I cannot believe how my life is going to shit. My beautiful car is now a piece of junkyard trash, Dad is having this sexual thing with Sam or Aileen or whoever the hell she is, Mom is heading for the crazy farm, they’re getting divorced—which I can certainly understand from both their points of view—and I’ve become a freak.

I’m a ready-to-go-to-work-for-the-circus freak. Drop down your five bucks and I’ll read your mind. Another five and maybe I can tell you how you’ll die.

Shit to hell!

It’s all my fault. This whole thing is because of me. Mom and Dad wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my wanting to get away. Why did they have to come after me? Why couldn’t they just believe me that I could take care of myself? I was doing just fine until Dad showed up. Now I find out that Sam thinks I’m a brat bitch. All this time she was faking it, pretending like she liked me and was pleased that I had come. She didn’t really want me here. I was just a brat bitch interrupting her life. I may be a brat bitch, but she’s a whore bitch.

I give her the finger and don’t give a shit if my mom is sitting next to me. I want to yell out the window that she’s a whore bitch, but I can’t quite bring myself to go that far.

“Fuck you, Bitch!” Mom growls. I’m shocked because I’ve never heard that kind of language come out of her mouth before. She backs the car from where Sam is leaning on the hood and screaming that we have to talk. She turns to go around and I expect Sam to jump in front again, but she doesn’t. As we go past, almost close enough that I could reach out and touch her, everything in my sight disappears, except for her and an incredible raging storm of crimson and magenta light around her.

“Stop! Stop!” I yell at Mom and fumble for the door handle. Something’s about to happen. I don’t know what it is but I’ve got to get out . . . “Stop!” I have to get out! The car stops as I finally catch the handle and the door flies open.

Then the scream begins.

It’s nothing like I’ve ever heard before, except maybe at a rock concert when Snake Skin tried to hit a frequency and db level combination he claimed could be heard on Mimas, the Death Star moon of Saturn. The sound coming from Sam reminds me of that. Just as I put my hands to my ears it stops, or the pitch is so high that it slipped past the edge of the human range. And then I’m seeing inside her head. I want to stop it. I had decided that I would not look into anyone’s mind ever again, that I’d turn it off as soon as I saw it happening. But I can’t turn this off. It’s as though someone has started a movie and then locked my head in place and my eyes open so that I have no choice but to watch.

Somewhere in the distance Mom is screaming at me to get back into the car, but it’s like she’s on the other side of a thick wall of cotton, her voice overpowered by visions in my head, visions of cats rising out of dark places with huge orange eyes and enormous flashing white teeth with gigantic overbites, the same that I saw while pressed and shaking against Matt’s back; only for some reason this is more fearsome. It’s not as though they’re about to attack and bite my head off. They’re in her mind—her thoughts. No reason to be scared of that.

But the sabre-toothed cats are there, many of them, and they are coming. I also understand that some are actually here already, watching us, and that they will not harm us as long as we do what Samantha demands. They are here at her bidding, summoned by her, the sabre-toothed goddess.

Mom’s hands are on me; pulling me. I push her off over and over again; her screaming words are flat and filtered. I turn my face to her. “Mom! Back off!”

My words do not pass by my vocal cords. I only think them but all of a sudden she is leaving me alone, and she has shut up. The high pitch from Sam has also stopped. She is turned to face me, her arms angled slightly away from her body, fists clenched, eyes glaring with the same angry intensity as her aura. I can feel her, or I feel the essence of her, or the spirit of her. Every nerve ending around every pore begins to tingle until it feels as though my skin is about to turn inside out, until it’s as though we are one.

 

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