And there I was again. Elsewhere. The odd flashing, as if light and dark were competing with each other. In a moment, infinite possible realities would present themselves in the form of something dragged from my subconscious. But then I thought—What if I could direct that, even just a little bit? What if I could represent these worlds in a form I could more easily read? And just willing it made it so. Suddenly I was visualizing the array of realities as—wait for it—phone emojis.

That might sound annoying and useless, but it was actually helpful. Emojis communicated something. They meant something—although what I thought they meant wasn’t always their official meaning, but that didn’t matter. These were pulled out of my subconscious, so they meant exactly what I wanted them to.

I stayed away from the angry ones, the crying ones, the sick ones, and went nowhere near the grinning turd.

I settled on the smiley face with sunglasses—my personal favorite. It felt familiar. Comfortable. I willed myself to slide toward it. It grew. I fell into one of the lenses. And suddenly I felt triumphant. Not like the way you feel when you win a big game—more like the childish joy of tying your shoelaces for the first time.

It was just practice, of course—when the real thing came, I doubted I’d be seeing emojis, but the sense of those other worlds would be the same. I needed to remember that shoelace feeling. Simple, familiar accomplishment. And the joy of coming home.

12

Who We Are

“I just want to wish you good luck.”

Katie intercepted me on the way into the locker room before Friday’s game. I’m sure Layton had already gone in, otherwise she would never have taken the chance to talk to me. She’d been avoiding me since Monday. Truth be told, I was avoiding her, too.

“We don’t need luck,” I told her flatly. “The Torkington Storks are the worst team in the league.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Yeah, I knew that. “Oh, then you mean good luck with my delusions,” I said, dripping sarcasm. “I don’t need luck there, either. All I need are meds, like Layton said.”

She glared at me. “Do you really think I meant what I said the other day, Ash?”

“You sure sounded convincing.”

“Of course I did! I had to! Layton can’t know any of this—so I gave him a half-truth, because he would have known a full-out lie.” Then she took a moment to think about things, and gave me something she never gave Layton. A full-truth.