Odds & Ends Read online

  “Not with my ears.”

  “But . . . in your mind?” Cookie felt a chill run down her spine.

  Martina looked at her with bright blue eyes. “Well, yes. Wasn’t that your intention when you thought to me?”

  “Yes, of course, I just didn’t know if it would work.” Cookie leaned against a tree.

  “It worked.”

  “I can see that.” Cookie thought a moment.

  “Yes,” Martina responded. “I can hear you now, too.”

  “What was I thinking?”

  “Can you not remember? You just thought it.”

  “Martina!”

  “You were telling me to let you know if I could hear you. And now you’re annoyed with me.”

  Cookie gasped. “I didn’t even mean for you to hear that!”

  “I didn’t, you just seem annoyed. Are you worried about people being able to hear what you’re thinking?”

  Cookie was. She nodded.

  Martina went back to drawing in her sketchbook. “I wouldn’t worry about that. I don’t think people can hear you unless you want to be heard.” She looked up. “But try not to think anything terrible, just in case.”

  “Like what???”

  “I don’t know. Bad things. Murder. Stealing.”

  “Getting into a car that doesn’t belong to us with an unlicensed underage driver and crashing it into a bunch of stuff?”

  “Right. That sort of thing.”

  “HOW CAN I NOT BE THINKING ABOUT THAT SORT OF THING WHEN IT JUST HAPPENED?” Cookie exploded. “HOW CAN YOU BE SO CALM ABOUT ALL OF THIS?”

  Martina smiled at Cookie. “Hey, I totally didn’t hear you thinking that.”

  Cookie paused. “Really?”

  “Really!” Martina said. “I just heard you yelling it. I think people can only hear your thoughts if you want them to. If you’re giving directions, like when you wanted to meet me here, then people can get it. Just like you can hear when other people are thinking about directions.” She put her sketchbook into her backpack and stood up. “Do you want to practice?”

  Cookie looked at Martina. Let’s practice.

  For the next hour they worked on honing Cookie’s new ability. Cookie would think something to Martina, and Martina would let her know if she’d heard her.

  Pick up that rock would result in Martina picking up a rock and proudly presenting it to Cookie. Clap your hands, Cookie would think, and Martina would give her a short round of applause. Martina heard Cookie think Climb that tree, but refused. “I’m wearing a skirt,” she explained.

  “Okay, so you can hear me, but I can’t control you.”

  Martina looked slightly disturbed. “Would you want to?”

  “No!” Cookie said. “Well, I wouldn’t want to control you.”

  “But maybe you’d want to control someone else?”

  “I could command Jay to stop making gross comments about the future biracial babies he’s convinced we’re going to have,” Cookie muttered.

  “Why would you need to do that when you could just explain to him why that’s not all right?” Martina asked.

  Cookie looked at her. Martina Saltis had a way of making everything seem so much simpler and at the same time preposterously impossible.

  You didn’t just tell people how to act; they should already know. Was Cookie supposed to be responsible for how other people thought and behaved? If she had the power to make them not act like fools, maybe she would use it, but talking to someone was not a power. It was work, and as far as Cookie was concerned it was not her job to be the Friendly Brown Person in Muellersville who kindly educated everyone on what was and wasn’t okay to say. People should care enough to figure it out for themselves.

  Of course, Cookie knew that they wouldn’t. Why would people change the way they acted if no one had any objections? But if Cookie could make them stop without having to say a word . . . now, that would be something.

  She could make Jay stop giving his “compliments.” She could force Sam Stoltzfus to never make monkey noises at her ever again. Or any noises! She could make sure that Emma Lee stayed away from Addison and Claire . . .

  “Are you trying to think something at me right now?” Martina asked. “Because I’m not hearing anything.”

  “Nothing . . . I wasn’t thinking any directions,” Cookie said. “How far do you think my thoughts go?”

  “You called me out of my house.”

  “But I was practically standing outside your window. Let’s see how far we can go.”

