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self-help authors gave you confidence in facing your life. After I read
The Magic of Dreaming Big,
I was high on life for about a week and a half. It was during that time that I talked my roommate, Todd Stedman, into visiting a cemetery with me late one night so that I could look for some of my ancestors, part of a Personal History class research paper.
    I shared that trip with the girls, just as a note of interest. "To my amazement, I didn't feel scared at all. In fact, I wondered, as my roommate read names off of tombstones, if my great-great-great-grandparents were looking down from above, so glad I had taken an interest in them. If you believe in some sort of afterlife, then that makes sense, right?"
    "Right," they chimed.
    "My belief in ghosts swings with the wind. But my belief that the cemetery felt happy and not sad—I've never changed my mind about that."
    "Mike can feel energy that other people can't," RayAnn bragged. "But he hates when people accuse him of being psychic."
    "There's nothing magical about it," I said. "It started with being hypersensitive to people's moods. Comes from living in an alcoholic home, I think. No pixie dust."
    "Do you think it has something to do with being blind?" Katy asked.
    "I think that helped it along." I nodded, listening through their riveted silence until I swallowed and washed burger back with the Coke. "It got ten times keener after I lost my vision two years ago. Now I can sit in a meeting at the newspaper, and if the reporter next to me begins to disagree with something being said, or loses interest, or becomes angry over an assignment—I know which way his mind just went. The reporter doesn't even have to move."
    They all agreed that they had felt the same things, though probably not as strongly. To bring the subject back around to Justin and the field, I asked, "But doesn't Justin believe his brother is alive? Other people told me that tonight."
    "Yeah, definitely," Chan said. "He doesn't think he hears his brother's ghost. He thinks his brother's voice reaches across the miles or something. I don't know what the terminology is for that, but that's the word on the street."
    "You mean ... he speaks to his brother telekinetically?" I asked.
    "Yeah. Like ESP. He swears to it. He says the Lightning Field is the only place where he's really happy, and when he's there alone, he can hear his brother's voice. He says Torey Adams is wrong. His brother's not in Texas, never was in Texas."
    "And ... this isn't drugs talking?" I asked.
    "I don't think drugs helped it," Katy said. "But he's been talking about his brother since right around Christmas. If he was doing drugs that early on, nobody knows about it."
    I nodded, trying to put all this together. With the talk about Texas, Katy was referring to a response on Adams's website that had caused a big stir ... a lot of people posting that the letter might be from Chris himself. I even posted something to the effect of "the letter sounds like him, if you read the e-mail he left for Principal Ames and compare the two," not that many were listening to me in the reverb. The initial letter implied that Chris had run off to Texas to live with one of his mom's two sisters, both of whom hated his mom and would never have betrayed him. Adams himself wondered...
    I shook the confusion from my head or tried to, having crossed the line between fact and hearsay many times. I was having trouble sorting what was newsworthy and how I would state the rest.
    I felt distracted, off-center, pulled slightly toward the shadow behind Katy and Chan, and the distraction was why I couldn't organize my thoughts. Negative energy, big-time. I'm so good at sensing people's energy, I could have predicted the type of story that came next and would have loved to avoid it, but trying to be the good professional, I went for the trouble.
    "Elaine, you haven't said a word. What do you think of all this?"
    Her laugh turned over so deeply in her chest that it sounded like