Elijah stomped the brakes again and stalled the car to keep from hitting a gorilla. The remnants of the parade flowed around them, and Elijah caught scraps of strangers’ thoughts that he didn’t want and couldn’t use: a recipe for guacamole, the current score of the Rockies–Red Sox game. He put the car in gear, restarted it, and touched his fingers to his aching head. “Your dad could be number one, but he doesn’t want to attract too much attention. People would blackmail him, kidnap him, kill him. And you. He’s been hiding in plain sight.”
In plain sight of everyone including Holly. She took it as a personal slap in the face, and her anger stirred. Then she cocked her head at Elijah. “What about your mom?”
They passed under the single traffic light and reached the edge of town—a good thing, because Elijah was growing impatient with pedestrians wandering into the path of the car. “My mom doesn’t have power,” he said, but come to think of it, he wasn’t so sure. This was one of the things he’d been trying to puzzle through, and Holly’s thoughts kept interrupting him.
Holly’s flamboyant dad was the more obvious trickster. Yet Elijah’s mom was the head dealer at the casino. The ability to read minds would come in handy for a job like that. And she’d conveniently taken a vacation just when his Mentafixol was cut off. She hadn’t been around for the past few days, so he couldn’t read her mind and discover all her secrets.
“Am I getting this wrong?” Holly’s voice interrupted his logic again. “You’re not mad at your mom.”
“My dad’s dead,” he said. “It’s always been just me and her. I guess she did what she had to do.”
“My God, Elijah, we’re not saying she worked late at the casino some nights. We’re saying she took your power away from you for seven years. She drugged you and told you that you were mentally ill. She might as well have tied you up in the basement. Get mad! Wake the hell up!”
She shoved his shoulder—not with her hand but with her mind—hard enough that he momentarily lost his grip on the steering wheel, and the Pontiac veered to the center of the road. He stomped the brake. The car screeched to a stop. The engine was dead.
As red dust billowed around them, he glared at her, surprising himself with the force of his anger. “Don’t. Do. That!” he shouted.
She stared wide-eyed at him, frightened at how dangerous he looked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Then you have to learn to control it!”
“Me!” she squealed, her fear turning back to anger. “You’ve been tromping through my mind twenty-four/seven!”
Turning away from her, he took a calming breath through his nose and started the engine again. “I saw an overlook on the drive in. Let’s stop there and we’ll talk.”
That meant they would have to drive through the tunnel. Holly closed her eyes, but the warmth of the sun cut off sharply. Her skin chilled, and the noise of the motor echoed weirdly around them. She sensed the whole weight of the mountain on top of her.
Feeling everything she felt, Elijah gripped the steering wheel and held his breath until they emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the mountain. The darkness of her thoughts didn’t relent. He found himself racing to the scenic overlook. He pulled into the empty parking lot, stopped the car with a jerk, snagged the box of Mentafixol, and leaped out, away from her, out of her thoughts. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief.
He led the way up a path between red boulders. Beyond a row of weathered wooden picnic tables, the ground ended in a cliff. He stood as near the edge as he dared and looked way over into the canyon surrounded on all sides by rugged mountains. He couldn’t see the bottom.
Darkness approached him from behind. He turned to watch Holly follow in his steps up the path, beautiful as ever, a faraway look in her eyes the only sign that her world as she knew it had ended. She seated herself on a boulder with her long legs folded gracefully to one side, ankles crossed, very close to the edge of the cliff.
He backed away and seated himself about fifteen feet from her, just out of range of her thoughts.
And suddenly he felt like himself again. Her anger lifted from his shoulders. She was just his beautiful friend, in a world of trouble. He placed the box of Mentafixol on the rock beside him—the land side, where it was safer, not the cliff side, where he might accidentally kick it into the abyss. Not yet.
“It could still be a joint hallucination,” he called to her.
“They would have come after us,” Holly said. “If we really had MAD and we were dangerous when we ran out of Mentafixol, they would have kept a closer eye on us. They would have known you were headed here to get some. They would have called the police to lie in wait for us and make sure we got drugged up. You haven’t heard the thoughts of anyone lying in wait for us, have you?”
“No, but you’re saying two different things. If the police were here, we would be insane. If I heard their thoughts, I wouldn’t be insane.”
“You’re not,” she said. “Because of Kaylee. That’s what convinced me. She’s been up here to oversee the Mentafixol as part of her security job with the casino. That’s why my parents sent me to live with her, too. I thought I’d gained my freedom, but they were still watching me. It all comes back to the casino.”
“So, what are we saying?” He opened the box and took out one of four plastic bottles. He peeled the lid off the bottle and tipped the contents into his hand. Golden pills poured out and spilled over each other. He grabbed a handful and threw them full force off the cliff. They caught the setting sunlight as they fell, each one a potential shining moment of his high school and college years and Holly’s, thrown away under the heavy influence of a drug and their parents and the machinations of some mysterious power struggle at the casino that they didn’t understand. He watched the glinting pills bounce against the rocks and fall until they disappeared into the canyon below.
He turned back to her. “Are we ready to get rid of all of these? Are we sure?”
“I don’t want to live this way.” The bitterness in her voice surprised him, and now he wondered what she’d been thinking in the two minutes he’d sat beyond range of her. He’d stayed in the kitchen too long during a TV commercial break, and now he’d missed a major plot point in the show. He rose and shifted closer to her again, into her thoughts.