“You know I’m Elijah Brown,” Elijah burst out. “Open the door for me. Don’t you dare shove me. I’m having a really bad day, and so help me God, I will kick your ass.”
The red-haired guard froze. The kid was one of those, and Mr. Diamond hadn’t warned him!
The bearded guard was unimpressed. Elijah might be a mind reader, but he didn’t know how to control his power yet. The guard hoped Elijah did try something, and then he would show Elijah how to kick somebody’s ass. He pushed open the door and shoved Elijah twice as hard as the red-haired guard had planned. Elijah reeled across the carpet, his backpack throwing him off balance. The door slammed shut behind him.
He stopped himself in the center of the room, in front of a single chair. Beyond that was the biggest desk he’d ever seen. Mr. Diamond himself sat behind it. Floor-to-ceiling windows displayed a killer view of the Strip at night. Other casinos glowed every color. The red and white lights of traffic crawled by a million miles below.
Beside Mr. Diamond’s desk, waiting for Elijah with his arms folded, was Holly Starr’s dad. Elijah hadn’t recognized him at first without his magic cape. He wore a normal business suit, had a black eye, and scowled at Elijah.
Uh-oh.
“Sit down,” Mr. Starr spat. He tried to make this sound authoritative, but he was distracted. Elijah looked exactly like his father had looked at that age. It was uncanny that two people could look that much alike, father and son or not.
Hearing this in his head, Elijah forgot to follow the instructions. He placed his hand lightly on the back of the chair and watched Mr. Starr.
Mr. Starr pointed at him. “This is exactly the attitude that’s gotten you in hot water. And you’re not taking Holly with you.” After his experience earlier that night, Mr. Starr now thought Holly might be more dangerous than Elijah. But that didn’t matter right now. His mission was to scare this kid. “Stay away from my daughter.”
“Bullshit,” Elijah said as calmly as he could. His voice broke, but he pushed ahead, heady with power and high on the tingling sensation in his limbs. “You’re scared of me and of Holly. You’re trying to hide something from both of us, and I won’t let you.” To make good on this threat, Elijah turned to Mr. Diamond for help.
But Mr. Diamond was the only person Elijah had encountered in the last few minutes whose mind he couldn’t read at all. Elijah would have suspected the old man was a cardboard cutout, another reproduction like his portrait from the elevator, if it weren’t for Mr. Diamond’s middle finger tapping the opulent desk.
Mr. Diamond stopped tapping and cleared his throat. “Peter, it’s happening for Elijah right now. He can hear everything you think.”
Mr. Starr looked at Elijah in surprise, then at Mr. Diamond. “Do you have a shot?”
“Not here,” Mr. Diamond answered in a kindly, rumbling voice. “You’ll have to take him down.”
Mr. Starr grabbed Elijah by the throat. He hadn’t moved a step toward Elijah. He hadn’t uncrossed his arms. But with his mind, he took Elijah by the throat and squeezed.
Elijah fought back. He knew now that he was powerful. If Mr. Starr was scared of him, surely Elijah could crush people’s carotid arteries with his mind, too. He focused all his energy on Mr. Starr’s throat, just as Mr. Starr focused all his energy on Elijah’s. But Elijah only tingled mightily from the effort, his mind bursting with Mr. Starr’s violence, as the room faded to black.
He woke not fifty feet from where he’d started—in the basement of the casino, at the employee health center, with his mom and a physician named Dr. Gray in chairs on either side of his bed. His memory of what had happened was so ridiculous that he immediately doubted it. His mom confirmed that much of it had been a delusion. Mr. Diamond really had called Elijah up to his office because Mr. Starr had complained about a lowly apprentice carpenter asking Holly out. Mr. Starr had not attacked Elijah with his telekinetic powers, duh. Elijah had wigged out and punched Mr. Starr. Funny how Elijah’s malfunctioning mind had turned that around to make him think Mr. Starr already had a black eye when Elijah stepped into the room. If he’d held out hope that Holly’s parents would reverse their decision and let him date their daughter someday, that was pretty much over.
