“I think I should just take you home,” Patrick said groggily.
“What did you just do?” Finn demanded, almost frantically. I turned to look at him, and Patrick shook his head tiredly. “Wendy, what the hell did you do?”
“Nothing!” I snapped and looked back at Patrick. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No!” Finn stepped in between Patrick and I, blocking my attempt to escape. “Do you even know what you just did?”
“I didn’t do anything!” I repeated, growing irritated. “I just wanna go!”
“Yeah, I know you do!” Finn’s eyes were wide and startled, and his reaction was confusing me. I really hadn’t done anything, and I didn’t know what he was freaking out about.
“Good! Cause I’m gonna go.” I tried to step around him, but he grabbed my wrist, gripping it with the same iron grasp he did when I had punched Tegan. “Let me go!”
“I need to talk to you,” Finn maintained. “In private.”
“Why should I-” I wanted to argue with him, but he was looking at me too insistently.
“I’ll be right back,” Finn assured Patrick, but he just nodded dazedly at us.
Still hanging onto my wrist, Finn dragged me away. We went through the side doors into a small, empty alcove. Once in there, Finn let go of my wrist and glanced out the windows on the doors, as if we might have been followed.
As soon as he turned to look back at me, I slapped him as hard as I could across his face. He took a step back and stared at the floor.
“I told you if you ever drug me anywhere again, I would punch you,” I told him and crossed my arms over my chest.
“That you did,” Finn acknowledged, still rubbing his face. His cheek had already started to redden, and I felt a dim satisfaction from that. He totally deserved it.
“You’re lucky that I slapped you instead.”
“I believe it.” He stretched his jaw and then looked at me, putting it behind him. “What did you do out there? With Patrick?”
“I didn’t do anything with Patrick.” I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You really don’t?” Finn eyed me suspiciously, unable to decide if he believed me or not. “You didn’t notice the way Patrick acted?”
“He acted like Patrick,” I shrugged.
“No, he didn’t,” Finn persisted. “When you went up to him and said you wanted to go home, he said no. And then you kept staring at him, and he looked foggy and dazed. Then suddenly, he said he would take you home like you wanted.”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I stumbled.
A chill ran over me and I started feeling vaguely nauseous. I had noticed the change in Patrick’s expression, and it wasn’t the first time I had seen something like that. Just the other day, Maggie had reacted the same way when I had tried to convince her not to see my mom anymore. There had been times before that, too, but I never thought anything of them. And I didn’t want to right now either.
“Yeah, you do.” Finn nodded solemnly. “You just don’t know what it is.”
“I’m just very… persuasive,” I said without any real conviction.
That is what I had always thought it was, whenever I bothered to think about it. I was rather pretty, and over the years, I had managed to get boys to do things with the right smile. And if that didn’t work, I hadn’t been afraid to kick some ass to get what I wanted. Recently, things had started to get even easier, where I just had to look at people, without the coy smile or the threat to bodily harm. But I thought it was because I had just gotten really good at it.
“Yeah, you are,” Finn admitted. “But you can’t do that. Not like this.”
“Do what?” I feigned innocence. “I didn’t do anything! And even if I did, who are you to try and stop me?” Something else flashed in my mind, and I looked at him. “Can you even stop me?”
“Stop you from what?” Finn took a step closer to me. “What do you think happened? What do you think you did to Patrick?”
“I just… glared at him,” I answered uncertainly.
“You did more than glare. You used persuasion,” Finn said emphatically, as if that were somehow much different than what I had been saying. “I guess that’s a kind of slang you don’t understand. Technically, it would be called psychokinesis.”
“I don’t know what that means, but I can assure you that I’m not psychic by any definition of the word.” I was starting to find it disturbing how matter-of-factly he was talking about all of this, as if we were talking about biology homework instead of the possibility that I possessed some kind of paranormal ability.
“Not yet,” Finn allowed. “Persuasion is when you want something from somebody, and just by thinking about it, you can get them to do it. It’s a form of mind control.”
“Whoa!” I put up my hands and took a step back. “I did not use mind control on Patrick! Or anyone ever! If I could, I would be using it on you now to get you to stop being such a freak.”
