Leaving Time: A Novel by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

it happen instead of warning her. When the class gerbil escaped and I had a vision of it running across the principal’s desk, I pushed the thought out of my head until I heard the shrieks coming from the main office.
    I made friends, just like my parents said I would. One was a girl named Maureen, who invited me to her house to play with her Polly Pocket collection and who told me secrets, like that her older brother hid
Playboy
s under his mattress and that her mother stored a shoe box full of cash behind a loose panel in her closet. So you can imagine how I felt the day that Maureen and I were on the playground swings and she challenged me to see who could jump off the swings the farthest, and I had a quick flash of her lying on the ground with ambulance lights in the background.
    I wanted to tell her we shouldn’t jump, but I also wanted to keep my best friend, who knew nothing about my Gift. So I stayed silent, and when Maureen counted to three and went sailing through the air, I stayed put on my swing and closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to see her fall with her leg pinned beneath her, snapping clean in two.
    My parents had said that, if I didn’t hide my second sight, I’d get hurt. But it was better that I get hurt than someone else. After that, I promised myself that I’d always speak up if my Gift helped me see something coming, no matter what it cost me.
    In this case, it was Maureen, who called me a freak and started hanging with the popular girls.
    As I got older I got better at figuring out that not everyone who spoke to me was alive. I’d be talking to someone and would, peripherally, see a spirit cross behind. I got used to not paying attention, the same way most of you register the faces of the hundreds of people who cross your path daily, without actually looking at their features. Itold my mother she needed to get her brakes checked before the light went on in the dashboard signaling something was wrong; I congratulated our neighbor on her pregnancy a week before the doctor told her she was expecting. I reported whatever information came to me without editing it or making a judgment call about whether or not I should speak up.
    My Gift, however, was not all-encompassing. When I was twelve, the auto parts dealership my father owned burned to the ground. Two months later, he committed suicide, leaving my mother a rambling apology note, a picture of himself in an evening gown, and a mountain of gambling debts. I hadn’t predicted any of these things, and I cannot tell you how many times since I’ve been asked why not. Let me tell you, no one wants to know the answer to that more than I do. But then again, I can’t guess the Powerball numbers or tell you which stocks to follow. I didn’t know about my father, and years later, I didn’t foresee my mother’s stroke, either. I’m a psychic, not the Wizard of Freaking Oz. I’ve replayed things in my head, wondering if I missed a sign, or if somebody on the other side didn’t get through to me, or if I’d been too distracted by my French homework to notice. But over the years I’ve come to realize that maybe there are things I’m not supposed to know, and besides—I don’t really
want
to see the whole landscape of the future. I mean, if I
could
, what’s the point of living?
    My mother and I resettled in Connecticut, where she got a job as a maid at a hotel and I dressed in black and dabbled in Wicca and survived high school. It was not until college that I started to really celebrate my Gift. I taught myself to read tarot and did readings for my sorority sisters. I subscribed to
Fate
magazine. Instead of my schoolbooks, I read about Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. I wore Guatemalan scarves and gauzy skirts and burned incense in my dorm room. I met another student, Shanae, who was interested in the occult. Unlike me, she couldn’t communicate with those who had passed, but she was an empath and would get sympathy stomachaches every time her