Fingerprints – Gifted Touch, volume 1

We are introduced to seventh graders at a private school. Rae (Rachel) and Lea, her best friend, are the first two. Rae has a talent for psychometry; she can touch things and, in her case, receives thoughts and feelings from them. She's worried because her mother ended up in a mental institution, probably from the same type of thing.

Things get horribly worse at lunch at school, and it appears that Rae has really gone insane.

Rae spends the summer at an institution and then has to return to school. She is still having impressions from things she touches, though, but she tries to hide this. (I keep thinking of Babylon 5 and the Psi-Corps, where the people had the same type of ability and they wore gloves to cut the sensations down.)

Rae has to attend a group therapy meeting. When she gets ready for the first day of school she scrubs her back so hard it bleeds. There's a volunteer person from the hospital she had met while she was there that is visiting and helps Rae fix her back up.

Another character is introduced, a boy named Anthony who is in special-ed classes and has a problem with anger management. He also seems to have some interest in Rae. He's in the same therapy group that Rae is in, and in the first session they didn't get along too well.

There's also someone who seems to be after her, and not for a good purpose. Rae goes to the restroom and almost gets blown up by a pipe bomb. Anthony had been in the restroom, getting some pot that had been hidden there. A girl in class had been the one that told Rae to go to the restroom, though. Someone had also set Anthony up by planting certain items in his backpack.

Then there's another bit written by Rae's would-be assassin, and it ties that person's actions in to something Rae's mother did.

Things get worse for Rae when someone sneaks into her house and trashes her bedroom. It turns out it was a boy named Jesse that she catches and forces him to clean up her room.

Anthony is able to help Rae figure out exactly what is happening to her and how. Rae finds out the guy she likes is just using her.

So the only things she has left to do is deal Jesse and his using her, find a way to get Anthony freed from jail and prevent him from going to prison, find a way to get the evidence she needs, and deal with yet another person who seems out to kill her.

A very good first book in the series.

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