GBVE: Shannon McKelden

ATTENTION: Before reading, get information about the Great Blog Voice Experiment here.

The topic: “A young woman confronts her parents after discovering she has inherited telekinetic powers.”
__________________________

My parents gaped as the fifty-dollar bill floated through the air and drifted over to settle on my open palm.

“Wanna explain that?” I asked.

I’d known it would happen. It had been happening for the last two days. I looked at something, decided I wanted it, and the next thing I knew it was headed in my direction. Without much control of it on my part. When it happened with the lipstick I had dropped behind my vanity and couldn’t reach, it was pretty cool. And I tried it about a dozen times just to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

When it happened with the answers to the pop history quiz Ms. Jones had on her desk, right in the middle of class? So. Not. Cool. The only way I managed to stop it was to fake a fainting spell–which resulted in a trip to the nurse’s office, giving me an extra day to study for the quiz anyway, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Except that this couldn’t go on. At least not without me knowing what the hell “this” was and how I could use it to my advantage.

So, I decided to ask my dad for money, knowing that with this
newly-discovered talent of mine, I’d have no problem getting something more from his wallet than the piddly little twenty he’d try to give me.

“Um, I have no idea,” Mom said slowly, struggling to maintain her game face. “Frank?”

Dad shook his head. “No clue.”

“Oh, come on! Seriously!” I waved the fifty in the air. “Enough with the secrets already. I know you know something.”

If they truthfully thought I couldn’t put two and two together and figure out that they knew all about this little secret “power” of mine, they didn’t know me very well.

Their tightly-clamped lips made it clear that all the pleading in the world wasn’t going to result in the information I wanted. Blackmail was necessary.

“Fine,” I said, folding the bill in fourths and tucking it into my bra. Whirling, I made my way toward the back door. “I’m going to the mall with Meg. And, if that Coach purse I’ve been wanting just happens to float into my possession–“

“Okay!”

When I turned back and saw my dad’s look, I realized smugly that this was going to be better than I thought.

Maybe now I’d make sense of my earliest memory, sitting on my father’s lap as a toddler, inconsolable about something. Dad stressing out that he couldn’t comfort me. Suddenly my mother came flying into the room like Super Mom, tackling the beer my dad had floating toward him in midair, before crashing into the coffee table.

From the guilty look on Dad’s face–and the glare on Mom’s –I had a feeling my little “gift” came from the paternal side of the family.
_______________________________
To find out more about Shannon McKelden’s chick lit or young adult fiction, check out http://www.shannonmckelden.com or http://shannonmckelden.blogspot.com/ and watch for VENUS ENVY, coming Feb 2007, from Tor .