• "No one is looking at you. No one is looking at you," I mumbled to myself as I walked through my new school on my first day. My head was down and my eyes to the floor but even that I could still hear. Still feel the gazes of the class. I gulped. My classmates, I thought.

    "I heard that she moved here because her family is rich and her parents got tired of living in Montana." I heard one girl whisper to her friend. I ducked my head some more and blushed. As much as I wished I could turn the voices in my head off... well lets say I wasn't their yet. I could hear everything. Both spoken aloud and thought. Of course my only flaw was I was still human. I could only hear as well as a normal human and only see as well as a normal human and every thing else about me was normal human stuff. Just the hearing the thoughts part wasn't so normal. It's an inherited trait. My mother had this and so did her mother and so on an so forth.

    Most of the thoughts were dim. But only because I've been working so hard on locking the voices out of my mind ever since I understood what was going on. I didn't want to be a freak. I still don't.

    The girl had half her story correct. I used to live in Montana. Well that was before someone put two and two together. I'm still not sure how I missed that but I did. She blabbed to the school and we had to move. Instantly. And of course it was in the middle of my sophomore year.

    I liked my old school. I had a lot of friends in my old school. Once they found out that I could read their minds some distended themselves from me but a few stayed close so they could use me. I told my parents once I found out that my secret had leaked. We relocated here in Alabama. My school is so small that the entire school system, from kindergarten to senior year, fits in one school. The population in the school is one hundred and ten. That would be, if my calculations are correct, about eight students per grade.

    I sat down in my desk in the back room at my first period class, with six kids in the room, after I introduced myself to the class, and felt like shrinking and then disappearing. I looked at the front of the room to see half of the class staring at me and the other half thinking about me. I blushed again and put my head in my hands. I could feel that this was going to be a very long high school career.