Psychic

Growing up Psychic

The first time I heard the word "psychic," I was in gymnastics class, waiting in line to do handstands against the wall next to a girl who was mean to me, but also the only one I was friends with. I could never communicate well as a kid, and I wasn't much better when I got older; I just felt more self-conscious about it. I was a quiet pair of eyes, absorbing everything, rarely participating.

"My sister's psychic," the girl said. She was bigger than me with blotchy skin and thin brown-gray hair. We were ten or eleven.

"What's that?" I said, knowing she'd call me stupid for asking. She liked to say things she knew I wouldn't understand so she would have to explain them to me.

"You don't know what psychic means?"

"...like psycho?" I pictured her sister as a knife-wielding criminal, though I knew that wasn't right.

"No! It's when you know everything. Like when you know the future. You can see people's future."

The girls ahead of us dismounted, I put my palms on the blue floor mat, and kicked my legs over my head. My braid hit the ground. Psychic. I thought about the time when I knew what my mother's office looked like the night before Take Your Kid to Work Day, and how I knew exactly where my teacher was going to hang my project on the wall outside of our classroom. Things like that happened all the time, and they struck me as strange, but I never knew it wasn't normal. Was that the same thing? I had a feeling it was, but I had a knack for overthinking my instincts until I muddled the truth.

"Psychic" stuck with me, and I started noticing it in other places including That's so Raven and on the backs of book covers. I overheard my mother talking about when she and her friends saw a psychic on the boardwalk when they were teenagers. I asked her what her fortune was.

"Oh, I don't remember," she said. She lowered her voice like she were telling a secret. "Catholics aren't really supposed to see psychics. It's offensive to God to want and know your future."

"Why?"

"Because we're supposed to trust He'll take care of us."

"Then why would God make psychics?"

She scoffed, and I knew she thought they were con artists. I knew she would assume I was joking if I told her all of them couldn't be fakes because I was one. I felt insane and alone. I went back and forth between "It can't be true," and "It can't be a coincidence." I saw mental images, like when I was walking through the mall with my friends, and I pictured a scene from the movie, Avatar. When we walked into the electronics section of a store, all monitors played the same Christmas movie except for one, smaller monitor playing the scene from my head. Most of the time, I just knew when something was true, or if something didn't feel right. If I made plans to go out with friends, I'd have a feeling it wasn't going to happen long before they canceled. I knew who was calling when I heard the phone ring, I correctly predicted the genders of all of my siblings, knew how many of us there would be, and I know what people were going to say before they said them. The information I got was typically mundane; I wasn't predicting the end of the world or spouting prophecies. Being psychic wasn't like TV where a crisp clip of the future blotted out your vision, and it wasn't an instant knowing. I felt like it should be more obvious. The more I dwelt on whatever intuitive information I received, the more I distorted it with what I wanted to happen and with what past experiences told me should happen, so I was often wrong when trying to use it on command. My self doubt stressed me out.

I told two of my friends when we were pre-teens during the summer as we loitered in the parking lot in the drive between our houses. It was hot. We leaned on the basketball hoop with no net and sat on the stone wall behind it, facing each other.