VIII: In Which They Learn About Each Other

“I’d like to begin by saying that most of you won’t believe what I have to say, and that’s okay.  I just need to tell someone.  I’ve been dealing with my ‘gift’ alone for a long time and it’s driving me mad.  Or maybe I already am.”  Colin hesitated, looking around at the group gathered at his table, gauging the doubt in their faces.

“I know that feeling.” The oldest woman, Selena, said with a nod of her head.  Surprisingly, half the table was nodding along with her, knowing commiseration painted on their faces.

“What kind of gift do you have, friend?”  Ronaldo asked, looking genuinely concerned.

Colin’s hesitation seemed to have melted away.  “I see a kind of … aura over some people’s heads.”

“What kind of people?”  Alex asked when Colin paused.  “What kind of aura?” Ronaldo asked at the same time.

“I see a ‘glow’ over the heads of the sexually inexperienced.” Colin blurted, waiting for the dismissive laughter he always heard every time he rehearsed this scenario in his head.

It didn’t come.

“Like, virgins?”  Xander asked in the silence.

“Virginity’s not exactly a black and white thing,”  Colin replied. “But, for simplicity’s sake, yes.  It took me a few years to piece together why some people have halos and others don’t.  They always disappeared  around the same time people in my class were talking about fooling around with someone for the first time.”

“Does anybody here have a ‘halo’?” Steve grinned impishly.

“Xander and I can read each other’s minds!”  Alex blurted before Colin could answer.

All eyes turned to her. All eyes but Xander’s which had rolled toward the ceiling.

“Like real telepathy, not just knowing what the other is probably thinking from being so close, similar brain structure and reading body language like most twins, actual thought-sharing.”  Alex’s voice rose in pitch slightly and her words came out faster as she spoke.

“For real?  That’s so cool!”  Selena said as Alex took a couple of short breaths.

“Oh my god, whisper something in my ear and I’ll send it to him!”  Alex was almost bouncing in her seat.  Smiling indulgently at his sister, Xander closed his eyes and covered his ears.

Selena placed her lips near Alex’s ear and cupped her hand around them.  Xander opened his eyes and looked at her, his face creased in confusion.  “The hell is a ‘Purple monkey dishwasher’?”

“Wow!” Her eyes widened, impressed.

“We can even feel what each other feels most of the time, like when Xander bumped his leg under the table, I felt it in my knee!”

“That must make maturbation awkward.” Steve laughed.

Xander fixed him with a dead glare.  “You have no clue.”

“What about you, Selena?”  Alex asked her, still a little breathless.  Selena’s smile dropped a bit.

“Well, it does get awkward sometimes, but…  Oh, my gift!  You’re asking about my gift!”  Her eyes lit back up.  “I have dreams.  Really vivid dreams, ever since I was little.  I started keeping a dream journal about them.  Then in Junior High, I was researching a paper for a class and came across an article in an old newspaper on microfiche. The article was about what happened in one of my dreams!  This girl had murdered her whole family back in the sixties and they locked her up in Kanetown State Mental Institution until she died.  I got out my old journals and started looking into things.  I found quite a few articles that matched up.  Somehow I’ve been dreaming about real events that actually happened in the past.”

Her face guarded, Selena looked around the table, seeming to challenge anyone to mock her.  Everyone was nodding understandingly instead.  Only Sam looked confused.

“Umm, what are micro-fish?  Why would someone kill their family over fish?”  Priceless innocent confusion covered Sam’s face, sparking laughter from everyone at the table.

“Micro-fiche!”  Colin laughed, trying to catch his breath.  “It’s film they stored old newspapers on before the internet.”

“Oh!  That makes a lot more sense.”  This prompted a new wave of laughter which Sam joined in.

“So, what’ve you got, kiddo?”  Xander asked him.

“First off, don’t call me that.  I may be the youngest one here, but I’m not some little kid.”  Sam challenged.

