I'd screwed up with my stupid telepathy before, but never quite that badly. I felt awful. Whatever I'd seen was obviously really personal. I hadn't meant to invade Scott's privacy - really, I hadn't. As I was passing by the den, this image of fire suddenly broadcast itself into my mind. It took me a moment to realize it wasn't real. I'd heard voices of thoughts plenty of times, but I'd never seen images like that before. I had no idea telepathy could be visual like that.

When I heard a man call Scott's name, I started to figure out that I was seeing one of his thoughts, a memory or a dream or something. I should have tried to shut it out right away, but I was so scared and I couldn't figure out what I was seeing and I didn't even think that I should be trying not to see it.

I'd never seen Scott angry before. Evidently he was too angry to speak to me after the whole incident; I didn't see him until the next day.

Saturday morning we found out that the Professor and Logan were off doing who knows what, and Storm seemed to sense that there was a lot of tension between me and Scott and gave us the day off. The two of us were sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal in silence. I found myself almost wishing we did have training today. Maybe being forced to work together would help us figure out how to talk again.

"I am really sorry. About last night."

Scott glanced up at me, then quickly back down at his bowl. "Don't worry about it. I overreacted."

I ran my fingers through a section of my hair, working out the small knots that no amount of brushing could seem to prevent. After what felt like five minutes, I cleared my throat. "So, um, would you be up for maybe getting in some training on our own?"

"What'd you have in mind?"

Seeing that he was actually looking at me, I forced myself to maintain eye contact. "I was thinking maybe some target practice."

Holding my gaze, Scott considered for a moment before answering, "Sure. Let's go get dressed and then - where should we meet?"

"The west lawn?"

"Okay. See you in a few."

I hurried back to my room and hastily changed into jeans and a tee and grabbed my jacket. I was pulling my hair into a low ponytail when Scott came jogging up, his usual glasses replaced with the visor he always wore for training sessions.

"So why aren't we in the Danger Room?"

In answer, I telekinetically lifted up a clump of earth about the size of a soccer ball. It hovered up in the air about fifty feet away. "Try to hit it."

Raising a hand to his visor, Scott let loose a small beam. It would have hit my dirt clod, but at the last second I moved it a few feet to the right. I risked a glance over at Scott and was happy to see the corners of his mouth turned up in just the tiniest hint of a smile.

On his fifth try, he finally hit his target and it exploded in a shower of soil. He turned to me, grinning. "What else you got?"

"How good is your eyesight?"

"20/20 - well, last anyone was able to check it."

"Good." This time I swept leaves, about twenty in all, from where they lay in the grass up into the air. They were scattered across a stretch of space about thirty feet across. Immediately, Scott's hand was up at his visor, and he shot down three in rapid succession.

"No fair! At least don't make your beams bigger than the leaves!" I laughed, a bit breathless; it was hard maintaining a connection with so many objects at once.

He complied, and he teased me when he shot five more without missing. But then by the time there were six left, he was missing more than twice as often as he was actually hitting his targets. The very last one took him a good fifteen tries.

"Not bad, Jean." Scott was smiling, and I smiled back, relieved that we were acting like friends again.

"Not bad, yourself."

"Go again?"

We went a few more rounds, with our makeshift targets getting increasingly harder for me to control and for Scott to hit. I finally protested that I was starting to get a headache and we stopped, intending to take a five-minute break. We never did get back to it. We sat in the grass, talking about homework and music and which Star Wars movie was the best (The Empire Strikes Back, obviously). We spent the rest of the morning like that, and by the time we went inside for lunch, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off me. Yeah, telepathy sucked, but maybe it didn't have to mean I'd never have a friend like Scott.