I launched myself out of the recliner. “No! They’re the ones who are purple!”

I found myself getting light-headed as I stood there, and realized I was hyperventilating. I shut my mouth, and shut my eyes even tighter, and sat back down, burying my head in my hands. When I opened my eyes again, Leo was staring at me.

“Ash, are you okay?”

I wasn’t okay, but I couldn’t get into this with Leo. Our friendship was like an island of normalcy in a rising sea. I needed that normalcy and didn’t want to drag him into the waves. Meanwhile, he was looking at me like I had some serious insult to the brain. That’s what doctors call a bad concussion—an “insult”—like maybe the brain might be fine if it just had a really good comeback line.

“This is not what you’re thinking,” I told him. “It’s not something . . . physical.”

“I never said that it was,” he said, with a calm that felt forced—so I forced myself to seem calm, too.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just got confused, is all. One person’s green is another person’s purple, right?”

He still stared at me like he was going to ask what the hell I was talking about, but he backed down, and we both returned our attention to the game. But not really. Well, at least the Jaguars were still teal and gold, but the cat on their helmets was facing the wrong way. Then, when it went to commercial, Leo lowered the volume.

“Do you remember a couple of years ago, when Angela came down with meningitis?” he asked, entirely out of the blue.

“Yeah . . .”

“It shook us all up pretty bad. Even after she was all better, my parents were on edge, and I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking the strangest things. Every rainstorm was a hurricane. Whenever the wind blew, it was a tornado. I kept bracing for the worst, and even though it never came, I still kept bracing. We all did. Crazy, right?”

“Wow . . . ,” I said. “I’m sorry, Leo. I didn’t know.”

“Anyway, we went to see this talk doctor. She said we had PTSD. And she helped us get through it. Best thing we ever did.”

The game was back on, but he kept the volume down. “Ash, if there’s something messing with your head, it’s okay to talk about it. And if you can’t talk about it with me, that’s fine, I get it. So if you want, I can give you her number.”