“Sorry, man I didn’t mean it like that.  So what have you got, Sam?”  Xander said apologetically.

“I’ve got a monster under my bed.”  Sam said meekly.

Several people in the coffeehouse looked up and over at them as they all burst into uproarious laughter, Sam laughing the loudest.  “I’m serious, though.  Well, sometimes it’s in my closet.”

“What’s it look like?”  Steve asked when the new wave of laughter died down.  His voice was uncharacteristically serious.

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen it.”  Sam’s face was sober.

“How do you know it’s a monster?  What does it do?”  Jane asked.

“It throws anything I put under my bed into the middle if the floor, opens my closet door a crack, making the hinges creak, even when I oil them, shakes the bed sometimes.  Mostly, though it just gibbers or moans to itself late at night.”

“How the f**k do you sleep?  I’d be noping the f**k out of there.”  Steve looked at him with new respect.

“It’s been there since i was a little kid.  I sorta … got used to it?”  Sam shrugged.

“How do you get used to that?”  Steve’s eyes were wide, interested.

“Oh, come on.  Lot’s of little kids think there are monsters under their beds.  Their parents tell them nothing’s there, it won’t hurt them, that kind of thing.  No matter how scared you are, you have to sleep eventually.  It never hurt me or did anything really threatening, little kids can adapt to a lot of things older people would find intolerable.”  Sam spread his hands in front of him in a ‘what’re you gonna do’ gesture.

The face of the freckled girl with no halo popped into Colin’s mind briefly, but he pushed it away.  He drained his coffee cup and set it down.

“Stockholm Syndrome.  Got it.”  Steve said.

Jane immediately stood up.  “Small caramel misto.”  She said, turning to Colin.  “I’ll get it for you and use my discount.”

“Here, let me give you some money.”  He reached for his wallet.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ve got you.”  She said, waving her hand toward him and walking away.  He pulled two dollars out of his wallet and tucked them under the edge of his laptop, planning to put them in the tip jar when they all left.

“You must come here a lot.”  Selena said, smiling.

“That’s true, but that isn’t my usual order.  I don’t think I consciously knew that’s what I wanted until she said it.”  Colin’s brow wrinkled.  “The same kind of thing happened when I first came in.  She said she’d explain after three.  Maybe it’s part of whatever her gift is.”

While Jane was up, Sam talked about looking under the bed for the monster after it tossed something out - in full daylight, of course, with his parents nearby in their room.  The times he had, it would suddenly be in the closet and vice-versa.  If he checked while placing himself between the two places, he could hear and feel it crawling or slithering through the floor or the wall.

“Why didn’t you have someone look in one while you looked in the other?”  Alex asked.

“By the time I had worked up the nerve to actually look, I was too old to ask anybody to help me with it.  People humor you when you’re little, they send you to therapy when you’re older.”

A weird type of dual image of Sam had formed in Colin’s mind and he tried hard to reconcile it.  As a high-school student (a group he was having increasing trouble relating to as he got older) it was easy to think of him as an immature kid; especially in light of his paranormal connection.  Yet, possibly having grown up knowing people were dismissive of his problems and fears and he had to face them alone, Sam had developed some very mature ways of seeing the world.

“Nope, moved the whole bed and all the furniture into the hall several times to shampoo the carpet during mom’s annual spring-cleaning binges.”  Sam was saying.  “Floor’s solid, carpet secure, no loose baseboards or holes in the wall, either.  Same goes for the closet, but since the floor’s hardwood in there we never did both at the same time.  It might not have liked that very much.”

“What’d I miss?” Jane said as she handed Colin his new drink and sat back down at the table.

“Sam’s monster doesn’t show itself, gotta keep up that aloof, mysterious image that makes all the kids swoon with terror.”  Steve said.

“Your turn.”  Sam said with a kind of relieved smile, the kind of smile Colin imagined he had on his face earlier; one that said he was relieved to have finally shared his secret with people who didn’t dismiss him as crazy, but was ready to change focus away from it for awhile.

