Sarah Stevenson - Underneath (Sarah Jamila Stevenson)

Who tells their parents they might have ESP?

Whatever was happening to Shiri, she didn’t tell her parents either.

Downstairs, I plop myself on the couch in front of the TV and try to lose myself in an hour-long hospital drama, hoping it’ll keep me from thinking about how I’m either a freak or crazy, and how I probably don’t have friends anymore. Instead, I have to bite my lip so I don’t cry. I’ve had it with crying. It’s not going to change anything.

After a little while, Dad comes in and sits next to me. He holds up the remote and gives me a questioning glance. I shrug. He changes the channel to an Angels game. It’s utterly boring, and perfect. I lean back against the cushions and stare vacantly at the screen, my eyes half-closed, watching statistics scroll by and portly guys standing around in the outfield scratching their butts. Some guy with an ugly mustache hits a triple, and my dad says an “a- ha! ” of approval. Mom is rattling pots and pans around in the kitchen, washing dishes and getting dinner together, but it’s only background noise. Before I know it, an hour has passed.

Maybe this is why Dad watches so much baseball. You don’t have to think.

After a late dinner I go upstairs to my room, then spend a minute debating with myself whether to turn on the clock radio or put in my earbuds. For now, I settle on the clock radio. I tune it to a rock station and turn it up loud. All part of the strategy so I won’t “underhear” any more horrible nasty thoughts I never wanted to know.

I try to catch up on French homework, but my eyelids start to droop even though I slept a lot today. Then I realize it’s Friday and I have the whole weekend to do it. So I put my notebook away and, on impulse, pull my laptop over and open a search window.

“What to do if you hear thoughts,” I type, and click Go.

Big mistake. I give up after scouring five pages of results. Apparently my most likely scenarios are that God is speaking to me or I’m going crazy.

I can’t accept either of those answers.

But I do find a website with tips to help people relax their minds and go to sleep, and I could really use that right now since I’m keyed up again. I skim the page, then open the top drawer of my nightstand and pull out a long teakwood incense burner and a package of lavender incense sticks that Mom gave me on my last birthday.

I turn off the radio and slip my earbuds in with the volume set to low. Then I lie back on my bed, trying to clear my mind and focus on the swirls of smoke, the feeling of my breath going in and out of my nose, the smoky floral smell of the incense, the sound of quiet, slow guitar music strumming in my ears. After a while the incense makes my throat scratchy and I have a coughing fit.

I reach for my water glass and wonder if I should try some of my dad’s incense from Pakistan, the pungent-smelling agarbatti sticks; and just like that I’m thinking of Shiri again. Of how I used to escape from my parents’ embarrassing Saturday yoga group in our living room and hop in the car with Shiri and Auntie Mina on a trek to India Sweets and Spices … hot samosas from the deli counter, the air in the tiny shop filled with competing scents of incense and cardamom and fried goodies and a million other things; the three of us pointing and giggling at all the melodramatic Bollywood movie posters on the walls. That’s never going to happen again.

I wonder if Shiri ever thought about those times. If she did, she didn’t write about them in her journal. But I can’t stop thinking about them. Even if the memories make my heart twist every time I relive them.

I smile a little, bitterly. When we were kids, Shiri and I used to hide up in the big tree in her parents’ backyard, our legs dangling off the biggest branch, and talk about what special powers we’d have if we were superheroes. The one thing we both agreed would be great was to know what other people were thinking.

Now that I’ve heard what other people think, I’m realizing it’s not so great. My own thoughts and memories—those are more than enough. But I can’t help wondering, in some deep dark part of me, what if I’d been able to hear Shiri’s thoughts? Would I have been able to do something to help her? Or at least maybe understand?

Monday morning is grayish and overcast, but not too cold. Typical early November. My motivation for getting dressed for school is severely limited, so I throw on an old green Yosemite sweatshirt, then pull my hair back into a loose braid and cover it with a faded baseball cap of my dad’s with some Led Zeppelin symbols on it. My wardrobe is the least of my worries today. Today is the first day of the rest of my life, as they say—the first day of sitting alone at lunch and watching my former friends having a great time without me. Clearly they haven’t been having a good time with me.

Maybe I’m not being fair. But midway through my drive to school, I have a moment of sad epiphany. Nobody called me before the beach barbecue Saturday to see if I was going. Except for a drunk text from Spike late that night, nobody seemed to care that I didn’t show up. No call from Cassie saying “Are you okay, Sunny Bunny? We missed you.” No call from Elisa to fill me in on James and Eyes-Front’s goofy exploits, or to tell me Evan still looked as hot as I remembered. Spike called yesterday to ask if I was feeling better—as if I’d come down with a virus and it would be gone next week.

As if. By the time I pull into the school parking lot, I’m fuming.

My first class is French. Eyes-Front is in that class, and at first I can’t even look at him. Unfortunately, Mrs. Lam pairs us up for conversation exercises.

“Monsieur Marc avec Mademoiselle Soleil, s’il vous plait, merci,” she chirps, tapping on each of our desks with a burgundy-painted fingernail as she walks by. Soleil is “sun,” of course. Mrs. Lam tries to give everyone a French nickname. We normally hassle each other the whole time about “Soleil” and “Marrrc” when we’re doing work in pairs, but today we hardly talk. Eyes-Front doesn’t meet my eyes—or anything else, for that matter—for more than a second at a time, and there’s no extraneous conversation. To me, this is confirmation that Cassie has been talking about me behind my back and that I shouldn’t expect any of those dumb guys to jump to my defense. But it hurts.

I really thought they were my friends. Stupid me.

By the time lunch rolls around, I have a serious stomachache. Still, out of habit, I get in line at the pizza cart parked at the edge of the quad. When I glance behind me, the whole gang is sitting at our usual table, laughing and talking like nothing’s out of the ordinary. I can easily guess what’s going on: Elisa is wondering out loud which of her many club meetings to go to. Eyes-Front is staring at Elisa’s chest. Spike is re-gelling his hair and teasing Elisa for being such a geek. James is not-so-surreptitiously trying to show off his latest pair of expensive brand-name sneakers, which his parents regularly buy for him. And Cassie … Cassie glances up and sees me looking at her. She quickly looks away again. She seems quiet; sorry. Maybe things will be okay. If I go over and sit with them and pretend nothing happened … a tingle of hope zings through me.

As I’m watching, Cassie says something. Suddenly, they all look up. At me. Cassie stares at me almost challengingly. Without breaking eye contact, she makes some other comment to the group. Then she starts giggling, a high-pitched, annoying sound that carries all the way to where I’m standing. The wanna-be gangster behind me in the pizza line turns his head, looking around. James and Elisa grin, and Marc even lets out his braying donkey laugh. My face goes hot, and I hope the people around me don’t realize I’m the one being laughed at.