“Yeah, congenital means ‘present from birth,’ so yeah.”

Okay, so—how did they figure out you had it?”

“I never cried.”

This was true.

Steve didn’t cry when he was born.

He didn’t cry when he had a diaper rash.

He didn’t cry when he started growing teeth and bit his tongue until he bled.

He didn’t cry when he burned his hand reaching into a campfire to retrieve a rogue toasting marshmallow.

He didn’t cry when he reached for a spoon that had been dropped into boiling water.

He didn’t cry when he stepped on a nail with his bare foot.

He didn’t cry when he fell down the stairs and broke his ankle and walked around on it for hours before anyone noticed the swelling and the bruising.

But his mom cried a lot. She felt all the pain her son couldn’t feel. And it was all too much for her.

And the way she took care of her pain took her away from her family.

So Steve and Rob’s grandma raised her daughter’s sons.

And when she died, Rob became Steve’s legal guardian. Which was nothing new, because he had always been Steve’s main caregiver anyway.

“So … can you … feel … things?” asked Marvalyn.

“Kinda.”

Marvalyn suddenly poked Steve. “Did you feel that?”

“Yup,” laughed Steve, surprised by Marvalyn’s forwardness. “I can feel the pressure. But … that’s it. ’Cause I don’t have fully developed pain sensors. They’re immature, my brother Rob says, and because they’re immature—”

“How does he know that?” interrupted Marvalyn.

“Oh, he reads, and because they’re immature, my development as a human being has been compromised, he says, but he teaches me what hurts, though.”

“Why?”

“So I won’t ruin myself. I have to know what hurts, so I know when to be afraid. See, my mind can’t tell me when to be afraid, ’cause my body doesn’t know what being hurt is, so I have to memorize what might hurt.”

“Okay.” This made sense to Marvalyn.

“And I have to memorize what to be afraid of.” Steve opened his book of THINGS TO BE AFRAID OF to a random page, eager to show Marvalyn all the things that his grandma—and Rob—had helped him learn to be afraid of. Almost all of them corresponded to items in his THINGS THAT CAN HURT YOU book. “Things like”—Steve pointed to a random item on the page—“guns.”

He turned to another page and pointed to a random item on it. “And bears.”

He turned to another page and pointed to a random item on it. “And oven burners that are orange and red.”

Then he turned to a page almost at the end of the book and pointed to a random item on it. “And—oh, this one’s newer: fear, I should fear fear itself. I don’t really know what that means, but the second President Roosevelt said it.”

He turned the page and pointed to a random item and said, “And—this one’s new, too—pretty girls.”