TAYLOR COOK
TURNER COUNTY, SOUTH DAKOTA
TAYLOR DISCOVERED THAT SHE WAS ONE OF THEM on the Wednesday morning when she reached for her buzzing alarm clock and accidentally sent the thing flying across her bedroom. The clock smashed against the wall, made a squawking sound like a dying goose and was silent. Taylor was 99 percent sure she hadn’t laid a finger on it.
“Okay, get a grip,” she told herself. “You were still half dreaming. It was an accident. You’re freaking out over nothing.”
Taylor held her hand out toward the broken alarm clock, gasping when it levitated and floated back to her.
“Dad!” she shouted.
Brian didn’t hear her. He was already out of the house. Taylor threw open her bedroom window and gazed out over their small farm. The barn doors were open, her dad probably in there feeding the hogs.
A dented pickup truck made its way up their dirt driveway. That would be Silas. He got out of his truck, hair slicked back as usual, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his flannel shirt, like a dingy version of some old movie star. Over the last few months, ever since she spoke up to him during the invasion, he’d started looking at Taylor in a new way, a creepy way. He always made a point of telling her how much she’d grown. He saw her watching and waved.
Taylor shut her window. Took a step back.
“This isn’t happening,” she told herself.
It’d been almost a year since the world got crazy. Things had been normal here, though, just like Taylor had hoped. She’d even gotten comfortable with the idea of aliens and superpowers in the world. But now . . .
“I . . . I can’t be one of them.”
But she was. Taylor realized she hadn’t used her hands to shut her window just then. She’d used her mind. She went back to the glass, peering out, praying that Silas hadn’t noticed anything. Taylor watched him saunter into the barn like nothing had happened and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Okay. Okay.” She looked down at her hands. They were shaking. “Nothing has to change.”
Taylor decided then and there that she would act like nothing happened. She got ready for school. Wiping steam off the bathroom mirror after her shower, Taylor studied her reflection. Blue eyes, wavy blond hair, a small nose and rounded cheeks. She didn’t look any different than yesterday. Granted, every day she looked more and more like her mother, a fact that annoyed Taylor. But there was no physical manifestation of her telekinesis.
Telekinesis. A year ago that word was strictly in the vocabulary of comic book readers and science fiction fans. Now it was everywhere. The telltale sign of a Garde developing their powers. There were PSAs on TV about what to do if you spotted someone using telekinesis. Taylor never thought she’d be one of them.
She would hide. There were fewer than ten thousand people in all of Turner County. Those government people she saw on TV would never come to South Dakota looking for one of their so-called Human Garde. Her dad had said no one would bother with their little town.
“Going to school!” she yelled into the barn as she half jogged down the driveway to where the bus waited. Usually, she’d never leave without giving her dad a hug and a kiss, but Silas was there, lingering in the barn’s doorway waiting to take the tractor out, and even though Taylor knew he was just eyeballing her in his usual pervy way, she felt extra exposed that morning and couldn’t bring herself to get too close.
Taylor zoned out in her history class, daydreaming about the fiery images she’d seen of the invasion, imagining herself there, clumsily floating around a broken alarm clock while pale aliens shot at her with lasers. She got scolded, her classmates giggling after the teacher called her name five times. At lunch, her friends told her that she seemed distracted and Taylor brushed them off, making an excuse about not sleeping well. When the kid in front of her grabbed the last peach iced tea from the drink cooler, Taylor nearly used her telekinesis to snatch the bottle out from under his fingers, then immediately felt ashamed. Whenever she needed to reach for something, she could feel the telekinesis urging her to use it. Ignoring the ability was like not scratching an itch. It frightened her how much the telekinesis already felt like a part of her, an instinct she had to fight against.
“It’ll get easier,” she promised herself in the bathroom mirror as she washed her hands. Then she floated a paper towel to herself from the dispenser, screamed in frustration and stomped her feet.
Sooner or later, she would screw up and someone would see her. Unless she learned how to bury this power deep inside her, make like it never existed. But already that felt like keeping an arm tied behind her back.
On the bus ride home from school, Taylor stared mutely out the window while Claire rambled on about some boy. She watched Turner County glide by and then imagined the bus carrying her onwards, all the way to California and that bizarre Academy for Human Garde. If they caught her, that’s where she’d end up.
She had promised herself that she would never leave Turner County.
Inevitably, this led Taylor to remembering the last time she’d seen her mom. She was nine years old and they were at the bus station in Ashburn. Her mom wore jeans that Taylor thought were too tight, a tied-off plaid shirt and a red bandanna in her hair. All the rest of her clothes were stuffed into the backpack she carried on her shoulder.
