A cold snap arrived toward the end of November. The soft summer feeling went out of the air, and for three or four days everyone went around in sweaters and slacks instead of shorts.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the chill vanished, and it was warmer, though not quite the same. The mosquitoes were gone and the air seemed thinner.
“This is what a Florida winter is like,” Elizabeth said.
To Nancy it didn’t matter much whether it was summer or winter. Each day was so filled with problems that she did not have time to think about the weather. Sometimes she looked at Kirby and Brendon and wondered what was wrong with them that they could be so obviously happy in a place where she herself was so miserable.
To begin with, there were the piano lessons. She was taking them because her mother wanted her to. The old upright piano that Elizabeth had bought from a local elderly woman after asking around town was exactly the kind that she had practiced on when she was a child.
“With Kirby so busy with her dancing,” she said, “it will be nice for you to have a hobby, too.”
So Nancy went every Tuesday to a little woman named Mrs. Nettles who taught in the basement of the Unitarian Church, and Nancy practiced an hour each day out of the pale green book with three mice on the cover.
“I feel like an idiot,” she grumbled to her mother. “ ‘Three Blind Mice’ and ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’! At my age!”
“I can understand how you feel,” Elizabeth said sympathetically. “You are starting a bit late. You’ll be out of that beginners’ book soon, though, and on to more interesting pieces, and it does give me so much pleasure to hear a child of mine playing in this old living room. It takes me back to my own childhood again.”
So Nancy kept doggedly plugging away, although in her heart she was certain she would be on “Three Blind Mice” for the rest of her life.
Brendon made it worse. Every time she played a piece, Brendon told her what was wrong with it.
“You’re not holding that last note long enough,” he would say, or “Can’t you tell that chord’s wrong? You need your third finger down a note.” Sometimes he simply moaned and covered his ears and said, “The whole piano’s so out of tune it makes me sick.”
Once when he said this more rudely than usual, making a gagging noise and pretending to stick a finger down his throat, Nancy told her mother about it.
“I can’t practice with him around!” she wailed. “I just can’t!”
But, as usual, their mother did not blame Brendon.
Instead she said, “Maybe he’s right. It’s a secondhand piano. Probably it hasn’t been tuned for years.”
The next day a man came out and adjusted the strings.
But worse than the piano, which was simply boring, was school. All day, every day, Nancy dreaded the moment when she would walk into Ms. Green’s social studies class. No matter how well prepared she was for her day’s lesson, Ms. Green would manage to find something wrong. Even when the answers themselves were right, as they nearly always were, Ms. Green marked errors.
“Your i’s look like e’s,” she would write on the paper, taking off five points for carelessness, and Nancy, whose handwriting was as clear and round and perfect as any page in an old-fashioned penmanship manual, would seethe with silent fury. The other students in the class were noticing the teacher’s unfairness.
“I’ve heard about her from my older brother,” a girl named Jessie told Nancy. “She’s been teaching here about eight million years, I guess, and she’s old and cranky. She always seems to choose one person out of her classes to pick on.”
“Why don’t you go to the counselor?” Jessie’s friend Emily suggested sympathetically. “Mr. Duncan’s nice. All the kids like him. I bet if you tell him how bad things are, he’ll get you transferred to another class.”
“He can do that?” For one deliriously happy moment, Nancy pictured herself in another social studies class. Then she thought of Mr. Duncan, and the happy picture faded out of her mind. Since the night that her mother had invited him to dinner, it seemed as though Mr. Duncan had been coming to their house constantly. If he wasn’t picking Kirby up at the dance studio, he was taking Brendon for haircuts, and one Saturday, even though their own car worked fine, he had driven Elizabeth to the grocery store. She would never give him the opportunity to do her a favor, never, ever, as long as she lived.
There was nothing she could put her finger on to explain her violent feeling about Mr. Duncan. He had never been anything but pleasant to her, or to any of them. She only knew that every time she saw him her stomach knotted up with fear and apprehension. There was something he was offering that she would not accept, and there was something for which he was reaching that she would not, could not, give.
