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ridiculous
?”
    Ted’s mouth was opening and closing a little, like he was trying to talk. He looked like an anxious fish.
    “I just want to know who you think you are,” I repeated, my voice getting louder than I meant it to. But hey, I was on a roll.
    “Who are
you,
Ted Kennedy, to make —”
    “Ted Kenyon,” he whispered.
    “What?” I spluttered.
    “I’m not Ted Kennedy, I’m Ted Kenyon —” he said, in a voice barely above a whisper.
    “Who are
you,
Ted
Kenyon,
to make this proclamation to the world?”
    There was a pause long enough for him to assume this wasn’t a rhetorical question.
    “Nobody,” he said quietly. His face was beet red.
    “Okay, then!”
    I got to my feet.
    To be honest, I was actually kind of embarrassed at this point. I’d meant to call Ted out on his categorical dismissal of
     my entire life, but I had never intended to make a scene. But I
had
made a scene, so I needed to come up with a Big Finish and get the heck out of there.
    “Then you might want to keep your assumptions to yourself,” I said. “And the next time you decide to flat out dismiss a belief
     system held by millions of people, the next time you get all holier-than-thou and condescending about an idea that’s been
     around since the dawn of man, maybe you’ll give it a second thought!”
    Then I stomped out of the room as self-righ-teously as I could. When I got to the hallway I started to sprint, and I didn’t
     slow down until I got to the elevator, which was mercifully there and waiting. The last thing I needed was for Cro-Magnon
     Boy to come running after me.

Chapter 9
    By the time I’d reached the hallway leading to room 505, I was feeling ridiculous. The world was full of people like Ted.
     People who mocked belief in the supernatural. For years, I’d witnessed this happening to my mom — someone would find out she
     was a medium and act like they had this Free Mockery card.
    Before we moved, I had a friend in the third grade who was really fat. I never really thought about her size one way or another
     — she was just Tessa. But sometimes the kids in class would rag on her and call her names, and nobody did anything about it.
    One day I asked Tessa why she accepted this treatment without fighting back. She told me what her mom had told her — that
     some people in the world felt entitled to insult fat people, that no matter how messed up someone was they could always console
     themselves by feeling superior to a person who was overweight. And that she had learned to accept it, rather than waiting
     for the world to change. Because inside, she knew her own worth.
    I never got the impression Tessa felt like it was okay for kids to rag on her. Just that they did, that they probably always
     would, and that she wasn’t going to let it get to her. Now I was starting to understand what a difficult thing that must have
     been for her.
    To much of the world, my mother and I would always be a source of amusement, at best, and contempt, at worst. I thought of
     Brooklyn Bigelow back at school — first lady-in-waiting to the celestial entity of popularity: Shoshanna. When Brooklyn found
     out my mother was a medium, she practically bubbled over with venom. She truly thought she’d found a nugget of hidden information
     so scandalous it would drive us from town in disgrace.
    Not everybody was as bad as Brooklyn. But there were too few Jacs in the world. Be that as it may, I couldn’t go ballistic
     every time some dillweed like Ted sounded off about people like my mom and me.
    Better luck next time.
    By the time I unlocked my room, all I wanted was to go to bed and let sleep blot out the events of the evening. I opened the
     door and hurried inside, then stopped.
    Madame Serena was sitting on my bed.
    Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving. She was wearing some kind of turban, with a glittering pin fastened in its
     center. Her face looked tinted by orange — as if she were illuminated by a