Free The Gifting by Katie Ganshert Page B

about the pet snake one of her brothers had in junior high. Apparently, it got loose in the house once and her mom hyperventilated.
    I have a hard time listening. Because that was no aura. I have no migraine. I either saw a huge, hissing snake that Leela somehow didn’t see, or I just had a hallucination.
    *
    The next day at school, Leela acts like nothing weird happened. Apparently, freaking out because a stick looks like a snake isn’t all that unreasonable to her. She seems to have forgotten about the episode altogether. But I cannot. The scene is stuck on repeat in my mind. Over and over again through all eight periods, until the bell finally rings and I am released to go to my sixth appointment with Dr. Roth at the Edward Brooks Facility.
    I sit in the red, cushy seat and jiggle my leg.
    “Everything okay?” he asks.
    My leg continues its frantic jiggling as I replay—for the millionth time—what happened in the woods. Dr. Roth waits patiently. Finally, I stop my fidgeting and sit up straighter in the chair. “What would you say if you had a client who swore she saw a snake, but it turned out to be a stick?”
    “That seems like an easy enough mistake to make. Sticks look a lot like snakes sometimes.”
    “What if that client told you she saw the stick slithering and hissing with fangs and red eyes and was about to strike her and one of her friends?”
    He steeples his fingers beneath his chin. “You’re positive it wasn’t a snake?”
    I nod.
    Pushing his glasses up his nose, he leans forward. With each passing appointment, his interest in me has slowly waned. Now, however, I see a tenuous pulse of intrigue flicker to life in his eyes—like the twitch of a dying man’s finger. This latest bit of news has resuscitated his interest.
    “Does having hallucinations make me crazy?” I ask.
    He raises one of his eyebrows. “Are you sure you didn’t fall asleep?”
    I don’t miss the tone of sarcasm in his voice. He’s referencing the séance, of course. Something we haven’t discussed since our first meeting. Dr. Roth clearly doesn’t believe my nightmare theory any more than I do. “For people who suffer with psychosis …”
    “Psychosis?”
    “It’s just what came to mind.” I grip the armrests on either side and pin my gaze on his framed degrees. I really don’t want to watch the flicker of interest in his eyes turn into a flame, but I have to know more. I have to know what is happening to me. “Do they usually … are people with psychosis … are they aware of having it? Do they know what’s happening to them?”
    He doesn’t answer. He simply sits there studying me until I’m boiling in my own frustration and my leg has resumed its jiggling.
    “I’d like to try something with you, Tess,” he finally says.
    “What?”
    “Hypnosis.”
    I scratch my patch of eczema. “Hypnosis?”
    He gives a single, confident nod. “I think it will help.”
    But Dr. Roth is wrong. Hypnosis doesn’t help at all.

Chapter Eleven
    Genocide
    T hat night, my nightmares return.
    I’m standing in the middle of a crowd of people with angry faces, holding signs I cannot read. Babies cry somewhere off in the distance and standing before the angry mass is a man and a woman. The man wears a white coat and the woman, maroon scrubs. He has fine black hair and slanted eyes and she is petite and fair.
    I don’t know why I’m here—in this crowd.
    But then I see something. The skeletal man with greasy hair and white eyes. He stands in the crowd, his spindly fingers spread wide, a dark web escaping from his fingertips, only instead of hovering over Pete, the web sticks to an expressionless man wearing a trench coat. He’s like a marionette on a string. The web controls his arms and his legs, moving him away from the crowd, closer to the Asian doctor and the petite nurse.
    When the man pulls a grenade from his coat pocket, my throat closes with fear.
    I want to yell at him to stop—to shake off the black web