A Penny For Your Thought Ch. 03

Maybe this chapter should have been the first and it's cutting the chronological continuity of the story, but this felt like the right place to tell the story of their first meeting.

Many thanks to chunks for his editing; I never knew how many mistakes I make until he went over this chapter :-)

Constructive criticism is welcome.

___

Nick was in class early; he still had about a half hour before the exam began, which was good because he wanted to go over his notes. Well, they weren't his notes, exactly. This one pretty girl always arrived to the exams a little early and went over her own notes, and from previous experience he knew that her notes were supreme. When he needed a review he just focused on 'listening' to her read her notes and make small but significant remarks to herself in her head. This, in combination with bits and pieces from her actual answers, was usually what allowed him to succeed in the exams he thought of as superfluous. He tried to make sure he never got a higher grade than she did in those exams, thus keeping his integrity intact in his eyes.

Nick wasn't proud of himself. It's not that he wasn't bright enough or intelligent enough, it was just something he did.

In high school he had shown real promise, until he discovered his gift. After that, concentrating was a real problem. Since he hadn't known how to block out or filter his classmates' thoughts, his grades had plummeted. The school administrators became concerned and sent him to the guidance counselor and eventually called his parents (or rather his adoptive parents). They reacted poorly, sending him to tutors, almost killing his social life, and eventually suspecting him of doing drugs and threatening to send him to rehab. That was when he had really become scared. Thankfully, during the spring break that year he had figured out how to separate the different mental voices. This revelation opened a whole new world of possibilities since he now could distinguish between the answers of the good students and those of the bad ones. Although he still couldn't concentrate enough to formulate his own answer, he started picking up answers from other students. After a while, even though concentrating wasn't an issue any more, picking up thoughts of others just became a habit. He didn't see the point in the pressure of exams when he could just pick the answers from some 'A' student.

Now that he found himself in law school his perspective on studying had changed somewhat. Success was important to him; it was almost a need to prove that he was capable. Nick applied to law school because it sounded interesting, because at this point in his life he didn't have anything else that he wanted to study, and because it seemed that he should study something. But he had other things on his mind besides studies, not the least of which was the need to earn enough cash to fund law school in the first place. Therefore he found he needed to free some of his time for work or other lucrative activities. That's why he devised 'The System'. It wasn't all that elaborate. He just divided the courses each semester into 'important' and 'unimportant.' The 'important' group consisted of courses that either seemed challenging or interested him on a personal level. Nick pursued the knowledge given in these courses with zest, going to all the lectures and studying in earnest for the exams and taking pride in the grades he received. The other courses, unimportant and/or superfluous, and their requisite exams bothered him neither in a practical sense (given his abilities) nor from a moral perspective. Since he wasn't planning on becoming a lawyer he figured he wasn't cheating.

This system freed his time for his favorite occupation and his true avocation. He had acquired his private investigator license some years earlier and had every intention of pursuing this as a career. He was a very good PI, too; given his 'listening' abilities this wasn't very surprising. It was a way he had found to use his abilities for good, at least to some extent. There were other ways his gift could be useful, too, but there was little that was good about them.

Trying not to draw attention to himself he slipped into the seat behind the girl and closed his eyes as if resting before the exam. The proximity helped his abilities; he almost didn't need to filter the other students' thoughts.

Nick had noticed her on the student orientation tour at the beginning of the previous semester. Her serious green eyes and her long, light brown hair with honey-colored highlights caught his attention immediately. Nick was drawn to her almost magnetically but knew better then to approach her. Something about the way she held herself screamed, "I'm here to study, I don't fool around and I don't do light relationships." He watched her and 'listened' from a distance, trying to discover as much about her as he could. He knew that her name was Cassandra and that she was very serious about law school; her thoughts focused on it almost exclusively, rendering his listening abilities essentially useless in his inquiries. Also, at times her thoughts were extremely quiet - more so than any other person he had ever met - and he had to exert his mind in order to hear her thoughts. If possible at all, doing so made his head pound. He knew that she was a couple of years younger than him but that was a given since he started college later than most. Other than these few trivial facts, he couldn't learn anything more. It seemed as though she didn't have any close friends and the people who knew her didn't seem to know any personal facts about her. He waited for a good opportunity to arise for him to talk to her, but she always seemed so busy that he just hadn't found the chance yet. She always seemed to hurry somewhere, not noticing him at all.

