A Second Sight Read online

  “Yeah, I thought of asking her, but I figured she was spending most of her time with Malcolm.”

  “Ah, yes,” dad nodded. That nod made him look more like an older man than the grey hair. “Her new beau. I like him better than that last one.”

  He scrunched his face up after he spoke.

  “I’m sorry, Samantha, I just…” he said.

  “No, it’s fine dad. You’re right. Malcolm is a much better fit for Izzy.”

  “How is little Tangerine?” my father asked. He wanted to get as far away from conversations about my ex as possible. My dad was very fond of all animals, so I knew he was at the very least being sincere about that.

  “She’s fine. Getting tired of me,” I joked.

  There was an awkward silence between us then. My mind drifted off to a memory of Alex. It was in the early stages of the relationship. You know, that part where you see all of the good things about a person, and you don’t think anything can go wrong because it’s so new and exciting? That was where my memory took me.

  He and I were at a fair. It was a traveling fair that went to different towns all over the country to spread joy for a few days before packing up and heading over to the next town. He and I were wandering around and holding hands. I was eating a bright green cloud of cotton candy, and he had honey-roasted peanuts in a small bucket.

  “Want me to win you a prize?” I asked him. I walked by a booth that had floating targets moving from left to right, as well as the occasional golden goose. The goose was so far from the front of the booth, I was sure that nobody would have been able to hit it. There were wands at the booth, and you had to have the right aim and the right amount of power to unleash a spark in order to hit the targets and the goose.

  “I thought I was the one who was supposed to win you a prize,” Alex said with a smirk. I loved that he had so much charm, but there was a little bit of bad boy in him. I wondered how he ever found a girl like my sister. Had he ever shown that bad boy side of himself to her?

  “Yeah, but I can be chivalrous too,” I said. He let go of my hand and made a gesture for me to go ahead, like he was presenting the booth to me. I looked over at the prizes that were available and smiled.

  “Which one do you want?” I asked.

  Without even looking over at the prizes, Alex said, “The rabbit.”

  “Why the rabbit?”

  “It’ll remind me of you. You have those big front teeth with a tiny gap in the middle.”

  I frowned.

  “Don’t be upset. It’s cute. You’re cute. I just want you to always be with me, even when you’re not around,” Alex brought his face closer to mine and gave me a kiss. Even though I said I was going to win him a prize, he insisted on paying the old warlock who was in charge of the booth.

  I picked up a wand with my left hand and waved it around a bit. I was more or less a good shot. I didn’t want to hit any of the targets though. I wanted my powers to get me all the way to that golden goose. I flicked my wrist, and a small black fuse shot out of it. It hit an outer rim of one of the targets.

  “Two more blasts for the little lady, just two more blasts!” the warlock said. He twirled his handlebar mustache and watched as I twirled my wand again.

  “Get ready for that rabbit, baby,” I said. I stuck my tongue out of the side of my mouth as a way to get more concentration.

  “I believe in you, bunny,” Alex said. That made me swoon. We hadn’t given each other nicknames yet, but when he called me ‘bunny’ that was all I needed. I flicked my wrist again, and the bright black flash blasted out of the wand and straight through the golden goose.

  I remembered being so happy that night. Alex kept telling me how cute I was and how proud he was of me. It scared me that someone could be an entirely different person than you knew them to be. I never imagined he was capable of such manipulation and emotional abuse.

  The daydream ended, and I was back in my parents’ living room. My throat felt closed, and I remembered when Alex’ fingers had been wrapped around my neck, and how my eye had throbbed from where he had hit me. I remembered thinking how different it was from that night at the fair. What had changed? Was it me? Did I bring out the evil in him?

  “You know, at some point we’re going to have to talk about what happened.” It was my dad. He was bringing me back into the present, making it clear that I couldn’t live inside my mind or my memories.

  “It doesn’t have to be today or even soon, but at some point, we’re going to have to talk about what happened with you and that... that…”

  My father’s voice trailed off, and I could hear the lump building up in his throat. He was angry and letting himself be human. He might not have ever mentioned this if my mother was home.

  “I know, and I’ve been meaning to. I just can’t find the right words.”

  “I don’t care about the right words. I care about you. I want to know if you’re okay. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”

  I felt my own tears building up inside of me. I had disappointed everyone. The only people who had not run away from me were the ones I was running from or pushing away. I was going through my own thing and healing in any way I could, but that shouldn’t have meant shunning my own mother and father. And if Isabelle or Malcolm hadn’t reached out to me, I might have kept my distance from them too. I had no idea what the expected outcome would have been.

  “Dad, I…” My voice got caught in my throat. I thought it was because I was becoming emotional, but that wasn’t it. The walls around me were shaking, and I could feel the world inside me spinning.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I thought. I didn’t know if I could speak aloud during times like this. I could hear my father’s voice calling my name, but it sounded so far away from me. I had never been more grateful for already being seated. My hands gripped the sofa, and I clung to it for dear life. I was nowhere near as dizzy or loopy as I had been the first time this happened, but I was still scared that there would be a vision accompanying the dizzying sensation, and I was afraid of what I might see.

