Sophie gathered her books, shoved them in her bag and slung it over her shoulder as she followed Alicia out the door. "This place is nothing like back home." She had gone to a small, private yet fairly exclusive and expensive school that was basically the landmark of her hometown. The teachers were strict and everybody knew everybody else. Her grandmother had always wanted her and her brother to have the best education money could buy.

Sophie thought about all of the weird thngs that had been happening around her lately. They were the kind of thoughts that her brother would probably call 'conspiracy theories'. He usually had a more rational explanation for things where Sophie was ready to believe that aliens had crash-landed in her backyard. Wouldn't that be cool? Nobody had believed her the time when she was ten years old that she had told the house staff back home that she had seen her granddad's ghost causing havoc in the dining room, although that was really only to explain away a broken vase that she and her friends had accidentally knocked over while playing tag.

And then there was what happened last summer. She and Gabe had gone riding down some rather rocky, unused paths and her horse had slipped and broken its hind leg, nearly seriously injuring her in the process. They had been trying to create a tourniquet for it when Gabe touched the leg and the horse was healed. They told no one about it, and Gabe refused to talk about it. Looking back, she wasn't even sure that it had really happened.

But then there were the odd feelings she had been getting lately. Animals had suddenly decided to act weird around her. And at times, she almost felt like she could understand them. She would keep what had happened between her and Gabe to herself for now. But being the kind of person she was, she had a tendency to speak whatever was on her mind, and it didn't really occur to her that she might say something that someone else would find strange, even if she had just met that person. So, as the two girls stepped out into the hall, parting from the crowd of students exiting the classroom a little, she turned to Alicia.

"Do you believe in psychic powers? You know, like the supernatural and all that?"