It was an idea that had come with surprising ease to her.
It was July 24th, a hot, humid day like you'd expect from a small Californian town in the middle of summer. She and her mother had moved there a month prior, "for a change" her mother had said, "so I'll be farther away" she had heard. She understood. She didn't know how she would have reacted if one day her own daughter looked her in the eyes and said "Dad is cheating on you, I heard him think about his secretary like he used to think about you". Of course, at first, neither of her parents believed her. It was understandable; there had been no case similar to her condition around the world, except for these Jeanne d'Arc on television who claimed that God talked to them, or that they were Jesus's reincarnation.
But she knew about things a child should never know about their parents, like how her dad was cheating on her mom, or how her mom spent most of her 'girls night' evenings spending the family's money at the casino. But that was only a small part of it. She soon learned her dad was a compulsive liar with a superiority complex –she later read it was called being a narcissistic pervert, and his father was the perfect example of it– and her mom thought about the American Dream of being white and rich obsessively. There were times when "that's because you're Latina, you don't understand" and "that's because you're white, you think you're so much better" became the only thing on their minds and that was how she learned about racism and how stupid people could get when skin color and race were weighting on the scale.
Her condition had only worsened it all. Her mother confronted her father about the cheating, he retaliated, shaking the words out of Maya's mouth with a strength she didn't know anyone could exert on their own daughter. They had immediately sought medical help, but all the scanners gave her only headaches and no information on whatever was wrong with her head. Soon enough, her parents became known as the town's whack-jobs, and they blamed it on her, and she understood now. So they moved, two states over, in a bigger city, in a cookie-cutter residential district that insured normal appearances. She went to school there, she was around eleven years old, and she learned the hard way how mixed-race people were treated in the wonderful state of Kentucky. All the bruises and the cuts went unseen by her parents, because they didn't have the time, they had to go to work, "I love you sweetie" but all she heard was their hurry to get away before she could hear anything that was going on in their head.
She had made a friend at her school. A small, small boy with a thin face and thinner arms, and bruises and bad memories and she never told him that she could hear his thoughts. She never told him she could hear his thoughts become blurry and faded and panicked when people were shouting a bit too loud. She never said anything when she noticed how he flinched when someone bumped into him or raised a hand too quickly next to him. In these moments, all she could do was hold his hand and smile uneasily like nothing was wrong and he knew she knew, but he never said anything either, and maybe that was for the best. She had tried to speak to teachers, tell them something was wrong in his house, he was always starving and scared but nobody listened. It was around that time she realized people didn't care about others, whether it was kids teachers were supposed to watch over, or children parents were supposed to love and protect.
She stayed by his side the whole year, giving him what little snack she managed to get her parents to buy for her, even though she had never eaten any of it. But by the end of the year, they were moving again, because the psychiatrists hadn't found anything wrong with her. They wouldn't have, of course, because she was aware that hearing thoughts meant she was crazy, and crazy meant locked up and forgotten about. So she never told any of these people she could hear when they thought "poor little girl, her parents think she has powers, it must be hard on her" when really, it was harder on her parents. They yelled at her, asking why she didn't tell the psychiatrist she could hear thoughts, and she started to lie to them about it, tell them it was over, she couldn't hear anything anymore. She lied through her teeth for another three months before her dad called it quits and left suddenly in the middle of the night when her mom was out –at the casino again, it was getting worse– and he thought she was sleeping.
She stood by the window when he got into his car and drove away, never to be heard of again, and she did nothing because there was nothing she could do, nothing her parents wanted her to do. So she pretended she didn't know anything when her mom barged into her small bedroom the next morning, make up smeared and clothes askew, yelling, wanting to know where he was, and she could only nod negatively and swallow down the words that threatened to tear her throat apart.
Maybe that was where it went downhill.
Her mother started going out more, so much so that she rarely saw her when she got to and back from school. She was twelve and she started to watch cooking videos on the internet so she could cook for herself and not only eat junk food and pasta. She was twelve and she started reading theories on mind-reading, and ghosts, and the universe being infinite or not, and whether Einstein really only started speaking when he was seven years old and it was perfectly. She was twelve and she had to learn by heart which bus she had to get on to go to school, and which ones were to avoid, and within a week she had memorized all the hours and paths of the three different buses she could take to go to school.
The kids there were nicer than those back in Kentucky, but she was a silent girl and people didn't come to her first, and she had too much on her mind –literally and figuratively– to care about it. She just went with it, passing through each day like it was a chore and she studied pretty well because she didn't want to cause any more trouble to her mother. She even started doing other students' homework for small amounts of money, and she kept the money hidden safely in case she needed it someday. She started making small bets, and she earned herself roughly thirty dollars each month, but that was more than enough for her, since she never spent any of it. One of the girl who had lost a bet against her began talking to her during recess, since they weren't in the same class, and they got along pretty well. Her name was Lily and, to put it bluntly, she was a special snowflake. She cut her hair herself and listened to both classical music and metal and she had pierced her ears herself and her thoughts were more often than not centered on another girl from Maya's class.