“You can’t use it on me now.” Finn shook his head absently, but he was too nervous or excited to really pay attention to how weirded out I was getting. “It’s really not that major, especially the way you’re using it. But you already have some mastery of it, and you didn’t even know you had it.” His brow furrowed and he stared off into space for a minute. “You really didn’t know that’s what you were doing?”
“I’m not doing anything!” I insisted.
Confused and frightened, I wanted to run away. Finn was saying things that sounded completely insane and impossible, but they also sounded kind of true. Even as I started questioning everything about myself, in the back of my mind, I suspected that this might just be another twisted trick. Finn obviously got off on confusing and hurting me, and this was all just part of his game.
“Wendy, calm down, okay?” Finn reached out to me at some poor attempt at being comforting, but I jerked back from him. The last thing in the world I wanted was him to touch me right now. Well, maybe not the last thing, but I was not ready to calm down. “You just need to stop and think for a minute.”
“No! I want to go home! And maybe I can’t ‘persuade’ you or whatever the hell it is you call it, but Patrick’s all ready to go and waiting for me.” I reeled and grabbed the door, preparing to escape before I actually started crying or throwing up or whatever it was I ended up doing.
“Wendy!” Finn grabbed my arm to stop me, and I yanked it back from him.
“Don’t touch me!” I yelled, and he flinched but let go.
Patrick was still by the punch bowl, but when he saw me running towards him, he didn’t argue with me. He just put his arm around me and ushered me out of the gymnasium. He tried to ask me what had happened with Finn, but I refused to talk about it. It wasn’t even so much that I wanted to keep it a secret from him. I was too afraid that I might cry if I even mentioned it. He drove around for awhile so I was reasonably calm by the time I went home.
Matt and Maggie were waiting by the door for me, but I barely said a word to them. That freaked out Matt, who started threatening to kill Patrick and every other boy at the dance, but I managed to reassure him that I was fine and nothing bad had happened. Finally, he let me go up to my room, where I proceeded to throw myself onto the bed and not cry. Maggie knocked on the door a little way later and offered to talk, but there was nothing I could really say to her, so I sent her away.
The night swirled in my head like some bizarre dream. There was all the excitement and nerves about seeing Finn, and then that glorious moment where we danced together, before he completely shattered it. Even now, after the way he’d treated me, I couldn’t shake how wonderful it had felt being in his arms like that. In general, I never liked being touched or being close to people, but I loved the way I had felt with him. His hand strong and warm pressing on the small of my back and the soft heat that flowed from him. When he had looked at me then, so sincerely, I had thought…
I don’t know what I thought, but it turned out to be a lie. After he freaked out on me about psychokinesis, I could suddenly explain all his odd behavior; he was completely insane. That had to be it. His random mood changes. His flat affect.
Because I couldn’t really “persuade” people. It wouldn’t be possible to just look at Patrick to get him to do what I wanted. He had just been able to see how distraught I was and changed his mind. And even if I did do that, how come nobody had noticed before? How did Finn even notice? He had said that
“persuasion” was a slang term, too, implying that a group of people used it in place of psychokinesis. They used it so frequently they had their own terminology.
What it came down to is that I knew nothing about Finn. I could barely tell when he was mocking me and when he was being sincere. Sometimes I thought he was into me, and other times he obviously hated me. He could just as easily be insane as he could be telling the truth. There wasn’t anything I knew about him for sure. Except that despite everything, I still really liked him.
Sometime in the night, after I had changed into sweats and a tank top, and after I had spent a very long time tossing and turning, I must’ve finally fallen asleep. When I woke up, it was still dark out, and I had drying tears on my cheeks. I had been crying in my sleep, which seemed unfair since I never let myself cry when I was awake. I rolled over and glanced at the alarm clock. It’s angry numbers declared it was a little after three in the morning, and I wasn’t sure why I was awake. I flicked on my bedside lamp, casting everything in a warm glow, and I saw something that scared me so badly, my heart stopped.
A figure was crouched out my window, my second story window. Admittedly, there’s a small roof right outside of it, but that’s still not exactly the thing you except to see. On top of that, it wasn’t just anybody. It was Finn Holmes, looking hopeful, but not at all ashamed or frightened at having been caught peeping into my room. In fact, he knocked gently at the glass, and belatedly, I realized that’s what had woken me up. He hadn’t been peeping intentionally; he’d been trying to sneak into my room. So that was slightly less creepy, I supposed.