Read Running Scared for Free Online

kids had accepted him. Until last year when Todd Neider and his gang had decided it was open season on “the freak.” She cringed at the name. Adolescence was hard enough if one was just like the other kids, but in Jon’s case, growing up was hell.
     
    The freak.
    Weird how a quality that most kids barely notice when you’re younger can be the one thing that defines you in high school. Defines you as a loser, of course.
    Back in grade school, kids thought it was cool when he could guess which number Miss Meyers was thinking of. In fourth grade Jennifer Caruso gasped in delight when he told her she’d get the lead in the school play a week before auditions even started. What used to be considered a gift was now a bad stripe, the weirdo factor that turned him from a kid with a talent to a psycho.
    Someone should have warned him that it would all blow up in his face, that people would get rattled when they learned about his visions, that they’d stare at him in the grocery store, cross the street when they saw him coming, call him a psycho psychic and a retard.
    Like maybe his mother should have had the sense to tell him to crank it down a notch. But she’d always encouraged him to talk about the dreams and images that gripped his mind. When he was little, she’d told him he was seeing “angels” when people appeared in visions. She told him the reason he could read thoughts and see things other people weren’t privy to was because he was special.
    She should have warned him that “special kids” were the rejects in high school.
    She should have told him it wasn’t normal to know that your second grade teacher was thinking about the feverishly hot forehead of her son when she left for school that morning. His mother should have pointed out that other kids don’t have visions of the shiny green bike they’re getting for Christmas, other kids can’t smell a snowstorm coming, and they definitely don’t have dreams that spell out future events for them months in advance.
    Not that he could have stopped the visions from coming, like flashes of light popping from cameras in the dark of a rock concert. Nothing could shut down the flow of his inner sight.
    But he could have kept it to himself.
    And he had stopped talking about it at school. When kids asked, he told them he couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t read their thoughts or see movie reels from the future.
    He’d lied.
    And he was still pigeon-holed as the kid who could see too much.
    The freak.
    Out in the hall her footsteps touched the stairs again. The door creaked, but he didn’t move from his spot on the bed as his mother paused in the doorway.
    “McPherson?” he guessed.
    “Yep. He gave you another day’s suspension because you ditched.”
    “Good. I hate school.”
    “Jon, is it really that bad?”
    Instead of answering, he turned his gaze away from her to stare at the wall, where a fading photo of Michael Jordan was partially covered by the mystic, masked eyes of Val Kilmer as Batman, a poster he’d gotten free at the movie theater. The dark, swirling world of the super-hero appealed to him. Something about the fact that Bruce Wayne could put on a mask and become someone else, a great out when you’ve got your mother and your principal and half the kids at school on your case.
    “Jon?” his mother sat on a corner of the bed and put a hand on his calf. “Something’s bothering you,” she said, jostling him.
    “Just leave me alone, okay?”
    “Maybe I can help.” When he didn’t answer, she added, “Look, I can’t fix things with Todd Neider, but I’m not afraid to give Don McPherson a piece of my mind. If you’re being treated unfairly at school…well, I can push the vice principal…”
    “Neider is the least of my worries, and McPherson is fair.”
    “So…it is something else.”
    Seeing the genuine concern in her eyes, he turned away. It would be worse to tell her; he hated to scare her. But shouldn’t she be warned? It