I drew a deep breath. For hours I had been running through my aching mind all the things I was going to say—but now none of them felt right. They all seemed like things that would literally make him walk—or more likely run—than wait for the bus. So I reached in and pulled something out of my brain that I didn’t even know was there.

“When you were a baby you burned your left hand on an oven door,” I said. I knew that burn had carried over into this world because I could see his scarred palm. “You always felt like it was a little gift from God, because it roughed up your palm just enough to make it a little bit easier to catch a pass.”

He was unimpressed. “There’s a thousand ways you coulda known that. You coulda talked to people who know me. Hell, you coulda read the interview a school reporter did. It’s old news,” he said. “Older still, because I dropped out before it could mean anything anyway.”

I tried to hide the pain I felt at hearing that. I knew that to reach him, I had to dig deeper.

“When you were eight,” I told him, noticing the small scar on his left cheek, “you got hit by a drunk driver while you were on your bike. Hit and run. You broke a few ribs, and it left you with that scar. The guy would have gotten away with it, but you remembered the last three digits of the license plate. For more than a year you would go out riding everywhere in town until you finally found the right car. The guy was convicted and went to jail for it.”

Leo tried to act unimpressed again, but I could tell that it was getting to him. I could tell by the way he rolled his shoulders, like he had a kink in his neck. It’s what he always did when trying to hide the fact that something was working on his nerves.

“You got that wrong,” he said. “I found the guy, but he never went to jail. He pleaded it out, and they gave him community service.” Leo spat out a breath. “Can you believe that? Community service for hitting a kid on a bike and taking off. I don’t know why I even bothered.”

“Well, he went to jail where I come from.”

That made him look at me. “Exactly where do you come from?”

I chose not to answer that. Not yet, anyway. I decided to try to reach him one more time. I had to come up with something I couldn’t find out elsewhere. Something he never spoke about to anyone. Anyone but me. It came to me in a flash, and I smiled as I remembered—I could only hope it happened in this world, too.