Alice would have much rather gone on talking about his life and family, or really anything other than her “friend”, but it could no longer be avoided. He’d given her enough stalling time with the pizza, for which she was grateful. “Oh, right. Yes, I know.” But which ones to tell him? Surely not all, he would think less of as a freak with each one of them.

It wasn’t necessarily uncommon to have more than one power, but when having one was frowned upon, surely more would be even worse. Lucas may seem cool about it, but in his mind he was probably picturing the ones shown on tv the most. Levitating, reading minds, the pyro and ice stuff… Nothing like hers. 

Personally, Alice had never spoken about her powers to anyone except anonymously online, and even then she held back. She wasn’t exactly a conspiracy theorist, but the idea of the government being able to hack into websites for information wasn’t that farfetched to her. But Lucas, telling him a few details wouldn’t hurt anything, surely. Afterall, he thought it was someone else. “She can read emotions,” she finally answered, pouring her coke into the glass. Alice hesitated in going on, watching the fizz go down before pouring more. “It’s called telepathy. Not thoughts, mind you, that’s different, but emotions can tell you a great deal about what a person’s thinking. She can read them, and with a little more effort put her own emotions on others as well. But she never does that, of course. That would be wrong.”

Alice avoided looking at him, moving her glass around while looking into it, the ice clinking around inside. “It takes a lot of work for her to control it, block people out with mental walls and all that. It um…it makes being in crowds exhausting, overwhelming. Makes her look shy when really she’s just trying to hold onto her sanity.” Her heart was aching, and they hadn’t even touched the surface of what she felt every day.