Not so super -- Chapter 2

 

Okay.  I guess there are some things I should admit.  For starters, I do have a superpower.  A sucky one.  I can read minds.

 

Before you get jealous, let me tell you:  It's not so great.

 

I’m guessing that there have been times when you wished you had ESP.  I’m imagining a party where somebody said something crazy.  I'm seeing you wondering “what on earth was she thinking?”  You probably wished you could just look inside that brain and read it like a book.

 

Me, too.  But I can’t.  That's not how it works.  

 

Here's how it works:  Sometimes, when I'm minding my own business, words just invade my head.  Sometimes it’s like two radio stations fighting over a frequency.  Sometimes it's like overhearing a conversation at the next table.  But mostly it’s like stepping in a puddle on a wintry day.  There’s a sudden, unpleasant shock followed by the lasting impression that I was somewhere I didn't belong.  When it’s just one voice it’s not too bad, like only my toes got wet.  But the more voices there are, the deeper into that puddle I go.  When I’m in a crowd, especially an anxious crowd, I can find myself in over my head. 

 

I don't remember a time before I heard those voices.  But there have been two great divides in my life -- markers between “before" and “after.”

 

I do remember, before kindergarten, telling my parents about the voices while they watched TV.  I prattled on about the voices with all the joy and exuberance a five year old could muster.  And what did I get for all of my excitement? 

 

Therapy. 

 

At first I thought therapy was great.  When Mom would drop me off, it may as well have been a playdate.  The guy had a bin full of toys.  Every session began with a full-on truck extravaganza.  But that wasn't the best part.  After I’d had my fill of trucks, we would sit and talk about my favorite subject.

 

I loved the first few sessions.  Wild with excitement, I chattered on about my voices.  I never wanted to leave.  As I only got to talk about the voices in these sessions, I awaited them hungrily.  But eventually, even a six-year old could see that something was wrong.  I could tell that he was indulging me without belief.  Increasingly, I felt like I was talking about something inappropriate or even forbidden.  Without understanding the concept, I felt like he was tricking me into confessing.  And then, on the day that would forever become the first separation between “before” and “after,” I arrived as a different kid.  I was a kid who understood that adults found my voices unacceptable.  I was a kid who realized the threat that therapy would expose me as the freak that I was.  I was a kid who understood what he needed to do.   Holding my favorite fire truck in my hands, I braced myself for the Big Lie.

 

“How have voices been this week?” he asked.

 

“What voices?” I asked, full of youthfully feigned innocence.

 

“The ones you hear in your head,” he answered.

 

“Oh, that was just a game.  I made them up.”

 

That was the first time I ever wished I could choose to hear those voices.  Looking at his blank expression, I yearned to know what he was thinking.  At the time, I thought he was mad at me.  I thought that he knew I was lying.  I was ashamed of what I was doing and feared that he could see through me.  Years later a different thought occurred to me.  Maybe he realized that he had lost me.  Maybe he saw that I had retreated into my shell, beyond where he could help me.  Maybe, on that day, I broke his heart.

 

When I was younger the voices didn’t bother me.  They didn’t mean anything to me either.  Therapy had helped me in one major way:  I learned that voices came from the people around me.  But even after I knew that, I simply accepted them.  They never affected what I did.  Once the divorce hit, the voices started taking on a new role in my life.

 

My parents and I used to live in a great, big house.  There were lots of rooms, a generous backyard, and a playroom in the basement.  The house was spacious -- and quiet.  When the nanny wasn’t around, I was left to myself and the silence that surrounded me.  When she was around, she talked so much that there wasn’t anything else to hear.

 

But after Dad left, things fell apart fast.  Mom couldn’t keep the house and unloaded it as quickly as she could.  For a few months, we bounced around among Mom's friends.  There was so much upheaval that I almost took no notice of the growing noise in my head.  But I couldn't ignore it.  I was constantly being invaded by the voices of people from the adjacent apartments.  First, there were the kids upstairs.  Then, there were the fighting neighbors.

 

And always, there was Mom.

