“I don’t see everything all at once. If I make skin-to-skin contact with someone, like a handshake, or if my hand rests on their bare arm, I can catch a glimpse of one of their secrets. Sometimes it’s something relatively minor. Maybe they stole something from a store, or cheated on an exam. But other times…”
She hesitated as memories flooded into her head.
“Other times it’s much worse. Darker. I can see the things from their past that they’ve buried deep. Moments of cruelty, violence, or the harm they’ve caused someone. It’s never all of their sins. I can’t see someone’s entire history or all of their memories. Just one. One secret at a time. But sometimes one secret is enough to right a wrong and expose someone’s character.”
“But who’s to say what you’re seeing is actually the truth?” Wade Nottingham asked. “Memory is unreliable. People misremember things all the time, and sometimes they reshape events in their own minds until what they believe happened has very little to do with reality.”
That was a fair question.
“What I see isn’t a memory in the ordinary sense,” she explained carefully. “It isn’t filtered through emotion, bias, or self-justification, and it doesn’t come from a single person’s interpretation of an event. What I see comes from someone’s mind, but it feels…objective. Direct. As if I’m witnessing the moment exactly as it unfolded, without distortion or embellishment.”
She hesitated, searching for a way to accurately explain it in plain terms.
“The closest comparison I can make is that it’s like watching a recording or video of the event itself. Not someoneremembering it after the fact. Actually seeing it as it happened, with nothing altered and nothing hidden. And it is almost always more damning for the secret-keeper than it is for anyone else involved.”
“You only see the bad things a person has done?” Crispin asked, wincing. “That’s rough.”
“It is,” she admitted bluntly. “That is why I haven’t been particularly eager to use my ability until now. It is also why I wear gloves out in public to prevent accidentally reading someone.”
“What changed?” Gildor asked. “You stated in your proposal that you would like to start using your ability to help investigate crimes for the council.”
“Actually, hearing about what happened to Kingston is what first planted the idea in my head. Learning about how you were accused, convicted, and punished for a crime you never committed made me realize just how valuable my ability could be if I could use it to help uncover the truth. For the first time, it feels like my gift could be more than something strange or burdensome. It could actually serve a purpose. It could help people. I just never imagined I’d be meeting with the council, trying to convince all of you of that, quite this soon.”
The smile faded from her face as quickly as it had appeared.
“But if I’m being honest, Kingston’s story isn’t the only reason. The real reason I want to use my ability to help people is much more personal. When I was growing up, I had a close friend named Poppy Westlake. She went to a different boarding school than I did since she wasn’t a supernatural, but that never mattered. We still kept in touch and called whenever we could. We made an effort to remain a part of each other’s lives, no matter how busy things got. She was bright, funny, and kind. One of those people who made the world seem a little lighter just by being in it. Then one day, everything changed.”
She drew in a shaky breath, forcing down the swell of emotion threatening to rise.
“After an ugly incident happened at her school, Poppy took her own life. I found out later that she had been accused of trying to steal another girl’s boyfriend. That rumor spread fast, causing other people to harass her. And they got away with their behavior because of her already tarnished reputation. Even the faculty refused to listen to her pleas for help. Things continued to snowball until she was relentlessly bullied at school and online. Day after day, message after message, she was torn apart by people who had decided she was guilty without ever caring whether or not any of it was true.”
She lowered her hands in her lap so they wouldn’t see her ball them into tight fists.
“After she was gone, I found out the truth. It hadn’t been some misunderstanding or school drama that got out of hand. She had deliberately been targeted. The couple had set the whole thing up as some cruel little game, and Poppy was the one who ended up losing. She was humiliated, isolated, and destroyed for something she never actually did, all because some other kids had made a bet that they could ruin her life.”
Lana’s voice hardened as she thought back on their cruelty.
“There were others involved, and Poppy wasn’t their only victim. They had done it before. Perhaps if my friend had known about my ability, things would have been different. If I had told her, if I had understood what I could do, if I had been brave enough to use it to help her, maybe I could have uncovered the truth in time. Maybe I could have shown her proof that she wasn’t crazy. That she wasn’t helpless. Maybe I could have given her something to hold on to. But she had been too humiliated to tell me any of it until it was too late.”
Kingston’s voice was hard with anger as he asked, “What happened to the ones who caused it?”
Lana sighed. “I helped expose their lies after the fact, but by then the damage was done, and it still didn’t feel like enough. The truth coming out afterward didn’t save Poppy, and it didn’t erase what they put her through. But it did stop them from ruining someone else’s life.”
“That’s good,” Thayer said. “I fucking hate bullies. It couldn’t be easy exposing them, especially if they were well connected.”
“I’ll admit, I had to… persuade my father to get involved and start applying pressure in the right places. He wasn’t eager to touch the subject at first. Cases like that are messy, public, and inconvenient for people in power. But once he realized there was growing interest in stronger protections for students, and increasing outrage over how easily school administrators were allowed to ignore abuse and escape accountability, it became much easier to convince him. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about one girl or one tragedy anymore. It became about policy, liability, public image, and the fact that people were finally paying attention. It gave him a platform.”
“I heard about this,” Wade acknowledged. “School bullying has become a growing concern across the world, especially now that social media has erased the boundary between what happens at school and what follows students home. Now, harassment has expanded through phones, group chats, videos, and anonymous posts, reaching them at all hours of the day and night.”
“And the worst offenders could be halfway around the world,” Crispin added with disgust. “I’ve been following this subject for a while now, as well.”
“The problem is that technology evolves faster than the systems meant to manage it,” Wade explained. “Schools are constantly trying to catch up as legal responsibilities shift, and new questions about accountability emerge. Administrators are expected to protect students, but many struggle to determinewhere their authority begins and ends when the harassment happens online and outside school grounds. At the same time, they’re also trying to teach students how to use technology responsibly. Unfortunately, compassion is a lot harder to teach than how to use an app.”
“Or, people just need to stop being fucking assholes,” Thayer growled. “I mean, who the fuck wants to ruin someone else’s life for fun? Don’t answer that. I already know there are too many damn sickos in the world. Hearing stories like this just pisses me off.”
“That is why if I can keep even one other person from suffering the way my friend did, then I have to try,” Lana said.
“So, you would like to use your ability to aid in council investigations to ensure that the real guilty parties are punished and innocent individuals are not wrongly convicted,” Gildor summarized.