His mom and Dr. Gray listened to his story of what he’d imagined Mr. Starr had done to him. When he finished, his mom and the doctor stared at him for a few moments. He wished he knew what they were thinking, but all of that was gone.
Finally his mom smiled. “Well, no wonder you’ve got an A in English. That makes a great story!” She looked at Dr. Gray. “His advanced English class is reading Romeo and Juliet right now.”
“Ohhhh.” Dr. Gray nodded. “We see this a lot. All teenage boys want to save the girl and take on the world. The only difference between other boys and you, Elijah, is that you, unfortunately, have a hereditary mental disorder that pushes your delusions of grandeur into the danger zone and makes you think you can read minds.” He chuckled.
It wasn’t funny. Tamping down his panic, Elijah turned to his mom. “Hereditary? Did Dad have it?”
His mom took a deep breath and held it.
“Dad didn’t die in a drunk driving accident like you told me, did he?” Elijah asked. “He had this disease and he did something horrible.” His mom had always been vague about the details of his dad’s untimely death. Now Elijah knew why. It had been a lie, for good reason. The truth was worse.
His mom let out her breath slowly. “He wasn’t on medication. You’re in much better shape.”
Dr. Gray patted Elijah’s arm and handed him a glossy pamphlet. “This will tell you more about the disease. Just take your medicine, Elijah”—he picked up the prescription bottle on a nearby table and rattled the pills inside—“and I think you’ll be fine. If you’re not, we’ll move to the next step.” He rose, and Elijah’s mom followed him to the doorway of the examining room, where they talked softly together.
Elijah opened the pamphlet, which was decorated ironically with butterflies, rainbows, and stick people hugging each other. Somebody down at the crazy people’s print shop had a sense of humor.
LIVING WITH MENTAL ADOLESCENT DYSFUNCTION
The news that a patient has mental adolescent dysfunction (MAD) can be devastating, both for the family, who had expected a normal, healthy life for their child, and for the patient amid an already turbulent adolescent period. Patients and their families should take comfort in the knowledge that a diagnosis of MAD no longer mandates a lifetime in a mental institution. A new drug makes normal life possible in many cases. Mentafixol suppresses the symptoms of the disease and enables most patients to enjoy an average lifespan. In fact, all known assaults by patients with MAD were committed when the patient was off medication.1
1 JA Gray, “Mental Adolescent Dysfunction: Long-Term Prognosis,” Journal of Mental Illness.
Elijah frowned at the pamphlet and ran his thumb over a rainbow. He’d been on a wild ride, a strange mix of fact and fiction, he realized now. If only the whole thing were his imagination. Especially the part where Mr. Diamond and Mr. Starr ganged up on him to keep him away from Holly.
Elijah’s mom returned alone and sat at his bedside again. “I’m so sorry, honey.” She picked up his fist and kissed it.
He looked down at his hand in hers. Shouldn’t his knuckles be bruised from punching Mr. Starr in the eye? Maybe the adrenaline from the disease had given him superhuman strength and resilience, like an addict on crack.
Then he looked up at his mom, still young and pretty, with long black hair and dangling turquoise earrings that showed pride in their Native American heritage. Yet for some reason, she was terrified they’d have to live on the reservation—she called it the “Res”—and he sensed one of those lectures coming on.
“You’ve got to be careful now,” she said. “People are prejudiced against the mentally ill. Don’t tell anybody about your disease.”
“I won’t,” Elijah promised. If he did, he would never hear the end of it from the lacrosse team. Worse, what would Holly think? He was almost glad she’d broken their dates. She deserved better than a mental patient. What if he’d gone out with her and hurt her?
“And for God’s sake, stay away from that girl,” his mom said. “Don’t even talk to her. Mr. Starr and Mr. Diamond were understanding of your condition and promised to keep it quiet. But that’s it for you and me, Elijah. Mr. Diamond says if you have another episode, I might have to withdraw you from Holly’s school, or I could get fired altogether, and then I wouldn’t be able to take care of you. You might end up at the Res. You don’t know what the Res is like, Elijah. Promise me you won’t pull any more Romeo and Juliet shit on me. There are plenty of pretty girls you can ask out. Let this one go.”
