Blood Memories

Dr. Van Tassel was often with him then. Apparently, Wade talked a good deal while in his state of delirium. He'd been speaking aloud whatever the nurses happened to be thinking. Sheila Osborne, a young nursing student from the Psychic Institute, had been working on her internship at the Whitman County Hospital during Wade's stay.

The night before first seeing him, she'd experienced the worst blind date of her life. The guy her best friend had fixed her up with looked like he belonged on the cover of Muscle Fitness. He wouldn't eat the popcorn she bought at the movies because it had salt and butter. He called her babe and lectured her most of the night about the best kind of workout for slimming down her thighs. And then he actually expected her to sleep with him after his cellulite comment.

Slamming bedpans into the cupboard of a hospital room, she heard soft murmuring from the bed.

"I don't have cellulite. And I was wearing Levi's. What would he know?"

She stopped in shock. A semiconscious young man on the bed was rolling slowly in sweat-soaked sheets and whispering her recent thoughts. Forgetting her own hurt vanity, she leaned over him and wiped his face.

"Yeah, I had Levi's on," she said. "What kind of shirt was I wearing?"

"No shirt-that pink sweater your mom bought you last Christmas."

His voice was barely audible, but she heard him. Ten minutes later, she was on the phone to Dr. Van Tassel in Colorado. "I think you'd better come up here. There's someone you need to see."

That was the beginning. Sheila returned to the institute and remained his friend. Although he never did remember much about his stay at Whitman County, she related an embarrassing story about him exposing an affair between a prominent neurologist and his youngest male lab assistant. That hadn't gone over well in North Dakota.

Wade found some of the experiments he participated in to be pointless. But he continued high school with other young people like himself. Well, not quite like himself. No one in the history of the institute had demonstrated anything close to Wade's telepathic ability. He was the golden boy. Everyone wanted to be like him. But as the years passed, they kept asking him a lot of redundant questions.

"What do you see in my mind, Wade? Do you see words or pictures?"

"I see what you feel. Pictures, I guess. I don't know."

Scores of PhDs in fields he didn't understand wrote papers about him.

The frightened, barely literate farm boy from North Dakota slowly fell away, and a self-assured, young-adult version of Wade took his place. In time, he began to verbalize his responses on a higher level.

"What do you see in my mind, Wade? Do you see words or pictures?"

"What do you see when I speak?" he answered. "Do you see words coming from my mouth? How does your mind know what I'm saying?"

In his senior year of high school, he stopped studying for exams. Why should he study when the answers were right there in the teacher's head? He took Russian and began speaking the language fluently in three weeks just by concentrating on the instructor.

He lost his virginity to Sheila, but then left quickly afterward when she began thinking that he'd been okay but didn't compare to her last boyfriend, Steve.

His teachers started making him take his exams in a private room.

But most of them understood his sometimes difficult behavior. He was

different, and they did not expect his schooling to be normal.

However, when new arrivals came to the institute, he was often put in charge of helping the young children adjust to their new environment. Early on, Wade exhibited strong-almost obsessive-tendencies toward protection over the institute's children, especially any who had been abused or neglected by their families… due to their abilities. He remembered all too well how it felt to be blamed and punished for his gift.

The children responded well to his assurances that everything would be different now, and he always let them talk to him, even though he could simply read their thoughts.

One thing Dr. Van Tassel did discover was that if he, or anyone else, put a conscious effort into blocking Wade, it wasn't difficult to lock the young man out. But the doctor never stopped thinking about the possibilities for Wade's gift.

"You could be anything you wanted, my boy. Anything."

The problem was that Wade didn't know what he wanted. At nineteen, his self-assured nature wavered when he was faced with choosing a university. The memories of fear and ostracism from his childhood had never quite passed away. The people in Colorado seemed to like him, and Dr. Van Tassel was the closest thing he had to a father. He hadn't seen his own since leaving for the institute.

His first thought was to go into social services-specializing in child protection. But he wasn't certain that his motivation was correct, and he had no idea where he wished to attend college.