Today she was distracted: stray and extremely quiet thoughts kept interrupting her reading, and it was difficult for him to focus on the material. To his listening gift, her thoughts sounded like blank pauses or static with floating words interrupting the flow of her reading. Something was definitely bothering her; she was berating herself for something she planned to do later but she couldn't seem to give up on the idea. Fortunately she finished reading everything before the exam began.

***

Cassie couldn't believe she was going to go through with her plan. 'I'm a horrible person,' she thought. 'But then again it's for a good cause... eventually. And it shouldn't really hurt him. I mean it's just one grade, and it seems as though he doesn't even care that much about law school. I mean, he didn't show for any of the lectures during the semester'. The thoughts kept spinning in her head.

Ever since Cassie discovered her gift, she had a plan. She was going to be an environmentalist lawyer and use her gift to punish big corporations that ruined the environment. But coming from her background, being part of a foster care system and not having an actual home to go back to once she turned eighteen, an Ivy League law school wasn't even a possibility. She had the grades but even on a full scholarship she couldn't afford it. So she did the next best thing, attending a lesser but affordable school, knowing that she had to be the best in her class in order to even be considered against the Ivy League graduates.

Starting from the first semester, it was obvious that there was only one other student that could be considered her competition for the top of the class. She was smarter and applied herself harder than most of the other students and her grades were always better; except in comparison to Nickolas Levin. The thing that annoyed her the most was that he seemed to breeze through most of his classes. Hell, he didn't even come to most of the lectures. But time after time he got excellent grades, sometimes beating her by some points and sometimes coming in second. She felt like she was in a race and couldn't get a breath of air for fear of him taking advantage of her pause. It didn't help that he was very handsome, self-assured, and somewhat arrogant in a disarming way. She was instantly attracted to him, which for her only meant staying as far from him as possible.

Although she had finally discovered a way to block the mental outbursts that could influence unsuspecting subjects, maintaining the thin mental walls she erected required a lot of concentration - concentration she couldn't seem to maintain when under the influence of strong emotions or even while simply looking at Nickolas. Fearing that she would slip and push her opinion of him into his head -- whether it was her jealousy of his accomplishments, her rivalry, or her attraction - she either focused on maintaining the wall as long as she could, not raising her eyes to look at him even if she wanted to, or deliberately thought of boring or study-related issues and moved out of his vicinity. Eventually it became second nature to erect the walls and look down while thinking her personal thoughts, and then suspend the effort while studying.

Now at the end of the second semester, Cassie knew that Nickolas was beating her in their race to the top and she just couldn't stand it. That's why she decided to do something she swore she wouldn't do. She was going to make him lose this exam to her by a good difference by using her gift. She wasn't going to make him fail. All she needed was a fifteen point difference so that she would get a little boost in her average.

This was going to be tricky. She was going to have to work really fast, writing down her own answers and then pushing the wrong ones into his head. The exam would consist of three questions. She figured that if she forced him to be half wrong on one of them, she would be fine. This was one of her favorite courses this semester and there was no chance that she would receive less than a perfect grade.

***

The Professor handed out the exams and everybody focused on their papers.

For Nick, it was a double focus since he had to both concentrate on reading the questions and block out the thoughts of the other students. As always was his habit, he skimmed over all the questions first and quickly recalled the relevant points from Cassandra's prior notes and saw which questions he still had and would need to fill in from her answers. He was still sitting behind her to keep the proximity.

