The first time that Cassandra Smart read someone’s mind she was three years old it. It was her father’s.

It was almost 9:30 at night and her parents had been out for the evening. Cassandra had stayed home with her babysitter, a 17-year-old girl named Shayla, but pretty much everyone just called her Shay-Shay. Shay-Shay lived down the street with her parents and would graduate from the 12th grade that September.

Cassandra was laying, stretched out on the love seat, watching Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo was her favourite film, and while she didn’t watch it three or four times a day anymore, she still enjoyed watching it every few weeks. As she watched the film she tried to stretch herself across the whole of the loveseat, from one armrest to the other, but she wasn’t yet tell enough, even if she pointed her feet and pushed out her toes as far as they would go.

Shay-Shay wasn’t as fond of the film as Cassandra, likely in part because she had seen it every time she had come by to babysit for the Smarts. Instead, her nose was firmly planted in a book, swiftly turning the pages of the novel -- Catcher in the Rye -- that had been assigned in her English classroom.

It was just past 9:15 when Cassandra heard the familiar creak of the front door and the dry, shuffing steps of her parents as they stepped inside their townhouse. “Mommy! Daddy!” she cried, the movie already forgotten as she leapt to her feet and sprinted quickly down the hall. Her parents were just slipping off their coats and hanging them in the hall, but she collided with them anyway, wrapping her arms around her dad’s leg even before he coat was completely free of his arms.

“I missed you!” Cassandra cried, giggling.

Her father scooped her up in his arms and held her tight. “We missed you too, munchkin. Did you have a good time with Shay-Shay?” He started down the hall towards the living room, where Shayla was already packing up her stuff.

“We watched Finding Nemo!” she shouted extatically.

    “Well, of course you did,” he said. He turned to Shayla who was looking up at him expectantly. “So, what do we owe you for tonight, Shayla?”

    “Thirty-five, please.”

    He dug a handful of wadded bills out of his pocket, picked through them, and managed to pull out a 20, a 10, and a five, then handed them over to the girl who was eagerly waiting for them.

    “Thanks,” she said, then she turned around, bent down to her backpack, and stuffed the wads of bills into the front pouch.

    That’s when it happened.

    She didn’t understand what she was seeing in the slightest. All she knew was that world went kind of funny looking, kind of grey, like the colours were seeping out of it, and suddenly there was a different picture for her to look at. Not the one that she saw with her eyes, but instead, it was one that was only in her head.

    It started as something she could already see -- Shay-Shay’s backside as she bent over to fiddle with her backpack -- but suddenly, it seemed so much larger, like it the image of it was dwarfing everything else in front of her eyes. And then, suddenly, she could imagine the rough feel of denim in her hand, as is if she was running her palm over the seat of Shay-Shay’s jeans. And then a squeeze, and then another.

    And then the image was gone, but it was replaced with a different picture. This was a picture of her father embracing Shayla. Their arms and legs were intertwined and, Cassandra realized a moment later, neither of them were wearing any clothes. A sudden shudder ran up the length of her spine then blossomed at the base of her skull, sending tinglings out in every direction, like the glowing tendrils that flew off a sparkler.

    And then it was done.

    She looked curiously up at her father, who shook his head lightly then turned away. “Thanks again, Shayla. You need a ride home tonight?”

    ...say yes, don’t say yes, say yes, don’t say yes, say yes, don’t say yes…

    he asked as he moved back towards the front door.

    “Nah,” Shay-Shay said. “It’s a nice night. I’ll just walk home. Thanks, Mr. Smart.” She gave Cassandra a smile and tousled her hair. “Goodnight monkey-butt,” she said.

    “Goodnight,” Cassandra replied, but the words felt strange on her tongue. She realized that there was a sick, greasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she had just eaten too many slices of pizza. She felt like she wanted to throw up.

    Her dad held open the door as Shayla stepped outside. His eyes followed her down the steps, and then that same image spun dizzyingly into her mind again -- that picture of Shayla’s bum, so large that it was like the only thing that mattered in the world, and then there were the words

    ...good lord would I love a taste of that…

    that came with them this time, words that spun as slick and greasy in her mind as the feeling in her stomach.

    And then it all disappeared as she heard the door slam shut under her father’s hand. He stepped slowly back into the room with a warm smile on his face. “Okay, monkey,” he said. “It’s time for bed.

    “Daddy,” Cassandra said, “I don’t feel good.” And then everything came rushing out as she threw up all over the floor.

