Seb bent over to take his sneakers off too, and I saw another scar on his forearm: a thin white slash this time, like from a knife blade, stark against his tanned skin. Time seemed to slow as I stared at it, thinking of everything Seb had told me – hating everything he’d been through.

“I wish we’d known each other when we were children,” I blurted out. Immediately, I was embarrassed that I’d said it, but it was true. I wanted to go back in time somehow and just...be there for him, so that he knew he wasn’t the only one of his kind.

A few loose brown curls fell over Seb’s forehead as he looked up at me. He didn’t seem surprised, just sort of wistful. “Yes, I wish so too,” he said softly. “All my life, I’ve wished that.” He gave a regretful smile. “But I think it would have been better if I had been with you as a boy in your home in the mountains. Not for you to have been where I was.”

And for a second, all I wanted to do was hug him. I looked away and crossed my arms over my chest, ignoring the treacherous voice that was whispering friends can hug.

“So, you were telling me about what happened with your angel,” I said, hoping that Seb wasn’t picking up on any of this. God, this must be what it was like for Alex, having a psychic girlfriend.

If Seb sensed my confusion, he didn’t let on. “Yes. My angel saved me, I think.” He settled himself in the opposite corner of the sofa, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles. The sofa was long enough so that his large boy-feet in their clean white socks weren’t touching me.

I sat cross-legged as I faced him. “He saved you?”

Seb nodded. Propping an elbow on the arm of the sofa, he took a gulp of his Coke and then stretched over to put it on the coffee table. “I was in a bad fight, and I think I must have had—” He frowned and touched his head. “Concussio? How do you say it?”

“Concussion?”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “I was an idiot; I’d fight with anyone. And so I fought with someone twice my size, and he got me down and kicked me in the head. Once, twice – I don’t know how many times. When I woke up, I was bleeding; I didn’t know where I was. I lay there for a long time, and thought I was going to die. I didn’t really care, but I was furious that a human had done this to me.”