“Everything back in black-and-white,” I murmured.

“Hm?”

“I sometimes feel like I’m Dorothy and the dreamworld is Oz,” I explained. “Technicolor and magical and surprising. If I didn’t have the dreamworld, everything would be black-and-white forever.”

“Dorothy, huh?” he said, sizing me up, one eyebrow rising.

I shrugged.

“Guess that makes me the Tin Man,” he muttered, looking back out over the park. I thought about asking what he meant—if that meant he thinks he needs a heart, why he thinks that when he was so quick to care about me, about my dad, enough to try to help us—but I knew him well enough to read his body language. He didn’t want to talk about whatever was going through his head.

“Okay, so, tell me more about all these Atypical friends you had,” I asked, changing the subject.

And he did. He told me about living in LA with a bunch of Atypicals when he was my age, getting into trouble and having the time of his life. We laughed as he told me about the time they almost burned down a bar and I could picture the open road so perfectly as Damien described the road trips they would take. It was so refreshing to talk to someone who didn’t follow the traditional path—who didn’t go to college or have a regular job or a perfect family to live up to.

I genuinely don’t know what Aaron is so worried about. For once, I have a friend who, yeah, might not be my age or have similar life experiences, but who gets me. What could be bad about that?

community/TheUnusuals post by n/thatsahumanperson

The family drama never seems to end and I’m posting again here today to ask you all, especially the mind readers among us, for advice.

So that Unusual that my sister got coffee with has turned into an actual friend of hers, which would be fine, except he’s ten years older than her and seems, like, really obsessed with all things Unusual and with That Place. My sister is spending a lot of time hanging out with him and talking about all this stuff, apparently, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot. She’s known the guy for two weeks and after their first coffee, she was going on about all this stuff to do with That Place and seemed kind of … manic? Things have calmed down in the past week or so but now it just feels like she’s avoiding me because she doesn’t want to talk about it again because I didn’t react exactly as she wanted the first time. Then again, she could just be avoiding me because that’s what she does now.