Besides that, he was the one who had started that embarrassing testing business with Dr. Russo. The doctor had called several days after the card test to talk with Elizabeth.
“Nancy was right,” he said. “She didn’t score well on the test. But that doesn’t mean anything. It could’ve been the atmosphere—having her family around her—being in everyday surroundings. I would very much like to repeat the test with the real ESP cards in the privacy of my office.”
“Would you be willing to try it, dear?” Elizabeth asked, and Nancy shook her head firmly.
“It would be a waste of time,” she said. “Besides, I’m too busy.”
So Elizabeth said in her polite way, “Perhaps another time, doctor, and thank you for your interest in my daughter.”
“Don’t feel bad, dear,” she said later to Nancy. “It was a silly test, anyway. I can’t imagine anybody doing well at it.”
“I don’t feel bad at all,” Nancy told her.
The next day she had gone to the library and taken out a book on extrasensory perception.
She started reading it before dinner and could hardly tear herself away from it to go set the table. After the meal, she went straight back to her room and continued reading.
By the time Kirby came up, she was three-quarters finished.
“Thanks for leaving me with the dishes,” Kirby said, starting her evening exercises.
“I’ll do them tomorrow,” Nancy said, not lifting her eyes from the page.
“And the next day, too. You’re two behind me. Mom told Brendon to help me, and he broke a bowl. Deliberately, of course. So she won’t ask again.”
“Sorry,” Nancy said. “It’s just that I’m caught up in this book.”
Kirby glanced over with interest.
“What are you reading? Oh—hey—where did you get that? It’s about ESP, isn’t it? Did Mr. Duncan give it to you?”
“No!” Nancy said shortly. “I got it at the library.” She turned a page.
“Well, don’t just sit there.” Kirby went over and closed the door, then came back to sit down on the end of her sister’s bed. “What does it say? Do you think you’ve got it?”
Nancy sighed and laid down the book. “You won’t tell anybody?”
“Of course not. I never tell things.”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “I’ve definitely got it.”
“Wow!” Kirby’s eyes grew wide. “Nance, how exciting!”
“I don’t think it’s exciting,” Nancy said. “I think it’s terrible. It’s scary. Do you realize that I’m a weirdo? A freak? If people knew—like Dr. Russo—if they had any idea—I’d be shut away in a laboratory somewhere like one of those white rats.”
“You’re kidding!” Kirby exclaimed. “They couldn’t do that to you, could they? It would be kidnapping!”
“They’ve done it with other people,” Nancy told her. “You should read the case histories in this book. There’s a million kinds of tests they give. The card test is just for starters. They work them all out by mathematical statistics, and some people have to take them for years and years.”
“What do they do that for?” Kirby asked. “What is it they want to find out?”
“Everything. What it is, why it is, the whole works. It seems like at first only a handful of scientists believed that ESP existed at all. Then a bunch of universities started to get involved, but now it’s mostly independent research centers. They keep trying to prove it does exist, and a bunch of skeptics keep trying to prove they’re fakes, and the poor people who actually have it get caught in between.”
“Well, what is it exactly?” Kirby asked. “Is there more than one kind?”
“Apparently, there are a few different types of ESP.” Nancy referred to the book. “There’s one kind called telepathy. That means being aware of what another person is thinking. Then there’s clairvoyance; that means knowing when something’s happened. There are other kinds, too—precognition means knowing about the future, and being able to tell when something is going to happen. Retrocognition is knowing about the past.”
“Which kind do you have?” Kirby regarded her sister with fascination. Then she answered herself. “Telepathy, I guess. That’s how you knew the questions on that geography test. I was thinking about them at lunch, and you got them out of my mind.”
