Now You See Me-Gifted 5 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Martin’s destination. Tracey looked around, wondering if she’d spot Serena, Clare, or any of the people she and other Gifted students had encountered in the past. But all she saw was the kind of people one would expect to find in a playground – some little kids with parents over by the see-saw and swings, and a group of teenage boys on the basketball court.
    The latter group was the one Martin approached. He planted himself on the court just in front of the boy who held the ball. Like the other guys in the group, the player looked to be around sixteen or so. All the boys were bigger than Martin.
    ‘What do you want?’ the boy holding the ball asked.
    ‘I want to play with you guys,’ Martin said.
    Oh no, Tracey thought. She didn’t have to be Emily to see what the immediate future held for Martin. The boy would tell him no. Beat it, kid. Get lost, jerk. Something like that. Martin would refuse, maybe try to take the ball. The other guys would jeer. And Martin’s inner superhero – or in his case, supermonster – would come out.
    But the older boy just shrugged. ‘Sure. I need another guy on my team. Go take a position over there.’
    Was she crazy, or was that disappointment she was seeing in Martin’s eyes? He scowled.
    ‘Forget it,’ he muttered, and walked off the court.
    His next stop was a picnic table just a few yards away where a group of men were playing cards. A couple of them looked kind of rough and there was a bottle of cheap whisky on the table. Tracey got nervous.
    Martin tapped one man on the shoulder. ‘I want to join your game.’
    A grizzled face turned to him. ‘You play poker, kid? Sure, take a seat.’
    Once again, Martin’s face fell. ‘Never mind.’ And he walked away.
    Now Tracey understood. Martin didn’t want to play basketball or poker. He wanted to be teased, taunted, brushed aside. He wanted those older boys who played basketball, the men at the poker table, to mock him, make fun of him, laugh at him. Then his so-called ‘gift’ would be summoned. Martin had been looking for a way to be strong, to assert himself in the only way he knew how.
    But then why did he resist the gift when it started to emerge in his back yard? OK, maybe he didn’t want to hurt a blood relative. This was interesting, she mused. It meant that Martin actually had some control of his gift – it seemed like he could stop his gift from taking him over, but he still couldn’t make it happen by himself – she knew how frustrating that must be for him because she was having a similar problem. It also meant he had feelings, that he wasn’t just this whiny wimp who didn’t care about anyone but himself. So there might be more to Martin than any of his classmates ever suspected.
    But as she walked alongside him while he dragged himself slowly home, she was pretty sure that whatever else Martin might be, he wasn’t a spy.

C HAPTER F OUR

    I N MOST OF HER classes, Jenna sat at the back of the room, where she wouldn’t be noticed and the teacher would be less likely to call on her. If she became bored – and this happened frequently – she could amuse herself by reading the minds of her classmates. Outside the Gifted class, she could benefit from the fact that no one knew what she could do, and no one could block her. In her last class, she’d been nicely entertained by a student’s memory of a family trip to New York City.
    But this was her English class, one of the few classes where Jenna sat closer to the front and paid attention. She’d always been a book person, and in this class, they’d been given some good stuff to read. And Ms Day, the teacher, had a way of getting the students to talk about the literature they’d been assigned. Right now, they were reading Jane Eyre , and even though the language was old-fashioned, Jenna liked the heroine. For someone who’d had a crummy childhood, Jane was actually a pretty gutsy girl, and Jenna could relate to her. She was looking forward to