“Rose, I really think it’s for the best!” he said, stern but not matching my volume. How do I do that? How do I conquer the skill of speaking strongly, assertively, without my voice rising in level and pitch, without it feeling like my words are barbed wire pouring out of my mouth and wrapping around the limbs of the people I’m directing them to? In the dreamworld I never have this problem. I shout and scream, with joy and with fear, I laugh loudly and without shame, and the sound is carried up on that soft breeze that’s always there, made of light and music, keeping everything in balance. Even me. Why can’t real life be like that? Why can’t real life feel like a place where your voice is always at the right volume, always perfectly poised to be heard in exactly the way that you want?

“No one else does!” I said. “Aaron is god knows where, there’s no way he cares about this, and Mom hates the AM—”

“You know they don’t appreciate people with your mother’s ability—” My dad sighed, a wrinkle forming in between his eyebrows as he pleaded with me.

“Exactly, so what do they know!” I yelled. “I don’t need them—”

“I don’t understand,” my dad said, blinking at me. “Did something happen in your first round? Something you haven’t told us about?”

“Oh, you mean, besides feeling like a freak among freaks?” I spat. “Besides falling asleep in the middle of therapy or going walking inside someone’s head during group and having people think less of you because you’re not the perfect Atypical in perfect control?”

“Rose,” he started, so soothing and gentle, “people there understand better than anyone how difficult it is to control an ability, especially when it’s new. They know what they’re doing—”

“No, they don’t!” I shouted. “They don’t know how to fix you!”

He didn’t have any rebuttal to that. I’m not sure what I would have wanted to hear, or how I expected him to react. I know I wasn’t expecting him to look … defeated. He had an answer for everything—for every reason I didn’t want to go, for what I should do on my first date with Emily, for how I should approach Chef about a promotion. My dad always had the answer. And he let Aaron and me get away with stuff, would goof around with me, encourage risky flambé experiments, but he always knew where to draw the line. He called us on our bullshit.

I just wanted him to call me on my bullshit. I wanted him to say, “Actually, you’re wrong, you need to go back to the AM, to trust them, because they’re working on a fix for me. They’ve got it all figured out.” But he didn’t say that at all.