed very still in the hallway, taking shallow breaths and digging her fingernails into her palms. If her parents knew she was listening, they’d stop talking about her. They might stop thinking about her, too. Or try to.
“I want our daughter to be proud of who she is,” her father replied. “Emily won’t be a pariah unless you make her see herself as one.”
“So this is my fault?” her mother said. “It’s wrong to want other people to look at us and see a normal, happy family?”
“Rose,” her dad said heavily. “Is there such a thing as a ‘normal, happy family’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Our family is perfect just as we are,” her dad said. “Or we would be, if you’d lay off trying to change everybody.”
Emily slunk off, her face burning. Her mom wasn’t trying to change everybody. Just her.
She waited for her parents to go to bed, then slipped out of her room and went to her brother. Nate was ten and in the fifth grade. He was the best big brother ever. And, like her dad, Nate never treated her like she was weird.
“Hey, Nate, will you play a game with me?” she asked.
He propped himself up on his elbow and put aside his book. “It’s late,” he said. “We’re supposed to be asleep.”
“It won’t take long. Anyway, you weren’t sleeping. You were reading.”
He gave her a sideways smile. “Fine. What’s the game?”
She perched on the end of his twin-size bed. He scooted back and sat all the way up.
“I’m going to think about something really hard, and I want you to guess what it is,” she instructed. “Okay?”
She scrunched her forehead and thought about doughnuts. Doughnuts, doughnuts, doughnuts, because Nate loved doughnuts. She painted the most vivid mental picture she could of his favorite kind: a cake doughnut with maple frosting.
“Well?” she asked. “What was I thinking?”
“That . . . you need to use the bathroom?”
“No!” She wanted to throw something at him, but found nothing to throw. “I was thinking about doughnuts. Maple doughnuts.” She pushed her hand through her hair. “You think about something, and I’ll see if I can tell.”
Emily had developed a habit of tuning Nate’s thoughts out. She could do that if she tried. She followed the same practice with her mom and dad, although she made exceptions, obviously. It was pretty easy with Nate and her dad. Her mom’s thoughts, however, were often
