It didn’t take me long, once I’d learn to speak, to learn to shut up. However, in that short amount of time between ages zero to six, the damage was already done. I went through three families and four schools. By the time I was eight I had begun learning not to listen, if I tried very hard, to the voices in my head. I wasn’t crazy (though I made others crazy), the fact was, the voices I was hearing didn’t come from my own mind at all, but from those around me.

I don’t when I became aware of my power. My Granny Clara says I was always an unhappy baby, so I suspect I was born this way. Granny says she’s never seen a more fussy child, but there was nothing to be had of it. I was in everyway healthy, no colic or anything like that anyway. I was fat and round as a beach ball; I’ve seen the pictures. Really the oddest thing about it all was that I got worse when anyone was around. Most babies scream for their mother’s arms, I screamed to be away from mine. I was only peaceful when I lay alone in my darkened crib.

My oldest memory, the one where I suddenly popped into existence and was aware of me, was the day my mother made my birthday cake. I wasn’t there; I read the memory of my cake out of her head. I was two, about to be three. I remember saying my cake was pink. She thought I’d peaked in the refrigerator, not into her head.

The next year was filled with changes as I became aware of others thoughts. I couldn’t separate other’s thoughts from my own. Sometimes I’d read innocent things, like when my mother would read books I could see her thinking them. I would sit at her feet when she would think she was being silent but she wasn’t and ask her questions that would unnerve her. What would happen to that man on the horse mama? Sometimes I’d scream aloud.

Sometimes it was less innocent. Who was that woman dad? That one with the read hair, what did she do to you?

I was sent to live with my mother’s parents when I was three. I packed my little red suitcase full of dolls and my stuffed goose and my stuffed giraffe. They had thoughts ingrained on them too. I could see my relatives selecting them in toy stores when I touched them. I was more sensitive then and it’s always easier when you touch.

My grandparents hose was calmer and bigger. I was alone more, although neither of them went to work. I could walk through the gardens with their flowers high as forests (I was not yet four years old, and small) and watch the flashing, disconnected thoughts of insects and feel the flowers roots in soil. When I butterfly landed on me, I’d get a jolt. I would be that butterfly, but me too, I’d feel my wings, my legs, my arms all at once.

My Granny June was young for someone old, her hair was gray but her face was not lined. She wore faded floral dresses and spoke with a soft southern twang. She’d stand in the kitchen, singing and cooking flapjacks and I’d sit at her heels devouring memories of Georgia, of a boy with brown hair, most of all of horses. I was mad about horses, I had their pictures all over my walls and I’d pester her for stories about them. “Tell me about Star again.”

“Star?”

“The gray one, she had a star on her forehead.”

“Dear me, I’d darned forgot I mentioned her, not right now girl, go fetch me some strawberries, I’m very busy.”

Granny June liked me well enough in her own way I suppose. Grandpa, who I fear, wanted me to see a doctor.

I fear him not because he was mean or gave me any reason to fear him in his behavior, but because he was so throbbing with dark thoughts. He was much older than Granny; his eyes were bleary and gray. He had killed someone once, in a smoky place, in a battle. I feared him has he rose slowly from bed, as her perched his glasses on his nose and read his morning paper, as he moved about the hose in his slippers and as he planted flowers in the fresh soil of her garden.

His garden was what everyone called his passion. Anyone was else would see this as tender, I suppose, the way her trimmed and watered the plants with a steady hand. To me however, he felt as cool and calculating, as disconnected, as a well-oiled machine. What he valued was order and silence.

The only thing I loved in him was his stories. Sometimes he would read to me or sometimes he’d make things up from his head. It didn’t matter which it was. I’d lie in bed and listen to his words and watch his thoughts. His thoughts were so vivid they seemed to fill my room. Dragons wrapped around my ugly desk and cowboys chased Indians across my bed sheets. My room was ugly, not meant for a child at all but when he spoke it filled with light and youth.

When I was four, I started school. Used to the calmness of my grandparents’ house, I was overwhelmed by the noise and the herds of other children. Children’s thoughts were louder and brighter than the old. I never spoke to anyone; I was too swamped with disconnected thoughts from the others.

I was taken out. They tested me. Was I gifted or retarded? I was sent to a different school and I had to drive an hour across town to get there. It was quieter and the kids thoughts there moved slower and I hated it. I walked home and never let them take me back. I stopped going to school that same year and finally was allowed to just stay home where I wanted to be.

Then, when I was four and a half, my grandpa never woke up. The house was filled with people and it was almost like being back at school only adults thoughts move slower than children’s and in straight lines that I couldn’t follow.

I went into the room where he lay, but he no longer scared me. His thoughts had lifted out of him, they were in the air around him, they were rising like smoke and I could see through them.

Grandma June wouldn’t look at me, my mother didn’t want me either I don’t think because she was at the funeral and didn’t speak to me. My father wasn’t there but a new man was, a man who had carefully blocked me out of his mind.

I moved again to live with my grandma Clara in her stuffy little house. The only thing that truly interested me there were the rows of boxes in the basement. In them were toys my mother and her two brothers had once loved and I could see them running through the woods behind the house, I asked my grandma about it and she said I must be imagining things, she didn’t even know where those toys came from and it was better to keep my mouth shut and not be a nuisance.

When I was five, she asked me why I didn’t go to school. I told her how I feared the other children. I was beginning to get the idea that I wasn’t like other children. I wondered if it was I who had broken my parents. I wondered if I had scared me grandpa to death.

I said these things to grandma Clara because she seemed to old and stoic, nothing could scare her anymore, nothing could surprise her. She looked at me for a long time and I noticed something new. It was as though someone was turning the pages of my brain, looking for a certain chapter.

I started at my third school that year and before I left Granny pulled me aside.

“Sometimes when you’re young, things seem different to you. Sometimes it’s better not to say everything you’re seeing or hearing,” she said. “Just try and act like it’s not there and maybe it won’t be.”

I looked at her for a moment, I couldn’t see anything she was thinking; she had frozen me out. I spent the next few years working in silence to tune everyone out and I made no friends. At first, this tactic worked well. No one thought I was weird, mostly no one anyway, just shy. Teachers tried to get through to me, but I was too busy trying not to hear. By age eight I was all but normal (as long as no one was touching me.) By age ten, I had learned a new skill. If I wanted, I could jump into someone else’s head. I could control it. As I got older, I got better at it. I could see not just current thoughts but a whole world of them.

I could do this to almost anyone, but not my grandma. I didn’t tell her about it, I feared what she’d say. She had told me to shut people out, so I pretended I had. I shut her out. I wondered if I was being paranoid, but I was sure she could read me just as I read all those around me.

I hated middle school, but I kept my head down and got straight A’s. I hated high school too but I finally started to talk to people. I didn’t really have a lot of options, friends wise. My grandmother had raised me, I was socially stunted, and everyone already thought I was weird. I started diving into people’s heads and pretending to be interested in things they liked. I used it to manipulate my teachers too. I no longer worked hard; I copied from people around me, through their heads. I could hear the answers by touching my textbook. I finally made real friends when I started smoking pot in other people’s cars at lunch. When I was high, I lost my ability to control what I was hearing. It was alright though, it was relaxing. It almost increased my high.