I took a deep breath as I composed myself. There was a good chance that we were getting worked up over something that probably didn’t happen. In spite of all the coincidences that arose from the moment in the parking lot, there was hardly substantial proof any actual mind reading had occurred. More than likely, Lizzie had gotten rattled because she was incredibly stressed about my accident and got spooked when I grabbed my hand. This whole thing was ridiculous.

            “Ok, let’s collect ourselves real quick,” I said with my hands waving downward in a “calm down” gesture. “Let’s remind ourselves of what we’re starting to let our minds believe. If what you’re claiming is true, then someway, somehow, you literally read my mind. As in, I had a fully coherent sentence formed in my brain and you heard it as though you thought it yourself. Something like that happening… well, it just doesn’t happen! It’s stupid, it’s-”

            “Impossible,” Lizzie finished for me. She was starting to… smile again?

            I blinked at her out of place grin. I chose to ignore it as best I could. “…Right. There has to be some reasonable explanation for this. Maybe you just recognized that I was trying to calm you down when I held your hand and you sort of… filled in the gaps of what I was trying to say? That’s reasonable, right? Yeah, that makes sense. Certainly makes more sense than mind reading.” As I ranted, I was talking faster, led on by Lizzie’s weird smirk, which was still widening. She was really freaking me out now. I grabbed her hands and locked our eyesight. “Seriously, that has to be what happened. Because you can’t hear my thoughts. That’s just not possible. It’s crazy. It’s impossible. It’s-”

            “Magic,” Lizzie said, eyes sparkling.

            My entire thought process broke.

            The restaurant’s quiet Italian music echoed through the small corridor that still no other customers had come through. The upbeat melodies were the only sound apart from Lizzie’s heavy and excited breathing. I was struggling to find my own breath, trying to put into words what she was now claiming to have happened.

            Lizzie had completely convinced herself that magic was real.

            It certainly explained her puzzling excitement. She was a massive fantasy novel fan, often getting lost in magical worlds that fascinated her. It was by far her favorite genre to write. Anything magical, superhero, fantastical creatures, she was all over it. She’d even admitted to me that she’d gladly leave Earth for whatever alternative dimension existed out there—mostly as a joke, but her eyes always sparkled with that extra bit of enthusiasm to know that she’d actually consider it. It was no wonder she was so animated; She literally thought her magical dreams had come true.

            It was clouding her judgement. It had to be. Magic wasn’t real. “Lizzie…” I responded, gripping our locked hands tighter. “That’s absurd.”

            She shook her head violently. Her cheeks were blushing, and her lips were quivering, unable to keep still. “No, it’s not! In fact, it’s the only thing that makes any sense!”

            “Lizzie-”

            “Think about it!” she said, pulling me closer. She released my hands and grabbed my shoulders instead, practically forcing me to slouch down to her eye level. Holding me firmly, she peered right through my eye sockets, peering straight into my skull. “It explains how the electricity hit your body while you were in the cage. It explains how you survived ten shocks to the heart in the first place, let alone without injury. It explains how you had a symptom that a nurse claimed wasn’t physically possible. And it explains how I heard your thoughts in my head! Seriously, how else can you explain any of those?”

            Each reminder of the unexplained phenomenon that had occurred this past weekend was like a separate blow, a kick in the chest. I had completely forgotten just how many events were still unsolved. How no professional was able to give a concrete answer to any of the things she had mentioned. But the thing she mentioned that really caught in my mind was the SFE again. No matter how many times I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for how it kept dissipating. When it flared up again this afternoon, I had fully convinced myself that I had willed it away through mental command somehow. If that was true, was it because of… magic?

            I could feel my guard lowering. I could fight the prospect of magic all I wanted. But deep down I knew that Lizzie might just be right. There was no way we had each come up with supernatural explanations for the unexplained individually. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

            Argh, what am I convincing myself of right now!?

            I shook my head, desperate to get on steady ground again. “No, this is crazy. You can’t honestly believe that I have superpowers now, can you?”

            She frowned at my continued denial, and took her hands off my shoulders. She broke eyesight, looking toward the ground. She looked deep in thought, and at first I thought she might be reconsidering her new beliefs. But then she looked back up. “What if we could prove it?”

            My eyes widened in shock. “You can prove it!?”

            She nodded her determined head. “I think we can. We just need to replicate what happened in the parking lot again. If you can think of some words, and I can repeat them back to you exactly without you having said a word, that’s pretty darn definitive, isn’t it?”

            I considered her words slowly. If she truly could read my mind somehow, I really couldn’t argue with her. If her experiment actually worked and she started repeating my thoughts as though I were speaking them aloud, then… I’d have no choice but to accept it.

            I was seconds away from just dropping the subject and going back to the table; we’d been away for far too long. But the more I reflected upon the week and the mountain load of impossibilities that continued to stack up halted me. I really, really wanted to dismiss the possibility of magic. But something just wasn't adding up about this past week. I shouldn’t have been alive. I shouldn’t have come away without injury. Those flares of static didn’t go away by coincidence.

            Something was very, very off about this weekend. And if magic was real, a lot of the mysteries might finally get solved.

            Fully convinced to play along, I nodded. “Alright, let’s try. What do I do?”

            Lizzie softly squealed in excitement before grabbing my hands again. “Try thinking at me again, just like you did outside.”

            “Thinking… at you?” I repeated slowly.

            “Right,” she nodded. “So basically, form a sentence in your brain, and without saying it aloud, think it into my head.”

            I blinked in confusion. “Think it into your head… I don’t even know what that means.”

            “Just try it. You might figure it out on your own anyways,” she said.