 

Now that we were stuck in these little spaces, I heard Mom all the time.  Often, she was angry at me.  Or thinking about Dad.  Or thinking about work.  It was never good.  What's worse, she went out of her way to keep her anxieties from me.  I was constantly facing the disconnect between her thoughts and her words.  I became so distressed, caught between seeing her brave face and hearing her inner pain.

 

Mom could tell that I was wrestling with something although she couldn't imagine what.  She started talking to me about her struggles.  The strain didn’t get better.  She never felt comfortable sharing everything and I always heard the difference between what was said and what was real.

 

We finally ended up in an apartment in Cambridgeport, a neighborhood of Cambridge between MIT and the Charles River.  It was a cramped, underpriced, one-bedroom apartment.  We took the bottom floor and another family took the upper two floors.  More families lived to our left and right.  Mom turned part of the living room into my space and we made a home of it.

 

There was a time when the apartment was a place of refuge.  But my comfort was eroded by the growing weight of Mom’s unspoken thoughts.  Numbers became the safe space which the apartment couldn't provide.  I would hide from the words in my head by focusing on the numbers around me.

 

I had come to think of those foreign words as invasions.  The numbers, however, fascinated me.  I was struck by the hitchhikers that snuck in with the voices:

 

“$30 by Friday…”

 

“Batting 7th with a .227...”

 

“Down 40 points since Tuesday…”

 

I yearned to understand numbers more than the words they accompanied.  I had a sense that there was an order to numbers, an order that the words lacked.  From a young age, I fought to understand math.  My private school had given me freedom to pursue my interest.  I lost that freedom when I transferred to public school.  But I was already on my way.   Math had become my sanctuary.  It became the medicine I sought when the voices were what ailed me.

 

I stole Mom's spiral-bound notebook and started a tally.  I made daily entries in the book.  I noted what I had heard along with the time and place of each voice.  Later, I added word-counts for each intrusion.  Once I got my first smartphone, I created a password-protected spreadsheet to hold all of my records.  With the extra layer of security, I started listing those thinkers whose voices I recognized.

 

By the time I hit high school, I was studying statistics.  I was in heaven.  There I was, with a treasure trove of data to analyze, even if I couldn't share my results with anyone.

 

I quickly picked up on some patterns.  Outside of our noisy apartment, I could go an entire day without suffering any invasions.  But I'd get hit three or four times in a typical day.  Being around people made most of the difference.  The intrusions were more frequent in crowds, especially ball games, movies, and concerts.  Tests were really bad.  Math meets were the worst.

 

You'd think that mind-reading would be a gift during math meets.  Why not just pluck the answers out of the air? But invasions were never longer than five or six words.  They might be part of an answer.  They might be part of a question.  They were usually neither.  Nobody ever thinks “the answer to question six is 8.”

 

For years I lived in an uneasy harmony with my situation.  These invasions were harmless noise pollution.  They meant nothing to me.  Sometimes I heard things I didn't want to hear.  Occasionally, I heard things that made me feel horrible.  But most intrusions were benign.  Last year, something happened and changed my whole perspective.  This became my second great “before" and “after.”

 

I had just gotten a poor grade on an essay about The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson.  It was far from my mind when I ran into my teacher, Mrs. O’Shea.  I asked her about the paper.  She was always so kind and giving.  She stopped to answer.  But before she could say anything, I “heard" her.

 

“...when I'm late for my...”

 

I held up a hand.

 

“But I didn't mean to hold you up,” I said, mustering as much magnanimity as my fifteen years allowed.

 

“Thank you,” she replied.  “I'm late for my departmental meeting.”

 

While she strode off, my head was abuzz.  I had read her mind.  I had actually done it.  I had even gotten her to say the exact words that I had heard in my head.  Somehow, this felt like a validation of my power.  All those years ago, I had lied.  I had told my therapist that it was all made up.  I guess part of me feared that it really was all in my head.   But hearing her words twice, inside then out, was a magical moment.  Even better, I had used my powers for good.  I had kept her from being held up.

 

This was my second, great divide.  After this experience, I became obsessed.  I wanted to use my power for good.  I desperately longed to hear people so I could validate what I’d heard and do good deeds.   

 

Alas, according to my records, my results hadn't been impressive.  Only five times had I managed to get someone to speak the words that I had heard in my mind.  And I had never again managed to act on what I heard.  Mrs. O’Shea remained my one good deed.

