“You’re fine. I put you on speakerphone with my two best friends, Robin and Valerie.”
“Just Val,” said one voice. “I’m psychometric.”
Katherine nearly tripped over her own feet. “You mean there’s more than one of you?”
“Three to be exact. We all have different abilities,” Monica said. “Precognition for me, obviously, which we’ve talked about.”
“And I’m Robin,” a third voice said. “I hope you’re doing okay. Get your food, okay? Make sure you eat something.”
“I’m getting some.” Katherine hurriedly put together a plate of cheese, crackers, and pears. “I tend to forget to eat.”
“My mother is the same way. My father constantly has to remind her.”
“I have to remind my husband. He’s even more absentminded than me.”
“I cannot imagine a house where people forget to eat,” Val said. “I think my boys eat six times a day. Maybe more.”
“They sound like teenagers.” Katherine took her plate to the deck and sat down.
“They are, and they’re hungry. Constantly. How about you? Any kids?”
“Just my students,” she said. “There are more than a few of those. And I have two gorgeous nephews in London and a niece and a nephew in San Francisco.”
“It sounds like you have a wonderful family,” Monica said. “Have you told your husband about any of this yet?”
“Oh no.” Baxter would immediately take her to a neurologist. “Absolutely not.”
“Does anyone know?”
“Um… you three know.” And it was possible that Megan and Toni suspected something, but that was a whole other problem she didn’t know how to deal with. “I think that’s all I can handle right now.”
“Why don’t you tell us about it?” Monica said. “Start from the beginning and describe what happened to you exactly.”
Katherine spent the next few minutes giving Monica, Val, and Robin an accounting of the incident the day before. She tried to include everything she could think of, including what Megan had said at the police station and her suspicions about Toni’s empathy.
“That’s a lot,” Robin said after she’d finished the story. “No wonder you’re feeling frazzled.”
“Frazzled?” She wouldn’t have used that word, but it was a pretty good description. “Yes. I’m frazzled. I don’t know what to do with any of this.”
“Now, other than human understanding, I don’t know how much we’ll be able to help you. I’m a medium—”
“A medium?” Katherine blinked. “As in… ghosts? Spirits?”
“Ghosts, I guess you’d say. I haven’t met any spirits that haven’t belonged to a dead person. Not that I’m aware of anyway.”
Katherine was extremely glad she didn’t see ghosts. “And Val said she’s psychometric.” She glanced at her neighbors’ deck, glad that they were rarely home. “So she reads memories and emotions from objects?”
“You got it,” Val said. “Have you studied this or something?”
“Not formally. It’s a bit of a side interest. I haven’t really looked into it in years. I’ve been really busy with other things.”
“So between you, the gun-moving gal, and the lady who calmed the guy down, I think you and I have the most similar talent,” Monica said. “And my visions sound very different than yours.”
“Yours was interesting.” Val was speaking. “It was so immediate. It seems like it would be really easy to doubt yourself.”
“I had the same thought,” Katherine said. “It would have been so easy to imagine that I was suffering from anxiety or had an overactive imagination.”
“Why didn’t you think that?” Robin asked.
She tried to recall the moments in the gym before everything had broken loose. “I just… knew. I could hear the screams. I smelled the gunpowder, and it was almost as if I could feel glass shards cutting me. In the moment, I knew absolutely that it would happen if I did nothing.”
“So you tackled him,” Val said. “Fucking badass, Katherine.”
“Cover your ears, Monica.” Robin continued, “I have to agree. Fucking badass.”
Katherine stuffed some cheese in her mouth and swallowed. “Okay, but what do I do? This is not normal. Is it going to happen again? Is it a onetime thing?”
“There’s no way of knowing,” Val said. “You just have to wait and see. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll only happen once.”
“I’m not sure there’s much you can do,” Monica said. “All our abilities were triggered by the same incident. It’s been three years and they haven’t gone away yet.”
“What incident?”
“Robin’s car went into the lake,” Val said. “We almost drowned.”
“RIP faithful Subaru,” Robin said. “I still miss you.”
“So you had a near-death experience,” she said. “And three years later… still psychic?”
“Yep,” Monica said. “I thought I’d just get hot flashes in my forties, not visions.”
Did an averted mass shooting count as a near-death experience?
Probably. Probably it did.
This wasn’t good.
“I wish I could tell you that the visions probably won’t happen again,” Monica said, “but I found them to come more regularly the longer I had the ability.”
“Like… every day?”
“Oh, nothing close to that. I’m not like Val.”
“I wear gloves,” Val said. “All the time. And I take antianxiety medications. They dull my senses just enough that I don’t usually have an immediate reaction to everything.”
“I have social anxiety and I’m medicated,” Katherine said. “Do you think that might stop more visions?”
“Were you taking your medication when you had the vision?”
Damn it. Of course she was. She never missed a dose. “Yes.”
All three women seemed to hem and haw. Several comforting mutters were audible.
“I think you’ll just have to wait and see,” Monica said.
“What should I do about Megan and Toni?” Katherine asked. “Should I try to get in touch with them? Ask them if they’ve ever experienced this kind of thing before?”
“If it was the first time they genuinely ever feared for their life, it may be new for them too,” Robin said. “I’d at least try to contact them and see if they’d be willing to talk to you. Then you wouldn’t be alone.”
“Do your families know?” Katherine tried to imagine telling Baxter. He would