  I kept my eyes open this time. Closing them didn’t seem to help the other times, and I wanted it to pass as quickly as possible. Each time felt like it lasted forever, but I’m sure it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds at most.

  I looked around me, and I could see my surroundings change. I was in a place I hadn’t been before. It was a cozy apartment. The features of the apartment were a ghostly cover of the living room in my parents’ home. I could still distinctly see everything that was in my old home, but I could see this apartment as well. And there was Peter. His back was turned to me, but I would recognize that straight black hair and build anywhere. I could see a part of his tattoo peeking from the back of the shirt he was wearing and creeping down the length of his right arm.

  That apartment must have been Peter’s house. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing there. Then, Peter turned around and he smiled at a space near me. He looked directly at me, and his expression changed. He was puzzled. He rubbed his eyes with one hand and shook his head. By the time he looked up again, he was gone. The entire vision was gone. The only thing I could see was my father staring at me with a blank expression on his face.

  There was no getting around what he had just seen. He saw me stare out into the distance and grab hold of his couch. There was a chance he thought that was a symptom of my anxiety and a way for me to get out of talking to him about what had been going on with me for the last year or so. There was no place to begin. I could be honest, or I could play it off. I could ask for his help, or I could offer some reassuring words to let him know I would go to a hospital to get whatever it was checked out. What I could not do was sit and stew in this painful silence much longer.

  “Samantha…”

  “I’m not sure what that was,” I said. I cut him off. There couldn’t be any speculation. I was just going to tell him what was going on and be done with it.

  “I do. Did you… Did you just have a pre
monition?”

  What? There’s no way he could have known.

  “How did you…?” I asked. I was breathing in and out of my mouth. Now my thoughts were spinning for a different reason.

  “I didn’t think anyone in the family would ever get them again,” he said. “You’re the first in quite a long time.”

  It was the fact that he was so calm that was off-putting. I was so ready to panic, but he was talking to me like he had accepted it as something mundane and ordinary. There was nothing ordinary about what it was I was going through.

  “Are you telling me that someone on Mom’s side of the family can see the future?” I asked.

  “Your mom?” He laughed in spite of himself. It was a soft laugh that mostly came out as short bursts of air from his nose. “No, no… My family has that gift.”

  “But, you’re human…” I said in utter disbelief.

  “Yes. It’s rare. Almost impossible, really. But there are some humans who are clairvoyant. It’s a trait that runs in our family. We’re told about it after a certain age, but the last person to have it was your great grandmother.”

  “What happened? How did she get it? How long did it last? Could she change anything?” I asked, the words coming out in a rush of air. There was so much curiosity building up inside of me that there had to be a release somewhere. I erupted with questions, unsure of what I wanted answered first.

  “I don’t remember too much. I just know she had it in her younger days. When she was older, she didn’t see anything as often. But she said it was very violent in the beginning. When it started, everything was spinning, and she had no control of it. It took her a while to get the hang of it—to even sense that one was coming. But no, she couldn’t change anything. She accepted then that there was a destiny for each of us and that there was nothing that could be done. Once you see a vision, you just have to wait for when the moment comes in real life. Nothing can prepare you for that. It can be the next day or in a few weeks from when you had the vision. She never knew when each would come. Sometimes the things she saw would overlap one another, and she couldn’t figure out what was going to happen first.”

  There were no words I could think of to say. I was still in shock. This was something that ran in my family, and no one had thought to say anything to me or Isabelle.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “My mother and none of her siblings had it, I didn’t get it, and neither did my older sister. It happens to us at random. Before my grandmother had it, I think it was my own great-great-great-grandmother who had the gift. I wasn’t expecting it to be one of my daughters… I wasn’t expecting it to be you, Sam,” my father said.

  The tears that were bottled up were now coming to the surface. This wasn’t something that would just go away. I would be able to see different parts of my future without having any say on how they were to unfold. My life was not mine. The fact that my life was never mine and never would be again was more than I could stand. My life had been mapped out for me, and now there were no choices or options. Like it or not, I had to take glimpses at different areas of my future.

  “What did you just see?” my father asked me. He spoke his words slowly, as if trying to savor them. He had a concerned look on his face. He didn’t want to see me crying. I had been away for long enough, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing in case there was a chance it would push me away from him again. But I wasn’t going to go anywhere. I needed my family more than ever. I was having a difficult time getting a grip on what was happening to me.

  “I don’t know what’s going on. It started about a month ago. This is the fourth time it’s happened, but the second time, I didn’t see anything. I could sense it coming, everything was shaking, but there was no picture to go with the feeling.”

  My father did nothing but nod. There was more, and he knew it. He wasn’t going to coax it out of me, but he already knew more than I knew about what was going on with me. If I was going to get any answers at all, I was going to have to tell him everything.

