“That’s wonderful, Rose,” she said, and the way it sounded coming out of her mouth made me think of Owen. He says “wonderful” all the time. I wonder who picked it up from who. “And you’re having an easier time getting up in the mornings? Staying awake?”

“Mostly,” I said, thinking back to this morning, when I woke naturally, at a reasonable hour, for the first time in what felt like months. They had alarms at the AM that would wake me gently if I slept more than ten hours, and I’d been sleeping through my own alarms for weeks, ignoring the blaring sound when it would seep into the dreamworld by covering it up with music of my own creation. Which is pretty fucking cool if I do say so myself, but also completely baffling because I do not have a musical bone in my body.

“There were still times that I wanted to stay in the dreamworld. It’s just so…” I tried to find the words. “Sometimes I think that learning to control it was the worst thing I could have done.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I expected it to take forever,” I said. “Gaining control, that is.”

“You adjusted remarkably quickly,” she said, sounding genuinely impressed.

“Do you think it’s because I come from an Atypical family? That there’s something in our DNA that makes us really good at this?”

I felt strange asking the question, like I was trying to suggest that my family was special or better, which I absolutely do not believe. I mean, I love my family and yeah, we’re Atypical, but we’re also just people. But Dr. Bright didn’t seem to think it was a crazy question.

“Did your brother have an easy time learning his ability when it first started up?” she asked.

“I guess.” I shrugged, annoyed that I was being asked to consider Aaron’s duck-to-water ability to be good at everything. “It also only took him a couple months to get used to reading minds and learning how to lower and raise the volume on them. Though, he was at the AM for two whole months, so that might have made things easier.”

“Does it bother you that you had an easier time than you expected?” she asked. The question surprised me. Aren’t you supposed to be happy when you’re good at something? When something is easy? I didn’t know I was allowed to be anything other than satisfied with that.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, still considering the question. “It bothers me how quickly I got sucked into it. In the beginning, I was so worried about going into people’s dreams and learning stuff about them but now I want to do it. I understand Aaron a lot better now.”

“How do you mean?”