Free 2 Empath by Edie Claire

little test with flying colors, didn’t she?” Kylee said lightly. “That’s what all this was about, wasn’t it? A test?”
    Tara nodded stiffly. She turned to me. “I’m sorry, Kali. Please don’t be mad at me. I was just so sure… and I thought maybe it would make you feel better if we could find a scientific explanation.”
    “You mean it would make you feel better,” Kylee accused. “Kali is cool with the supernatural. It’s always been a part of her life. How could she not be?”
    Cool with the supernatural, I thought to myself. Was I? Just a month ago, I would have said No with a capital N. But now?
    As much as I shrank from the idea of having some assigned cosmic role that I didn’t want to play, it was equally disheartening to think that everything I had gone through — and still went through — had no purpose at all. Could this sensitivity of mine have some practical use? Clearly, I could not change history. But could my ability to see the shadows affect the present? What if the people in that village in Vietnam had believed the man like me?
    Before Zane faded away from me in Oahu he had begged me to look at my abilities as a gift, to be honest with my family and friends. He wouldn’t even remember saying those things now, but he had been right. Despite the rough reactions from both Tara and my dad, I did feel better now. Less like a freak. Less alone.
    More cool with the supernatural?
    Maybe.
    “It’s okay,” I said, getting up. The shadows might repeat any time now, and despite the new and intriguing thoughts swirling inside my head, I really wasn’t up to that. “Look, guys, this has been fun and all. But could we just, like, go get some ice cream or something?”
    Kylee leapt up with a grin. “We’ll do better than that. We’ll get a quart of vanilla and a bunch of toppings and make suicide shakes in my blender.” She reached down and grabbed Tara’s arm. “Come on, you hopeless skeptic,” she said good-naturedly. “You’ve had a shock, but you’ll survive.”
    Tara rose without complaint and followed us to the car, walking like a zombie.
    “I think I’ll drive this time,” Kylee announced, taking the keys and getting in the driver’s door. Tara shuffled to the back, got in, buckled, and sat staring blankly forward. I slid into the passenger seat next to Kylee.
    “Tara?” I said worriedly. The girl still had no blood in her face. “You going to be all right?”
    “Peachy,” she mumbled.
    “Don’t worry,” Kylee told me. “We’ll throw an energy drink in her shake.” She started the car and pulled back out onto the road. “It is kind of a sad story,” she said sympathetically. “I mean, a teenaged girl takes her first teaching job, and her reward is to get whacked by some crazy paranoid farmer’s wife?”
    “The wife was crazy,” I agreed. “But she wasn’t paranoid.”
    Kylee’s eyes widened. “You mean, the teacher was messing around with the other woman’s husband?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “But how do you know that?”
    I remembered again the girl’s feeling of terror, and how absurdly mixed it was with anticipation and a certain macabre excitement. She felt guilty, but not that guilty. She felt… smug. As if she knew she’d done wrong, but expected to get away with it. Even deserved to get away with it.
    Miss Sarah Plimpton had been a serious piece of work.
    “I can’t really explain how I know,” I answered, marveling at my own certainty. “Some things, you just have to feel.”

Chapter 6
    My mother watched me with an amused smile twitching at the corner of her lips. “You could always just call him, you know.”
    I slipped my phone self-consciously back into my pocket. Yes, I checked it occasionally, just in case I had gotten a text but didn’t hear the ringtone. Maybe I checked it often. And just maybe I had gotten into the habit of staring at it mournfully every other second of every waking moment of the day. What of it?
    “Mom,” I