She’s getting undressed now, right across the hallway. Off with the shirt, the slacks, the bra, the panties, whatever the hell she wears. I can hear her moving around. I wonder if her door is really closed tight. It’s a long time since I’ve had a good look at her. Who knows, maybe her nipples are still standing up. Even if her door’s open only a few inches, I can see into her room from mine, if I hunch down here in the dark and peek.
But her door’s closed. What if I reach out and give it a little nudge? From here. I pull the power up into my head, yes…reach…push… ah…yes! Yes! It moves! One inch, two, three. That’s good enough. I can see a slice of her room. The light’s on. Hey, there she goes! Too fast, out of sight. I think she was naked. Now she’s coming back. Naked, yes. Her back is to me. You’ve got a cute ass, Sis, you know that? Turn around, turn around, turn around…ah. Her nipples look the same as always. Not standing up at all. I guess they must go back down after it’s all over. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. (I don’t really read the Bible a lot, just the dirty parts.) Cindy’s got bigger ones than you, Sis, I bet she has. Unless she pads them. I couldn’t tell tonight. I was too excited to notice whether I was squeezing flesh or rubber.
Sara’s putting her housecoat on. One last flash of thigh and belly, then no more. Damn. Into the bathroom now. The sound of water running. She’s getting washed. Now the tap is off. And now…tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. I can picture her sitting there, grinning to herself, taking a happy piss, thinking cozy thoughts about what she and Jimmy the Greek did tonight. Oh, Christ, I hurt! I’m jealous of my own sister! That she can do it three times a week while I…am nowhere…with nobody…no one…nothing…
Let’s give Sis a little surprise.
Hmm. Can I manipulate something that’s out of my direct line of sight? Let’s try it. The toilet seat is in the right-hand corner of the bathroom, under the window. And the flush knob is—let me think—on the side closer to the wall, up high—yes. Okay, reach out, man. Grab it before she does. Push…down…push. Yeah! Listen to that, man! You flushed it for her without leaving your own room!
She’s going to have a hard time figuring that one out.
Sunday: a rainy day, a day of worrying. I can’t get the strange events of last night out of my mind. This power of mine—where did it come from, what can I use it for? And I can’t stop fretting over the awareness that I’ll have to face Cindy again first thing tomorrow morning, in our Biology class. What will she say to me? Does she realize I actually wasn’t anywhere near her when I knocked her down? If she knows I have a power, is she frightened of me? Will she report me to the Society for the Prevention of Supernatural Phenomena, or whoever looks after such things? I’m tempted to pretend I’m sick, and stay home from school tomorrow. But what’s the sense of that? I can’t avoid her forever.
The more tense I get, the more intensely I feel the power surging within me. It’s very strong today. (The rain may have something to do with that. Every nerve is twitching. The air is damp and maybe that makes me more conductive.) When nobody is looking, I experiment. In the bathroom, standing far from the sink, I unscrew the top of the toothpaste tube. I turn the water taps on and off. I open and close the window. How fine my control is! Doing these things is a strain: I tremble, I sweat, I feel the muscles of my jaws knotting up, my back teeth ache. But I can’t resist the kick of exercising my skills. I get riskily mischievous. At breakfast, my mother puts four slices of bread in the toaster; sitting with my back to it, I delicately work the toaster’s plug out of the socket, so that when she goes over to investigate five minutes later, she’s bewildered to find the bread still raw. “How did the plug slip out?” she asks, but of course no one tells her. Afterward, as we all sit around reading the Sunday papers, I turn the television set on by remote control, and the sudden blaring of a cartoon show makes everyone jump. And a few hours later I unscrew a light bulb in the hallway, gently, gently, easing it from its fixture, holding it suspended close to the ceiling for a moment, then letting it crash to the floor. “What was that?” my mother says in alarm. My father inspects the hall. “Bulb fell out of the fixture and smashed itself to bits.” My mother shakes her head. “How could a bulb fall out? It isn’t possible.” And my father says, “It must have been loose.” He doesn’t sound convinced. It must be occurring to him that a bulb loose enough to fall to the floor couldn’t have been lit. And this bulb had been lit.
How soon before my sister connects these incidents with the episode of the toilet that flushed by itself?
Monday is here. I enter the classroom through the rear door and skulk to my seat. Cindy hasn’t arrived yet. But now here she comes. God, how beautiful she is! The gleaming, shimmering red hair, down to her shoulders. The pale flawless skin. The bright, mysterious eyes. The purple sweater, same one as Saturday night. My hands have touched that sweater. I’ve touched that sweater with my power, too.
I bend low over my notebook. I can’t bear to look at her. I’m a coward.
But I force myself to look up. She’s standing in the aisle, up by the front of the room, staring at me. Her expression is strange—edgy, uneasy, the lips clamped tight. As if she’s thinking of coming back here to talk to me but is hesitating. The moment she sees me watching her, she glances away and takes her seat. All through the hour I sit hunched forward, studying her shoulders, the back of her neck, the tips of her ears. Five desks separate her from me. I let out a heavy romantic sigh. Temptation is tickling me. It would be so easy to reach across that distance and touch her. Gently stroking her soft cheek with an invisible fingertip. Lightly fondling the side of her throat. Using my special power to say a tender hello to her. See, Cindy? See what I can do to show my love? Having imagined it, I find myself unable to resist doing it. I summon the force from the churning reservoir in my depths; I pump it upward and simultaneously make the automatic calculations of intensity of push. Then I realize what I’m doing. Are you crazy, man? She’ll scream. She’ll jump out of her chair like she was stung. She’ll roll on the floor and have hysterics. Hold back, hold back, you lunatic! At the last moment I manage to deflect the impulse. Gasping, grunting, I twist the force away from Cindy and hurl it blindly in some other direction. My random thrust sweeps across the room like a whiplash and intersects the big framed chart of the plant and animal kingdoms that hangs on the classroom’s left-hand wall. It rips loose as though kicked by a tornado and soars twenty feet on a diagonal arc that sends it crashing into the blackboard. The frame shatters. Broken glass sprays everywhere. The class is thrown into panic. Everybody yelling, running around, picking up pieces of glass, exclaiming in awe, asking questions. I sit like a statue. Then I start to shiver. And Cindy, very slowly, turns and looks at me. A chilly look of horror freezes her face.