The lift was busy with patients and hospital staff leaving work and Rosie was stressed. There were elbows close to her face and bad breath coming in bursts. She began to realize that somebody had just farted too as she glared at all the innocent faces around her, trying not to breathe too deeply. When she met her mother’s gaze, they raised their eyebrows at each other.
Rosie felt a scream floating up from her guts towards her mouth like a bubble about to pop.
The lift rumbled down the inside of the hospital building like some missile being lowered into its silo, and she willed it to speed up and reach the ground floor more quickly so she could step out and breathe clean air. It was a sort of test for her to try. The amazing things she had learnt to do in the past few weeks, since just before her diagnosis, like moving things a few centimetres across her bedroom floor and catching glimpses of what people were thinking, had been exciting, but she wanted to do more. However, it was difficult to know how, even with the advice of her grandmother, the only person Rosie had dared tell about what she could do.
The lift kept to its slow, rumbling pace however much she wished for it to go faster. Frustrated, she tried looking into the heads of the people standing beside her, searching for secrets to distract her from the intolerably slow journey. But all she sensed were snippets of things, swirling round her, and she could not tell who was thinking what or which pieces of information belonged to whom. It was like being submerged in some sort of private psychic soup of which no one else was aware. Like seeing into the Cloud, she thought.
When the lift stopped and the doors opened, Rosie silently gave thanks for the fresh air and then immediately cursed whoever had stepped inside and added to the crush.
It was a boy. Mousey-coloured. Plain-looking. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have given him a second glance. But as the doors closed she kept staring at him, her eyes like magnets she could not pull away.
She knew, somehow, that there was something special about him as he turned round to face the doors as they clicked shut.
Her brain ticked over until she suddenly recognized him. That was it. He was the boy who had fallen into the sinkhole and survived. She had seen a picture of him on someone’s Facebook page, on lots of pages in fact. Even from her brief look at him before he had turned round, it struck her now how different people could look in real life, less real somehow than on a screen.
But Rosie’s curiosity wasn’t satisfied. There was something else about him. Without even thinking it might be rude or too forward, she reached out and touched him on the shoulder and her fingers seemed to stick to him as if nailed there. As the boy tried to turn round to see her, struggling with her arm locked tight to him, Rosie heard voices instantly all around her and it shocked her for a heartbeat until she realized what they were: the thoughts of each person in the lift. They were so loud a switch seemed to have been flicked on in her head. The boy appeared to hear them too, pausing to listen for a moment, before he managed to turn right round and look directly at Rosie as her arm dropped away.
But Rosie still felt a connection to this mousey-haired, plain-looking boy. As if the air between them was charged. It made her feel invigorated somehow, open to the idea that she could do whatever she wanted if she put her mind to it.
When the lights flickered and the lift lurched downwards for a second, everyone gasped as their stomachs hit their throats and Rosie blinked and told it to slow again. She felt excited and afraid by what she had done while people all around her exchanged relieved looks as the lift continued to rumble on at its stately pace.
But the boy was still looking right at her as if he knew exactly what she had done. A thought occurred to her – that they had done it together. Somehow, he had made her gift more powerful.