Seer

Chapter 1

It all started with the stupid birthday cake.

July 25th, Jasmine's stupid 15th birthday. There was nothing particularly stupid about that day other than the fact that it was the day all of her problems started. Aside from that, it was a rather average birthday with an average party and an average cake. 

It wasn't actually the cake that ruined everything. It was Lucas Miller-Garcia. 

Lucas was quite short with curly, dark brown hair and even darker brown eyes. He had freckles and dimples and tan skin, and his teeth were perfectly straight even though he never had braces. 

Jasmine wasn't even friends with Lucas. It was her parents who were the reason he was at her birthday party. Jasmine's parents and Lucas's parents were good friends, so Mrs. O'Connor had invited them without even thinking to ask Jasmine if she was okay with that first.

So there she was, staring at the stupid, pink cake with the words Happy Birthday Jasmine! frosted in purple, when Lucas Miller-Garcia shoved her face into it.

Well, not really. At first it seemed real. Jasmine felt the sweet tase of butter cream in her mouth and the sticky frosting covering her face. She heard her parents and her guests gasp in surprise. And when she lifted her head and wiped the cake from her eyes, she saw Lucas Miller-Garcia grinning mischievously.

Then, all of a sudden, she was sitting upright in her chair, the cake perfectly intact, the off-key singing of happy birthday in her ears. Jasmine didn't fully understand what happened at that point, but she had enough sense to scoot her chair away, just as Lucas's hand came flying down and landed smack in the middle of her cake.

The guests stopped singing and gasped. Lucas raised his hand, which was now covered in cake, and stared at Jasmine, confused.

"Lucas!" Mrs. Miller screamed in horror, breaking the silence. 

"Mom, I-" Lucas tried to explain, the confusion in his eyes quickly being replaced with terror, but Mrs. Miller grabbed his cake- hand and held it up.

"Did you just try and shove her head into the cake?" Mrs. Miller snarled, as if that wasn't obvious enough.

"I think the better question is how did you know he was going to do that?" Jasmine's friend Zoe Bridges asked, staring at her suspiciously.

Jasmine stared at her ruined cake. "I- I saw myself get pushed," She muttered, as everything started to make sense in her head. "And then I was back to normal. I think- I think I had a vision."

At first there was silence. 

"She's a Seer!" Her dad exclaimed. 

All at once, everyone's shock turned into excitement, and Lucas's prank was quickly forgotten. Except, of course, for his mom, who glared at him once before joining in the celebration.

At first Jasmine was ecstatic. Why wouldn't she be? She was a Seer, like her parents, and she was the first of her friends to manifest her gift. That meant she was legally allowed to brag to them.

The rest of the party went on perfectly. Games were played, karaoke was sung, and excessive amounts of junk food were consumed. Lucas even apologized to Jasmine. (Probably because his mom made him).

The bad things started the next day.

"Try Seeing something!" Jasmine's mom had asked the next morning.

So Jasmine closed her eyes and focused. Nothing.

"It's okay, try again!" Her dad insisted.

Jasmine tried again. Still nothing.

"It's okay. Maybe it will take some time," her parents agreed.

But Jasmine didn't get any visions the next day. Or the day after that. Or the day after that. Or even the day after that. 

She didn't get another vision until two weeks later.

Jasmine was reading under the big tree in her front yard when a ball came flying at her head and broke her nose.

Except it didn't.

The same thing happened at the party. Jasmine vividly experienced her nose getting broken by a rouge soccer ball, and then a few seconds later, she was back under the tree, with her book in her hands and her nose very much un-broken. Jasmine glanced up and saw the soccer ball from her vision hurdling towards her, and ducked just in time to avoid injury.

That was how her visions were. A few moments before a dangerous event occurred, Jasmine would get a vision and narrowly avoid disaster. She would never see any more than ten seconds into the future, and she could never control when her visions happened.

"Are you sure you're really a seer?" Jasmine's parents had asked. "Maybe you're just lucky."

But luck didn't explain how Jasmine could predict the lightning that struck the neighbor's tree, or the window that was broken by a wayward baseball, or the flying chair that almost decapitated her dad during the windstorm. Still, it wasn't good enough. Most Seers could See at least a few hours into the future at least, and their visions lasted way more than five seconds. The majority of Seers could even See on command, even if their visions were only fuzzy glimpses of the future.

"It's okay," Her parents had said after she caught her neighbor's cat when he fell out of Mr. Steward's fourth floor apartment. "You'll just have to learn how to control your visions at school."

Jasmine sighed. At least they were no longer doubting her gift. But she didn't want to learn at school. She wanted to be able to See correctly now. And to make things worse, Zoe Bridges had also manifested the gift of Prophecy and she could control her visions, which meant she was legally allowed to brag about it to Jasmine. Not cool.

So there she was. After what seemed like years of counting down the days until the end of summer, (to the horror of her friends), Jasmine stood excitedly outside of Meadowfield High School. Today, she was going to her first ever Prophecy class. Today, she would learn to See.