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A Supposedly Beautiful Mind

"Claire!" Dad screamed down the airport hallway. "Zeep zeep!"
He was doing his best to sound authoritative, but with his French accent, he reminded me of PepŽ Le Pew. My entire family had stopped walking and was looking at me as if I were personally responsible for how grumpy and tired they all felt after our eight-hour flight home. Mom made an exaggerated yawn, and my little brother, Henry, weighed down by his enormous backpack, crumpled against her legs.
The girl with the puppy emerged from the bathroom and cast me a wary glance. She coasted ahead of me, and I couldn't help taking one last look at the pink lock dangling off her bag. It was definitely the same one I'd seen in my mind before we'd boarded. Unfortunately, that was all it was.
It didn't mean a thing.
"I'm coming!" I screamed.
I'd been having visions ever since I was little, but they were usually stupid and meaningless, like Henry holding a green umbrella with a frog on it or, say, a bright pink lock--things that I'd later see in front of me but that never lead me to anything groundbreaking.
There was one time I saw something worthwhile: a picture of a tabby cat napping in a fedora. When I saw the same image on one of my grandmother Kiki's hatboxes, I peeked inside and found bundles of carbon-copied letters between Kiki and my mother from the time my mother was still in college. Suddenly everything made sense--my parents and Kiki didn't clash regularly just because of a difference in lifestyles, as they'd led me to believe. There had been a massive falling-out. Kiki had violently disapproved of Mom's getting engaged to her "penniless French professor," and when my parents went ahead and eloped, Kiki wrote my mom a soap-opera-worthy letter saying something along the lines of "Being excluded from my only daughter's wedding has been more painful than you, who do not yet have children, can imagine. I don't expect I will ever fully recover."
This revelation was huge--and not only because it explained so much about my family. It also gave me reason enough to believe that my next vision might lead to another monumental discovery. A hope I was hanging on to for dear life.
I never said a word to Kiki about the letters, but she already knew all about my visions. I had to tell her--the second you so much as think about a secret you're keeping from her, she sniffs it out. And she wasn't too weirded out when I told her. She said it was my parents' fault since they were the ones who'd given me my name. "You don't do that to a girl whose last name is Voyante," she'd moaned. "Not that Claire isn't a lovely name on its own . . ."
For their part, my parents said they'd named me after my dad's great-aunt Claire, who died in a Parisian heat wave the summer I was born. My little brother, Henry, is legally Henri, or as Dad pronounces it, On-ree. My mom, who thinks she's French, tries to pronounce it the French way, but she forgets at least half the time.
Down at baggage claim, Mom was channeling her inner Frenchwoman. "Voile! There it is!" she cried, waving her Evian bottle across the carousel as if her luggage might be looking for her, too. Even when she's shouting, Mom's voice is light and girly, the polar opposite of my own husky rasp.
"You see it?" Dad asked. He squinted and perched on his tiptoes to look past the crowd

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