I sank in my seat. This dinner couldn’t get any worse.
“Peas!” Olivia flicked a spoonful toward Gabe. In turn, Gabe threw a biscuit at her plate. She took a bite and erupted into giggles, chunks of bread falling from her mouth.
Cromwell lured Hayden into a discussion about which football teams would be playing on Thanksgiving Day while Olivia and Gabe continued their food play.
“Can we go like we did last year?” Phoebe asked Hayden. “We could leave Wednesday afternoon and stay over.”
My ears pricked up. They were talking about the parade in the city— the big one. Would Cromwell let her go after everything she’d done?
Hayden’s eyes flicked away from his plate. “I don’t know. I don’t really feel up to it this year.”
“Come on. It’ll be fun.” She pouted. “I could really get away.”
I tried to act like I wasn’t listening, but the moment I looked up, Hayden and I locked eyes. He was the first to look away.
Finally Cromwell seemed to hear what Phoebe was suggesting. “I do not believe that will be possible this year, Phoebe.”
Phoebe opened her mouth, then clamped it shut. Her gaze, full of accusation, drifted to me like I was the reason she was in trouble.
I wanted to throw my peas at her.
My stomach twisted as I poked a lump of meat around my plate, and I couldn’t sit here anymore. Pressure built in my chest. Without looking at anyone, I pushed away from the table and headed out into the hallway. No one stopped me. I think, if anything, the stress around the table lessened. It was like I was the one who’d been doing crazy things, not Phoebe. It blew my mind.
Drawing in a deep breath and letting it out slowly, I stopped in the foyer outside one of the dark sitting rooms. No matter how many times I did this, the walls still closed in around me. Minutes ticked by. I just stood there, staring into nothing.
“Are you okay?” Hayden asked me. “Your arm?”
I closed my eyes. “Yeah, my arm is okay.”
“You didn’t eat anything.”
A snappy retort died on my lips when I faced him. He stood so close that I could smell his aftershave. “You didn’t, either.”
Hayden shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. You?”
“Nothing.” He nodded, then pulled his hands out of his pockets and ran one of them through his hair. “Em?”
“Yes?”
A moment passed in silence, and then Hayden shook his head. A tight, tense smile appeared on his face. “Never mind, I’ll talk to you later.”
Then he was gone, and I stood there, wanting to cry.
“You need to stay away from him.”
Startled, I spun around. Kurt slouched against the wall, the strands of long blond hair practically obscuring his eyes. I had no idea how long he’d stood there. Obviously it’d been long enough. “Are you following me?”
“I’m not the one who’s been following you, and I think you know that.” Kurt pushed off the wall. “You need to leave Hayden alone. You’re not good for him.”
My hands balled into fists. “I’m not bothering Hayden.”
“He loses sight of everything when he’s around you.”
I frowned as I rubbed the itchy skin around my stitches. “It doesn’t seem that way.”
Kurt tipped his head slightly. “You’ve been dealt an unfair hand in life. I can see that. Everyone can see that.” He stepped forward, clasping his hands behind his back. “But so have Hayden, Gabe and the twins. And so have I. The only difference is that we’ve been able to see past all of that. You haven’t.”
I opened my mouth, but he cut me off.
“What Phoebe did was wrong, but can you blame her for wanting you to leave? What you feel must choke her. And your presence has affected Hayden since he first laid eyes on you. If you cared about anyone—your sister—you’d leave here. Leave your sister so she can have a real chance at life, and leave Hayden before he does something that all of us will regret.”
His words struck a chord. Anger sparked and fired through me.
“And I think it would be best for you, too. You don’t trust us.” Kurt smiled. “We don’t trust you.”
“Where would I go?” I asked. “Live on the streets so I’m not your problem?”
If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I don’t care where you go. Money won’t be a problem. How much do you need?”
“Are you serious?” He couldn’t be, but the look on his face said he was. “You know what? I don’t care what you think or what you want. The only way I’m leaving without Olivia is if you drag me from here. And I’d like to see you try.”
Kurt opened his mouth, but closed it. I got the satisfaction of stunning him into silence. Spinning around on my heel, I left him standing in the foyer.
* * *
My run-in with Kurt empowered me. Instead of hiding in my room to sketch or forcing Olivia to entertain me, I started practicing with the plants on my own. Each night I crept downstairs once the house was silent and painstakingly carried a plant back to my bedroom. With my bum arm, I could only carry them one at a time. A garden of dead plants littered my room, serving as a painful reminder that I had yet to figure out how to control my touch.
If control was even possible.
The evening before Thanksgiving, I sat on the floor with a plant in front of me. Six withered plant corpses filled the pots in the corner. I stared down at the new one—the live one—then closed my eyes and tried to clear out my mind. Hayden had said it had to be one thought that triggered it. He’d tried to use Parker to get to that thought, but everything had turned to crap after that.