“You’re coming back, right? This isn’t forever,” Taylor had said to her mom.
“Oh, honey,” Taylor’s mom said, and touched her gently on the cheek. “You can come visit me whenever you want. Minneapolis is only a couple of hours away.”
Young Taylor glanced over her shoulder to where her father sat in their truck, watching them, a baseball cap pulled low to hide his eyes. She looked back to her mom.
“But how will I get there?” she asked. “I’m nine.”
Her mom smiled. “You’ll see one day, Tay. A person can’t stay in Turner County forever. Even if it hurts now, you’ll come to understand.”
Minneapolis was just Taylor’s mom’s first stop in her flight from South Dakota. She kept going farther and farther east—after Minneapolis was Madison, then Chicago, and the last Taylor heard it was Philadelphia. Taylor never ended up visiting any of those places. Her mom promised that one day Taylor would understand, but she didn’t want that day to come because it’d mean she was like her mother. She’d take over the farm from her daddy, just like he’d taken it over from his daddy.
Her dad made patty melts and French fries for dinner that night. She got the feeling that he had noticed her hasty departure that morning and thought maybe she was mad at him, so he cooked one of her favorite meals. Taylor hugged him while he was frying up the burgers.
“There’s my girl,” her dad said, sounding relieved.
Over dinner, Taylor studied her dad. He was a handsome man with his half day’s growth of beard, brown hair graying at the temples, lean and tan from all the work around the farm. He’d never remarried after Taylor’s mom, not even a girlfriend as far as Taylor knew, although the single ladies in the county still sent over cookies and pies on a regular basis. She got teary-eyed while picturing a scenario where she’d have to say good-bye and leave him here all by himself.
Brian caught Taylor looking at him and rubbed a hand across his cheek. “What is it? I got slop on me?”
She laughed. “No, you’re all good, Daddy.”
“If you say so.” He kept looking at her. “What about you? You all good?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just tired.”
Then, Taylor reached for the salt and the little glass shaker slid across the table right into her waiting palm.
They looked at each other.
After a long silence, Brian said, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Finally, Taylor started to cry, big heaving panicked sobs, and her dad came around the table to hold her. “Come on, now. I always knew you were a special one and this just proves it.”
“I don’t—I don’t want to be special!” Taylor replied through her tears. “I like our life here! I don’t want anything else!”
Taylor’s dad rubbed her back. “Come on, now,” he said quietly. “I saw them say on TV that the ones who get powers are the best among us. That they’re destined to be important people.”
“I saw that same show, Dad! The one lady said all that flowery bullcrap, and the other guy said it was all random. An alien lottery. And I didn’t want to win!”
“Well,” her dad said calmly, “I choose to believe the bit about destiny.”
“Are you not listening? I don’t want a great destiny. I like it here. With you. I don’t want to go to their dumb Academy.”
“Then you won’t have to.” Her dad nodded once, like he’d just come to this decision. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“But it’s a law now. You’re supposed to . . .” She swallowed. “You’re supposed to turn me in.”
Brian shook his head. “Not in a million years.”
“But someone else could see,” Taylor said. “You don’t know how hard it was today at school to control myself. All day, I wanted to use it. I’ll slip up.”
Brian considered this for a moment, studying Taylor, who was studying her hands like they’d suddenly become foreign.
“Just us and the hogs out here, most times,” her dad said slowly. “Maybe if you practice doing your alien-thing around the house, it’ll be easier when you’re out in public.”
“Ugh. Please don’t call it my alien-thing.”
“Sorry. Your Legacy.”
Taylor frowned. All day, she’d been thinking about ways to suppress her telekinesis. Maybe her dad was onto something. Maybe instead of ignoring her power, she could exhaust it in the moments when it was safe to use, get it out of her system.
“It’s worth a try,” she admitted.
“Besides,” her dad said, picking up the saltshaker and wiggling it through the air, “I think it’s pretty cool to watch.”
For a month, Brian’s plan worked. Taylor used her telekinesis around the house—she floated her homework books out in front of her while she studied, poured herself glasses of water in the kitchen while standing in the living room and spooned sugar into her dad’s morning coffee while flipping eggs. Her control began to get more precise, the tasks she could complete more complicated, the objects she could lift heavier. And while it felt like a part of her was asleep whenever she went to school or when Silas and the other farmhands were around, Taylor found it easier and easier to keep from slipping up in public.
But then came the day of the accident.