When I first met Estella everything changed. My mam had always waxed poetic about meeting my dad for the first time. Love at first sight, heavens opening, violin strings playing, my mother tended to lay it on thick but I figured some of it had to be true. With meeting the love of her life my mam got syntheses she could taste colors, hear the music of numbers. “My life cracked open and a million colors and smells and sounds flooded me,” she would always say to me. Dad was able to understand suddenly every language, long dead and every dialect. As a historian he was pleased as punch according to mother. When I was five he was recruited by the CIA or some alphabet group and we never saw him again.

It made mam nostalgic for all things love, it made me nervous.

I stayed loveshy. Throughout high school and into college, I did my best to avoid entanglements. I kept my heart on the shelf. And then Estella walked into Aberrant Psychology.

Tall and pale as the full moon, she had small high breasts and mouth accustomed to sneering. We were both thunderstruck. Despite all of my carefully constructed defenses I fell head over heels. Against my will I stood and reached for her. Instantly my new sense unfolded. I could read other people’s emotions. Waves of alien feelings buffeted me. I wavered and Estella caught me.

Estella’s eyes grew big as saucers. I swallowed hard. We looked around the classroom. I gripped my love’s hands.

“Your name is Chelsea right? Let’s get the hell out of here.”