didn’t do anything. Then, with my mind, I reached out cautiously and tried to see through his eyes. For nearly an hour, that’s the last conscious thought I had.

chapter 9

Wade

Wade Sheffield was born in North Dakota in 1977, the fourth son of a wheat farmer. He was seven years old before realizing that no one else could hear other people’s thoughts. His older brothers thought him weak because he cried while helping with daily chores like delivering baby calves or butchering chickens. His sisters sometimes cried when chickens were killed, but the men in his family couldn’t figure tears over a new calf.

“She hurts so much,” he would say, stroking the heifer in labor.

At the age of twelve, he began responding verbally to people’s thoughts. This made several of his teachers nervous—especially the ones who quietly hated teaching, and Mr. Rhinehard, who was sleeping with a fifteen-year-old student named Phyllis Dunmire.

Wade knew all this. He knew what they thought of him. Most of the boys hated him because he was different, and most of the girls wouldn’t be seen with anyone so unpopular. Lisa McKendrick had a secret crush on him for a few years, but she also worried much of the time about her private nose-picking habit.

By reading the thoughts of animals, he could always tell when a storm was coming. Animals knew a lot about weather.

One year, when he was fourteen, he stopped off for hamburgers with two of his brothers and mentioned to Mr. Masterson and Mr. Hinthorn that they should bring their cattle in early because of a thunderstorm. The weatherman on the radio had predicted no storm.

That night, every farm within a seventy-mile radius of the Sheffields’ lost half their wheat. In anger and frustration, people blamed Wade because he’d warned them.

Within a week, three farmers caught him alone on the way to school and beat him with pitchfork handles until his left leg and four ribs were broken. His oldest brother, Joshua, put him in the back of a Ford pickup and drove him to the Whitman County Hospital, where he was also diagnosed as suffering from a concussion. The next few weeks were hazy. He didn’t remember much besides a lot of bright lights, but when he woke up, a miracle happened.

Dr. Geoffrey Van Tassel leaned down over him and smiled.

“Welcome back,” the round-faced man said. “Tell me what I’m thinking.”

Wade had grown practiced at hiding the extent of his gift, but now he picked up bits and pieces of very focused thought patterns. “A garden,” he whispered. “Strawberries that your mother planted a long time ago.”

The eyes above him grew warm. “I have an interesting proposition for you, young man, when you’re feeling better.”

Wade often viewed that moment as the real beginning of his life. Six weeks later, he arrived at the Psychic Research Institute of Northern Colorado, on a set of rented crutches, and began to realize his own self-worth. Suddenly, being able to do something no one else could do had turned into a plus instead of a severe minus.

Dr. Van Tassel was often with him then. Apparently, Wade talked a good deal while in his state of delirium. He’d been speaking aloud whatever the nurses happened to be thinking. Sheila Osborne, a young nursing student from the Psychic Institute, had been working on her internship at the Whitman County Hospital during Wade’s stay.

The night before first seeing him, she’d experienced the worst blind date of her life. The guy her best friend had fixed her up with looked like he belonged on the cover of Muscle Fitness. He wouldn’t eat the popcorn she bought at the movies because it had salt and butter. He called her babe and lectured her most of the night about the best kind of workout for slimming down her thighs. And then he actually expected her to sleep with him after his cellulite comment.

Slamming bedpans into the cupboard of a hospital room, she heard soft murmuring from the bed.

“I don’t have cellulite. And I was wearing Levi’s. What would he know?”

She stopped in shock. A semiconscious young man on the bed was rolling slowly in sweat-soaked sheets and whispering her recent thoughts. Forgetting her own hurt vanity, she leaned over him and wiped his face.

“Yeah, I had Levi’s on,” she said. “What kind of shirt was I wearing?”

“No shirt—that pink sweater your mom bought you last Christmas.”

His voice was barely audible, but she heard him. Ten minutes later, she was on the phone to