    Cassandra was retired to her bedroom shortly after her outburst in the living room. Her retirement amount to her mother scooping her up off the floor, holding her tightly against her chest, then hurrying her into the bathroom to rinse the poor girl offer and get her a glass of water. Her mother asked her a few times if shew as alright, and though she felt groggy and a little dizzy, Cassandra said that, yes, she felt fine, because she mostly did, at least, in regards to the nausea that had come upon her like a bullet and left her just as quickly.

    As her father worked to first mop up and then scrub away all traces of the little present Cassandra had delivered to them in the living room, her mother laid her down in her cool, quiet bedroom, tugging her blankets up to her neck, then gently stroking her hair.

    Her mother asked her the question again. “Do you feel okay, sweetie?”

    And once again Cassandra nodded her head. She didn’t speak right then, because she was carefully trying to decide what to say next. She wanted to ask her mommy about what she had felt and seen about her father only a short while earlier, but because it seemed to happen and not happen in front of her all at the same time, she wasn’t entirely sure how she should approach the question.

    But all that thinking had shown up in her eyes, and her mother, being the sort of mother who was in tune with the goings on of her daughters mind, could very easily see that something was up. “What’s going on, sweetie?”

    Cassandra frowned, but she had decided she would speak, and tell of what she had seen the best she could. “I saw daddy…” she said, then her voice drifted off for a moment. Her eyes went cold and sharp even as they drifted away from her mother’s eyes. She searched for a moment, hoping to find the right word, then she spoke again. “He...I think he touched Shay-Shay.”

    Her mother frowned. “What do you mean you think he touched her?”

    “Touched her,” she said again, and then she raised her hand as if to show her mom what she meant. “Touched her,” she said a third time. “On the bum.”

    “Excuse me?”

    “Daddy, I think he touched her on the bum.”

    “What do you mean you think he did?”

    She thought again, because she felt like this was something bad, that was what had made her belly feel funny, and she was afraid for her daddy. She wanted to make sure that she got it right. So she said, “It was like he did, but also he didn’t.”

    “I don’t know what you mean,” her mother said.

    And in a quiet voice, Cassandra said, “Neither do I.” She rolled over and closed her eyes, but sleep was a long ways off for this little girl. She was haunted by images that she hadn’t seen and thoughts that were not her own.

    Her mother sat with Cassandra for a while, waiting to see if maybe her little girl would have any more to say. She didn’t know entirely what to think about what her daughter had told her, or what she should do about it. If it had been a simple black and white situation, if her little girl had simply told her that she had seen her father touching the babysitter, that would be a fairly easy situation to respond to. But there was the strangely tentative nature of the confession, of a girl who maybe seemed like she didn’t quite know what she had seen.

    Finally when she was sure that Cassandra wasn’t going to say any more, her mother pushed herself to her feet, her knees popping from having bent for so long, and crept quietly out of the room. She wanted to keep from waking Cassandra, but of course Cassandra wasn’t asleep at all.

    That’s how she was able to hear the murmurs that started up not too far outside of her door as her mother went and tried, somehow, to talk to her father about what Cassandra had said.

    At first she couldn’t hear the words. Not really. But she felt them. She felt them in the same way that she hadn’t seen her daddy touch the babysitter, but had felt it, felt it in a way that had made it seem almost as real.

    And while she couldn’t hear the words, and didn’t know exactly what was being said, she could feel the intentions and the emotions behind it all. She could feel her mother’s anger and accusation. She could feel her father’s guilt and confusion. And she could feel the way that each of them was pushing those feeling forward, towards the other, and that both were colliding in the air between them, swirling around and around, creating this sort of emotional tornado that was very rapidly doing all kinds of invisible damage to their surroundings.

    Cassandra had no idea how she could tell these things, and in fact, didn’t even realize that she shouldn’t be able to tell. It was simply the way it was.

    And then, at last, she could hear a voice as her mother raised hers to a fever pitch. “Well, she sure as hell thinks she saw something!”

    And then her father: “You said she didn’t know what she saw!”

    “She was pretty goddamn clear about you grabbing Shayla’s ass!”

    “Well, I don’t know where she got that idea, because I didn’t do any such thing!”

    “And what do you suppose will happen if I call Shayla?”

    “Jesus Christ, Meredith, what do you think will happen? She’ll tell you that nothing happened!”