            I held her hands awkwardly, suddenly realizing just how odd we must look from onlookers. I gave a nervous glance behind me. “I… I don’t know, this feels weird…”

            “No one’s around,” she said reassuringly. “And no one will hear this anyways, that’s the whole point.”

            I sighed. This felt incredibly stupid. I could already imagine Mom walking to check on us only to see us holding hands in front of bathroom doors. But… as much as I hated to admit it, I was extremely intent on finding out the truth. A lot was riding on this. There was too much at stake to just give up to embarrassment. I eventually nodded. “But… what do I say?”

            “Anything!” Lizzie said. “Don’t say it aloud, I’ll repeat what you say back to you to prove I heard you.”

            Doing everything I could to avoid my self-consciousness dying from embarrassment, I closed my eyes. Feeling completely alone in my own mind, I thought up the words Hello, Lizzie. Can you hear me?

            Silence passed, and all we could hear were the Italian tunes playing over the restaurant speakers. I opened my eyes, eyeing her curiously.

            “Did you think something?” she asked with a head tilt. “I didn’t hear anything.”

            “I thought I did? Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.”

            “Did you try wanting me to hear it?” she asked as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

            “What?” I asked, baffled. “What does that mean?”

            She turned her head to the wall, looking at nothing in particular. She scrunched her eyes to remember. “When we were outside and I heard your thoughts, it felt like you really needed me to hear your message. There was urgency to your tone, I could hear your panic. So maybe you just need to do that again. Have that need to make sure I hear you.”

            This was getting ridiculous. How much detail did she get from that one thought in the parking lot? I released our hands to cross my arms. “How do we know that I need to do anything? You were the one to read my thoughts earlier.”

            She shot me a playful glare. “Excuse me, I’m not the superhero here, you are! You were the one who was struck by lightning ten times in the heart and walked away without injury. It’s only logical that you’re the one with the powers.”

            “Where are you even coming up with this stuff?” I asked, a smirk starting to form on my face.

            “I read a lot of fantasy novels,” she said with a goofy grin.

            As much as I wanted to discredit her theories from literal fiction, they were as good of ideas as any and it wasn’t like anything I was dealing with was rational anyways. I closed my eyes again and squeezed her hands again.

            “I’m watching your lips closely,” she said. “I don’t want to see any movement.”

            I scrunched my eyes, concentrating harder this time. I blocked out all other sounds so that the only sounds were the words in my own head. As clearly as I could, I repeated the phrase again.

            “Hello, can you hear me?”

            When the thought finished, I gave a weird mental nudge, imagining the thought leaving my head and going into her hands. I wanted her to hear me. I wanted her to hear my thoughts. This needed to happen. Because if she could hear my thoughts, it might just be the key to everything that’s happened so far.

            There! The same twinge that had emerged from my head from earlier! Just like before, I felt the smallest sensation running down my arms and toward my fingertips, leading to a strange pulse where our hands met.

            Before my mind could fully comprehend something had happened, Lizzie made a strange noise that was cross between a snicker and a gasp. “Oh, come on… You have to be more original than that!”

            My eyes shot open. “It worked!?”

            “You felt it, didn’t you?” she said, practically bouncing on her feet in excitement. “I heard your voice in my head, and your lips didn’t move one bit!”

            “What did I say then?” I challenged her, heart racing.

            She rolled her eyes. “You said ‘Hello, can you hear me'. Come on, give me something harder.”

            “What?” I said sputtering, struggling to contain myself. “That’s amazing, what are you talking about? You heard my thoughts!”

            “I’m not convinced yet,” she said with a shrug. “There’s the tiniest chance I could’ve guessed what you were thinking. Let’s go again. But think of something original. Something I’d have zero chance of guessing.”

            My heart was beating too fast to concentrate. The walls of reality had shattered all around me. Normality was a lie. The impossible was possible. Lizzie’s wild theory was right after all.

            Magic… was real!?

            No no no, hold on, I thought to myself. Lizzie’s right. It’s still too soon to say for sure. She could’ve guessed what I was thinking. I needed to come up with something far more original to fully prove it.

            Ignoring my heart’s incessant pounding, I searched through my panicked head to find something that she’d never guess. The obvious idea was to make up a series of random words and string them together incoherently, but even then Lizzie might be able to figure that out. We had way too similar a sense of humor, there was always a possibility that she thought of the same random words at the same time I did. Perhaps I could make up a word? But then what if she couldn’t repeat it back to me? A few thoughts later, and I realized the solution: I could tell a lie. She was probably expecting me to tell her a secret of some kind, so she’d be expecting the truth. It’d be near impossible for her to predict, and even if she did, I could make up anything about myself or my life. I started formulating the sentence, and I eventually I had something.

            Closing my eyes, I focused on the sentence at hand. “I think my brother James is gay. I’ve seen the way he looks at some of Eliza’s magazines.” Again, I gave a mental nudge with the hope that she would hear what I said.

            I expected the tickling feeling down my arm this time and when it reached Lizzie’s hand in a fraction of a second, she burst into laughter. I reopened my eyes. I knew that the message went through.

            “You’re joking right? There’s no way that’s true!” she giggled.

            “What’d I say then?” I asked, full of anticipation.

            “You said that you think James is gay,” she playfully sneered. “That he looks at Eliza’s magazines all weird.   Which is just complete BS, by the way; you’ve told me over and over that James is hopelessly after some girl named Phoebe, who’s like, head cheerleader. If that ain’t straight…”

            Her words trailed off as we stared at each other, fully taking in what just happened. She’d fully heard my head. Somehow, someway, I’d projected my own thoughts into her brain. The veil separating the natural from the supernatural had officially been broken.

            “You’re… you’re a superhero.”