 

Even so, that event had changed my life.  These snippets of other people's thoughts were no longer just invasions.  They were opportunities to do good.  Given the choice, I'd rather have had them out of my life.  But given no choice, I awaited them.  I began to look for the good I could build out of them.   There were even days when I welcomed them and longed to hear the thoughts from those around me.

 

My new resolve suddenly put my homelife in a different light.  Since we moved into this apartment, seven years ago, our relationship had been steadily deteriorating.  It started with fights, followed quickly by lies.  That soon progressed to alienation.  Most recently it had decayed into a happenstance of accidental proximity.  Given the lack of interaction we’d had of late, Mom was shocked that I’d volunteer to spend more time with her.  She jumped on the idea and we obsessed through the details together.  Yeah, I inherited that gene from her.  I certainly didn’t get it from Dad.

 

I had been the one who forged our brand new ritual:  On Friday night, Mom and I found a movie on TV.  By 8:00, we had passed out on the sofa.  At 4:15, on Saturday morning, the alarm app was blaring.  Somehow, we were out the door by 4:30.  

 

We walked for two hours, deep in a conversation like we'd never had.  As the morning progressed, the sun rose.  We made sure to stop and revel in it.  And at 6:30, to cap the ritual off, we went to Starbucks, to enjoy some well-deserved lattes.

 

If I had created the ritual, Mom had been the impetus.  She had started to fret about her weight.  And for every time she mentioned it, she thought about it twice.

 

I guessed that Mom was starting to get heavy.  I wouldn't say that she looked fat.  But every day, her body wore a little worse on her.  She bulged in the wrong places.  And her face looked different.  There were plenty of fatter kids at school.  I wasn’t sure why her weight consumed so much of her waking thoughts.

 

But that's just the way Mom was.  Her obsessiveness needed a target.  Recent bull’s eyes had included my taste in music and lack of tidiness.  Now it was her slowly expanding backside, which had suddenly accelerated and was power walking past me.

 

And so I found myself, lurching forward with a sudden burst of future regret.   My unathletic body rumbled into a slightly higher gear.   With more effort than I should have needed, I pulled back alongside Mom.  She was unfazed by my absence.  She hadn’t even paused her never-ending list of things that needed to be fixed in our apartment.

 

I panted from my exertion while Mom continued her monologue.  I’d never had the capacity to run, but Mom was different.  She used to have a pretty decent gym habit.  But that was eight years ago, before the divorce.  Nowadays, she wasn't any more run-ready than I was.  Still, she was managing to make me look bad. 

 

It hadn't been easy to squeeze the walk in.  For me, weekends were a disorganized blur of homework, sleeping, and occasionally seeing my friends.  I had actually welcomed 

 a little extra structure in my days.  But for Mom, with her seven-day work schedule, finding time was non-trivial.  Ultimately, we opted for the early morning walk.

 

We felt virtuous, getting out there and exercising.  We talked non-stop, from when we left the house until we cruised into Starbucks.  That was, roughly two hours more than we had spoken to each other in the entire previous week.  That morning, we talked about everything.  Well, almost everything.

 

We talked about school.  We talked about work.  We talked about the math team.  We talked about her book club.  I’d have been happy to talk about girls, but I had nothing to talk about.  Mom did talk about boys.  At first, that made me uncomfortable.  But she didn’t have anything to talk about either, so I relaxed into that conversation, too.  

 

“These website have sent me a lot of Mr. Wrongs,” she admitted.  “But I’m starting to imagine what the apartment will feel like when you leave.”

 

Truth be told, I had mixed emotions when it came to Mom's romantic life.  When I first learned that she was looking online, it felt wrong.  I wasn’t ready to make room for someone new.  But Mom was right.  When I graduated from high school, I intended to get out of Cambridge.  I guess that I’d never thought about what that meant for her.

 

I could imagine Mom saying ‘I can't believe it's been eight years since your father left.’  But I could.  For me, it was harder to believe that he’d ever been there.  It's not like he’d been so big into parenthood when he lived with us.  And, while I remembered plenty from before I was eight, I seem to have blotted out those pieces that involved him.  He was, effectively, a non-entity for me.

