But at that moment, I wanted to know Paige’s secret more than anything else. I felt like I needed to know it for some reason. And all I had to do to discover exactly what she was hiding was just pick up her hairbrush—the one sitting oh-so-close to my fingers.

“No, that’s okay,” I told Bethany. “Paige’s brush is right here.”

Still looking at Paige, I reached out, curled my fingers around the brush’s handle, and waited for my psychometry magic to kick in, for the feelings and memories to hit me the way they always did.

An image immediately popped into my mind—one of Paige sitting on her bed, wearing a thick pink robe and clutching the hairbrush in her hand so hard that her knuckles were white against the brown wooden handle. After a moment, the door to Paige’s room opened, and her stepdad came inside. Paige had shown me a picture of him when I’d been over at her house searching for her cell phone, and he was a nice, normal-looking guy. He shut the door behind him, and Paige’s grip tightened on the brush even more.

Her stepdad came over to the bed, sat down beside Paige, and tugged the brush from her hand. Paige obediently turned to the side, and her stepdad started brushing her hair. Okay, that was a little weird. I mean, it wasn’t like Paige was a little girl who couldn’t take care of her own hair, so why would her stepdad comb it out for her? For the first time, I began to get a bad, bad feeling about what I was going to see.

It seemed like Paige’s stepdad brushed her hair forever, although it was only a second in my mind. Then, when he finished, he gave the brush back to Paige, who put it on her nightstand. Paige lay down on the bed, her hands clenched together over her stomach, her knuckles white once more.

I thought her stepdad would pull the covers up over her, tell her good night, and leave the room.

Instead, he pried Paige’s hands apart and opened her robe, almost like he was unwrapping a present. Then he took off his pants, lay down beside her, and started touching Paige in all the places that he shouldn’t.

And that’s when I started screaming.

I screamed and screamed and screamed. But I couldn’t stop the memories from filling my mind, couldn’t stop myself from seeing what Paige’s stepdad was doing to her, couldn’t stop myself from feeling all of Paige’s fear and hurt and pain and helplessness. One by one, her emotions hit me, like daggers driving deeper and deeper and deeper into my heart—into my very soul.

It was horrible.

The most horrible thing I’d ever seen and felt with my psychometry magic—and I couldn’t get it to stop. All around me, the other girls pressed themselves up against the dented metal lockers, wondering what was wrong with me. But all I could do was scream and scream and scream some more.