Free Skandal by Lindsay Smith Page A

so effortlessly.
    “Please, have a seat.” Anna ushers us to a settee pushed against the wall across from her desk. “Senator Saxton is still at lunch, but I expect him back shortly.” She settles behind her desk and lets those nails fly across the typewriter keys.
    I drum my fingers against the arm of the sofa, determined not to let it overwhelm me like the hallway did. Like I’m relearning to walk, I sink into its memories one fragment at a time. Fortunately, there are no darting shadows or dark, poisonous memories awaiting me. In fact, I don’t see suspicious men lurking around the senator, or anyone breaking into his file cabinets—nothing of the sort. Only the rote daily office work I’d expect, of Anna and the senator and his many guests shuffling in and out of the office, digging through file cabinets, typing away at the desk. I glance toward Cindy, wondering if I dare ask her about our mission in front of the secretary, but she’s busy melting a hole into the opposite wall with her gaze while she fiddles with something inside her purse.
    “Oh! Jules,” Donna exclaims to my right. “Let me see your nails.” Before I can give her a weird look, she clasps my hand in her own. Check out the secretary , she says, thoughts pressing against my shield while she pretends to study my ragged, unpainted nails. Doesn’t something seem off?
    Aside from her boobs sculpted like torpedoes by those awful “shaping brassieres” under her too-tight sweater, or her grin that tilts too readily into a smirk? The way she’s effectively locked us out of any and all chance for conversation with her maniacal typewriter hammering?
    I’m reading her thoughts , Donna says. Do you know how to listen in?
    I nod, though it’s been some time since I’ve done this, too. We peel back our shields just enough that I can peer into a portion of Donna’s thoughts, linking into her psychic observations as she focuses on the secretary. I don’t like the feeling—my hand in a near-stranger’s, our thoughts snarled up together—but I need to reacquaint myself with this sensation, too.
    The secretary’s thoughts spill across the surface of her brain like an oil slick. She’s worried about meeting her girlfriends after work and about impressing Dave, a junior staffer two offices down. Clack-click-clack; her words fall into a practiced tempo with the typewriter keys. She has five dollars budgeted for food and drinks until next paycheck. That leads her to thinking about the money she plans to send to her grandmother in San Juan and her mother in the Bronx. Each thought fits into the next with flawless precision: a tongue and groove custom-made.
    But it’s not how people think. It’s ordered, precise, rehearsed. It’s an effect like converting jumbled dictation into seamless sentences on the page.
    Even in translation, it sounds completely and utterly false.
    I glance up at Donna; she’s already watching me expectantly, a single eyebrow arched. I close my mouth and manage a faint nod. My hands scrape back and forth on the couch, scrounging for more clues about Anna like they’re loose change, but there’s nothing except dim memories of her typing at the desk, or lighting cigarettes for lobbyists while they wait for the senator.
    Donna bumps her knee against mine. Time to show you what I can do .
    The moment Anna stops flogging the typewriter to flip over her page of handwritten notes, Donna leaps up and approaches the desk. “That’s such a lovely manicure. Where do you go?”
    I stand up, too, and hover behind them, feeling every bit the awkward wallflower I’m portraying as I hover on the edge of their conversation. I run my fingers up the corner of Anna’s desk, sinking past the soft wood and into its memories. If Anna’s using these flat, eerie thoughts as a shield, then someone must have trained her how to shield her true thoughts from people like us. Trained her to hide—something.
    Streams of men, tall and fat and lanky and