Fear Street: The Runaway (R.L. Stine)

Felicia is sitting in sometime of biology/psychology lab at the community college, trying to move things with her mind. Apparently she has some kind of psychic power, which she inherited from her dad and her mean old aunt made her enroll in the project after her dad died. Everyone is super worried because she doesn’t really have a handle on her power.

She makes that pretty clear when she gets pissed off at the doctor in charge and shoots a pencil into his eye. She starts screaming because she can see it so clearly in her mind, but the doctor keeps yelling at her and when she looks up, the pencil is stuck in the wall. Psycho much? I honestly have a hard time remembering what part is a flashback and which part they tell at the beginning so let’s just explain what happened.

Felicia runs into her friend Debbie, who’s also in the project even though she doesn’t display any psychic powers. Debbie is super jealous and keeps pouting because Felicia has powers that she doesn’t have. They stop by an old abandoned house and Debbie keeps goading her into giving off a display of her powers.

Felicia eventually snaps and let loose, but lets loose with too much power. The house explodes and they run off, but then see the cars of two classmates in the back. They run into the house and discover their bodies in the rubble. Debbie shows up the next day and tells Felicia to get out of town because the police talked to the doctor and now they’re on the way to her house. She gives Felicia her car and she takes off, but then her emotions go haywire and she causes the car to explode.

Felicia finds herself hitchhiking alongside the road, when a guy nicknamed Killer picks her up. He decides that no one gets a free ride and tries to attack her, which brings out her power. She runs away from his car and gets picked up by Nick. He’s nice and cute, but she kind of blows him off because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone.

She ends up at a late night coffee shop where she hears two guys complaining. One guy offered to take care of his professor’s house for a month for $100 and forgot that he was suppose to take a trip with his friend. Felicia pretends like the professor is a friend of her dad’s and cons the guy into letting her do the job. He gives her the house key and after some prodding, half the money.

So Felicia has lots of powers and no one’s looking for her, which logically means she should enroll in high school! She cons the principal into thinking her transcripts got lost and starts taking classes. She runs into Nick again and he takes her out for a burger after school, but then introduces her to his girlfriend Zan. Felicia ends up taking a job at the same burger shop where they work.

Now she has a place to stay and some new friends, but she can’t stop thinking about what happened and she gets a big ole crush on Nick. He wants to know about her past and she tells him that she ran away from home. He keeps giving her mixed signals, like he’s all into her one minute and then saying he loves Zan.

Zan invites Felicia over for a sleepover and the girls bond over food and movies. When Zan goes to the bathroom, Felicia flips through her yearbook and finds a picture of a guy with his face blacked out. She asks Zan about any exes, but she claims that she and Nick have dated since freshman year. She checks the yearbook at school and finds that it was another guy she dated and one that happens to be dead.

Felicia starts getting cryptic notes from someone claiming to know the truth about her. She finally turns to Nick for help and he kisses her, but then tells her that Zan has some problems. A lot of people blame her for the other guy’s death because it happened at her house and she went to an institution for awhile.

The burger shop catches on fire one day and Felicia feels guilty because she thinks her power did it when she got pissed off. She stays until everyone gets out of the building and the survivors tell the news that the girl seemed to hold the fire back with her mind. Everyone is also a little suspicious because she totally took off afterwards.

Zan interrupts one of their private moments and he calms her by saying she’s the only one for him and he’s not interested in Felicia. The next day they’re talking in the hallway when Zan comes out of nowhere with a big ass knife and tries to kill her. She rants about sending her the notes and how the only way she can be with Nick is to kill her. Nick saves the day.

Felicia decides that she has to get out of town, but then decides she can’t leave until she gets the picture of her dad put back inside her locker. Of course she runs into someone and it turns out to be Debbie. Debbie tries to kill Felicia because she had it made when she left, but the story about the fire tipped her off that it was her.

Apparently Debbie does have powers, but she kept it a secret. She caused the house to explode because she was in love with their classmate and she then blew up the car, thinking it would kill Felicia. The two girls fight and Felicia directs all her power right at Debbie’s brain and she drops like a bag of bricks.

The epilogue follows Nick and Felicia talking about what happened. She says that Debbie now in some kind of a trance that the doctors can’t figure out and they don’t know if she’ll ever come out of it. Nick says that Zan is back in the institution and hopefully they can give her the help they need. How can one book with two psycho bitches be so boring?