She stopped in my doorway. “But I am a princess.”

“Not at school. Go.” I pointed toward her bedroom, ignoring the way my stomach was churning.

Olivia skipped down the hallway, completely clueless to how messed up both of us were. “Normal” didn’t have a place on my list of words describing us. I wasn’t even sure “human” would get a vote.

Alone in my bathroom, I stared down at my shaking hands, at the charcoal smudge on the tips of my index finger, and ordered myself to pull it together. I couldn’t afford to lose it. Olivia needed me to be strong. I glanced at my reflection and forced a smile. It was broken.

And I also had the hugest zit ever on my temple.

Awesome.

After a quick shower, I padded out to the bedroom, yanked on the first clean pair of jeans I found, and grabbed a cardigan off the back of my desk chair. A slinky top would have been so much prettier, but the scars patchworking across my arms would have been visible. Apparently Olivia’s healing touch didn’t fix everything.

In gym last year, one of the girls—Sally Wenchman—had seen the scars while I’d changed. Sally had called me “Frankenstein,” and the nickname had stuck ever since.

I snatched my sketchpad and shoved it into my book bag. On the way out, I grabbed the flesh-colored gloves off the chair and slid them on. The long-sleeved shirt hid most of the gloves, and the kids thought I was trying to hide the scars.

It was partly true.

“Are you ready?” I yelled, stomping down the steps. “We have, like, twenty minutes.”

“Yeah,” came the muffled response.

Following the sound of her voice, I found Olivia at the table eating cereal… in her princess dress. Dammit. The kid was weird enough without wearing the same damn dress every day. “Olivia, what did I tell you?”

She hopped up from the table and dumped her bowl in the sink, turning back to me with an impish grin. “It’s too late for me to get changed.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You’re such a brat.”

She came to my side, a tentative look on her face. Slowly, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around my glove-covered ones. When I nodded, her grip tightened and all was right in her world.

Two years had passed since I’d been able to touch Olivia without some sort of barrier between her skin and mine. When she fell and scraped her knee, I couldn’t kiss it and make it better. If she cried, I couldn’t hold her. I couldn’t even remember what the closeness of someone else felt like. This whole super-special-touch-of-death crap sucked.

Olivia was currently on this kick where she thought she had superhuman strength or something, so I pretended to let her pull me through the house and out to where my Jeep was parked. The dull, black paint gave it a world-weary look, and it needed new tires and brakes. Still, it was my baby. I could caress its smooth, outer frame and roam my hands over its soft interior all I wanted. My heart fluttered to know it wouldn’t keel over and die from my toxic touch.