Suddenly her thoughts assaulted him. She was practically shouting her answers in her mind. Never before had he heard her so clearly and so loudly. More disconcerting was the fact that he couldn't block her though he tried to mute her thoughts in his mind.

"... As stated in the constitution..." It was as if she were speaking aloud.

'Am I having a Spike?' he wondered. But then, noticing that he was still blocking out all the other students, he realized it wasn't a Spike. In addition to the weirdness of the situation, she was thinking about the wrong answer. This question was really easy, she had just gone over the material; there was no chance to get it wrong. So why was she so obviously mistaken?

***

Just to be sure she didn't fail, Cassie started off by pushing the thoughts into his head with medium strength. When she discovered her gift she had learned that people were very different in their reaction to it. Some people were easily influenced, she only needed to direct her thoughts in their direction and they would comply. These people were the primary reason she learned to block her thoughts inside her own head: some people were so sensitive, so open to suggestion that she accidently influenced their thoughts and actions even without meaning too. Other people needed her to apply stronger degrees of mental force, which she referred to as 'pushing'. She had never before tried to push something on Nickolas so she had no idea what worked with him.

He was sitting behind her and she couldn't see him, but she didn't need to. Usually she felt some sort of mental click as she succeeded to push a thought into somebody's brain; it was like sliding a letter through a slit in a door. But now she felt nothing of that sort, this was a different feeling all together. Gradually she increased the strength of her mental power, but again nothing. Soon her head was hurting from the effort and she even broke into a light sweat. Concentrating on what she was feeling, she could only describe it as shattering her thoughts against a mental wall.

She had to stop and rest; also, all this effort was taking too much time and she had to think about her exam. Looking back at the exam she saw the letters swimming before her eyes. She panicked. 'How am I going to finish this exam?' Closing her eyes Cassie cleared her mind and breathed deeply. It was one of the simplest mental exercises that she knew. It helped. At least the headache eased a bit and her vision cleared. She concentrated on answering her first question, thinking that she would try again on Nickolas with the second.

Cassie had little success with the second question or the third. By the end on the exam her head was pounding from the exertion and she almost had tears in her eyes. Worse than knowing she hadn't managed to do what she intended, she had the feeling that she hadn't done a good enough job on her own exam. She handed in the notebook and ran out of class.

***

Something was definitely wrong with Cassandra. Throughout the whole exam he could hear her thinking of the wrong answers to the question, and then her mental voice would just disappear while she wrote it down. Nick knew her to be one of the best students in their class; he had never thought she could be this wrong. Even without studying himself he could see that her thoughts were definitely going in the wrong direction.

Once the exam was over she practically ran out, and he thought he could see tears in the corners of her eyes.

Nick handed in his exam and left. He knew that he had done reasonably well, not brilliantly (considering that he had only had Cassandra's notes to rely on), but he would pass. Probably. But this didn't matter to him at the moment. What he really wanted now was to make sure that she was okay. He couldn't understand why it mattered so much, but it did.

He stepped into the corridor and went to the first obvious place a girl in distress would run to: the ladies room. Standing outside the door he opened his mind, trying to hear the mental voices inside.

'If only I were ten pound lighter Tom would notice me, for sure...' This wasn't the voice he was looking for.

'...tampons, shampoo, some of that herbal tea that mom got me last month, milk, cheese, oooh, and those chocolate chip cookies that I really shouldn't eat, and...' This wasn't it, either.

'Breathe. Everything will be okay if I just breathe.' Her voice. As always it took some special focus for him to even hear it and it still sounded muffled. Cassandra was definitely crying, even her mental voice had a sniffling quality to it.

