I was so shaken from such an intense psychometric reading that I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my keys from the counter. I ran back up my hall to the door next to the bathroom, unlocking its three locks. I flicked on the light and was instantly blinded by the absence of color.

Every last object in the room was exactly the same shade of white. There was an unused desk, two empty bookshelves, and a block of large, square storage cubes. A single cushioned chair—also white—sat alone in the center of the room.

The White Room was my inner sanctum, a room I had put together to be as psychically neutral a place as possible. I needed a place that was clean of any potential triggers to my power, since everything else in my apartment was potentially chock full of other people’s pasts. I came there whenever I needed to calm myself after a particularly bad psychometric incident, and tonight’s Mardi Gras Slamfest definitely made that list.

I sat down in the chair before I collapsed. When my panic finally settled down after several minutes, I realized that sitting here doing nothing wasn’t the solution.

I just had to get out of my apartment for now. I got up from the chair, turned off the light, and relocked the three locks on the door. On the way out of the apartment, I chugged a glass of OJ to fight the hypoglycemic aftereffect of using my power. I slipped my black gloves on, heading for the elevator. I rarely went anywhere without my gloves these days. They were old and worn and the one thing that muffled my powers. It just made life easier to wear them, but second skin or not, they always made me feel a bit like the Bubble Boy.

As I walked from my digs in SoHo up toward Union Square, I stopped at my trusty coffee guy and caught word that some real vintage Antiques Roadshow action was happening under the West Side Highway at Seventy-Ninth Street. I jumped straight into a cab. When the taxi approached the turnoff, the driver spooked out on me, refusing to take his cab any farther west. After a minute of pointless arguing, I got out and slammed the door.