Every interaction Martin has is suddenly put in a new light given the reveal that he has the ability to see into people’s souls:
All of the teachers getting angry or hurt by Martin’s words make more sense once you realize that he was pointing out their deepest worry and insecurity. He wasn’t just insulting them; he was insulting their very livelihood.
On a bleaker note, when Martin insults Torchie out of frustration from none of his friends believing him, Martin may have unintentionally picked up on Torchie’s insecurity about being seen as dumb. You can hardly blame the other boys from getting mad at him.
Martin guessing correctly that Lucky can hear voices from lost objects seems contrived, Until you realize Martin can read souls, and likely read Lucky’s.
All of the boys being in denial over having psychic powers seems like a weird case of Arbitrary Skepticism for two thirds of the book. However, it takes Martin all of the story with all six of his friends convincing him that he has some of his own. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem that odd since the main character apparently didn’t suspect a thing, and the audience might not have up until that point either.
It makes sense that Cheater turns out to be bad at cheating when he actually tries to do it. Despite his reputation, he prides himself on his intelligence, and can’t lie to save his life. If he didn’t have any powers at all, Cheater wouldn’t know the first thing about ACTUAL cheating.
Trash and Martin are direct foils to each other. Martin starts off new to the school, is a sarcastic kid with an attitude problem, and makes a group of friends within the first week. Trash is already a student, but has no friends and is a thoughtful, quiet artist. Even their powers contradict each other: Martin can manipulate people’s emotions and gets in trouble by making people mad, while Trash is destructive in the physical sense.
All the main characters sign their names on Flinch's cast, and if you look closely you can see that Trash and Cheater's signatures are oddly similar. Both of them have written their names in an angular, graffiti-esque style, but Cheater's is a little bit messy and hard to read. The H, A, T and R in his name are neat, but the C and two Es are messier and the "E"s are written differently each time, as if Cheater didn't know what he was doing. Evidently, Cheater inadvertently read Trash's mind and stole the idea from him. Seeing as there is a H, A, T and R in Trash's name, Cheater could copy those directly, but he didn't know what to do for the C and E, and seeing as he doesn't have Trash's artistic ability, he did them badly.
Fridge Horror
At one point, when helping his friends hone their powers, Martin brings up the possibility of Trash and Torchie accidentally hurting someone with their powers. While such a scenario doesn’t happen, it doesn’t do much to ease the mind of what Torchie or Trash could have ended up doing if they never figured outhow to control their powers.
we get a glimpse of Trash’s immense power in the sequel when he breaks all of a man’s ribs. It’s fortunate that Trash is a good person, and did that during a moment of irrationality, but picture if someone like, say, Bloodbath, got a hold of such a power. Really, there’s no telling what they could do.
In the scene when Flinch is climbing up the ladder and Bloodbath pushes him off, Flinch starts panicking and trying to climb down a few seconds before the ladder is pushed and he breaks his arm. This means that Flinch’s Future Vision isn’t always going to be helpful, and there will be times when Flinch sees disaster coming and is utterly helpless to stop it.
Lucky. Poor Lucky has lived his whole life hearing voices and being seen as a criminal when all he wants to do is have some peace of mind. If an object is out of his reach, as shown in the second book, he’s completely unable to shut them up and basically snaps. Being given the disruptor was likely the best thing that’s happened to him as of recent.
Also, what would have happened if Lucky never discovered a solution to hearing the voices or managing his powers? Would he just have had to live with them forever? How long would it be before he snapped and he got himself into even worse trouble? Snapping violently in the sequel may have ended up with him sent to a hospital, but an adult Lucky probably wouldn't be given the same leniency, and he could end up arrested (or killed, if he pisses off the wrong person).
Even worse, in the sequel, Lucky was given medication that managed to make the voices get quieter. The voices weren't turned off, but it made Lucky just not care about them as much, which can't really be a positive solution. If he'd never gotten the disruptor, would an adult Lucky eventually turn to drugs?
On another note, how do we know Lucky hearing voices is a part of his powers at all? in the second book, he even considers the possibility that all his powers really are is an ability to sense the objects and that the voices are really in his head. it’s quite the unsettling thought.
Bloodbath pushes the ladder holding Flinch off of the side of the building. Thankfully, he only breaks his arm and recovers by the end of the story, so what's so horrific about that? Well, Bloodbath had no way of knowing that he would survive that drop, or that he would only break his arm and not something more vital, like his spine. Bloodbath could have been attempting to murder him.
On another note, Bloodbath's gang shows little remorse for blowing up the school, which, if it had gone through, could cause property damage at best, and kill his classmates and teachers at worst.
A somewhat small example; Martin points out later in the book that Lucky still wets the bed. While this doesn’t seem too bad on the surface, and the boys don’t really see it as anything more than a mildly funny secret, bedwetting at an age far older than typical is a major symptom of unchecked trauma in children. Most kids stop wetting the bed by age seven at least, and Lucky is fourteen years old. Considering how his powers tend to manifest themselves, and the fact that he’s likely dealt with them his entire life, what sort of trouble might they have gotten him into when he was younger?
Unusual example. What are wimpy, so called "runts" doing at a correctional facility? They appear to only be there for Bloodbath to terrify.
Cheater was there for apparently cheating on tests all the time. Who's to say the "runts" weren't misbehaving in ways that weren't physical?
Most of the main cast are explained. Torchie was there for his fires, Trash was there for throwing things, Flinch disrupted class either with jokes or anticipatory reactions to things, Martin annoyed all the wrong people, and Lucky was reported for theft due to his habit of mysteriously "finding" other people's "lost" things.
Being forced into the school is mostly due to engaging in inappropriate behavior, not necessarily just violence. While Trash and Torchie are mistaken for vandals, and Lucky occasionally has violent outbursts, Martin, Flinch, and Cheater aren’t particularly violent or destructive, but because they do stuff like disrespecting teachers, cheating, and acting out in class, they get in trouble.
How has nobody but Martin ever noticed Torchie or Trash's powers? Torchie's constantly starting fires without any ignition source. He carries around a bunch of lighters but they're all empty, surely one of the teachers should have noticed that by now. As for Trash, Martin only has to sit at his table for three days before he notices him moving things without touching them.
In Torchie's case, it seems that he lights fires when no one is looking, and even he is unaware that he's the source, so if adults walk in on a fire and see an empty lighter in his desk, it's likelier they would come to the conclusion that he must have used the last of the fluid rather than lighting it with his mind. In Trash's case, the sequel explains that he is vaguely aware that things get destroyed around him, but has no clue how, and most of the blame he receives is because it's always traced to him (He was angry at a kid and later the kid's desk was found trashed, therefore, he is assumed to be the culprit). Plus, people actively avoided Trash like the plague, so Martin may be the only one to get close enough to actually see Trash in action.
Oddly enough, Martin finds out about their powers because of Flinch, whose power is far less flashy, which kickstarted Martin's interest in the other four. Basically, other people were able to rationalize the weird stuff that happened with Torchie and Trash as just kids acting out, and Martin figured it out because he was actively looking for evidence of psychic powers.
