When Hope met Mike (Hope Blackwell #2)

I haven’t posted anything here lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not working. The current large prose project is the sequel to Greek Key. It’s less research-oriented than the Rachel books, but writing a book from the perspective of a character with severe ADHD is challenging. Most prose flows from thought to thought, but Hope’s mind doesn’t work like that. Her thought process is the mental equivalent of walking barefoot on sharp rocks. This is a spoiler-free scene from the second Hope Blackwell book and, as always, will probably be edited down to a shade of itself by the time it appears in print.

Lemme tell you about the first time I met Mike Reilly.

It was at a martial arts tournament, of course. I was a little bit hyperfocused that day—I had placed high enough to get on the Olympics team (again), but noooo, the coach was all “The thing is, you’ve got a reputation…” (again) and “You’d be representing our country…” (again) and I knew I was benched.

(Again.)

I was a little bit angry.

By that time, I had already met Ben, but I still didn’t believe he was anything other than a hallucination. I put up with him mainly because Ben is cool as cats, but there was a decent side dish of me thinking I just didn’t have a say in the matter.

(Trust me, when Ben first showed up, I got my doctor to put me on every kind of medication in the book, and when that didn’t work, he took me off of my Adderall! That was a fun fourteen weeks.)

No. Medication—or lack of it—wasn’t causing my hallucinations. Because they weren’t hallucinations. I was just an ordinary psychic. Which, obviously, was impossible as all fuck so I didn’t believe the ghost of Benjamin Franklin when he told me otherwise.

So, back to Mike Reilly. Also a psychic, but he grew up in a family of psychics so he knew the rules. Such as: if two psychics who have never met are in close proximity to each other, they can find each other by their auras.

In other words? Psychics glow.

Everybody’s aura is different. Mike says mine is shades of blue and black, all twisted together. His is a bright sparkly blue, with yellow around the edges.

Now, say you’re a woman in her early twenties who’s just gotten some bad news (again). And you’ve left the arena where the tournament is being held so you don’t accidentally-on-purpose punch somebody (again). And you’ve found a quiet hidey-hole in a part of the building that’s under renovation, because nobody is working on the weekend and that means nobody is around to see you cry.

(Again.)

Then this big blue glowstick of a man appears. He’s shouting about this and that, and none of it makes any sense because he’s talking about stuff that sounds like magic. You’re pretty sure he’s not even real.

If you were like me, you’d run.

If you were me in particular, you’d also hurl a cinderblock at his head as you sprinted past him.

I might have mentioned that Mike’s a saint for putting up with me, right?