D. Graham - Put It Out There

“He looks like my brother, don’t you think?”

“Really?” I sat forward. “Show me again. Which one is he?”

She held the magazine up and pointed to a ruggedly handsome outdoorsy-type guy who had dark hair and light eyes. He was on a farm, shirtless, with a cut chest and abs, leaning up against a wood fence. He did look like Trevor. I sat back in my seat and Kailyn grinned wide enough that her chubby, freckled cheeks made her eyes squint shut. “Deri thinks Austin Sullivan is really cute, and he looks just like you. That means she thinks you’re really cute. Did you know that?”

Trevor didn’t turn his head, but I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. They darted for a second to look at me.

Kailyn turned in her seat to face me. “You and Trevor should get married one day,” she whispered loudly.

Right. As if that would ever happen. Trevor could have any girl he wanted, and the introverted tomboy next door wasn’t even on the list. He smiled—maybe because the idea of getting married to someone he thought of as a kid sister was ridiculous, or maybe because he couldn’t wait to tease me for saying a guy who looks like him is cute. Either way, the entire topic of conversation made me uncomfortable. Fortunately, one of Austin Sullivan’s songs came on the radio. Kailyn turned the radio up, and we drove along the winding highway without talking.

The road followed the coastline with the ocean on our left and the mountain rock faces to our right. It was one of the most pristine places on earth to live. I definitely didn’t want to have to leave it behind again. When we arrived at the community centre for adults with disabilities, Trevor turned the radio volume down and whistled through his teeth to break Kailyn’s attention from her magazine. “We’re here.”

She climbed out of the truck without saying thanks or goodbye and slammed the door. Her wide strides made her stocky body sway from side to side. After she disappeared inside the building, Trevor looked over his shoulder at me. I thought he was going to embarrass me for the Austin Sullivan comparison. Instead, he asked, “Aren’t you going to get in the front?”

“Oh yeah, right.” I jumped out of the truck and hopped into the front passenger seat.

As he pulled out of the community centre’s parking lot and headed back onto the highway, a bizarre image flicked through my mind: a girl’s head smashed against the ground, and her blonde hair turned red from the blood pooled on the floor .

Trevor glanced at me, concerned, as he waited for me to tell him what I saw. I didn’t want to. My meaningless intuition visions, inherited from grandmother’s grandmother, started when I was about three. Back then, I’d see things like a dish fall off the counter before it actually did, or I’d point to where the whales were going to breach long before they showed up. When I was little, I thought everyone could see things before they happened. I was shocked when Trevor told me he couldn’t. He used to play games with me to test if I could guess what card he was holding or what picture he drew, but I always failed. The intuition never worked on demand like that. It wasn’t something I could will. Instead, I would randomly show up at his house wearing my full snowsuit and toque and mitts, ready for the storm that wasn’t forecasted. He’d look up at the blue sky and bright sunshine, sceptical, but he trusted me enough to go back inside to put his snowsuit on too.

Being able to see things in advance started to bother me when I was about nine because the scattered visions and subtle senses began to only happen for upsetting things. I once had a dream the neighbour’s dog was going to get hit by a car, so I sat outside their yard all day to make sure he didn’t get out. I was really proud of myself for saving him until it happened a week later. It was frustrating to not know when it would happen, and I felt so guilty. When I was twelve, I had a vision that my grandmother got sick and died in the hospital. Three weeks after the vision, she was diagnosed with cancer. She died a year later.

After I saw my dad’s car accident happen, I attempted to block all my intuitions. I promised myself the new Derian would no longer have visions. Unfortunately, despite determined effort on my part, I couldn’t stop them.

“What did you see?” Trevor asked.

I should have known he wouldn’t let me off the hook. “Nothing. It was a headache.”

He frowned and focused on the road. “I’ve known you most of your life. I know what it means when you get that look on your face. You don’t have to pretend you don’t get premonitions. It’s me.”

“They aren’t premonitions. They’re useless images, like crazy dreams. It was nothing. Nothing that makes any sense.”

“They aren’t useless. Search and Rescue teams are helped by intuitive and clairvoyant people all the time. While I was in Peru, I met a woman who finds missing children. I told her about you. She recommended I read her book. She says people with natural intuition can practice and get better at it, just like any other skill. I brought it home for you to read.”

I opened my bag and dug through it, hoping there was something I could use as a distraction to avoid the conversation. There wasn’t anything. “Why would I want to get good at seeing traumatic things I can’t do anything about?”

“The better you get at it, the more likely it will be useful. Maybe you’ll save someone’s life someday.”

I slouched in the seat and crossed my arms over my chest, fixing my attention on the rock face next to the highway. “A lot of good it did my dad. I saw it happen in exact, excruciating detail and couldn’t prevent it. He still died.”

Trevor glanced at me with empathy in his eyes. “Your dad’s accident wasn’t your fault, Deri.”

I shrugged and fought to swallow down the emotion in my throat. “Either way, I want to practice not having intuition at all, not practice to get better at it.”

We drove in silence. He probably wanted to convince me my brain glitch was a huge asset, but fortunately he let it go. “How are you feeling about being back at school in Squamish?”

Thankful to talk about anything other than my flawed neurology, I said, “Excited and nervous, I guess. It will be awkward at first when they all try to be sensitive about my dad. Hopefully that won’t last long and everything goes back to normal.” As soon as I said it, I regretted using the word “normal”. My life was never going back to the way it was. It was never going to feel normal again. I exhaled, trying to steel myself for the day ahead.

“It’s going to be okay.”

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I joked, “Yeah. Anything is better than living with my mom.”

A deep crease etched between his eyebrows. “She’s not that bad,” he said quietly.

Before my dad died, my mom lived in our apartment in downtown Vancouver and only came up to Britannia on the weekends, which was great growing up. Living full-time with my dad at the Inn had worked perfectly since he and I were essentially the same person—nature-lovers, bookish, and artistic. The opposite of my mom. Since Trevor’s mom left them, he always thought I should appreciate the fact that I, at least, had a mom, even if she and I had nothing in common. My whole childhood, he had encouraged me to try harder to get along with her.

I knew I needed to get over my issues with my mom, especially after losing my dad. I just didn’t know how. After my dad died, my mom refused to drive on the highway between Vancouver and Britannia, where the accident happened. She acted like it was a panic attack thing, but I knew it was just her convenient excuse to never step foot in Britannia Beach again and to guilt me into moving to Vancouver.