  They spent another hour testing the limits of Cookie’s range. Martina went a little ways down the footpath that ran through the woods, and then farther, and farther, until Cookie could no longer see her, and then farther still until she could hardly hear Martina yelling her own thoughts. She jogged through the woods to meet up with Martina and was surprised by how far the blue—brown—gray-eyed girl had gone.

  “Wow,” Cookie said. “We’re almost at the school.”

  “Do you think you can think farther?”

  Let’s try.

  Farshad needed air. He’d just spoken with his uncle in Michigan and knew that if he had to talk to one more relative he was going to get rude. He put on his running clothes and told his mom that he was heading out.

  “But I was just about to call Manoosh . . .” Farshad heard her say as he closed the door behind him.

  I should go to the woods, he thought. Usually he liked running on even sidewalks, but it was as though the woods were calling to him, somehow. And I should probably pick up some ice cream on the way. And spoons.

  What?

  That was ridiculous. He wasn’t about to go jogging with ice cream and spoons. And he wasn’t even hungry.

  I should get pistachio.

  Farshad stopped, confused for a moment, and then concentrated on how to plunge a toilet before heading to the forest behind the school. Martina looked very pleased to see him; Cookie, not quite so much.

  “Was that necessary?” she snapped at him.

  “Did you use your powers to try to make me buy you ice cream?” Farshad snapped back.

  “It was an experiment. I had to see if it worked.”

  “So I experimented back.”

  “Always with the toilets, though. What’s wrong with you?” Cookie crossed her arms.

  “Why are we talking about ice cream and toilets?” Martina asked.

  “Yes, why are we talking about ice cream and toilets?” Jay and Nick came down the path, holding hands. It reminded Farshad of visiting Iran, where seeing men walking hand and hand down the street was no big deal; men there did it all the time. If you were friends with somebody, holding their hand was not weird. Farshad felt a rush of emotion that he couldn’t quite define; a strange sort of longing. He looked at Martina, whose eyes turned a deep, alarming blue. She looked away from him to Cookie.

  “Did you call them as well?”

  Cookie looked confused. “No, I didn’t. Or, at least, I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t thinking about them at all.”

  “Now, now,” Jay said, bouncing up to Cookie with a gleam in his eye, “let’s not pretend that you aren’t thinking about me pretty much all the time. Now, why are we talking about ice cream and toilets?”

  Farshad looked at Cookie. “She was able to call to me. With her thoughts.”

  Nick gaped. “Really?”

  Martina nodded. “Really. We’ve been practicing.”

  “Do me! Do me!” Jay yelped.

  Cookie rolled her eyes. “I’m not here to entertain you.”

  “Come on. Come on!” Jay hopped around excitedly. “Daniesha, my steaming mug of sweet cocoa. Please. This is extraordinary. I need to know how this works. You’re—”

  Jay stopped. Farshad could easily tell that Cookie was angry, but Cookie being angry had never stopped Jay from talking before (in fact, in the very short amount of time that Farshad had been hanging out with Jay, he’d never seen him stop talking . . . ever). But here he was with his
mouth still hanging open with unspoken words.

  “Did you hear her?” Martina asked Jay.

  “Yes,” Jay whispered.

  “Did she tell you to stop talking about her skin color?”

  Jay looked at Martina. “Not in those exact words,” he said quietly, and turned back to Cookie. “You know I’m only saying that stuff because I think you’re beautiful, right?”

  Cookie’s eyes narrowed as she looked at Jay.

  “Stop,” he whispered.

  Martina looked worried.

  “Please, stop—” Jay implored. His eyes were filling with tears.

  “Cookie,” Farshad started. He wasn’t clear on what she was projecting into Jay’s brain, but whatever it was, it was hurting him.

