Outview by Brandt Legg Page A

you as this cute little
kid playing among the fairies,” Linh said.
    “Then a couple of years ago the premonitions
started. At first I hardly noticed them. A thought would flash into my head for
no reason at all, like Rick Barnes isn’t going to be at school today. Sure
enough, he’d stay home sick. I would always look at the phone three seconds
before it rang. Or knowing which nights Mom would be home late. Recently
though, it’s been bigger stuff and farther in advance. About a month ago, a
picture of an older woman in the hospital came into my head. It was our
neighbor, a crazy artist with about twenty cats. Two weeks ago, an ambulance
picked her up. For a while, they weren’t sure she was going to live, but I knew
she’d be fine because there was an image of her coming home in my head almost a
week before. And I see colors around people and--”
    “You see auras?” Amber asked.
    Kyle was doodling on a napkin, only his
doodles always looked like they should be framed.
    “An aura is your psychic energy body,” Amber
explained. “Edgar Cayce, a famous psychic, called it the weathervane of your
soul. It’s like a halo that surrounds your whole body. Everyone has one, even
nonliving things.”
    “They’re in motion and change colors.
Sometimes . . . ” I stopped as the waitress came over, “they’re an inch thick
but they grow and contract so they can be like two feet in places.”
    Then I told them about the pops and the
shapeshifting. It was a lot to take in, and for me  too, hearing it all at
once.
    “Anything else? Can you read minds? Time
travel?” Kyle demanded, smiling.
    “Nothing really useful like that.” I said.
    “Give yourself some time, Nate,” Amber
said. “You don’t know what you’re capable of yet. You’re awesome.”
    I caught Kyle and Linh exchanging a look;
they didn’t seem convinced.
    “It’s not like I’m a comic book superhero. I
just want to know why this is happening to me. Why not you, Kyle, with all your
meditating and quantum physics? Or you, Amber, with your million new age books
and palm reading?”
    “I don’t read palms.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “You can develop all these abilities into
something so powerful,” Amber said.
    “I think he’d be happy to just have the
Outviews stop,” Linh said.
    “Why would he want them to stop?” Amber was
shocked.
    “They’re not fun!” Kyle shot back.
    “Let’s talk about Lee Duncan and
Lightyear,” I said, trying to change the subject.
    “It’s exhausting being your friend, Nate.” Kyle
had a strangely amused yet serious look.
    Mom stopped by and scooped up the check the
waitress had left. Everyone thanked her. She scoffed. “You kids come as often
as you want. Nate’s friends are always welcome. Besides, we’ve got
out-of-towners who eat here more often than my own son.” She was smiling, but I
still felt the zing. Mom called a server over with a tray of desserts and
wouldn’t take no for an answer. It’d been a long time since I tasted a Vanilla
Waterfall and missed them. Amber and Linh split a Sunrise Cake Sunset, and Kyle
had the Mint Happiness.
    Once Mom was safely back in the employee
area, I told them everything Josh said. We explored possible explanations, but
with the timing of Lee Duncan’s unexpected death, his telling my dad secrets
before he also suddenly died along with everyone else in the world with his
name, it was extremely suspicious. Fifty minutes later, we walked out of the
Station very tired and each convinced that my father had probably been
murdered.

 
     
    13
     
    Just as Josh had said, nothing useful came
up when we searched Lee Duncan, even when adding the word Lightyear. Kyle
suggested I meditate on them, but nothing happened.
    “Patience,” he said, more than once.
    Maybe I wanted to alleviate my guilt of
being responsible for my dad’s death, but there were too many coincidences.
Obviously, someone killed him and Lee Duncan to silence them. The facts that