Chapter 4

The date was not much if you are looking for excitement. We went to a science fiction movie that we both wanted to see, and we held hands during the movie. After the movie, we went to a parking place where we held hands some more and talked, mostly about what the people in the movie should have done instead of what the script writers had them do.

Jack delivered me home just after midnight, and I want to say how much I enjoyed the date. Getting a boy’s point of view was very interesting. I doubt that I could have enjoyed the date more. I called Jack Saturday morning, but he had already left for his part-time job. I left word for him to call me when he could.

I had a long discussion with Mom about the date, and she thought that it had gone well for a first timer for both of us. With no experience, I couldn’t argue with her, but I did say how much I had enjoyed it. She was pleased for me, and that was where it ended.

I was watching TV when the talk show was interrupted by a news flash. There was a crash on the expressway, and six cars were damaged. One of them was on fire. I did the usual tsk, tsk of the sympathetic viewer, but then it dawned on me that I might be able to help. I was wearing a tee-shirt and shorts with canvas shoes, so I was dressed like the typical teenager. I called to my mother that I was going for a walk.

I knew the area, so I was able to teleport to near the location of the accident. I noticed that a crowed had gathered, and there were three other girls there dressed as I was. That was good camouflage. I made a mental sweep of the burning car, and I found that there were three people in the car: two adults and a child.

The adults had been killed by the impact, but the child had been saved by the carrier that it was riding in. The problem was that the fire was not yet noticed by the firefighters on scene, so they were working on getting some other badly injured people onto stretchers for transport to the ER. Shit! That baby was going to die if I didn’t do something.

There seemed that there was nothing that I could do without giving myself away, but then I had an idea. The car, as was usual nowadays, had four doors so I pulled one of the back doors open and bent the sheet metal with my TK so that it looked like it had come open during the accident. I used my TK to tear the seat belts loose from the mountings and moved the baby still in the carrier to the street beside the car as if it had been thrown there during the impact. I made sure that the baby was far enough away from the car so as not to be burned by the fire. As soon as that was done, I ran to a firefighter and said, “Hey, there is a baby on the ground next to that burning car.” I then ran away before he could ask any questions.

The firefighter was on the ball and looked where I had pointed. The baby could be seen on the ground, and he ran to investigate. I figured that I had done all that I could, so I looked at the other cars to see if there was anything that I could do there. Everything else seemed to be under control, so I got out of there right away. I went to a secluded place and teleported home. I shouted, “MOM, I’M HOME!” and sat down in front of the TV.

Mom came in a few minutes later, and there was a rerun showing the tape the station had on the accident. Mom exclaimed as if this were the first time she had heard about the mess, so I said that I had not been gone long, so I had seen most of the tape before Mom came in. By now, there was a news helicopter at the scene, so we were getting a lot more of the crash than had been shown before. I felt pretty good when the reporter announced that a baby that had been thrown from a burning car was now safe and in the hospital. He reported that the parents were victims of the accident and the baby was now an orphan. Oh, well, I had done what I could.

This was obviously a slow news day, so all of the TV stations were now carrying a full report on the accident. The bad part was that there had been a total of 17 people involved in the accident, but only four had survived, one of whom was that baby that I had rescued. One reporter commented that what else could one expect when traffic was bumper-to-bumper and moving at 60 MPH (Miles per Hour).

As usual, there were a lot of talking heads bemoaning the number of dead and proposing all kinds of ridiculous solutions to the problem. Anybody with any sense had to know that this sort of thing was going to happen every once in a while—there was no way to eliminate it.

By the time Sunday came around, the mess had been cleaned up and the TV people were talking about other things, such as the latest squabble in the European Union or how to keep undocumented aliens out of the USA. The attention span of the public was amazingly short. Was that because the news media, particularly TV, was always looking for the next disaster to report on?

I couldn’t take it. I had to talk to somebody about my new-found abilities. I selected Dad as the one to hear my story. He was a lot more level headed than Mom, so I figured that I could convince him that what I said was true, and he could offer some good advice about what I should do with my abilities.

I managed to catch him lounging in his den. He was watching a golf show on TV for lack of anything better to do; he did not play golf, so I knew that he must be desperate for something to interest him. I knocked on his door and said, “Dad, I have a serious situation that I need to talk to somebody about, and you are my first choice.”

“Come on in, Honey, and close the door if you want to. I’m always available to talk to one of my favorite daughters.” I grinned at that, because that was always the way he prefaced a serious discussion with us kids.

“Dad, I didn’t want to say anything at first because I didn’t want to worry anybody or get the word all over town, but something happened to me while I was in the hospital with my stab wound.”

“Oh, my God! You aren’t in pain or having a relapse, are you?”

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that. The medicine they gave me had a strange effect on my brain, but it is nothing bad. It’s just very confusing. Dad, you know what ESP is, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. What has that got to do with anything?”

“Well, since I left the hospital, I have had the full range of ESP talents available to me. I can read minds. I can do telekinesis. I can teleport. There are other things that I can do, but those are the important ones.

“I don’t need mind reading to know that you don’t believe me, so I will show you. Let’s start off with an easy one. Think of a number and let me guess it. Okay, it’s 139. Try for another one, but make it more involved. It’s pi, 3.14159. You are now thinking that this is some sort of parlor magic trick that I have learned. Okay, let’s go to something else. Watch this.”

I lifted myself clear of the chair and drew up my legs so that I could fly around the room. I did that for about three minutes until I broke through my Dad’s disbelief. “Now, I will teleport.”

I popped from place to place around the room, sometimes on the floor and sometimes near the ceiling. I held myself in each new place by TK until my new location was firmly accepted by Dad’s mind. “I kind of hate to do this one, but I am going to illustrate mind control.”

I had Dad stand on one leg and pat his head while rubbing his stomach. Believe me, that is hard to do on your own. I cheated and used TK to make sure that he did not fall during that little demonstration.

“Okay, Dad, do you need more demonstrations to make you believe that what I have said is true?” I knew that he believed me because I could read it in his mind. Now he was concerned that I was always reading his mind. “Dad, I never read anyone’s mind under normal circumstances. I have never before read your mind, and I only did it once to Mom while she was on the phone with her friend Lois Whitaker.