  “Daniesha . . .” Jay let go of Nick’s hand and fell to his knees on the forest floor, and for a moment all was silent. It seemed to Farshad that even the bugs and birds had stopped their chittering. A week or two ago he would have dismissed that as his own imagination, but after all he’d seen, anything was possible. “Cookie,” Jay said with two fat tears rolling down his freckled cheeks. “Cookie, I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” Nick said firmly, stepping in between Cookie and Jay. “That’s enough.”

  “It’s okay,” Jay said from behind him.

  “It’s not okay. We don’t use our powers to hurt people.”

  “Since when?” Farshad asked.

  “Since . . . since we’re not supervillains?” Nick looked at Farshad. “I mean, we never had a meeting about it or anything, but I kind of assumed that it went without saying that we’re not, you know, evil?”

  “Maybe we should talk about it,” Martina said.

  “Wait, what?” Nick looked shocked. “What’s there to talk about?”

  Farshad took a step toward him. “What isn’t there to talk about? This whole time we’ve just been running from one thing to another, trying to figure out what’s happening to us, and in the meantime Cookie’s powers are clearly getting stronger, and that’s probably going to be happening to all of us.” He looked at his thumbs. They seemed like normal thumbs, but ever since the accident Farshad had been hyperaware of their power. He could use them to do whatever he wanted; he could use them to bust down doors and destroy cars and probably stop bullets (if the bullet hit one of his thumbs, which seemed unlikely, but still, he probably could stop a bullet if the shooter was an exceptionally excellent marksman and was aiming directly for them).

  Farshad looked at the group. If Cookie was now able to project directions into people’s minds, what would Nick be able to do? Teleport farther? Or maybe to the right? And what about Martina? The exact nature of her power wasn’t really clear, but if she could change her eye color would she eventually be able to change other things about her appearance? Could she make herself look like a completely different person?

  And what about him? What if the super strength spread to more than just his thumbs? Farshad imagined himself ripping one of the nearby trees out of the earth and hurling it. He could stop traffic, start avalanches—if the strength spread beyond his thumbs there’s no telling what he might be able to accomplish.

  “There are no rules for what is happening to us,” he said.

  “Well,” Nick spluttered, blinking out of sight and reappearing four inches to the left, “there should be!” He rushed back over to where Jay was still on his knees and grabbed his hand. “Look what she did to Jay!”

  “Really, Nick,” Jay said quietly, “I’m fine.”

  Farshad looked over at Cookie, who had slumped against a tree. Whatever she’d done to Jay had clearly taken something out of her. “What did you do to him?” he asked her.

  “Nothing,” she whispered.

  “Clearly you did something!” Nick blurted, helping Jay up. “Look at him!”

  “Good sir,” Jay said, “I am not an invalid.”

  “Whatever you did to him,” Farshad said, taking a ginger step toward Cookie, “could you do it again?”

  “Why?” Nick asked, getting more frustrated. “Why would she want to do”—he looked at Jay, who was looking a little shaky on his feet—“this?”

  “It’s not ‘why would she hurt people,’” Martina said in her calm, slightly detached Martina way, “Farshad just wants to know if she could.”

  “Clearly she can!” Nick had his arm around Jay now, and Jay looked frail and small next to his much larger friend. “And she shouldn’t!”

  “But what if she needs to?” Farshad snapped. “What if any of us needs to use our powers to protect ourselves? We’ve done it before. I don’t remember anyone having any objections to me using my thumbs to lock the Auxano goons in their own building.”

  “Plus,” he continued, “the other kids who got the formula are using it to gain an unfair academic advantage. What’s to stop us from using our powers to get ahead?”

  “There’s ‘getting ahead’ and there’s hurting people,” Nick said angrily. “The kids who did well on the exam weren’t hurting anyone. Cookie just hurt Jay. That had nothing to do with getting ahead.”

  “Don’t be naïve,” Farshad snarled. “By using the formula to ‘get ahead’ Izaak and his idiot friends hurt my chances to become valedictorian through hard work. Nobody is innocent here.”