“I’m clairvoyant, too,” Nancy said. “I can see things happening. Brendon’s building a boat, for instance. In the afternoons, if I reach out and look for Brendon with my mind, I see him banging away on it. And precognition—”
“You have that, too!” Kirby’s eyes were wide. “The way you know when a phone is going to ring! Nance, you’re a triple threat! They could give you tests for the rest of your life and never be done with you!”
“Well, they’re not going to do that,” Nancy said firmly. “I’m not going to let them. I’m not going to spend my life being somebody’s experiment.”
Kirby was silent. When she spoke at last, it was thoughtfully. “Just how are you going to spend it, Nancy?”
Nancy was surprised at the question. “What do you mean?”
“It’s your gift, isn’t it? This ESP thing? Like my gift is dancing? I feel sometimes—” She paused.
“How do you feel?” Nancy prodded.
“This is going to sound silly. Do you remember the fairy tale Mom used to read to us when we were little about a girl with magic shoes? Somebody put them on her feet and they became part of her and she couldn’t take them off again. They made her dance.”
“You think something like that happened to you?” Nancy glanced down at her sister’s long, straight feet.
“Well, not with magic shoes, obviously. It’s the thing about having been given something. I can imagine it sometimes—somebody actually having a present for me, all wrapped up, and it’s the ability to dance. ‘Here, Kirby,’ the person says. ‘Here is a special thing just for you. Work hard at it, and use it.’ ”
“Like a fairy godmother?” Nancy asked.
Kirby flushed. “See, I told you it would sound silly. It is a funny coincidence though, isn’t it, with both of us having special things?”
“Oh—Bren.” Kirby shrugged. “You can’t count him.”
“It’s a nice way to think about it,” Nancy said. “But I could believe it more if Brendon had something, too. A fairy godmother wouldn’t be that unfair, to give the two of us gifts and not give one to him. Besides, who believes in magic?”
“Who believes in ESP?” Kirby countered. She laughed, and the laughter was good, for it broke the tension.
Nancy laid the book aside and went over to the dresser to get out the T-shirt she slept in. Then she went into the bathroom to change so Kirby could have the whole room for pirouettes.
As she undressed, she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She was still straight and skinny, but suddenly, to her surprise, she saw that she wasn’t quite as flat as she had been. She turned sideways and looked at herself again. Yes, it was true. She might never look exactly like Kirby, but she was finally, at long last, beginning to look like something other than a boy.
She put on her T-shirt and went back to the bedroom.
“Kirby,” she said, “when did you first get a bra?”
Kirby was doing her pirouettes en pointe.
“Oh,” she said, “years ago. I think I was eleven. I needed it. I was starting to flop around.”
“It’ll probably be years before I need one,” Nancy said. “Lucky you.”
Nancy sat down on the bed to watch her sister. It seemed to her that Kirby was thinner than she used to be. The muscles stood out in long cords down her legs, but her knees were pointed and her arms were no longer so rounded. Her face looked thinner, too.
“Kirby,” Nancy said, “do you ever think about boys?”
“Nope,” Kirby said. “No time. Do you?”
“Boys like you,” Nancy commented. “I can tell they do. They look at you in the cafeteria and smile and act silly to get your attention. Jessie tells me—you know, Jessie in my social studies class—she has a brother who’s a senior. He thinks you’re hot.”
“Does he?” Kirby said without interest. She was practicing on demi-pointes now. Her face was red with exertion, and she was breathing too hard to continue the conversation. Watching her, Nancy had a sudden picture of Kirby years from now, still stretching and bending and pointing, all the roundness and softness gone, and just the muscle left.
I almost wish, Nancy thought, that she didn’t have her gift. I wish she were just herself, pretty and fun and nice, without this drive in her making her go all the time. I wish she had time to like more things—clothes and boys and parties and reading books and being a sister.
She did not say it out loud, because Kirby would think she was crazy. Kirby thought having a gift was wonderful.
Well, maybe it was. Maybe she could get used to it. Maybe she would get to love being a person with ESP just as much as Kirby loved being a dancer.