I frowned. “Don’t know what?” It couldn’t have been a terrorist attack or a quarantine or any of the other big, scary things they liked to warn us about on the news. There would have been some sort of announcement, not just people talking on the bus, and they would have been scared, not excited. There was no way I’d missed anything that important.

“Holy shit.” Lucas slumped in his seat, raking his hair out of his eyes. It made him look disheveled and younger than he was. It was rare enough to see Lucas off-balance that I didn’t say anything, just blinked and waited for the world to start making sense again.

“Okay,” he said, after a long moment. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start this car, and we’re going to drive home, where I will show you what I’m talking about. And then we can have a reasonable conversation, without me staring at you like … I don’t know, like some kind of asshole who stares.”

“Right,” I said, bemused.

Lucas put the car in drive. He didn’t turn on the radio. That, alone, was a solid signal that something was going on. He’s like me, in that he lives for his music. A silent moment is a moment wasted. Well, we were wasting a lot of moments now, letting them trickle through our fingers and into uncomfortable stillness. I didn’t know how to deal with this sort of silence. I spindled a fold of my T-shirt between my fingers, and waited for it to end.

My therapist says silence scares me. She says it’s old scar tissue from what happened when I was three, that my captors probably kept me locked somewhere until they decided what they were going to do with me. I do okay with music, and I do okay with voices, but the absence of both isn’t something I handle well.

Luckily, Lucas didn’t need to stop for gas or anything else on the way home, which made the ride as short as possible. I sat up and blinked when the driveway came into view. Mandy’s car was already there, waiting for us.

“The hell—?”

“Like I said, I don’t want to be staring at you like some kind of asshole,” said Lucas, and pulled into his side of the driveway. He paused to give me an unreadable look before getting out and heading for the door. I stayed where I was for a long moment, staring after him, trying to get my nascent panic and flowering confusion under control. Something was happening. Something big. I just had no idea what it was.

Slowly, I undid my belt, got out of the car, and followed him to the open door.