  “Are you seriously trying to tell me that getting good grades is the same as . . . whatever she just did to Jay?” Nick looked aghast.

  “You just don’t understand because you’ve never tried to get good grades,” Farshad snapped. “Some of us have worked really hard, and now it doesn’t matter because all that hard work has been replaced with the good luck that some rich white kids had to have been born into families that are willing to give them experimental formulas to make them smart!” He found that he was shouting.

  “So, what, we’re supposed to be as bad as them?” Nick asked. “Just because they’re cheating doesn’t mean we have to turn our backs on basic human decency.”

  “That’s pretty easy for you to say,” Farshad said. “Have you ever been called ‘Terror Boy’?”

  “No . . .”

  “He’s been called fat,” Martina chimed in.

  “Hey,” Nick said, hurt.

  “Well, you have,” Martina said matter-of-factly.

  “Fine, but that doesn’t give me the right to hurt anyone else,” Nick said. “Why are we even talking about this? Why am I crazy to think that we should use our powers for good and not evil? Have you never read a comic book?”

  He didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand, Farshad thought, what it was like to be the only Iranian-American in the school and to be tormented every single day because of where his parents were from and the foreignness of his name and the brownness of his skin. He didn’t understand what it was like to have the one thing—ONE THING—that he did irrefutably better than anyone else taken away from him. Farshad had always had a plan—get good grades, get out of Muellersville, never come back—and now all that he’d worked for was basically meaningless because it could be bottled and sold in a formula. And now he wasn’t supposed to use his superstrength in any way he pleased?

  “Whatever,” Farshad said, carefully putting his earbuds in and turning on the music. “I don’t have time to be lectured.” He jogged back down the path, out of the woods, and away from yet another thing in Muellersville that he could do without.

  Cookie watched the whole exchange between Farshad and Nick with a strange feeling of detachment, as if she were watching a television show. They were talking about her but no one was talking to her, a development that would have normally been irritating, but for once she was grateful to be part of the background.

  And then she looked at Jay and she felt terrible. And also powerful.

  She hadn’t meant to hurt him. Or had she? It was difficult to tell. She had definitely wanted for him to shut up, true, and she wanted him to know what it felt like to be constantly reminded of how she wasn’t like the other kids in Muellersville.

 
STOP IT, she’d thought at him in anger.

  STOP IT RIGHT NOW, YOU’RE HURTING ME, she’d thought, and then she’d felt a surge of power as she watched Jay’s eyes widen as her thoughts seeped into his brain. Cookie knew all too well exactly how unnerving it was to be forced into hearing the unwanted thoughts of others.

  She should have stopped there, but making Jay Carpenter realize how gross his “compliments” on her skin and hair were was giving Cookie a feeling of intense power and control. She wanted to show him more, to let him know exactly how they made her feel. So she thought at him.

  She thought at him about the time her mother took her to a playground when they’d first moved to Muellersville, and how she’d been playing with another girl and that girl’s mother had snapped, “Get away from her! We don’t talk to those people!”

  She thought at him about the time that George introduced her and her mother to his own sister, and how she’d kept touching Cookie’s hair and saying, “It’s softer than I thought it would be!”

  She thought at him about all the times one of the Farm Kids made monkey noises at her.

  She thought at him about how Addison and Claire would always tell her how she was so lucky to be so unique and exotic.

  She thought at him about how many times people were surprised that her mother worked at a prestigious place like Auxano.

  And as she thought these things directly to Jay, more memories surfaced, until she felt like she was hurling her thoughts directly into his brain; every insult, every side-eye given by a shopkeeper, every time her intelligence was questioned—she put it all into Jay’s head, and watched as the reality of her life as the only black girl in Deborah Read Middle School sank in. She kept hurling painful thought after painful thought, even after he’d asked her to stop, even after he dropped to his knees . . . If Nick hadn’t stopped her, she might have kept going until Jay felt every last ounce of pain that his seemingly innocent little comments caused her.