“Okay, but it’s going to seem really lame.”  She scratched below her left ear with her right hand.  “I know what drinks people are going to order before they tell me.”  Shrugging, she brought her elbows in close to her body.  “That’s it.”

“Mind reading?  Like Alex and Xander?”  Colin asked.

“No, I don’t think so.  Some people change their mind a few times before they settle on something, but they always end up choosing what I already knew they would.”

“Premonition, then.  Like glimpsing the future?”  Sam asked.

“Maybe.”  Jane’s voice was very noncommittal.  “But it’s only drink orders.  If I was seeing the future, you’d think I’d see something else every once in awhile, like knowing a car was going to swerve into my lane before it almost hits me.”

“I guess that must make your job easier, though.”  Selena said.

“It doesn’t, actually.  That’s what’s fucked up.  It’s so frustrating, it’s painful.  I can only start drinks early for regulars who are getting their usuals, or when people aren’t paying attention, or if I know them well enough that they trust me.”  Jane’s voice burned with frustration.  “If i even move for a cup before somebody finally ‘decides’ what they want and tell me, I get yelled at or ‘corrected’.  So I have to stand and wait.  The worst is when they tell me an order and I know they’re going to change it, and they get impatient when I don’t start right away, so i have to make the wrong order, only for them to stop me when I’m almost done and change the order to what I knew it would be in the first place and I have to pour it all out and start over with a smile on my face.”  Her hands were making short, clipped, forceful movements as she spoke, causing Colin to hope she wouldn’t knock her own drink over.

“Damn.  I never would have thought about that.”  Xander slowly lifted his drink  and took a sip as if truly appreciating it for the first time.

“That just leaves you guys.”  Jane looked at Steve and Ronaldo.  The two men looked hesitantly at her, then at each other, as if waiting to see if the other wanted to go first.

“Ron, you’ve been awfully quiet since the meeting started.”  Colin said, invitingly.

“I’ve just been listening carefully.”  He said.  “I have a pretty extensive library at home and I’m planning on researching my books for stuff that might provide insight on your gifts.  It will only be theorys, mind.”  Ronaldo spread his hands.

“So, you’re a paranormal researcher?”  Alex asked.

“Rather hard to be a warlock without doing research.”  He smiled.

“Hold up.  Twenty minutes ago, I’d have been laughing my a*s off if somebody said that…”  Steve interrupted.

“You were.”  Colin said under his breath, but Steve ignored him.

“But, I’ve seen some s**t, and from what I’ve heard from everybody today, I’m pretty open.  As long as you don’t say anything like:  ‘I’m a level fifteen warlock with maxed out heal spells.’.”

“Warlocks can’t cast Heal.  That’s a Cleric spell.”  Selena admonished.

“Not to worry, I’m not that kind of ‘Warlock’.  Ronaldo laughed.  “And I’m not some kind of ‘Evil Wizard’.  I’m trying to reclaim the word from its negative meanings.  I simply mean that I study the oldest beliefs of many religions and sacred traditions and endeavour to separate the truth or the mystical world from the stuff people added on later to further their own agendas.  I practice a personal system derived from a lot of sources:  Ancient Norse traditions, The Book of Enoch, Christian Apocrypha, The Vedas, Shinto, Buddhism, Indigenous  American beliefs, all kinds of things.  I perform rituals and cast spells based on my studies.”

“Sorry, man.  I wasn’t trying to mock you or anything.  It’s just, we’re all opening up and making ourselves vulnerable and i was expecting at least one person to have just shown up for the lulz to troll us, y’know?  It’s kind of weird that nobody did.”  Steve looked around at everyone.

“Oh, I took care of that.”  Ron assured him.  “Before I came, I warded our gathering against trolls.”  He said it completely deadpan, but a moment later cracked into a wide grin, setting the group back into companionable, comfortable laughter.