“Let’s go to the coaster,” Anne says, tossing her hair over her shoulders as she looks back at me. “The arcade is dead.” The arcade looks anything but dead, lights and alarms and children weaving between adults’ legs, but that’s not what she means—she means no guys are there.
We approach the roller coaster, a giant wooden monster that creaks and sways a little every time a car zips along the track. A car at the top of the starter hill pauses. The riders point ahead—the first hill sits snugly against the rickety pier’s steps and allows for a spectacular view of the ocean. The riders are watching the waves so intently, so wondrously, that they aren’t prepared for the drop. They scream.
I know who my sisters are going to pick before they say it aloud. A group of guys, probably early college or so, leaning on the queue railings. They have tans and are wearing T-shirts that are new but distressed to look old. Jane goes first, brushes by them casually, just enough that her bare arm touches theirs. She smiles, apologizes, and looks to Anne, giving a hardly noticeable tilt of her head. That one.
“Hi,” Anne says, smiling. She sidles up to the railing, leans over. “Where are you guys from?”
“Raleigh,” the target answers, smiling back. “What about you?”
“Here,” Anne answers. “We go to Milton’s. The boarding school? You pass it when you come in.”
“Catholic schoolgirls?” one of the target’s friends jokes, making his voice sound fake-sexy, and the others laugh. The target is staring at Anne, though, then Jane, and even lets his eyes flit on me for a moment.
“Not Catholic. Just schoolgirls,” Jane says in a way that makes the boys shut up yet entices them at the same time.
“Do you want to get out of here?” Anne says to the target. She leans forward, drums his arm with her fingers. The boy glances at her manicured nails—he knows something is strange about this. But Anne knows exactly what to do. She leans forward, laughs in a way that’s less seductive and more girl-next-door.
“Come on. Only the tourists ride this thing,” she says to him, teasing the other boys. The target seems to open up a little—he likes the way her voice sounds, you can tell. The way she’s pretty and casual and the way she smiles. He thinks she seems fun, interesting.
He doesn’t realize they’re just using him. Not only for the money he’ll spend on us, the compliments he’ll throw our way—especially Anne’s way. He’s just, as Jane puts it, “practice.” How will we know what all we can do with these powers if we don’t practice?
“I can’t leave them,” the boy says, motioning to his friends.
“Sure you can,” Anne says, then, eyes glimmering, teasing, “And you will.”
She’s right—she’s always right. You can’t hide your future from Anne.
The powers are our greatest secret. The secret we never told anyone, not even our parents, not even our brothers.
Jane’s skill developed first. People called her a perceptive child, but there was much more to it. Then Anne, who knew when I’d fall out of the tree house our brother Lucas made. Mine took longer. I thought maybe I didn’t have one, even, when I’d turned seven and still nothing had developed. Anne and Jane pushed me, assured me that mine would be the most impressive of the three of them.
But then it wasn’t.
Jane can know a person’s present. Anne can know their future. And I can know their past.
Anyone can know a person’s past, though. All you have to do is ask them. Anne’s and Jane’s disappointment was almost palpable, but it was nothing compared with mine. I touch someone, I know what they ate for breakfast yesterday, or what their childhood pet was called—how long ago in the past it was doesn’t seem to matter. When I hugged my mother, I knew what she felt like right before her wedding, and that our youngest uncle was secretly her out-of-wedlock first son, yet sometimes I’d hold Anne’s hand and see the secret she told Jane twenty minutes before. If I could control what parts of their pasts I see, maybe my power would be useful, maybe I’d think playing with the minds of boys was fun, too—and honestly, I bet I could control it if I practiced the way Anne and Jane do. But I won’t risk seeing people’s darkest memories just to better play games with my power. It’s not worth it.
“Come on,” Anne says, laughing. The sound is somehow brighter than all the bells and whistles of the carnival games nearby. “Buy me an ice cream.”
“Um…” The boy looks at his friends, who snicker. “Okay.”
The boy ducks out of the roller-coaster line and follows us back through the crowd to a stand where a bored-looking girl is dishing out scoops of homemade ice cream. Anne orders, looks expectantly at Jane and me.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Anne asks the boy, reaching down to touch his arm—skin on skin, that’s all it takes for our powers to work. She flashes a smile, tilts her head, all the things that she knows the boy wants, if only because at that angle he can see down her shirt a little. He doesn’t mind. They rarely mind, even if it’s dinner or movie tickets or letting Jane drive their fancy sports cars. I think that’s Anne’s favorite part: She knows just what to do and say to make them not care.
The boy buys us ice cream, banana-pudding-flavored, and then pays for a few rounds at the arcade. Jane finally shakes her head, though—he’s starting to think less of us, to suspect we’re just using him. So we drop him like a broken toy, sending him back to his friends pissed off that the anticipated hookup isn’t happening. We don’t care. After all, he was just practice.
I don’t really know what we’re practicing for, nor do I know how scamming boys out of money helps us understand our powers. I don’t think Anne and Jane know, either—they just like playing the game and want to justify it. They like being in control. Their powers give them that.
All my power does is weigh me down with everyone’s sorrow, everyone’s tragedies, things that can’t be changed or altered or fixed. It makes me afraid to talk to people for too long, worried I’ll reveal things about them I know yet shouldn’t know. It’s easier just to keep everyone away. Never touch them. Never read them.
My sisters’ powers are gifts. My power is a curse.
The three of us crash onto a bench in front of the Haunted Hotel ride, where rickety cars squeal through a darkened building. The drunker the tourists get, the more they love it, even though it smells like a basement and the fake corpses have twenty years of dust on them.