‘If you could get me, like, five of these and bring them to the seance tomorrow night, I could give you forty dollars.’ He’d been stashing portions of his allowance every week for the past month, trying to save up for an iPhone. There had to be at least forty dollars in his desk drawer. ‘Maybe more,’ he added.
‘Just to go to the library and check out books?’ Stevie asked.
‘Yeah. You’d be doing me a big favour. Like I said, I don’t have the time. It’s worth the money to me.’
Stevie’s eyes were shining. ‘Hey, thanks! See you tomorrow.’
Ken watched as he took off. Forty dollars, maybe fifty. That wouldn’t pay for new shoes and a visit to the doctor. And it wasn’t like Ken could provide money like that on a regular basis. Stevie and his family needed more. They needed that lottery ticket.
He was about to climb into bed that night when he remembered Jack’s latest request. Opening the drawer of his desk, he poked around through the junk he stashed in there and finally found the iPod Jack had left behind. So he’d have to talk to Lucy again. At least this time he could make it clear that he was only doing this for Jack and she’d realize that Ken wasn’t interested in her that way.
He went to sleep thinking about Stevie, and he was still thinking about him the next morning. By the end of the afternoon, when he entered the gifted class, he’d made a decision.
He wanted to talk about it, but he didn’t get the opportunity right away. Emily was practically bursting with news.
‘Tracey and I went to see Amanda at the hospital yesterday evening,’ she told Madame and the class.
‘How is she feeling?’ Madame asked.
‘The girl we saw is feeling OK,’ Emily said, ‘but it wasn’t Amanda.’
‘It was that fake-Amanda who takes over when the real Amanda is in someone else’s body,’ Tracey reported.
‘Are you sure?’ Madame asked.
Emily nodded vigorously. ‘She had that blank expression, like there weren’t any thoughts in her head. And she kept looking in a mirror and putting on lipgloss.’
‘And filing her nails,’ Tracey added.
‘Sounds exactly like the real Amanda to me,’ Jenna commented.
‘Nah, I could see the difference,’ Tracey said. ‘I had the real one in me, remember? I can’t explain it, but I could feel that it wasn’t really her.’
‘Does she know where the real Amanda is?’ Sarah asked.
Tracey shook her head. ‘No. I even tried asking her, but she just looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. It was definitely the robot-Amanda or the other-Amanda — whatever you want to call her.’
Jenna snorted. ‘That is so Amanda.’
‘What do you mean, Jenna?’ Madame asked.
‘She’ll do anything to get out of doing something she doesn’t want to do. She does a bodysnatch so she won’t have to go through the operation. She makes the other-Amanda have it instead.’
Ken agreed. ‘Yeah, she’s pretty selfish.’
Madame smiled slightly. ‘Oh, I don’t know if what she did was so terrible. Whatever takes over Amanda’s body when she’s not there — it’s not a real person. It’s like an impression of Amanda. I don’t believe it has any feelings.’
Jenna shrugged. ‘OK, maybe the fake Amanda doesn’t care if she has an operation. I don’t think the real Amanda cares whether fake Amanda feels it or not, as long as she doesn’t have to suffer.’
‘I think,’ Madame said slowly, ‘that you’re being a little hard on her, Jenna. But there’s something else about this situation that I find interesting. Sarah, do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s getting easier for Amanda to snatch bodies. Last month she took over my body because she was afraid she’d be kidnapped. But when she took over Tracey, it wasn’t like that.’
Tracey nodded.‘She didn’t want to be me but she felt sorry for me, so the bodysnatch just happened. Why would she feel sorry for Sarah? She just wanted to get out of her own body so she picked Sarah’s.’
‘But we don’t know that for sure,’ Madame pointed out. ‘The only person who knows is Amanda. Ken, do you have an opinion about this?’
‘No,’ Ken said quickly. As far as he knew the others weren’t aware that Amanda had taken over his body for a while, and he wanted to keep it that way. But in the back of his mind he’d always wondered — why had Amanda done that? Had she felt sorry for him?
‘What does it matter anyway?’ he asked.
Madame replied, ‘It matters because we need to be aware of what we can and cannot do, so that we can rely on each other in the future.’
Ken grimaced. She was going to start talking about the dangers they faced again. And he had something more important to tell them.
‘I’ve found a way I could use my gift to help someone,’ he announced.
‘How’s that, Ken?’ Madame asked.
He told them about Stevie, his dead father, the missing lottery ticket, and the plight of Stevie’s family.‘I’m thinking … if I work with the medium, if we put our heads together, maybe we can reach Stevie’s father and find out where the lottery ticket is.’
Madame frowned. ‘Ken, we’ve talked about this before and I thought I’d made myself clear. You cannot tell anyone about your gift.’
‘But why not? OK, I can understand why most of you have to keep your gifts secret, but bad guys have never been interested in me! Nobody’s tried to get me to help rob a bank or anything like that. My gift doesn’t have any value for criminals. Why can’t I use it to help someone?’
‘What about the rest of us?’ Charles protested. ‘If you tell the world about what you can do, it could lead people to this class. We could all be in danger.’
‘Charles is right, Ken,’ Madame declared.‘Revealing your gift can have serious consequences. If you can help Stevie without giving anything away, that’s all right. But you can’t tell Stevie or this medium what you can do.’
Ken slumped in his seat. He wasn’t going to continue arguing this. If he could help Stevie on his own he would do it, no matter what Madame said. Would he be putting the whole class at risk? Maybe Madame was exaggerating.
But what did it matter anyway? He had no idea how to contact Stevie’s father. He’d never contacted anyone. They came to him.
That appeared to be the case with live people too. He’d completely forgotten about Lucy and Jack and the iPod, but when he left the gifted class, he found her waiting for him outside.
‘I always wondered what goes on in that class,’ she said. ‘Do all of you talk to dead people?’
‘No. Look, I’ve got something for you.’
She beamed. ‘Really?’
He reached in his backpack and pulled out the iPod. ‘It’s from Jack. He told me to give it to you.’
‘Oh. Well, tell him thank you.’
‘Sure. I ’ll see you around.’
‘Ken!’
‘What?’
‘I did what you told me to do.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.
‘I told Simon I didn’t want to go out with him.’
‘Oh. OK, good. I’m sure you’ll find someone else to hang out with.’
She smiled coyly. ‘I think I already have. Can we go to the basketball game tonight?’
Damn. ‘Uh, gee, I can’t go to the game, Lucy, I’ve got plans tonight. Bye.’
At least he didn’t have to lie this time. There was no way he was going to miss the evening’s seance.
When he arrived that evening Stevie was already there, and he presented Ken with a stack of books he’d checked out from the public library. Ken handed over forty-seven dollars, all the money he’d found in his dresser drawer. Stevie was thrilled.