All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

“I just wish I had a gift for something I could use, y’know? Like, being able to memorize huge monologues, or dance choreography, or something. Not this.”

Fiona has not quite accepted her newfound status as a healer. It is possible that she never will. It’s not that she doesn’t care about people. In fact, she’s probably one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever known. But Fiona is butting her head up against something that, as close as we are, Roe and I can never understand. We’re not working against a stereotype that says you should always be the girl with the tourniquets.

“All I want is what you have,” she said to me once. “The right to be selfish.”

“Yes, Fi, but then you wouldn’t have saved our lives.”

“What good is that doing my career, though?”

“I’m coming to your bloody play, aren’t I, Miss Thing?”

“I suppose,” she says, adjusting the canvas bag filled with sandwiches on her shoulder. The Othello run went well, even if it was just three performances. Now she’s playing the younger sister in some play about the Blitz.

“Hey, Maeve.” She suddenly grins. “I’m thinking of a number.”

“This again.”

“Go on. We said you need to practise.”

I close my eyes for a moment, and feel for Fiona’s tail of light. “You’re not thinking of a number,” I say, finally. “You’re thinking about whether you’re going to keep being cast in the kid sister roles, and whether anyone will take you seriously.”

“Well, damn.”

The telepathy thing hasn’t gone away. It feels mad to even call it that, especially as it’s not at all how you see it in films. There, it’s always this rush of a million different voices, hitting the person like a wall of sound. With me, it’s never voices. It’s lights. Strands of coloured lights that I grab on to and follow until I’m a tourist in someone else’s brain. It takes time. It takes concentration. And it’s absolutely knackering.

In the days after the ritual, Fiona and I went to Divination, mostly to reassure Fionnuala that we were OK. It wasn’t an easy conversation to have, with her spinning between wild rage at having disobeyed her and extreme relief that what happened to Heaven hadn’t happened to me. She made us a cup of camomile tea, and slowly, we told her about our gifts. About the healing, the lights, the scar tissue that could disappear under Fi’s fingertips.

“The ritual changed you. You’ve seen beyond the veil,” Fionnuala sighed, a tinge of jealousy in her voice. “And now you’re for ever changed.”

Roe and Lily are already on the grass when we get to the Beg, sitting on a blanket, deep in conversation. We waited for a long time to see whether they had gained anything in the ritual. Eventually, we gave up. Fiona and I had big conversations about the fact that we were the only ones who gained gifts afterwards, and that maybe for the O’Callaghans, surviving was a gift great enough. But then it happened.

Small things, first. A cheap padlock sprung open when Roe put his hand on it. We thought it was a fluke. Then one day I was locked out of my house, and called him round to keep me company while I waited for Dad to get home. We decided to try the lock trick again. The front door stayed put; but the back door, with its old lock and rusty brown handle, flew right open.

He said, “Oh my God.”

I said, “Welcome to the club.”

The vague talent he had for fixing things has flowered into a kind of strange understanding of inanimate objects, one that makes perfect sense to him, but he struggles to explain. He gave me a watch battery on the bus and told me to hide it anywhere in my house. Two days later, he walked through the front door, took one long blink, and said, “Behind the bookcase in Pat’s room.”

“Hey, you guys,” I say, bending down to kiss Roe. “What are you chatting about?”

“It’s private,” Lily says. Firmly. Not crossly. A month ago it would have been snappily. Now, we are on “firmly”.

“OK.” I nod. “Me and Fiona have hot chicken rolls and cans.”

“Angels,” Roe says.

“We try,” Fiona agrees. “Who wants a Game of Thrones tarot reading?”

“Ooh, me,” Lily says, huddling in close to her.

I try not to take it too personally.

On the whole, Lily’s mental recovery seems to be taking much longer than her physical one. The world was exhausting to her for a long time after the ritual. I think she might have given up on living entirely, if her gift hadn’t appeared.

We all thought it would be water. We looked for rain and leaky plumbing. It wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever is, I suppose. Then things started happening. Lightbulbs exploded. Watches stopped working. Some popcorn caught fire in the microwave. Lily kept on accidentally breaking things that Roe inevitably had to fix.

“Some gift,” she grumbled.

Then a CoB head followed us down the street, demanding to know why Roe was wearing a skirt and holding hands with a girl at the same time. He shoved a leaflet into Lily’s hand and immediately yelped, dropping the pile of paper on the floor. Lily froze, and we hustled her into the nearest cafe.

“What was that?” Roe asked, his arm around her.

“Sparks,” she whispered. “My gift is electricity.”

We sit under the trees, and Roe complains about his exams. We make grisly faces about the fact that next year, we’re going to be sitting ours, and that I will almost certainly have to do night study every evening to even scrape the points for a decent college. If, as I keep qualifying to my friends and my parents, I even want to get into college.

Fiona says she’ll help me, and I move my head closer to Roe’s chest. Lily’s eyes rest peacefully on the Beg. She has promised Roe she won’t try to go back, but I’m not sure how committed she