"A week from Sunday."
"I'm very anxious to see her."
"Why?" Jenna asked bluntly.
He had a dazzling smile. "This might be hard to believe, Jenna, but I was very much in love with your mother. Even when I left her."
Tracey gazed at him curiously. "Do you think you might still be? In love with her, I mean?"
"Tracey!" Jenna glared at her. "Isn't that a little personal?"
Stuart Kelley laughed gently. "It's all right, Jenna. And who knows? All I can say is that I've never stopped thinking about her. And you, Jenna."
Jenna didn't say anything. A new thought had come to her. This man was planning to stick around and see her mother when she came out of rehab. Barbara Kelley might have a foggy memory after all those years of drinking, but she wasn't stupid. Surely she'd know her own ex-husband.
Jenna looked at him now and tried to imagine him as her father. Maybe … maybe this wasn't quite as far-fetched as it seemed. An image flashed across her mind: a family, made up of a mother and a father and a daughter, living in a real house, having a normal life …
With effort, she pushed the picture out of her head. She was not optimistic by nature, and she wasn't going to start looking on the bright side of everything now.
There was an uncomfortable silence at the table. Stuart Kelley must have felt it, because he changed the subject. "So your father said you can disappear, Tracey?"
Jenna almost smiled. She liked the way he had said it conversationally, the way someone might say, So your father said you play the piano? He wasn't acting like they were freaks, the way some people would have.
"I used to,"Tracey said. She looked at her parents, both of whom suddenly became terribly interested in what still lay on their plates. Jenna couldn't blame them--they must have felt awful about how they'd treated their daughter. Tracey was nice enough not to go into the whole story for Stuart.
"I'm practicing now," she went on. "What I need is to be able to feel invisible, and it's not so easy for me anymore. But I'm doing these meditation exercises, and they're helping." She turned to Jenna. "Right?"
Jenna agreed. "You were practically translucent last night. I could see the glow from the lamp behind you."
Tracey nodded happily. "We're in a special class, Jenna and me," she told Stuart. "And we're learning how to get in touch with our gifts and control them. Use them wisely."
Stuart turned to Jenna. "Is that working for you, too?"
Jenna shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."
Mr. Devon was looking at her with interest. "How deeply can you read minds, Jenna?"
She shrugged again. "I don't know."
"I mean, can you go beneath the surface?" he continued. "Or can you just read what people are clearly thinking?" He turned to his wife. "Just think of the benefit to therapy. People wouldn't have to be analyzed for years to find out what's going on in their subconscious minds. Jenna could tell them!"
"Let's try it right now," Mrs. Devon said excitedly. She turned to Stuart and explained, "I've been in analysis for years, and we just had a breakthrough last week--an event that I'd buried in my subconscious. Let's see if Jenna can tell me what it was!"
"Mom!" Tracey moaned. "Don't ask Jenna to do that--it's embarrassing!"
Jenna could feel her face turning red. She was embarrassed, but how could she say no to the woman who was providing her with a home at the moment?
Tracey hadn't finished. "Besides, Madame says we should never exploit one another's gifts, and that includes the parents of the gifted."
"Who is Madame?" Stuart asked.
"Our gifted-class teacher," Jenna told him. "She says we have to be very careful about revealing our gifts. She tells us there are plenty of bad people out there who might want to use us for their own nasty purposes."
"And she's absolutely right," Stuart said firmly. "I don't know what kind of benefit people could get from using your mind-reading skills, but I'm sure they'd think of something." Turning to Tracey he said, "And someone might try to force you to rob a bank for them. I think it's best not to let too many people know what you can do."
"I agree," Mr. Devon said. "Just keep it in the family."
"That's right." Stuart looked at Jenna. "Keep it in the family," he repeated.
Jenna suddenly became aware of a rush of feeling filling her up. Was this happening? Could this be real?
"You're absolutely right," Mrs. Devon declared. "In fact, I'm ashamed of myself for asking you to show off your gift, Jenna."
"That's okay," Jenna mumbled.
Mrs. Devon raised her wineglass. "Let's toast our gifted daughters and vow never to take advantage of their gifts."
Stuart raised his glass, and so did Mr. Devon. "To our daughters," they intoned.
Tracey looked at Jenna, but Jenna averted her eyes. She suspected that Tracey knew exactly what she was thinking, despite not having any mind-reading skills.
Which reminded her of what she'd planned to do to Stuart Kelley. When Mrs. Devon went into the kitchen to get the dessert, Tracey left to help her, and the two men began talking about some movie they'd both seen. It was a good moment to try a little mind reading.
Since the men were talking, their topic of conversation would probably be the uppermost thing on Stuart's mind. But this would be a good opportunity to try what Mrs. Devon had suggested--to see if she could get below the surface thoughts to something deeper.
Her father's--she corrected herself--- Stuart's back was to her, so she had no problem staring. First, she blocked out their voices, the music coming from the stereo, the sounds from the kitchen. Then she concentrated on piercing Stuart's mind.
But she couldn't. She tried again and again, but she couldn't even pick up the superficial thoughts about the movie they were discussing. Was he able to block her, like Emily? No, it was probably Emily's own weird gift that made her unable to be read. This was more like what happened when she tried to read her mother's mind. The family thing . . .
She caught her breath. Then she started coughing.
Mr. Devon poured her some water while Stuart patted her on the back. "Take deep breaths," he ordered. She did, and when the coughs died down, she drank the water.
"Are you okay?" Stuart asked.
"I'm fine," she assured her father. And in her mind, she added, Maybe more than fine.
Chapter 9
AMANDA HAD NOW HAD 24 hours to practice being a boy. Well, not exactly being a boy--other than using the toilet, she hadn't really clone anything boyish. But she'd had a day to get used to feeling like a boy. Which wasn't long. So she still felt very, very strange.
When she'd realized, the morning before, that she was now inside Ken Preston's body, she'd been pretty stunned. Even though that had been one of her original plans, she hadn't been aware that she'd been feeling sorry for Ken. But apparently those feelings she'd had after seeing him on Tuesday were real sympathy and pity, not simply distaste at seeing a boy cry.
So now she was in a body unlike any she'd ever known before. Thinking about it now, she had been a boy once--little Martin Cooper from the gifted class, years ago when he'd lived across the street from her and she'd seen him being bullied. But that had lasted only a minute or two, and at that age, she probably hadn't been all that aware of the difference between boys and girls anyway.
Now she was very much aware. When she'd climbed out of bed the day before, she couldn't even bring herself to take off her clothes to have a shower--it had been just too embarrassing to look at the body she was in. She'd realized that, other than babies and statues, she'd never seen a totally nude male before. It was all too much. So when Ken's mother appeared at the door and demanded to know why he hadn't come down for breakfast, she pretended to have an upset stomach and a sore throat. For a moment, Amanda was afraid that Mrs. Preston might call a doctor, but instead she decided he should stay in bed and see how he felt the next day. Then Mrs. Preston took Ken's little sister to school. And as it turned out, she had a job, so Amanda could be alone and had the house to herself all day.