I did try. But I couldn’t move, was stuck to the floor behind my mom’s desk, couldn’t wave away all the people. I tried finding the seams along the corner of the dream with my mind, pull down the classroom so I could build something else, but it was welded shut.

“Rose,” she insisted, “do something.”

“I’m trying—”

“Try harder—”

“Am I never going to be good enough?” I snapped suddenly.

“Do something!” she shouted.

“Why didn’t you!” I screamed back and all the other people vanished in an instant, blown away by the power of my shout. My mom’s face flickered, the dream version of her morphing in front of me, changing in size and age as my frustration just kept pouring out of me.

“Why didn’t you see anything about him?” I said. “Why couldn’t you help him!”

“You know that’s not how it works,” she mumbled, looking smaller and smaller in the chair. “I don’t get to choose what I see, when I see it—”

“Then what’s the point?!” I shouted. “If you can’t see the future in time to change it, then what’s the point!”

“There is no point,” she cried. “We have these abilities just because we do. It doesn’t make us better or more equipped for the hard things in life—”

“Maybe when you don’t try,” I said. “But there are Atypicals who use their powers to get things done. Who use them to make their lives better—”

“Well, good for them.” She finally stood from her seat, growing taller and older in front of my eyes. “But that’s not the hand that I was dealt. Your father gets to have the fun ability, gets to use it for work, to make you and Aaron laugh when you were babies, to pour us another glass of wine when we’re already all comfortable on the couch.” Her voice cracked, and I could see the sob rising up physically through her body. “But my visions don’t work like that. It has always been a curse. To know what’s going to happen before it happens, but randomly, without reason or purpose, to be haunted by every stray thought or errant anxiety because you wonder if that was a vision, if you’re somehow manifesting these things, making the future fold out in front of you in horrible inevitability—”