Another time, when he was ten, his mother had a violently bad reaction to a pepper and had to be rushed away in the ambulance with anaphylaxis. The Kims had come over, but Josh had been like a feral animal, they told him later. It had taken Ben and another neighbor to carry him in the house and hold him down until he came back into himself.

A few days later, after talking to his pediatrician, Josh’s mother told him these incidents weren’t uncommon for people with Asperger’s, as they called it then. The trick was handling it. Distracting himself. She’d given him a sentence to chant when he was little—The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. “It has every letter in the alphabet,” she said. “Think about it, Josh. Count the letters.” It had become a mantra when the red started to flare. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

At the same time, Ben had taught him to box, or at least, the different types of punches used in boxing. Josh never hit any human, but hitting the bag was . . . cathartic.

Now, at 8:42 p.m., he could see the red rising. Still time to head it off at the pass.

He went to the always empty gym on the first floor of their building and beat the shit out of a punching bag.

Barefisted. The smack of his fists against the hard leather, the exhale with the effort, the sting of the punch, the ache radiating up his arm weren’t enough. Harder. Harder. The hiss as he punched the bag turned into exhalations of ha! ha! Sweat poured off his body. The exhalations turned into words—No. No. No. No. Then, into curse words so foul and filthy he should’ve been ashamed. But he wasn’t. He was furious.

She shouldn’t have died. She should not have died, goddamnit, and the motherfucking idiotic way-behind-the-times motherfucking healthcare system fucked her over and left her for goddamn dead and had motherfucking nothing, nothing, nothing to offer her, the stupid sonofabitch asshole fucking shit, shit shit fuck.

His fury bounced off the walls, echoing, and his knuckles were bleeding now, his fists sliding as they landed on his own blood, and good, good, the pain felt better than the helpless oppressive nothingness.

Finally, staggering from exhaustion, sweat running down his bare torso, his hands looking like they’d been through a meat grinder, he staggered to grab a towel and mop himself up.

Creepy Charlotte, with her pale blue eyes that were too far apart, smiled at him from the doorway. “Want to grab a drink, Josh?”

“Jesus Christ, no,” he said. He got the disinfectant wipes and scoured the punching bag, distantly noting the burn on his knuckles.

“Another time, then.”

“No. Never.”

“See you soon.”

And people thought he was bad at reading signals.