    “Well, I guess we’ll find out about that, won’t we.” And just like that, Cassandra could feel her mother’s energy diminish, moving away, even as it continued to pulse suspicion and fear and anger and distrust. The tornado that had erupted from the colliding energy in the room was released and began to knock itself around the room, leaving pockets of diseased energy everywhere it touched.

    Cassandra pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and clamped her eyes even more tightly shut. She just wanted to go to sleep and pretend none of this had happened.

    Shayla, of course, had nothing to say about the incident. She didn’t know what Mrs. Smart was talking about, and found the avenue of questioning more than a little bit uncomfortable. After a very brief amount of consideration, she decided she would not be returning to babysit at the Smarts again.

    Mrs. Smart, to her credit, accepted Shayla’s words, and told her husband as much, apologizing for her outburst. But she remained both cautious and curious, because she was not willing to accept that her daughter had lied to her. She tried, once, to speak with her daughter about what had happened, but Cassandra had simply slipped away from her, scooped up one of her numerous barbies, and began to slowly brush her barbie’s hair, refusing to speak.

    Mr. Smart never quite forgave his wife for the accusation, and worse yet, was overwhelmed by the guilt he carried with him after the incident, for while he had never touched the babysitter inappropriately even one, he had thought about it considerably, and found he had a difficult time understanding how those thoughts had somehow slipped out of his mind and fallen into reality.

    As for Cassandra, she never spoke of the incident again, and while it was certainly not the last time she read someone’s mind, she became increasingly adept at fighting off the nausea that frequently came with an awareness of someone’s innermost thoughts and feelings. And, after some time, she even began to realize that there was a difference but what she could perceive with her regular senses as something that happened in the physical world, and what she could perceive with this other, different sense, things that didn’t happen physically, and yet were no less real.

    But there were more difficult lessons still to be learned.

    Cassandra’s father finally left home when she was nine.

    It had been building and building ever since the night that Cassandra had told her mother that her father had groped the babysitter. It wasn’t just that he had felt shame nearly every day after the event, even though he had done nothing, though that had certainly played a part. It was mostly because his fantasies about the babysitter had been the symptom of a much larger problem, which was that he was no longer in love with his wife. It would only be a matter of time until he was scooped up by someone new, someone perhaps more exciting.

    That happened almost five years after the Shay-Shay incident, when Cassandra’s father began sleeping with one of his students at the university. Though he kept it a secret for a number of months, feeling a sense of obligation to his family, he eventually came to realize that he wasn’t happy where he was, and never would be. He tried to explain this to his wife as best he could, it wasn’t that he was leaving her for a younger woman, and that it wasn’t just a midlife crisis, it was that he had come to see his current road as almost entirely hopeless. And he wasn’t sure that this new road had any hope at its end, but it was a road he felt he needed to travel down just the same.

    Mrs. Smart didn’t really hear any of it. All she heard were the words of her daughter from five years before, words that said that her father had touched the babysitter on the bum. Mrs. Smart realized that her husband had been looking for an opportunity to hop into bed with a younger woman for quite some time, and if it hadn’t been now, it would have only been a matter of time. Deep down she was grateful it had happened sooner rather than later, though she’d never admit as much to her husband.

    And of course, through it all, through all the unspoken tension and resentment, all the withheld feelings of abandonment and fear, Cassandra new every moment of it. She knew each and every one of both her mother and father’s private-most thoughts and feelings.

    By now she knew better than to speak of the things that she observed this way. It wasn’t something she had learned right away, but gradually over time, starting from the night she told her mother about what she had almost seen her father doing with the babysitter, she had begun to understand the difference between what she actually saw with her eyes, and what she observed using her mind. She wasn’t yet able to describe the difference, and really, she never would be, not really. But she knew there was something strange about it. And she knew, just from talking with a handful of other people, that this wasn’t something that most people could do. This was something that made her special.

    And while most little girls (and little boys too, of course) liked to feel special, this was a strange sort of special. This wasn’t the kind of special where you found out that you were really a princess who had been stolen away from her kingdom and you only had to travel back to your castle and you’d be allowed to reclaim your life, or the kind of special where you were a magical wizard who needed to go to a special school for wizards so you could learn how to use your talents and save the world. Those sorts of special were quite lovely. Cassandra’s sort of special was actually rather difficult, terrifying, and even sometimes sickening.

    Here’s the thing: Most of us have the chance to learn the complexities and intricacies of adulthood gradually, as we work our way through adolescence, struggling with an emerging sexuality, and finally emerge as awkward but still fairly well formed adults. Cassandra had to experience this approach adulthood quite a bit differently.

