Free Lost in Thought by Cara Bertrand Page B

hadn’t been for the visions, I never would have ended up here. I felt sure that, somehow, my father had known this would happen.
    After a minute of no answer I demanded, “Well?!”
    Carter coughed but only looked at his aunt. My champion came from an unexpected source.
    “Just tell her, Melly,” Jeff Revell said softly before he turned and slipped out into the hall.
    Melinda sighed and started, hesitantly, “It’s…complicated, Lainey.”
     
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    “I’m not surprised it is,” I replied. “If it weren’t complicated, all of my many doctors would’ve figured it out by now. What I don’t understand is why you all seem to know exactly what’s wrong when years of testing couldn’t tell me.”
    “It’s because they really couldn’t, Lainey,” came from Carter. He was still hovering a few feet from the bed. “What’s wrong with you…well, it’s not wrong , it just is, but not even the best doctors would be able to explain it, unless you find the very right one. We know you didn’t see any who could because they’d have told us.”
    Okay. This conversation was getting stranger by the second. I thought I might throw up, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of my rapidly developing migraine or the battle between freaked out and angry raging in my stomach. “Okay, what the hell is going on?” I looked back and forth between Carter and Melinda. “One of you better explain, fast, before I get up and run out of here, headache or not.
    You’re scaring me.”
    Carter slipped from behind his aunt and knelt down on the floor next to me. He put his hand out toward me, but I flinched away and he let it drop to his knees. “You don’t need to be scared, Lainey, not of us, not ever. I’m sorry.”
    “I don’t want to be,” I said, and realized, as my voice cracked, that tears had started to slip down my cheeks. “But you’re not making that very easy right now. Please. What’s going on here?”
    “Lainey,” Melinda started gently. She leaned over to place her hand on my arm and I let her. “You are different. Special. Along with many of the Academy students, and Carter, and me. You’re not ordinary, but extra ordinary. The simplest way to put it is that you, like us, have ESP.”
    I stared at her stupidly for a minute. Had I really just heard that? I found my voice again, and found that my tears had been mopped dry
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    by skepticism. “ESP. Extrasensory Perception. Come on!” I said.
    “That’s not even funny.”
    Except they weren’t laughing.
    “ESP,” I tried again. “So you’re trying to tell me that what, I can predict the future? And you can too?” And then as my brain caught up to my words, I gasped and clapped my hands over my mouth.
    “Brooke,” I whispered between my fingers. “I…I swore she was really telling fortunes. I heard you mention her in the hallway. Jesus. You’re not kidding.”
    “No, honey, we’re not,” Melinda said. Carter still knelt beside me, in what had to be an uncomfortable position, but he showed no evidence of it. He was watching me so intently I could almost feel him willing me to believe them.
    “Oh God! I knew it!” I shouted. “I really am crazy!” And then I started to cry in earnest.
     
    I CRIED FOR a long time. Melinda hugged me, making soothing noises but not really saying anything. When the sobs finally slowed, and I felt like I could breathe enough to speak again, I said, barely audibly, “Please tell me this isn’t real.”
    At least Melinda was tender in her denial. “I can’t do that, honey. It is real. Very real. But you’re not crazy, and you don’t have to be scared of it, I promise.”
    Carter spoke for the first time since my breakdown. “It’s not like you see on TV or read in books, and especially not like the trash they print in those tabloids,” he said earnestly. “‘ESP’ isn’t even what we call it, not at all, but it’s the easiest way to explain it to