Doctor Sleep

about because it would worry them, the way she guessed it would worry them if they knew she had made out with Bobby Flannagan—just a little, no sucking face or anything gross like that—one day after school. That was something they wouldn’t want to know. Abra guessed (and about this she wasn’t entirely wrong, although there was no telepathyinvolved) that in her parents’ minds, she was sort of frozen at eight and would probably stay that way at least until she got boobs, which she sure hadn’t yet—not that you’d notice, anyway.
    So far they hadn’t even had THE TALK with her. Julie Vandover said it was almost always your mom who gave you the lowdown, but the only lowdown Abra had gotten lately was on how important it was for her toget the trash out on Thursday mornings before the bus came. “We don’t ask you to do many chores,” Lucy had said, “and this fall it’s especially important for all of us to pitch in.”
    Momo had at least approached THE TALK. In the spring, she had taken Abra aside one day and said, “Do you know what boys want from girls, once boys and girls get to be about your age?”
    “Sex, I guess,” Abra had said . . . although all that humble, scurrying Pence Effersham ever seemed to want was one of her cookies, or to borrow a quarter for the vending machines, or to tell her how many times he’d seen The Avengers .
    Momo had nodded. “You can’t blame human nature, it is what it is, but don’t give it to them. Period. End of discussion. You can rethink things when you’re nineteen, if you want.”
    That had beena little embarrassing, but at least it was straight and clear. There was nothing clear about the thing in her head. That was her birthmark, invisible but real. Her parents no longer talked about the crazy shit that had happened when she was little. Maybe they thought the thing that had caused that stuff was almost gone. Sure, she’d known Momo was sick, but that wasn’t the same as the crazy pianomusic, or turning on the water in the bathroom, or the birthday party (which she barely remembered) when she had hung spoons all over the kitchen ceiling. She had just learned to control it. Not completely, but mostly.
    And it had changed. Now she rarely saw things before they happened. Or take moving stuff around. When she was six or seven, she could have concentrated on her pile of schoolbooksand lifted them all the way to the ceiling. Nothing to it. Easy as knitting kitten-britches, as Momo liked to say. Now, even if it was only a single book, she could concentrate until it felt like her brains were going to come splooshing out her ears, and she might only be able to shove it a few inches across her desk. That was on a good day. On many, she couldn’t even flutter the pages.
    But therewere other things she could do, and in many cases far better than she’d been able to as a little kid. Looking into people’s heads, for instance. She couldn’t do it with everyone—some people were entirely enclosed, others only gave off intermittent flashes—but many people were like windows with the curtains pulled back. She could look in anytime she felt like it. Mostly she didn’t want to, becausethe things she discovered were sometimes sad and often shocking. Finding out that Mrs. Moran, her beloved sixth-grade teacher, was having AN AFFAIR had been the biggest mind-blower so far, and not in a good way.
    These days she mostly kept the seeing part of her mind shut down. Learning to do that had been difficult at first, like learning to skate backwards or print with her left hand, but she had learned. Practice didn’t make perfect (not yet, at least), but it sure helped. She still sometimes looked, but always tentatively, ready to pull back at the first sign of something weird or disgusting. And she never peeked into her parents’ minds, or into Momo’s. It would have been wrong. Probably it was wrong with everyone, but it was like Momo herself had said: You can’t blame human nature,and there was nothing more human than curiosity.
    Sometimes she could make people do things. Not everyone, not even half of everyone, but a lot of people were very open to suggestions. (Probably they were the same ones who thought the stuff they sold on TV really would take away their wrinkles or make their hair grow back.) Abra knew this was a talent that could grow if she exercised it like amuscle, but she didn’t. It scared her.
    There were other things, too, some for which she had no