Maya didn't care about it. She handled way worse than a girl attracted to other girls. There was this teacher that thought disgusting things about one of the seniors, who was only fourteen, and he was around fifty, and he always got her into detention and Maya had wondered if the girl was okay. She wanted to go to her, warn her about the teacher, but that would raise suspicions and the last thing she wanted was to put herself under the spotlight. However she still wrote a small note to that senior, saying "Be careful around Mr. Codler, he looks at you weirdly", and she was very glad to notice the older girl then treaded carefully around the teacher.
There was one time when she had invited Lily to her house, for a sleep-over of some sort. It was Maya's first sleep-over and she felt nervous for some reason. When both girls had gotten to Maya's apartment, her mom was drunk and completely out of it, and had yelled at Lily to get out, that her daughter was a liar and a traitor and other things that didn't make sense, but Lily still left, and started avoiding Maya after that. She never forgave her mother, but then she never really forgave Lily either.
She and her mom stayed in that town until the end of the scholar year. Maya had her first summer without any moving for the first time in what felt like an incredibly long time. Then came the beginning of the year, another grade, other people, but Lily's crush was still in her class and Maya had later wished she had never focused on that girl because her head was filled with atrocities about other people. There was a chubby boy she called "fat lard" in her head, but smiled to nicely in the class. There was a boy with big front teeth she called "beaver" and his friend, the class president, she called "the help" because she was black. Frankly put, the girl was a bitch, and Maya sincerely regretted she hadn't noticed it earlier, because that way she could have warned Lily not to get too close to her. She didn't have the time to, however, because November rolled around and Lily confessed and got ridiculed. Students would throw gum in her hair and avoid touching her while laughing, claiming "I don't wanna catch the dike's disease" and Maya, once again, could do absolutely nothing, but watch the girl who used to be her friend fall apart and eventually stop coming to school altogether.
They moved again right in the middle of December, to Iowa, because apparently her mom had always liked this state, but all she saw was a middle-aged woman who was addicted to casino and alcohol, stuck with a kid she wasn't sure she really had wanted at any point, trying to run away from reality as far as the continent allowed. She spent her birthday emptying boxes, alone in her to-be bedroom, hearing the neighbors that lived below think about their recent married status and already regretting it because it wasn't what they had wanted at all. Thankfully they were far enough that it was just a buzzing in the background, unlike her bedroom neighbor, whose thoughts felt like slaps in the face. From what she had gathered, he was a thirty-something man, obsessed with sports and hunting and being manly, but all she heard was a pathetic man trying to compensate for the fact that his mom had always been quite the Spartan when it came down to her son's life choices.
It was the day she became fourteen she also became more bitter, and prone to sarcasm. As if something had clicked inside of her, she started answering back to her mother when she was being grounded –for whatever reason her mother managed to find–, and she talked back to the teachers when they didn't admit they were wrong and she started bitching about everything and everyone. She was the new girl in school and around the time February came around she already belonged to a "clique". The bad one, the more-or-less popular one, the clique in which half of the people were known to fight at any given chance and the other half was cheering them on. She should have seen it as a mistake, since her grades dropped drastically, and she started losing weight and being irritable, but even now that she was seventeen, she still considered it to be the best year of her life since her condition appeared. That was also the first time she bleached her hair, the shockingly pale blond going along nicely with her caramel-colored skin.
In the clique, there was a leader of some sort, Mary, and she had a boyfriend, and that was the first time Maya looked at guys as potential kissing partners. Mary's boyfriend was Tom, and he was quite the pretty boy, and he knew it, and he was cocky and unstoppable and everything a fourteen years old mind-reader needed, because he said what he thought and he thought what he said. Maya and Tom immediately got along, they would hang out between classes and on Saturdays she'd go to his house and meet with some of the clique members, and play video games and put a serious dent in Tom's parents' beer stock. She was with them for two months when Tom and Mary broke up, and suddenly Mary lost all will to fight and was slowly left aside because the clique was moving on and she was stuck behind. A week after the break up, Tom invited Maya to his house, as usual, except that this time it was just the two of them and Maya found that she didn't really mind, even if his parents were out of town for the weekend.
And just like adults would expect of stupid, snot-nosed teenagers like them, they shared a kiss –her first– and another and eventually by midnight they were in Tom's bed, making sure the condom didn't have a hole in it, and that night she had a lot of firsts taken away and she had loved every bit of it. The thoughts he had about her were only positive, and she basked in it, in his "god I love her skin" and his "she has really nice lips", and she got a newfound confidence in herself that night, a confidence she could never thank him enough for.
She graduated from middle school and, no surprises, they were moving again. She had to say goodbye to Tom, and to the clique, and she knew he was hurt she was going far away, because she had heard him think so, but he pretended he was fine and she left it at that. They kissed one last time before she got into her mom's car and that was it. Suddenly, what felt like the biggest chapter of her life was gone and there she was, physically moving along, but mentally still stuck firmly on the blue carpet they used to own, the one she had sat on before telling her mom about her dad cheating, four years ago. When she started crying on the way to Colorado, her mom didn't say anything, just stared at the road ahead and Maya was thankful for it, even though her mom didn't mean it to be a good action. "She has nothing to cry about, I'm the one who should cry, having a child like that" she had thought, but Maya didn't really care, not anymore.