  “The one just now was in someone’s apartment. I think it was this guy that I met…”

  “A guy?” That seemed to interest him more than the fact that I had just had a full-on premonition in his living room when no one in his family had experienced anything like it for generations.

  “Yeah. He was in my first vision too. I was at the park, and I saw him and some people. Then, I had a dizzy spell close to the supermarket and that was right before I actually met the guy face-to-face. The third one was when he and his friends and I spent some time together. I lived that first vision on that day, and a few minutes after that I was surrounded by a wall of fire.”

  “So, what I’m getting from this is that the person you just saw has been linked to all of the visions you’ve been having?” my father asked me. I hadn’t thought of that at all, but my father was right! But what did that mean?

  I asked him.

  “I can’t tell you for sure what that means, but my grandmother met my grandfather because of her visions. He was linked to quite a few of them. When they first started dating, he said that sometimes he thought he saw her out of the corner of his eye without knowing it was actually her from the past having a vision about him. It’s almost like imprinting. When you’re clairvoyant and someone can see the ghost of you from when you had a previous vision, that means something.”

  My heart skipped several beats in my chest. Even when it came to matters of my heart, I had no say. Peter was destined to be in my life, maybe in a way that was beyond the very awkward beginning stages of a friendship. How was I ever going to face Peter again after knowing this?

  “What about the fire?”

  “I don’t know, Sam. Did you see anything else?”

  I shook my head. There had only been a wall of fire surrounding me. I didn’t recall being able to see anyone else in that vision.

  “You may just need to prepare yourself and wait for when that time comes,” said my dad. He stood up from his armchair and made his way to the couch. He sat beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulder.

  “So, there’s nothing I can do?” I said. I didn’t try to stop the tears from falling. I cried, and my tears fell from my face and onto my dad’s lap. I couldn’t help but feel like a child again.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do the visions always come true?”

  “I think so. I think that’s what my grandmother told me.”

  “How was she able to survive all of that? Wasn’t it too much of a burden with her knowing what was going to happen and being powerless to stop it?” I asked. I started to wipe my face. There was no more strength in me to cry. In the past year, it seemed like I had cried enough to last me several lifetimes.

  “My grandmother always knew that there were some things in life she couldn’t control and many things she wouldn’t experience,” my father said.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, she was always grateful for her visions. She got a chance to see so many faces and things she never would have otherwise.”

  “What do you mean?” I raised my head up so I could look at him when he spoke.

  “Didn’t I tell you this? Samantha, your great-grandmother was blind.”

  *

  My dad told me all he could about my great-grandmother and what she had told him about her visions. She kept it a secret for the most part, but she told everyone in her immediate family. To me, that meant my father was hinting at me telling Isabelle and my mother. I let him know that I would tell them in my own time and in my own way. He respected that and promised to keep my secret.

  A human with powers was so improbable that he had never heard of another human with such a power aside from his grandmother and me. I wondered if there were more humans around the world with powers they didn’t know they had yet, or powers that were beyond their control. I wanted to find out, but I knew it would be a waste of time doing that. I would discover more humans with powers, and then
what? We would start a club or something? There were more pressing matters at hand that didn’t involve other strangers.

  I asked him if my great-grandmother was part fairy, but she wasn’t. His direct family had married only humans for several generations. He was the only one in over 300 years who didn’t fall in love with or marry a human. My mother’s side had nothing to do with why I was like this now.

  “Thank you,” I told my father when I was on my way out. I wasn’t just thanking him for being able to tell me a few things about this new power I had developed. I was thanking him because I was so grateful for who he was and for his unconditional love. I made a vow to myself I wasn’t going to keep away from my family if there was ever a crisis in my life. It was freeing to realize that with people like my parents and my sister, I would never have to feel like I was walking on this earth alone.

  My phone chimed in my pocket as I walked away from the neighborhood I had grown up in. We were well into summer now. Everything was hot and green. I reached for my phone and took it out. There was one text message that had come through. It was foreign to me because I hadn’t gotten many texts as of late. The only person who messaged me on a regular basis was my sister, but even without looking at the phone screen I knew that it wasn’t her.

  I stared at the screen and read the message that had popped up.

  It was from Peter. I tried not to smile when I saw it was from him. I didn’t even know him, but there was some excitement that was stirring in me. If he was going to be as important to me as my dad said he would be, then this was the start of that.

  ‘Hello, Samantha (:’ the message read.

  ‘Hi Peter. How are you?’ I replied.

  Chapter Five

  Night Fever

  I’m not gonna lie, when Peter texted me, I thought that meant it was the start of something more… intimate and one on one. But it wasn’t. At least not yet. He messaged me with all the socially acceptable niceties of an acquaintance and then invited me on another outing with his friends. I didn’t mind his friends for the most part, but none of them had asked for my number, so in my mind it seemed as if Peter was dragging me along on outings whether his friends wanted me to join them or not. I was not sure how true that was, but I knew it wasn’t something Delilah liked at all.