I expected a chuckle. He’d say something like, “No, I’m always listening,” and he was, even when I blathered like a toddler who’d just learned to speak. But this time, there was no answer.

“Gabriel?”

My switchblade has a penlight, and I fumbled to turn it on and then shone it down the hall. The empty hall.

I hurried back. After a few steps I heard deep, panicked breathing. I tore around the corner and there was Gabriel, his chest heaving. When the light hit him, his head jerked up, the blank look in his eyes evaporating with a blink.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“What?” Another hard blink as he pulled himself up straight. “Yes, of course. I just…”

He looked around as if he’d see an answer in neon on the wall. I caught his hand, giving it a light squeeze and saying, “Let’s go—”

The room went dark, and suddenly I was crouched in a small, pitch-black space, the walls pressing in from every side. There was one single moment where I realized I’d fallen into a vision, and then that awareness evaporated and I was in the vision, thinking another’s thoughts, feeling what another felt.

It’s all right. It’s all right. She’ll be back soon.

But I couldn’t hear her anymore—hadn’t heard her in a long time—and I could always hear her when I was in the small place. Everything had gone quiet and stayed quiet and now my legs hurt, and I was so hungry and cold and I had to use the bathroom.

Maybe if I knocked—

Remember the last time.

I shivered at the memory. I’d had to go badly, so I’d knocked and been very polite about it.

I need to use the bathroom. Please may I come out?

I’d said it exactly right. I knew I had. Sometimes, when other people took care of me, they’d ask if I had to use the potty, and if my mother heard, she’d sneer and say, “My son doesn’t use that baby talk.” Which meant that I was not permitted to use it.

I’d made a mistake once, after my mother left me with a neighbor and her children for five days. Later, I’d called my stomach my tummy, and my mother made me sit in the corner and told me not to talk like a baby, and the man we were staying with said, “Geez, Seanna, he is a baby,” and she’d said, “Then he’d better grow up fast. Because I don’t have time for that shit.”