“Joy?” Laurence thought he had misheard for a moment. “I’m not joyful, I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m a misanthrope.” That was his new favorite word, and he had been waiting to use it in a sentence for a while.

She shrugged. “Well, you look joyful. You get all excited. I envy that.”

Laurence wondered if he could possibly cringe and be joyful at the same time. He rubbed his sore neck, first with one hand, then with both.

For some reason, Laurence believed Patricia’s story about talking to some birds and having an out-of-body experience. He was still kind of a gullible person, which had made him easy to prank at summer camp—but also, he rebelled at the idea of starting to close off possibilities in the world. If Patricia, who was sort of his friend, believed this stuff, then he wanted to support her. Also, she was suffering for her “witchcraft” and it would offend some basic sense of fairness for Laurence to think she was being punished for nothing. And really, was her story any crazier than other stuff, like the way Laurence’s body seemed to be rolling out new, totally unrequested features with alarming speed? Not really.

Plus Patricia had become pretty much the only person Laurence could talk to at school. Even the other so-called geeks at Canterbury Academy were too chickenshit to hang with Laurence, especially after he’d managed to get himself banned from the school’s computer lab (he wasn’t trying to hack anything, just make some improvements) and the school workshop (he was doing a carefully controlled flamethrower experiment). She was the only one he could laugh with about the Saarinian Program’s weird test questions (“Faith is to religion as love is to ____”), and he liked how she people-watched in the cafeteria, how her gaze turned Casey Hamilton’s student-council campaign into an amusing pageant taking place on the outskirts of fairytown.

Patricia pulled her legs out of the railing and got to her feet. “But you’re lucky,” she said. “There’s a difference between your type of outcast and mine. If you’re a science geek, people give you wedgies and don’t invite you to their parties. But if you’re a witch, everybody just assumes you’re an evil psycho. It’s kind of different.”

“Don’t try and lecture me about my life.” Laurence had gotten to his feet as well, and now he dropped his rucksack on the ground, so it nearly tumbled off the overpass. He felt both sides of his neck tighten up. “Just … don’t. You don’t know what my life is like.”

“Sorry.” Patricia bit her lip, just as a tanker rolled underfoot. “I guess that was out of line. Just trying to warn you that if you’re going to be my friend, you have to be prepared for worse stuff than just people thinking we’re girlfriend-boyfriend. Like, you might get some of my witch cooties on you.”

Laurence rolled his eyes at this. “I think I can handle a little peer pressure.”