At lunchtime, Ivy headed to the library as usual, hoping to get some statistics homework done. She sighed when she remembered that it was Friday. Food truck day. Almost everyone ate outside on Fridays because there were more options.
The library was desolate. She spotted one student on a computer, two wandering through the bookshelves, and two more at different tables. None of them shared her statistics teacher. What a letdown.
At least with so few people around she was able to concentrate on outlining an essay without any difficulty. Unfortunately, essays were something she couldn't copy.
When Ivy got up from her table she smacked directly into someone and dropped her backpack. She was stunned. She couldn't remember the last time she actually bumped into someone outside of a crowd, where it was impossible to avoid.
She always heard them coming but this guy was completely silent. A man of few thoughts? She had encountered a few people like that over the years.
"Sorry about that. Are you okay?" he asked.
Ivy gawked up at him. Still nothing. People always had thoughts when they spoke—even if they more or less consisted of what was actually being said. There wasn't that kind of overlap here. The guy looked at her like she lost her marbles. Maybe she had. Had her power stopped working?
'…two dollars in late fees and he still hasn't returned the book!'
'Hmm, this one looks decent, maybe I should read it next.'
'Stupid word count! I'm only 78 words short!'
'...divided by three would be twenty-one but what about this next step…'
Everyone else's thoughts were perfectly audible. But not this guy's. Ivy recovered from her abstraction and gave him a small smile to indicate she wasn't crazy.
"I'm fine, it was mostly my fault anyway."
He shrugged it off. "Eh, it was both our faults. Later!"
He walked away and Ivy was of half a mind to chase after him. But for what? It's not like she could demand answers from him.
If she said 'hey, why can't I read your mind?' to a random stranger she would lose what little reputation she had in this school. He would think she was nuts, possibly even dangerous. That wouldn't do.
She did her best to commit his features to memory in the hopes of finding him again later: tanned skin, short black hair, brown eyes. He dressed like a skater in cargo pants, a mall-brand shirt, a studded leather bracelet, and sneakers.
No one else had ever been exempt from her telepathy. How had she let the most intriguing person she had ever encountered walk away just like that?!
Ivy's head was so full of thoughts of this mysterious boy that she hardly even noticed the buzz of the hallway after lunch. What made him different?
Not knowing what he was thinking during their brief interaction churned her stomach into knots. Telepathy had become a crutch without even realizing it. Were there other people out there like him? What was she supposed to do about this?!
It bothered her for the rest of the day. Even her family noticed she was off.
"What's wrong with you?" Ethan asked with his mouth full of leftover cookies when her noticed her pacing in the living room.
How could she phrase this hypothetically… "What would you do if you knew stuff but suddenly didn't anymore but only about one thing?"
She cringed at how stupid that sounded but it's not like she could tell the truth.
"Very specific," he said sarcastically.
"Shut up."
"Seriously though, I've never seen you like this." Her little brother actually looked concerned. "What's going on? Something at school?"
"Well…" She needed to dumb this down to a normal person's level. "I met someone today who confused me. Normally, I read people pretty well but I don't get him at all."
That seemed safe enough. Anybody could read people based on body language.
"That's it? Geez, Ivy, I thought somebody was dying. You're normally super chill."
Ivy frowned. It was a big deal to her, okay? He couldn't understand. Maybe if she related it to something he knew.
"You know that comic book character you like that's a telepath? The leader of that superhero school?"
"Doctor Y?" Ethan asked excitedly.
"Imagine if there was a person whose mind he couldn't read. Wouldn't he feel like that person is an enemy?"
She was fairly certain the guy wasn't malicious—he looked like a regular high school student—but he definitely made her uneasy.
"There are a handful of people whose minds he can't read, like the Badger! Sometimes people are just immune to that kind of power. Not many but they exist in the comic universe. But how's that the same as you not understanding someone?" her brother asked.
"It's not," she lied. "I was giving an example. It feels weird not being able to figure this guy out, okay?"
Ethan frowned. "If you're such an expert on human behavior, what am I thinking right now?"
He concentrated really hard on trying to do a poker face but ended up looking more constipated than anything. 'She'll never guess what I'm thinking! I should go to Las Vegas; I'd make so much money! Nothing gets past me!'
She sighed. She didn't even need telepathy for this one. "You're thinking your poker face is foolproof but it's not. Don't ever gamble."
"You're the one with a bad poker face!" Ethan shouted as he fled up the stairs, embarrassed and cursing her out in his head.
'She's better than I thought…she always gets me on stuff like this! It's not fair. Just because she's older she thinks she knows everything! I know stuff too!'
He wasn't wrong. Ethan gave her an idea—she could look up more about Doctor Y's powers and their deficiencies. Having a research starting point would be helpful even if it was fictional.
It's not like there were any scientific sources she could use. To everyone else telepathy wasn't a real concept.
She checked out the character's informational webpage and soaked it all in like a sponge. Like her, Doctor Y was born with his powers. Unlike her, he was able to read thoughts up to 250 miles away, project thoughts, manipulate thoughts, warp perceptions to make himself seem invisible, cause memory loss, and induce pain in other people.
Yikes. Suddenly that made her occasional cheating seem like nothing.
As for the list of characters not affected by his powers…most of them, including the Badger, seemed to have great mental strength and made conscious efforts to block him out. These were people who knew about his abilities…how could this guy who had no idea she was a telepath be consciously aware enough to block her out? It had to be something else.
If anything, her research into the world of Doctor Y was even more perplexing. There had to be something else she could check besides comic books. The official source page on telepathy from the internet called it a pseudoscience and said all experiments were proven to be false, as expected.
There were fictional accounts of telepaths in other comics, anime, sci fi movies, and more. It took her hours to click through all of them and none matched her quite right.
It seemed like people believed telepathy itself was a lesser part of a greater group of powers such as telekinesis or psychic abilities. She wasn't psychic. And she had never moved anything without using her own two hands.
Why was this so frustrating! There wasn't a single soul alive that she could talk to about this without getting diagnosed with schizophrenia or something along those lines. She wasn't delusional. She DID hear people's thoughts and could prove it but fervently hoped she never had to. Was there anything else she could do about this guy without finding him again and conducting research in person?