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Overview
Rae can’t tell anyone about the voices she hears in her head.
If she does, they’ll lock her up in the hospital again, only this time, they’ll throw away the key. She wouldn’t blame them either. Rae does feel like she’s losing her mind. This is how her insane mother must have felt right before she died. All this makes life at Rae’s private high school lonelier than ever. Anthony might be the only friend she has right now, if she can even call the empathetic stranger in her group therapy session a friend. But when someone sets off a bomb in a bathroom with Rae as the intended target, Anthony is the only person Rae can turn to. Only problem? Anthony is the number one suspect . . .
“[A] fast pace and original premise.” —Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504088619 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 09/26/2023 |
| Series: | Fingerprints |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 182 |
| Sales rank: | 1,030,082 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fingerprints #1: Gifted Touch
Chapter One
"Is there anything you need for school tomorrow?" Rae's father asked as they drove down the freeway at precisely fifty-five miles an hour. "We could swing by the mall after your, uh, meeting. I'd be willing to give you control of my AmEx for, say, twelve or thirteen minutes." He took his eyes off the road long enough to give her something that she knew was supposed to be a smile, although it came out more like a grimace. Just way too many teeth showing.
That was your cue, Rae, she told herself. Her cue to launch into a long and elaborate whine-protest that would convince him just how key the right clothes and accessories were to having the kind of school year she'd want to look back on fondly when she was his age.
"What do you say?" her father asked. He rubbed the little mole on his right cheek, the way he always did when he got stressed.
"I'm good," Rae answered. She was sure there were some things she should want for the start of her junior year. A shirt in one of the "new" colors or a backpack upgrade or something. But she had no idea what the things she should want were. It seemed safer to stick to the stuff she already had. She could trust that Rae, the pre-freak-out Rae. But the only-days-out-of-the-hospital Rae—that was not someone who could be trusted with something as delicate as picking out appropriate clothes.
Her father's smile-grimace faded. "Well, if you change your mind . . ." He let his words trail off and studied the freeway stretching out in front of them with unnecessary intensity. Rae stared through the windshield, too, letting the waves of heat rising off theasphalt and the white lines flying past mesmerize her. Her happiest times, happiest post-freak-out, were moments like this—when she could blank out, her mind quiet. Which was pretty pathetic. She could just imagine her first day of school.
Hey, Rae, what did you do this summer?
Oh, I had a nice, long rest in a kind of . . . resort. And I took a lot of baths, which was fab because in the tub, my mind actually seems to work fairly non-psycho-ly. What about you?
And that was if anybody was even willing to talk to her at all after her meltdown in the cafeteria last spring. She'd seen Marcus only once since that day—hospitals gave him the creeps—although she'd gotten a couple of sweet cards from him. Lea had actually shown up at the hospital a couple of times—with a few other friends in tow—but she'd been better about sending an endless stream of little gifts. Not that Rae could blame her. A day at the hospital wasn't exactly the definition of summer fun.
"Could you hand me my sunglasses?" Rae's dad asked."Sure. You should always wear them when it's this bright. We blue-eyed types are so sun sensitive," Rae answered, doing her look-how-normal-I-am routine. She opened the glove box.
"What am I supposed to say to her?"
The thought was followed by a vicious wrench in the muscles between Rae's shoulder blades. A tiny gasp of pain escaped her lips.
"Are you all right?" her father demanded, his voice filled with needles of anxiety.
"Yeah, fine. Just banged my elbow on the door handle," Rae answered quickly. She'd managed to convince her dad and her doctor that the strange thoughts that had started slamming into her brain without warning were gone. And she wasn't going to give either of them any reason to suspect that she'd been lying; otherwise she'd be on the express train back to squirrel city.
"Sunglasses?" her father reminded her, sounding a little more normal. Neither of them sounded completely normal anymore."Oh, right." Rae snatched up her dad's dorky, geek-professor-attempting-coolness mirrored shades—"a bald spot"—and handed them to him, absentmindedly stroking the top of her head. She didn't try to figure out where the thought about a bald spot had come from. She'd given up on searching for explanations months ago and accepted the fact that this was her life now. All she could do was deal—and try not to foam unattractively at the mouth.
Rae focused her attention back on the heat waves and the white lines. But just as she was starting to reenter the blank zone, her dad changed lanes and moved onto the off-ramp. Three turns later the sign for the Oakvale Institute came into view. It was more low security than the hospital. No fences or anything. But Rae still bet it had that smell, that bargain-brand-disinfectant smell.
"I don't know why I even have to do this. I'm fine. Dr. Warriner said I was fine," Rae said.
"And you are fine," her father answered, his voice a little too loud. "You're doing great. The group sessions are just to help you keep on track, especially with starting back to school tomorrow." He pulled into the institute's parking lot and maneuvered the old Chevette into a spot almost in front of the main doors. "I'll be right here when you're done," he said, giving her arm an awkward pat.
Rae noticed he'd been touching her more since she got out of the hospital. She wondered if that was something Dr. Warriner had encouraged him to do in one of their private sessions. Rae wished her dad wouldn't bother. They'd never been touchy with each other, and now it just felt weird.
Fingerprints #1: Gifted Touch. Copyright © by Melinda Metz. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.