    She wasn’t much older than she was for the Shay-Shay incident when she first learned what a blowjob was, and while she went for months without able to escape the image of a man’s penis slipping in and out of a woman’s mouth, thanks in part to a 14-year-old neighbour going through an explosive burst of puberty, she certainly never spoke of it to her mother. By now she knew better.

    She it was at very early ages that Cassandra learned about all the intricacies of sexuality, from vaginal to oral to anal to things that even now she still didn’t entirely know the names for. Even at nine years old when she started to hear some of her friends giggle and talk secretively about the differences between men and women, and about penises and vaginas, and all the dirty things that grown ups did with them, she played along, pretending like she didn’t already know exactly how everything worked. She was careful to keep her mouth shut even when someone got something quite wrong about the physical details -- there was a girl named Bethanny who had told everyone at lunch one day that a boy had to rub his penis against your belly button for a long time until he got tired, and that was what sex was — because she really didn’t want anyone to know just how much she knew. Especially her mom.

It wasn’t without reason that Mrs. Smart had a tendency to worry about her daughter and wonder about exactly what her daughter was experiencing. There had been a number of strange statements and questions that had occurred over the years. Nothing that would make you really stand up and take notice, just funny little things, like her little girl knew things that maybe she wasn’t supposed to, or had questions about things she maybe shouldn’t be asking questions about quite yet. And then there were the things that were strange, not because of what she did, but because of what she didn’t do, like how after her father moved out, she almost never asked about him.

Mrs. Smart had asked Cassandra about this once, almost a year after Mr. Smart had left. She had said, “Honey, does it bother you that your daddy doesn’t come by to see you very often?”

Cassandra had thought about this a little bit and then said, “Not really, no.”

“Why not?”

“It’s hard for him to get away sometimes. He’s working a lot, and his new girlfriend wants him around when he’s not working. She’s pretty needy.”

“How do you know that? Did he tell you those things?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on.”

Mrs. Smart had let it go after that, wanting to just dismiss it as a little girl who had made up a story to settle her own mind’s reaction to a father who was never around. Except that it hadn’t really seemed to be like that. It didn’t seem like a girl who was lying to herself to make herself feel better about something. It seemed like a girl who just knew what was going on.

She did. Quite often.

And then in the fifth grade Cassandra started to know something that was going on with her teacher, and it was something she most certainly should not have known. And she didn’t know what to do about it.

When she felt it on the first day of the fifth grade, she wasn’t entirely surprised, because she had actually started feeling something similar during the fourth grade. It wasn’t there all the time, and when it was, it wasn’t something she could zero in on and pinpoint. When she had felt it before, it was like this low-key kind of nausea, like a kind of rumbling in her stomach that never really went anywhere.

The rumbling came back on the first day of school in the fifth grade, and it came back with a vengeance.

She sat down in class and after her teacher, Mr. Andretti, introduced himself to the class, she could feel the slick, greasy rumbling kick in, only this time it was quite a bit stronger, quite a bit nastier, and there was a part of her, a very real and terrified part, that thought that this particular sick feeling might very well go somewhere. And if she sat here for too much longer, that somewhere might end up being in her pants.

So while the class was reading silently, she raised her hand and caught the teacher’s attention. Mr. Andretti asked her what she wanted and she explained that she had to go to the bathroom.

“We’re not even an hour into class yet, Miss…” he glanced down at his attendance record, then continued, “Miss Smart. Couldn’t you have gone before you got here?”

“I’m not feeling very well,” she said, and then she felt a sickening gurgle down in her guts, like something was churning, threatening to come out in one direction or the other. She winced, hoping her teacher would catch the importance of this, and that’s when

she really doesn’t look good too bad because she’s a pretty one

she heard something flash through

i bet if she was just a little older she’d fill out nicely and

her mind that made the sickness flash up again, that made her guts quiver, and then

and she’d be one hell of a looker that one okay i guess she can go

he said, “Okay, I guess you can go,” and then she did, turning and running from her chair to the door and out to the hallway and down the hall to the bathroom. She crawled into one of the stalls, slammed the door shut behind her, and sat down on the toilet and cried.

She stayed there for almost 20 minutes, even though she was almost completely certain that nothing was going to come out of her. She knew now what she hadn’t known all those times she had felt the hints of this the years before -- that this wasn’t a real sickness, this was the kind of sickness that came from experiencing someone else’s sickness. This is what happened, for example, when you found out that your teacher had a fondness for little girls.