True Talents(39)

“So,” I said, not taking my eyes from Cheater, “how could someone miss every card, not just in one test, but six times in a row?”

“That’s impossible,” Flinch said. “You’d have to get some of them right just by chance.”

As Flinch spoke, Cheater looked away from me.

“Unless you knew what the right answer was,” I said. “If you knew the right answer, but you wanted to prove you didn’t, it would be easy to get every answer wrong. Easy, but not a good way to hide your ability. Mr. Briggs was interested in kids who got more than five right. He didn’t bother to look at the other side—kids who got less than five.” I held up the printout and pointed at Cheater’s scores.

“Wow. You’re right,” Flinch said, grabbing the printout from my hand. “It would be impossible to miss every one, unless you knew what the right answers were. Maybe—just maybe—you could miss all the cards on one test. But on every test? Give me a break.”

Even Torchie saw that I was right. “Cheater, you can read minds.”

Cheater shook his head. “No, I can’t. Mr. Briggs didn’t say anything. He would have said something …”

“Mr. Briggs was looking for hits, not misses,” I said. “You should be glad he was. If he’d noticed your score, he’d have known right away that something was wrong.”

“But …” Cheater looked around the room. “Lucky, you don’t believe this nonsense, do you?”

Lucky just shrugged.

“Flinch,” Cheater said, “you can’t swallow this stuff?”

“It makes perfect sense to me,” Flinch said. “Numbers don’t lie.”

Cheater turned to Torchie. “Come on, Torchie,” he said, “at least you believe me. I can’t read minds, and even if I could, I’d never tell anyone about your secret hiding place.”

Torchie gasped. “How’d you know? That’s just what I was thinking.” He stared at Cheater for a moment, then looked around at the rest of us. “I was worried that Cheater would read my mind and know where I hid my favorite comics.”

I could see it in their faces. They believed. Torchie was sure now—there was no doubt in his face, just wonder and amazement. The same with Lucky and Flinch.

I watched Cheater. I expected him to be angry or happy. Instead, he looked like he was about to cry. “I don’t want to be different,” he said quietly.

“But you are,” I told him. “Hey, everyone is different in some way, right?”

“Not this different,” Cheater said.

“No choice,” Flinch told him. “You are what you are. You gotta live with it.”

“There’s this guy in my town,” Cheater said. “Everyone called him Crazy Wally. He walked around talking to himself. He heard voices. People laughed at him. Kids teased him. One day, the voices told him to get even. He killed three people before the police shot him.” Cheater stared right at me. “I’m not crazy.”

“Hey, nobody said you were.” I began to understand his anger and fear. “You don’t hear voices. You aren’t walking around talking to yourself. That’s not what it’s like, is it?”

Cheater shook his head. He started to speak again, but it took several tries. “I didn’t want to believe it.” He looked down at the floor.

We all waited quietly. Finally, he went on. “Sometimes, I guess I just know stuff. It’s not like I hear it. I can’t pick through people’s brains. I guess I only get what someone is actually thinking. It’s like their thoughts show up in my mind.”

“Like a memory?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Cheater said. “But I know stuff on my own, too. I’m really smart. Ask me anything. Anything at all.”

“Hey, relax. We know you’re smart,” I told him. “You’re probably the smartest kid I’ve ever met.”

Cheater smacked his leg with his fist. “But sometimes I can’t tell it apart—the stuff I learned and the stuff that pops up.”

“So you’re not even sure where it’s coming from,” I said. That explained his problems in school. “When you’re taking a test, you think the ideas are from your own mind. You don’t hear the thoughts of the kid next to you—the thoughts are just there in your mind.”

“Yeah. I guess …”

Flinch started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Cheater asked.

“All your life, you’ve never cheated, right?” Flinch asked.

Cheater nodded. “Never. Not until the experiment.”