I nodded obediently. She could go over it as many times as she wanted if she was willing to offer me a full scholarship, complete with boarding and travel expenses. I knew it was a privilege to get such an offer. Tuition alone is forty grand a year at RAMS.
“You’ve had these… special powers since you were young?”
“For as long as I can remember.”
“When she was born,” my mom broke in, “she popped out of me with those big green eyes, so aware, as if she was asking ‘Who the hell are you? What is this place?!’ You see, she was my first so I had no clue how weird that was at the time.”
Oh God… Mom.
Simone shifted on the sofa and smiled softly. Even Cedric’s lips were curved.
“Have you always had visions?” Simone carried on.
My mother rudely cut in again. “Oh… when she was five years old, she refused to go to our favorite restaurant,” she said. “Later, we were watching the news and we found out that there had been a shooting. Anna had seen it before it happened.”
“And is that what happened with Calista Summers? Did you see her jump off that waterfall before it could even happen?”
I shifted in my seat. “Not really… I sensed a dark hole in her, I felt her desperation. And then I saw her drawing… but it all kind of fell together when I saw her on the news. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really been paying attention until then,” I admitted.
Silence filled the room, no one daring to make a sound.
“I really didn’t know the girl…” I trailed off, not knowing what else to say.
She scribbled in her notepad, and I was dying to know what she was writing. She wasn’t close enough for me to read her. “You have precognition and remote viewing abilities,” she said, not so much a question but more of a statement. I had no clue what she was talking about.
“Uh… sure.”
“You are also a psychometrist?”
“I’m sorry…” I said, not quite understanding.
“You can read people’s thoughts?”
“Oh yes, but usually only if I can get close enough… if I can touch them.”
“Can you also read objects and spaces?”
I shook my head. “Yes and no… I’m not super great at that,” I admitted.
“That’s fine. That’s okay,” she reassured me, scribbling once more in her notebook.
Meanwhile, Cedric was tapping feverishly on his digital tablet, and I wondered what he was up to. He was an intelligent serious man, pragmatic and highly intuitive like myself. I could see it all in his purple aura.
I could also tell that he was like me. I got a little excited at the thought of finally meeting someone like me, another ‘weirdo’.
“What other abilities do you have?” she asked.
“I… I can read auras, I can detect the slightest change in body temperature, smell sweat, hear heightened breathing, stuff like that… for example I can tell you right now that you two are cool as cucumbers while my mom here is sweating bullets.”
They both smiled, and my mother blushed.
Simone was still jotting down stuff in her notebook. “Clairsentience, claircognizance, clairvoyance… precognition, aura reading, telepathy, psychometry,” she said. “You run the gamut… that’s excellent.”
She was making me sound like a total freak. But I kind of liked it.
Finally, she closed her fancy notebook and smiled at me. “And what are your plans for the future, Annabelle?”
This question caught me completely off guard. To be honest, I hadn’t put that much thought into it. “Uh… I kind of want to be an artist, part-time, help out in my mom’s coffee shop.” That sounded a little self-indulgent and irresponsible, a little too ‘dreamer’. I quickly added, “Or perhaps work as a psychotherapist… help people.”
