The tour, and Teagan’s enthusiasm, seemed never ending, and it was boiling, especially with a book pressed to my chest. “And that’s Vuyo, you probably recognize him, he’s TikTok famous, the video of him flying down the stairs in a shopping cart and then wiping out got one million views, so cool . . . and that’s Nina-M I was telling you about, she thinks she’s this big beauty blogger because Kylie Jenner liked one of her posts or something, but really, she’s not.” I looked over at Nina-M; she was lying on the grass pouting at a selfie stick. I was getting a real education from Teagan all right. But it had nothing to do with the geography of the school and everything to do with getting a better glimpse into the characters that I was now forced to cohabit with.

And it was for all these above reasons that I now found myself sitting on our cool kitchen floor after school, listening to my favorite artist, Grimes, while eating ice cream straight out of the tub with the biggest spoon I could find.

“Hey, Captain Zac Sparrow.” My brother, Zac, walked into the kitchen, and I smiled up at him. I still called him Captain Sparrow sometimes, a throwback to his pirate obsession phase. Kids on the spectrum tend to develop obsessions with things. But as quickly as they develop, they suddenly change. One day it’s pirates, and the next . . . who knows.

“Want some?” I passed him the spoon and patted the floor next to me. Zac is probably the only person in the world who isn’t going to judge me for eating ice cream on the floor, unlike my mother, who scrutinizes every morsel I put into my mouth. She rarely says anything, though, which makes it worse in a way.

Zac took the spoon from me and immediately scooped up some vanilla ice cream. We only have vanilla in the house because Zac only eats white foods: plain yogurt, pasta, potatoes—not the healthiest diet. We make sure to give him a vanilla “milkshake” everyday, which is really a vitamin-enriched drink, because he refuses to eat anything with colors. He says he can feel the colors fighting each other in his stomach. This idea that colors could possibly be alive and interacting with each other has always intrigued me. In art there’s a concept called simultaneous contrast; it refers to the way that two different colors affect each other when placed side by side. It’s an illusion where one color can change how we perceive the other one. But I’ve often wondered if it isn’t an illusion for Zac, whether he is somehow capable of experiencing things in life that no one else can.

“How was your day?” I asked.