 

Before I came along, my parents had been quite the power couple.  Dad created financial packages and Mom was an up-and-coming accountant with a consulting firm.  While they toiled away, I was left with the nanny.  But when I was eight, it was Dad who left with the nanny.  And the savings accounts.  And the cash from getting a secret second mortgage on the house.  In Mom’s name.

 

Mom hired some lawyers and a private investigator.  But her cash ran out fast.  The banks did what they could for her, but it wasn’t enough.  Mom was left with nothing but a freakish, introverted eight-year old and her crumbling credit rating.  She dialed back her career so that she could care for me.  Back in those days, we muddled along.

 

But on this day, we turned left, onto Mass Ave.  The Starbucks was only a few blocks away.  We were in the homestretch.  Until this moment, I hadn’t really believed that I was going to be able to finish.  But now the shortest route to bed was to complete the course.  Via Starbucks.  I egged on my aching legs and leaned into the home stretch.

 

When we arrived, our “thank God” phones instantly leapt into our hands.  Struck by the invasion, I looked around at the cafe's only other customer. Our eyes met briefly, and she turned back to her laptop.  After the disorienting interruption, I opened my Twitter app, and joined Mom at the counter.

 

After two hours of talking, I was in major need of some pure introversion time.  To be honest, so was Mom.  We ordered our usual -- a cappuccino for her and a chai latte for me.  After picking them up, we grabbed a table.  With only one taken, we had our pick.

 

As we sat down with our drinks, I looked over to see Mom’s hand poised over her phone.  Her lips were pursed in a frown.  I knew what that meant.  She was looking at a guy.  While trying not to notice which way she’d swipe, some movement caught my eye.  I looked up and locked eyes with the girl in the corner.

 

I’m sure that I had never seen her before.  I couldn’t imagine why she was looking at me.  But I was definitely the object of her laser-focused attention.

 

She had straight, dark, shoulder-length hair.  Behind her thick, rimless glasses, her dark eyes twinkled with intense merriment.  If I had to guess, I would have said that she was older than me.  But she was so small, it was hard to tell.  She was giving me a knowing smirk, like she had caught me doing something.  I couldn’t guess what.  I did a quick survey of my shirt: no stains, no holes.  When I looked back up, she was pretending to be absorbed in her work.  I couldn’t escape the feeling that she still had one eye out for me.  But maybe I’d imagined the whole thing.  I wasn’t the type to get noticed.

 

Alas, I did get noticed.  By Mom.

 

“Is Kenneth giving you a hard time?” she asked, picking up on my discomfort, if not on its source.

 

Actually, as suspects went, Kenneth was a terrible guess.  I couldn’t imagine Kenneth giving anyone a hard time.  That just wasn’t in his nature.  But I knew who Mom meant.  She meant Dro.  Dro, Kenneth, Gers and I had our own little Twitter conversation running 24/7.  By using our special hashtag (#qDaBoyz), we could each follow the semi-private stream.  As Mom might have guessed, if she’d understood my friends better, Dro had already managed to roll out of bed and give me some grief:

 

=================================

**Alejandro Rodriguez

@DrDroDoctor

 

How was the date @IntegralRick? 

 

#qDaBoyz

=================================

 

“Yeah, he wants to know how our date went,” I answered, with an embarrassed chuckle.  The corner of Mom’s mouth turned up.  Mom spoke English well, but sarcasm was her native tongue.  I knew that from having spent too much time on the receiving end.  Today, she was using it in my defence.  I was kind of liking it.

 

“Ask him about a double date.  I’m super excited to see the new Lincoln movie when it comes out,” she responded.  “And I’d be happy to drive.”

 

Although she was still confusing Kenneth and Dro, I couldn’t help but let out a guffaw.

 

Dro was dateless.  Her comment highlighted his quixotic campaign to pursue girls, like Jenny, that were miles out of his reach.  But Kenneth, who was going steady with Linda, had just failed his driving test.  Mom’s oddly unleashed stone had somehow hit two birds.

 

As quickly as my laugh came, I tried to contain it.  I hated my laugh.  It made me feel self-conscious.  Inexplicably, my eyes darted back to the creepy girl across the cafe.  By now, she truly wasn’t paying attention.  She had her back to me, bending over to fish something out of her empty, purple backpack.  I’d always liked the color purple.