The next morning, Elijah had trouble getting out of bed, but his mom shook his shoulder incessantly and hissed at him that he had to go to school so no one would suspect anything was wrong. He walked into first-period English on the bell, as usual. Holly was the brightest point in his day, as always, her shining brown curls cascading over her shoulders, her dark brown eyes wide. But she cast them down at her desk the instant she saw him.
He crossed to the opposite side of the room and sat down, all the while reaching over the rows for her thoughts. He tried to read her mind, jonesing for the tingles that had spread through him when he’d read minds the night before. He wanted that feeling from her. But she kept her head down, poring over their Shakespeare textbook, with hardly a sideways glance at the guy she’d just dumped.
He opened his own book. His life wasn’t over, he assured himself. He would keep his grades up, pull his weight on the lacrosse team, make the most of high school despite his illness, and try his best not to worry his mom. Only one thing had changed irreparably since yesterday: there was nothing left between him and Holly but regret.
2
PRESENT DAY
Kaylee Michaels saw Holly walking toward her across the casino floor and felt her face light up. When Mr. Diamond had taken in Kaylee a year ago, he’d made her head of security at the casino though she’d been only twenty-one years old at the time. She was at the height of her mind-changing powers, the strongest person seeking refuge at the casino besides the many teenagers and twenty-somethings drugged with Mentafixol. The burden of the responsibility weighed on her every second, but she accepted it, seeing her job as a way to atone for the terrible things she’d done while she was at the Res.
Holly was her window onto the carefree life of a college girl. When Kaylee had first arrived, Mr. Diamond had encouraged her to befriend Holly and rent an apartment with her. He pointed out that, during her senior year of college, Holly would get the freedom from her parents that she’d longed for, yet Kaylee could still keep her safe. What had started as a business transaction had unexpectedly turned into Kaylee’s closest relationship ever. Despite herself, Kaylee had let her defensive walls crumble in front of this bubbly girl, and they’d been the unlikeliest of best friends since.
Now Holly glimpsed Kaylee and galloped toward her between two rows of slot machines, long brown curls bouncing, somehow looking even more glamorous in jeans and sandals than she ever did in her magician’s-assistant getup. She was leading a man by the hand. A handsome, clean-cut man about their age, but still. Even as Kaylee switched her bag of Thai food to her left hand and put out her right to greet him, her senses went on alert.
She poised to strike him with her power if she detected the slightest danger, ready to change his mind about getting close to Holly. Just because a guy had asked Holly on a date didn’t mean he was from the Res, but the timing was suspicious. For the past few days, the mind readers on the casino floor had whispered that they’d sensed people from the Res passing through, plotting to take over the casino.
He’d better not be one of them.
“Kaylee Michaels,” she introduced herself over the electronic music of the slot machines, looking hard into his brown eyes.
“Rob Price.” With no guile in his voice, he wrapped his hand around hers.
At the same time, Holly was effusing, “This is Kaylee, my roommate and the head of security at the casino. See, Rob, I told you we might find her on the floor somewhere. And Kaylee, this is Rob. He asked me out and he still wants to go, even after I told him my roommate is like the Secret Service.”
“Why is that?” Rob asked Kaylee. “Have you had security problems?”
“Well . . .” Kaylee puzzled over the strange question.
“You can tell Rob,” Holly said. “He’s a cop.”
“Oh, really?” Kaylee asked suspiciously, dropping his hand.
Rob drew his wallet out of his back pocket—slowly, as if he understood other cops and people in security didn’t like sharp movements, especially out of pockets—and showed her his Clark County Sheriff’s ID. She’d seen a lot of those cards in the year she’d been in charge at the casino. It looked authentic.
The issue date was recent. “Worked there long?” she asked, straightening.
“Just started. I went to police academy in Chicago,” he said with a flat Midwestern accent to back up his claim. “I got recruited to come here.”
She tried not to let her shoulders sag visibly with relief. If he’d arrived in town from Chicago in the past few weeks, he couldn’t have been sent here by the Res to infiltrate the casino and steal Holly away. Still, Kaylee would be researching him thoroughly as soon as she got back to her office. “Well, Holly’s one of our biggest stars—”