Aversion (Book One of The Mentalist Series) - Chapter One Excerpt

ONE

My name is Gemma Green and I am an Averter. You’re probably wondering what that means and why it is important for me to state that I am one. On the surface there is not much difference between me and most other fifteen year old girls, except for the fact that I have the ability to alter people’s minds and stop them from carrying out actions that will unhinge their predestined life paths. I know it sounds impossible but trust me, it’s true. Only another Averter will be able to tell what I am from sight. Well, not really sight. We have the ability to sense things that others overlook. For example, I always know when I’m being lied to. I can’t tell what the exact lie is but I get a knot in my stomach every time I hear one; the bigger the lie, the tighter the knot. It’s clearly not the most enjoyable ability for anyone to have but the older we get, the easier it becomes to tune the feelings out. You eventually get to a point where the only person’s emotions you can tune into is the person you are assigned to. But I’ll get to that later.

I live in a town called Sandes where my Dad works as a handyman and I go to school with all the normal kids. Dad’s job is convenient because he is his own boss and we can leave town whenever we have to without raising too much suspicion. You can only stay in a town for four years, tailing the people you are assigned to, before you have to move on to another location. That way we don’t get too attached to anyone and people also don’t figure out what is happening to them. All Averters with young children have to live in small towns so that they can teach their children to master their abilities in a controlled environment. Imagine having to grow up in a city with millions of people throwing out millions of vibes all the time. Only adults who have mastered their craft could survive the surge.

The other tiny little thing is, according to my Dad, I am a bit of an anomaly as I am the only known female Averter that exists. I don’t know why but our kind have always been men. Our lives are pretty much dictated from the start; a male baby is born from a union between a chosen woman and an Averter. The child is cared for by his mother for a year then handed over to the father, never to see his mother again. The father teaches him his responsibilities and at the age of twenty one, the son must carry on the tradition of our kind by creating a child with a chosen woman. That’s our circle of life. Son begets son begets son, until there was me. Dad knew being a girl would make my future as an Averter different but as he wasn’t sure how things would work out for me, he decided to bring me up exactly as his father brought him up. Study, study, study.

Once I had accepted all that I was meant to be, I realised that frivolous fancies and silly romantic notions were for the girls in my school and not for me. Why think about make-up and boys and all that nonsense when I knew that I had only four years to live in a town and that the clock to my age of motherhood was ticking? The way I saw it, if I couldn’t have the life that they had, the freedom to choose what to do with my life, there was no point pining for it. It would have been as dumb as craving chocolate milkshake when you’re allergic to cocoa. Plain stupid when my future was practically set in stone.

But then I had my first real jolt. Not the sensation I already mentioned that we feel when people are being dishonest. No, the jolts are much more than that. They are what you get when you sense that someone is going to do something really bad pretty soon. Like drink driving their father’s car into the path of a truck, killing two passenger friends and ending a very promising tennis career. I had never felt anything so strong and so horrible before but that was what I sensed when I walked past Russ that Friday afternoon after our English lesson. Dad said that you know the people you are assigned to by the fact that you get these jolts from them. Everyone else is white noise, that person becomes real to you. Russ was my first.

Internally, I felt sick but somehow I barely flinched at the visual I had. Dad had prepared me well for that day. I was to let him know once I felt it and we would perform my first Aversion. Once I stopped Russ from going to the party, our bond would be sealed and I would be able to sense his irrational decisions without being in the same room as him. Most of Dad’s people were his handyman job clients and so it was easy for him to avert them without anyone thinking that their meetings were out of the ordinary. Fortunately, we are not obliged to avert every single bad decision people make, only the ones that call out to us. If you’re lucky, you only get to carry out an Aversion on someone once in your time with them.