 

But the backpack didn’t hold my attention for long.  When I catch a girl bending over out of the corner of my eye, my head starts to move of its own volition.  I couldn’t help looking.  I feel terrible when this happens, but it’s kind of involuntary.  I try to forgive myself and someday I might.  But she had her back turned.  What harm could there be in taking in the view?

 

She was cute.  I'd give her that.  I let my eyes sweep down, following her dark pants, to her black hoes, to her funny looking pink heels.  I’m no expert, but I’d guess something on the order of one and a half inches.  When my eyes decided to wander back up her legs, I was in for a shock.  

 

Without removing the object of my admiration, she had craned her neck around so that she could catch me looking.  She was wearing that same damned, smug smirk.  And now she really had caught me.  Like she had known she would catch me, from the moment I walked in.

 

I tore my eyes away from her backside and directed them pointedly back to my phone.  Heat rose to my face as I tried to get my shaky fingers to relay Mom’s snark.  In my guilt induced confusion, I fired in the wrong direction.  

 

=================================

**Rick Smith

@IntegralRick

 

Mom says happy to double date, @KenTheFinalFrontier.  

She'll bring the wheels.

 

#qDaBoyz

=================================

 

As I sent the tweet, a phone buzzed on the other side of the cafe.  My eyes swept up and met hers again.  Now sitting, she gave me another little smile, then looked back at her phone.  I breathed in and saw that Kenneth had replied.

 

Kenneth, unflappable and always laid back, responded in his usual style.

 

=================================

**Kenneth Sherr

@KenTheFinalFrontier

 

That’s awesome!  

I’ll find out when’s good for @BaselineBabe

 

#qDaBoyz

=================================

 

I felt terrible -- Kenneth was the last guy who deserved ragging.  Worse, Dro immediately joined the pile-on.

 

=================================

**Alejandro Rodriguez

@DrDroDoctor

 

Kenneth catching ketchup!!!

#qDaBoyz

=================================

 

You probably don't speak Droish.  To be honest, I struggled with it myself.  I think that he was praising my mockery of Kenneth, but I didn’t really know.  Dro made up his own slang, and I was never sure what he meant.  While I was puzzling through Dro’s tweet, Mom cut in.

 

“Rick, honey.  I have to powder my nose and then we should really go.  You can take your drink with you.”

 

I grunted noncommittally as she got up and walked away from the table.  I looked back at my dormant screen, hoping for someone to continue the conversation.  But nobody was tweeting anything at this point.  Still, I hoped that gluing my eyes to the phone would end the weird thing I had going with that spooky girl.  It didn't.

 

I felt her presence before I saw her. 

 

She was right in front of me, standing behind Mom’s empty seat.  She wasn’t looming.   Not exactly.  Even in the heels, I couldn’t believe that she cracked five feet.  Now that I could see her up close, I could tell that she was older than me.  She was looking down at me with an all-knowing, confident smile.  Even in its smugness there was something serene about that smile.  That only made it worse. 

 

I squirmed in my seat.  I desperately wanted to burrow out of harm's way.  By now I was blushing so hard that I thought I would be sick.  Why could she possibly have come over, if not to confront me?  My brain ached as it ran through the possibilities.   Was she going to call me a loser?  Was she going to mock me in front of the baristas?  Was she going to accuse me of being a pervert?  I was only looking for one second. How much of a crime had I committed?

 

Without saying anything, she spun Mom’s seat around and planted herself on it.  It was one neat, little motion.  It only made me feel more self-conscious about stupid, young me and sophisticated, impressive her.  She straddled the chair with her face leaning towards me.  Her posture magnified my need for fight-or-flight.

 

“Rick Smith,” she said.  It wasn’t a question.

 

“Uh.  Do I know you?” I stammered out.

 

“No.  I guess you don’t.”  Her head cocked gently to the left, causing her hair to swing provocatively from side to side.  She was still smiling, but there was something new in her expression.  It was like… compassion?  Or empathy?  Or maybe even joy hiding behind her smugness?  That only made me more flustered.

 

“So… How do you know me?” I asked.