Choices by Ann Herendeen Read Free Book Online

behind her desk, she made a slight
movement of her head, switching off the full force of her
crypta
so that we could touch without disturbing our
respective electric fields. She put her arms around me, rocking me
like a mother with an injured child. The simple comfort melted away
any remaining self-discipline I possessed, and I broke into loud
sobs, crying a torrent of tears onto Edwige’s large bosom while she
stroked my hair and murmured soothing sounds. “All the Aranyis are
depraved,” she said. “That one, Dominic, is the worst. I knew he
would be trouble from the beginning.”
    I remembered the strange scene after my
crypta
test, when Edwige and Dominic had faced each other
like combatants squaring off for a duel. Edwige had told Dominic
then not to visit me. I had thought she meant a literal visit,
Dominic traveling to La Sapienza to see me. But perhaps she had
suspected all along that he might “visit” me as he had last
night.
    “Yes,” Edwige said in answer to my unspoken
question. “That’s exactly what I thought. I should have stopped it
after that first time.” It was yet another shock, that Edwige had
known of all those nocturnal conversations. “But I saw how it gave
you confidence,” she defended herself, before pronouncing her own
grim sentence. “I was a fool.”
    Eventually I stopped crying. I sniffed and
wiped my face on my sleeve, while Edwige rolled her eyes and sat
back down at her desk. “It’s not as bad as all that,” she said,
probably sorry to have unloosed this storm by her unthinking
sympathy. “If he tries it again, just use your shields to block him
out. You see,” she added, “these lessons do have practical
applications.”
    But I love him
, I thought.
I
can’t block that out of me
.
    “Love!” Edwige exploded as she read this
thought. “Don’t be such an idiot!” She stood up and came around the
desk again to confront me. It was as if what she had read in my
mind was so ridiculous that she didn’t trust even her powerful gift
to cope, and had to put her face a few inches from mine to get
through to me. “You don’t like being in high school. Then don’t act
like a high-school girl. You’re thirty-five. Act your age.”
    My emotions were unbelievable to Edwige. For
me to be experiencing the intensity of first love as a mature
adult, what people usually feel at fifteen or so, seemed
preposterous. She could not fully comprehend how my mental
abilities had isolated me on Terra, where nobody else was gifted.
Paradoxically, I had been cut off from all real intimacy, as I
received the unfiltered, candid thoughts of other people.
    Since they cannot read other peoples’
thoughts, the ungifted have no reason to believe others can read
theirs, and consider any unkind thoughts to be concealed if they
are unspoken. But at fifteen, it had been devastating for me to
discover what my girlfriends had felt about me, or what my
sixteen-year-old boyfriend had been thinking as we kissed. And this
problem had persisted, preventing any honest, equal relationship
from developing, denying me love and the support of close
friends.
    I had never felt more alone than at this
moment. I had found people like me, had begun to have hope—that
there was a place for me in the universe, that I could be accepted.
Instead, everyone had just now rejected me. And Dominic, the one
person who had given me the comfort of mind and body I had always
desired, had apparently betrayed me. Edwige was telling me to
repudiate him, but I could no more do that than I could gouge out
my eyes—the source of all my trouble, the windows into my brain
that activated my curse of a “gift.”
    Not until I learn the truth
, I
thought.
If she is right, then I will do as she says. If she is
right, it won’t matter anyway, because I will die. With my newfound
love destroyed, with nothing to live for, I will simply
die
.
    Edwige opened her mouth to speak, lost her
train of thought as she took in my misery, and stood in