'I wonder if people know how much their thoughts reflect their emotional and physical states,' Nick wondered, not for the first time. This was another aspect of his gift: the thoughts he heard carried more than just verbal information. They also carried a flavor or hue (he could never decide which analogy fit better) that he learned to translate into feelings or physical conditions such as crying or arousal. It wasn't a fail-safe ability. Different people expressed or reacted to their emotions differently and the hues of the thoughts changed accordingly. But now with Cassandra there was no doubt. Nick was sure she was upset and crying. He couldn't hear a lot of her thoughts, just a general feeling of misery flowing on random words, like hearing a child cry behind a closed door.

"Excuse me, you do know this is the ladies bathroom? I hope you weren't planning on going in."

Turning his head, Nick saw a pretty blond girl addressing him, realizing he was standing in front of the bathroom door and staring. He blushed.

'Wow, he's cute. I wonder if I can make him blush even more.' Nick heard.

"Not that I would mind if you went in there with me." She paused to see if he got her meaning. "But I think at this hour there are probably some other girls there too, so we wouldn't have any privacy." She flashed him a brilliant smile, wiggling her eyebrows a bit. While she was telling him this, her mind flashed some mental images of what they would do if they went in together and the bathroom turned out to be empty. Of course she had no idea that Nick could see these images with her.

This was the kind of girl that Nick usually dated. Some people would have called her slutty; Nick thought of it as open minded and self assured. The good thing about these girls was they never expected much from you and weren't insulted if you didn't call the day after.

Having his telepathic ability, dating was difficult, and having a relationship was almost impossible. After the fiasco with his high school girlfriend, who he had dated while discovering his gift, Nick tried dating only after he learned to block the thoughts around him. Unfortunately he found out that the more time he spent with someone the less he could ignore their thoughts. It was as if the longer he dated someone, the better attuned he became to her mental voice. Drinking alcohol helped somewhat; it dulled his mental abilities, but being drunk all the time was not very attractive. Then came a day when he could no longer block his girlfriend's thoughts at all. It's a horrible thing knowing all your partner thinks about all the time; there's a good reason why people don't tell each other all they are thinking. Actually the same problem applied to male friends: it's hard to stay connected to someone when you know all their deepest and darkest secrets, and when you can tell immediately when a person thinks about screwing your date.

Eventually he understood that a long term relationship wasn't possible and decided to settle for one night stands or short but passionate affairs. It wasn't that bad really but he missed the human connection, having a close person he could rely on. Plainly speaking, Nick was very lonely.

Nick smiled at the girl in front of him, and she smiled back.

"Maybe we can meet at a less crowded place," she suggested and, pulling a black marker out of her bag, wrote a number on the back of his hand.

"My name is Jen," she said while writing the name under the number. "Call me." And with that she went into the bathroom.

He was still smiling and replaying some of the images he got from Jen in his mind when Cassandra exited the ladies room.

***

Being in the bathroom didn't help. There were too many girls there so she couldn't have the melt-down she felt like having. And her head only throbbed more from all the mindless chit-chat of the other girls. Cassie decided to skip the rest of the day and go wallow in her misery at home.

'Ice cream and a spoon, a girl's best friends. That's all I need right now, and to hell with the extra pounds.' She could already taste the sweet soft vanilla chocolate chip ice cream she had in her freezer for 'emergencies' like today. Even thinking about it made her feel better. 'I'm such a cliché of a girl,' she laughed at herself.

Cassie opened the door to exit the bathroom and saw Nickolas.

'The universe is definitely punishing me,' she groaned in her head, immediately lowering her eyes and steering herself to bypass him.

She moved to the left, only to see his feet moving to the left too. She stepped to the right, but again he was in her way.

"Are you ok?" he said.

"Why wouldn't I be?" she answered, wondering why he was talking to her.

"It just seemed that you were upset after the exam."

"So what's it to you? You will probably get your wonderful grade and secure your place at the top of the class," Cassie blurted out. 'Why am I telling him all this?' she wondered to herself. As was her habit around him, she kept her eyes lowered and her mental barriers up, the concentration in combination with her already pounding head leaving her irritated and short tempered.