She watched the cloud, thinking that he was really very sweet and very attractive, and that he didn’t really need a lot of nonsense about disappearing clouds to lure her away from a Saturday afternoon of laundry and lesson plans. A grassy meadow, air fresh with spring, cows lowing off to the right, and—
A hole began to open in the center of the cloud. She stared, then glanced at him. His fine brow was tense, his mouth a thin line, his hands curled up into fists.
She looked at the cloud again. It was breaking up, collapsing into fragments.
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
He didn’t reply. She watched, and the process of celestial disintegration continued. The hunks of cloud turned wispy and, even as she looked up at them, disappeared altogether. She turned to him, open-mouthed, and he sighed deeply and beamed at her.
“See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”
“You cheated,” she said.
“How?”
“You picked one you knew was going to disappear.”
“How would I go about doing that?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a meteorologist, I’m a sixth-grade teacher. Maybe you used math.”
“Logarithms,” he said. “Cumulus clouds are powerless against logarithms. You pick one.”
“Huh?”
“You pick a cloud and I’ll disappear it. But it has to be the right sort of cloud.”
“Cumulus.”
“Uh-huh. And solitary—”
“Wandering lonely as a cloud, for instance.”
“Something like that. And not way off on the edge of the horizon. It doesn’t have to be directly overhead, but it shouldn’t be in the next county.”
She picked a cloud. He stared at it and it disappeared.
She gaped at him. “You really did it.”
“Well, I really stared at it and it really disappeared. You don’t have to believe the two phenomena were connected.”
“You made it disappear.”
“If you say so.”
“Could you teach my nice quiet boy? Could you teach Jeremy?”
“Nope. I don’t teach sixth graders.”
“But—”
“You teach him.”
“But I don’t know how to do it!”
“So I’ll teach you,” he said. “Look, Jan, it’s not as remarkable as you think it is. Anybody can do it. It’s about the easiest ESP ability to develop. Pick a cloud.”
“You pick one for me.”
“All right. That one right there, shaped like a loaf of white bread.”
“Not like any loaf I ever saw.” Why was she quibbling? “All right,” she said. “I know which cloud you mean.”
“Now let me tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to stare at it and focus on it, and you’re going to send energy from your Third Eye chakra, that’s right here—” he touched his finger to a spot midway between her eyebrows “—and that energy is going to disperse the cloud. Take a couple of deep, deep breaths, in and out, and focus on the cloud, that’s right, and talk to it in your mind. Say, ‘Disappear, disappear.’ That’s right, keep breathing, focus your energies—”
He kept talking to her and she stared at the loaf-shaped cloud. Disappear, she told it. She thought about energy, which she didn’t believe in, flowing from her Third Eye whatsit, which she didn’t have.
The cloud began to get thin in the middle. Disappear, she thought savagely, squinting at it, and a hole appeared. Her heart leaped with exultation.
“Look!”
“You got it now,” he told her. “Keep on going. Put it out of its misery.”
When the cloud was gone (gone!) she sat for a moment staring at the spot in the sky where it had been, as if it might have left a hole there. “You did it,” Cory said.
“Impossible.”
“Okay.”
“I couldn’t have done that. You cheated, didn’t you?”
“How?”
“You helped me. By sending your energies into the cloud or something. What’s so funny?”
“You are. Five minutes ago you wouldn’t believe that I could make clouds disappear, and now you figure I must have done this one, because otherwise you’d have to believe you did it, and you know it’s impossible.”
“Well, it is.”
“If you say so.”
She poured a glass of wine, sipped at it. “Clearly impossible,” she said. “I did it, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know. Can I do another?”
“It’s not up to me. They’re not my clouds.”
“Can I do that one? It looks like — I don’t know what it looks like. It looks like a cloud.”
“That’s what it looks like, all right.”
“Well? Can I do the cloud-shaped one?”
She did, and caused it to vanish. This time she could tell that it was her energy that was making the cloud disperse. She could actually feel that something was happening, although she didn’t know what it was and couldn’t understand how it worked. She did a third cloud, dispatching it in short order, and when it fell to her withering gaze she felt a remarkable surge of triumph.
She also felt drained. “I’ve got a headache,” she told Cory. “I suppose the sun and the wine would do it, but it doesn’t feel like the usual sort of headache.”
“You’re using some mental muscles for the first time,” he explained. “They say we only use a small percentage of the brain. When we learn to use a new part, it’s a strain.”
“So what I’ve got is brain fatigue.”
“A light case thereof.”
She cocked her head at him. “You think you know a person,” she said archly, “and then you find he’s got hitherto undreamt-of talents. What else can you do?”
“Oh, all sorts of things. Long division, for example. And I can make omelets.”
“What other occult powers have you got?”
“Thousands, I suppose, but that’s the only one I’ve ever developed. Oh, and sometimes I know when a phone’s about to ring, but not always.”
“When I’m in the tub,” she said, “that’s when my phone always rings. What a heavenly spot for a picnic, incidentally. And private, too. The ants didn’t even find us here.”
She closed her eyes and he kissed her. I have psychic powers, she thought. I knew you were going to do that.
She said, “I’ll bet you can make inhibitions disappear, too. Can’t you?”
He nodded. “First your inhibitions,” he said. “Then your clothes.”
The hardest part was waiting for the right sort of day. For a full week it rained. Then for two days the sky was bright and cloudless, and then it was utterly overcast. By the time the right sort of clouds were strewn across the afternoon sky, she had trouble trusting the memory of that Saturday afternoon. Had she really caused clouds to break up? Could she still do it? And could she teach her Jeremy, her nice quiet boy?
Toward the end of the last class period she walked to the rear of the room, moved over toward the windows. She had them writing an exercise in English composition, a paragraph on their favorite television program. They always loved to write about television, though not as much as they loved to watch it.
She watched over Jeremy’s shoulder. His handwriting was very neat, very precise.
Softly she said, “I’d like you to stay for a few minutes after class, Jeremy.” When he stiffened she added, “It’s nothing to worry about.”
But of course he would worry, she thought, returning to the front of the room. There was no way to stop his worrying. No matter, she told herself. She was going to give him a gift today, a gift of self-esteem that he badly needed. A few minutes of anxiety was a small price for such a gift.
And, when the room had cleared and the others had left, she went again to his desk. He looked up at her approach, not quite meeting her eyes. He had the sort of undefined pale countenance her southern relatives would call po-faced. But it was, she thought, a sweet face.