Parker—something Parker had said to me.
I wrinkled up my nose and held my breath. What had he said? Something about how we all coped with our gifts, everyone except Gabe. But it had nothing to do with Gabe, because he didn’t have to cope. Neither did I, right? I didn’t cope with it because I always believed there was nothing I could do.
I couldn’t help what I did.
Like when Dustin had touched me in the grocery store parking lot. I couldn’t have helped what’d happened. I had no control over it. It wasn’t—
My eyes popped open and I exhaled. That was it—what Parker had said. I’d convinced myself that I had no control so that I didn’t have to deal or have any responsibility.
And oh shit, maybe Kurt had been right—kind of. I had wallowed in my self-pity for two long years. If wallowing were an art form, I’d be on a gallery wall.
I placed my hands on the cool ceramic. Could that really be it? Was control over my fingers of death really something as simple as actually believing I had control? Taking responsibility for it—for my gift?
No. I don’t have a gift. Olivia has one. Hayden has one. I don’t have—
“I’m doing it,” I said out loud. “I’m doing it right now.”
What about my self-revelation courtesy of Catcher in the Rye? I’d decided I didn’t want to be like those statues in the museum, but I was. My thoughts worked the same. My actions did, too. I’d tried everything except believing I wasn’t a freak of nature.
Because it wasn’t that I didn’t have a soul. I mean, there were minutes when I truly wondered—when I thought about what’d happened when I’d died and how I’d felt afterwards—but I didn’t want to hurt anyone. What’d happened to Dustin had been an accident. I hadn’t wanted to hurt him. I never wanted to hurt anyone—not really. I’d had moments when I’d entertained the idea, deep down, times when I’d felt threatened, but I didn’t want people to be afraid of me.
It was more than that.
I didn’t believe I was gifted, but maybe I was. Maybe my gift worked differently than the rest—like something had to trigger it to become active. That something had been dying. Who knows, maybe I would’ve come back anyway, even without Olivia. Dying could’ve been a part of the great plan or something.
“Okay, now I sound crazy,” I muttered, running my fingers over the rim of the pot. “Like I walked into a cheesy sci-fi movie, but it’s something. I think. I guess.”
I dragged the pot into my lap. Earlier, I’d changed into linen shorts and a long-sleeved shirt. Both were thin enough to sleep in, if I ever decided to go to bed. It was well into the early morning hours. Everyone else had gone to bed hours ago…
And my brain was rambling again.
I made a face at the plant and sank my fingers into the rich, soft soil. Well-hydrated—Liz took good care of the plants here. I’d come to believe her other gift was a green thumb, because all of the plants grew so beautifully.
Until I killed them, that is.
“So I have a gift. A gift—not a curse—and the gift is the fingers of death, right?” I asked myself, feeling stupid when I waited for an answer. “Think about how badass that would be if I could control it.” I stopped there. Thinking about that inevitably led to what could happen if I could control it.
Touching, holding hands, kissing… Hayden.
Not the most helpful train of thought.
I focused for hours on telling myself I did have a gift before I finally felt confident. Only then did I pull my dirt-stained fingers out and took a deep breath.
Now or never. I focused on the plant. It was dark green, and on the tall, slender stems there were marks much like the skin on a snake. It had become my favorite of all plants, because it looked so weird.
I took a deep breath and tried to speak in my most confident tone. “I have a gift.”
Slowly, I brushed my fingers over one smooth stem, then jerked my hand back and waited.
A few seconds went by, then maybe a minute. Then five, and holy crap, nothing happened.
I started to stand, but my legs gave out. “No,” I whispered, clutching the pot until it chafed my skin. My heart sped up until a faint buzzing filled in my ears. This could’ve been a fluke. There was only one way to find out.
I needed to touch it again.
Calming down took a few minutes, but when my heart did beat somewhat normally, I touched the plant again. It moved under my fingers. It didn’t die. Not for ten minutes or twenty.
Around the twenty-five minute mark, I think I started crying. My cheeks were wet so, unless it’d rained inside, I guessed they were tears.
I had to share this with someone.
Jumping to my feet, I rushed across the room and yanked on the door with my good arm. In my excitement, I forgot I had locked it. My fingers were shaking so badly it took me a few tries to open it, but once I did, I raced down the hallway and prayed Hayden hadn’t locked his door.
His room was three down from mine, and I stopped in front of his door. What if he didn’t care? I’d be crushed. I turned the knob and it gave way. Breathing a sigh of relief, I eased it open and let my eyes adjust to the darkness.
I could barely make him out sprawled across the bed, but he was there. Remembering his last reaction when I woke him unexpectedly, I resisted the urge to pounce on him. I felt along the wall until I found the switch and flipped it. Bright light flooded the room. It didn’t faze Hayden, but it stole my breath. I stood there, unable to tear my eyes away from him.