Leah laced her fingers around the mug. There was a pause before she spoke again. “My father hurt me, Franny. He hurt me when I was a little girl.” She looked like she wanted to say more but instead took another sip of her drink. “It would be great if everyone was like your letters. That way you could always predict what they were going to say and do.”

I nodded and looked back down at my plate. It had designs around the rim. Little yellow flowers that looked distorted under the film of syrup.

She reached over and took my chin in her hand, tilting my face so that my eyes were on hers. “You are a very special little girl.”

I turned away from her because the one thing I did not want to be was Special. When teachers at school told me I was special all it meant was that I had to be taken out of the classroom to sit in small offices to talk about why I was special. It made me feel different from the other children when all I ever really wanted was to blend in and disappear so that no one would notice me. So many times I wished I could be invisible so that I could make the world stop moving so fast, stop sounding so loud, so that I could just spell to my heart’s content. One time I heard two of my teachers talking about me and they used the words “on the spectrum.” Later, I asked my grandmother what they meant. She said that a spectrum is a beautiful band of colors like a rainbow and that was a perfect description of me and, even though I wanted to believe her, I didn’t. Deep inside, I was pretty sure that being special was the real reason my mother had left me behind.

She probably said it to make me feel good but it didn’t. It made one whole side of my body go numb. For the first time in a long time, I started to feel it on my lips. I shook my head, trying to make it stop but I couldn’t. The letters slipped past and I let it happen. I let them pour out of me, too overwhelmed by the moment to make them stop. They popped out of my mouth like gumballs dropping out of a candy machine. Big, ugly letters. Steady, mean, constant, and loud enough for Leah to hear.

S-P-E-C-I-A-L.

That afternoon I tried ignoring the Things that were swirling inside of me. Things that used to have color but were now so muddled they looked like the paint water I used the first day I met Leah. It felt like the closer I got to her, the farther I moved from my sister. And no matter how I tried, I could not seem to think of one without the other.