So I’m working on a YouTube project — born from a writing prompt (‘One day in class you decide to scream something in your head to catch mind readers. As you do, you see your crush flinch’) and the headache of the top results for ‘mind reading GLMM’.
‘I Can Read The Hot Nerd’s Mind’ is a genuine thing, apparently.
So it’s basically me trying to make a GCMM about a mind reader that doesn’t rely on an unexplained ability to read one person’s mind (or heaven forbid ‘Reading Boys’ Minds In Disguise’).
And I’m realising that I really don’t have a good title…
The storyline so far:
Our mind-reading protagonist, 16-year-old Finch Kesell, wasn’t always called that. For the first half of his life, he’s 298-17MR-05.
After being found and later ‘adopted’ (very unofficially, because this kid technically does not exist — no birth certificate and such) by a police officer and her partners — Joanne, Laura and Daniel — he gets his name because he likes birds.
He’s eight, after all.
Fast forward to his presumed tenth birthday, and he discovers he can read minds. Or Daniel discovers it because Finch doesn’t quite understand what’s going on for a while… but he works it out later on.
Here we meet three other ‘numbers’ (156-22CB-07, 156-29FF-07 and 303-04PI-05 — Amber, Greyson and Zara respectively), and also Finch jumps out a first-floor window. Normal stuff, y’know?
Anyway, we fast forward again to our other main character, Alexis Everett. Or just Alex.
He’s got a nasty little habit of killing everyone he lives with. Not, like, stabbing them, but they all fall ill with the same illness once he moves in with them.
Of course, many of his foster parents have had a nasty little habit of either abusing him or just straight up trying to kill him… but that’s slightly beside the point.
So, after two months of living with the Tillery family — Emma, Danielle and Isaac — Isaac has fallen ill and Alex and Emma are going into Year Eleven together.
This first day is… well.
Finch makes several bad impressions on Alex, Alex has a nightmare about one past experience with a foster family which he thinks may have been triggered by Finch, and then he gets some odd texts.
Naturally, he blocks the number.
And then ten days later Finch, Alex and another boy — Roscoe ‘Rory’ Alden — get messages from the same number.
Rory is fairly calm, Finch panics, and Alex decides he knows what he’s doing. Funnily enough, he does not.
Someone breaks into the school almost entirely undetected except for Finch’s mind-reading (because our intruder is deliberately trying to scare him) but nobody actually gets hurt.
Later on Finch, Amber and Grey get home to discover a severed head on Finch’s bed, which is a ‘gift’ from said intruder. Finch almost immediately goes back out again, claiming he needs to think.
A bit later on than that, Alex and Emma are waiting for Danielle to finish talking with Isaac about the ‘grown up stuff’. Alex leaves when Emma gives him the idea to, and is then almost kidnapped.
Luckily, or rather for plot convenience, Finch is there to help… again.
This follows the kidnapping of two other girls — two of Zara’s roommates — and that’s where I’m up to, really.
The numbers, by the way, work as follows:
298 = Date of birth (DD/M, D/MM or DD/MM)
17MR = ‘17’ refers to ‘MR’ (mind-reading) being the seventeenth mutation the scientists came up with.
05 = Year of birth
So… any ideas? It might be a little complicated, but I’m struggling more than I should be…