Denver, Colorado, now that was new. Maya had lived in big cities before, but never a capital, and the tall skyscrapers were dizzyingly high and bright and the people talked as loud as they thought, and on her first day in the city she was so overwhelmed she had barfed the MacDonald's she'd eaten an hour earlier. Her mom hadn't even spared her a glance, even when passers-by stopped and asked her if she was okay, but she didn't mind, because she was starting to feel less and less related to the distant alcoholic her mother had become over the years. Their new apartment was pretty nice, she had the biggest bedroom out of all the other apartments she'd ever lived in until now. The neighborhood though, wasn't as nice as the inside of their living-room. Late at night, she'd hear voices shouting and the whispering of her neighbors' thoughts going array and she'd stay awake, peaking from behind her curtains, as people came and went down in the street, looking around them like they were being followed. Most of them probably were, judging by their faces and the smidgen she could hear from her place at the second story.
Going to highschool there was a real pain in the ass, if she was being honest. Both girls and boys were the complete American movie stereotype, girls in pink, laughing behind their hands and all dressed the same, boys in blue, rolling their shoulders back when a girl passed by and pretending to be tough. It was a big change from her clique, in which everyone was different but equal, whether it was Heather and her weight problems or Jules and his complete inability to fight. Now everyone was staring at her because she bleached her hair and teachers called her to their office, asking why she wasn't getting along with everyone, thinking "how could she ever" and smiling and wondering why she hated them all. The only good thing that came out of the eleven months she spent there was that she had taken an interest in music. Her school offered guitar lessons and she took them, gingerly getting into tempos and rhythms and why she should use a mediator instead of her nails. That was the only highlight of her day, the hour of guitar lesson she had every day at 4. She learned how to play some All Time Low songs, who were Lily's favorite band, and even managed to buy her own guitar with the money she had earned over the years, what with the countless bets and homework done for others. She eventually became great at guitar, even earning her teacher's praise during the parent/teacher meeting, but it wasn't like it mattered to her mother. Then again, her mother's opinion didn't matter to her anymore.
She was fifteen, in the middle of her second –and last– summer in Denver when she met Dante. He was a tall, broody black-haired senior who had a knack for hitting people in his free time, and he had the greyest eyes she'd ever seen. She knew him vaguely, because she'd seen him get into trouble at the school, but now he had graduated and he was alone for the summer and so was she. She was buying herself a mint-chocolate ice cream, had turned around, and had unfortunately crashed into Dante, smearing green ice cream everywhere on both of them. He had looked sincerely pissed at first, but when she apologized and he took a good look at her face, the first thought she heard from him was "wow, I'd tap that" and she wouldn't have known what to do otherwise, but then she remembered Tom's thoughts when they were together, and how people looked at her on the streets, and she had flung all thoughts that wasn't about Dante far away in her mind and had proposed to wash his shirt at her house. She didn't live more than ten minutes away from there and her mother was conveniently at work –not that she was at home often anyway, caught up between work and drinking as she was–, and she took the opportunity and almost literally jumped the poor guy's bones. Not that he had complained about it after she started kissing him, though.
Dante was skilled with his fists, judging by what she had heard about him, but boy was he also skilled with his mouth. And she gave Tom apologies, but he made her feel pleasure in a way she hadn't thought was humanly possible until that very day. She loved everything about the few hours they spent together, she loved having his thoughts focused solely on her, because in these moments it felt like she could only hear his thoughts, and that was incredibly resting for her brain.
They went at it until the bed was drenched in sweat, amongst other things, and took a much-needed shower –and almost slipped and fell at least twice– but by the time he gave her his number and she closed the door, she felt like a new person. When she came back to her room, however, she realized they hadn't used a condom, and the realization made her fall to her knee with pure relief because when she was dating Tom, she had gotten on the pill after the third time they'd done it. If there was something she didn't want, it was kids, especially not at fifteen years old. After that, she never forgot to bring a condom, even though she was on the pill, in case there was a day she had forgotten it. Her fling with Dante lasted three more weeks when, as she had predicted, her mother announced they were moving. Was it the sixth, seventh time? Maya had stopped counting a while ago.
Dante just called her on the day they were moving, telling her it was too bad because she fucked pretty well for an ice cream waster, and that they probably would never see each other again so she should erase his number. She had agreed to it but hadn't done it, for some reason, maybe because that also meant erasing the only picture of him she had in her phone. She had taken it one day after they had had sex. He was standing in front of her bedroom window, naked, profile to the camera, checking his phone with both hands, hair completely out of place because she loved to grab it, sun on his shoulder, grey eyes striking. She had taken the picture from the waist up in case her mother had the idea of going through her phone –and even though Dante was very nicely built, her mother didn't need to see it–, and from the angle she could still make out part of the tattoo he had on his back. The picture was only this beautiful because he was the model, and it would have been a waste to just throw it away. So she kept it, even transferring it to her new phone when she got another, along with his number. She didn't really know why, but admittedly, she didn't need a reason to.