Dr. Bright puts her notebook down, folds her hands in her lap, and stays silent. But it isn’t the kind of silence that’s trying to get me to talk. There’s anxiety coming from her but she’s not nervous or scared. It’s a quiet anxiety, like she’s uncertain about something. Hesitant. I twist my own hands, cracking my knuckles and trying not to feel like I’m waiting for an ax to fall.

“Caleb,” she says, not looking at me, which totally freaks me out. “You’re very special.”

“Oh boy, here we go,” I mutter, having heard some version of this talk from her before.

“I just want you to be careful.” She looks at me now, the orange concern replacing the hesitation. The flares and sirens are gone—this is warm, soft, caring concern, just close enough to condescension to make me itch.

“So that the people who are interested in people like me don’t find me?” I snap, feeling that little zing of victory when Dr. Bright looks surprised. My triumph is snuffed out quickly by the towering black-red-orange burst of worry that catches in my throat.

“My parents talked to me a bit,” I rush to explain, wanting to bring Dr. Bright down from whatever freakout she was about to have. Her shoulders rise as she takes a deep breath and the burst is gone as quickly as it appeared.

“It’s not to say you can never tell anyone, Caleb,” she says softly. “I just want you to be careful.”

“Yeah, that’s what my parents said,” I grumble. Her sympathy sticks in my teeth like toffee. “But I don’t understand—what’s the worst that could happen?”

“You’re not in danger, Caleb,” she says, sidestepping the question completely. “But people like you are sometimes mistreated, and I want to avoid that ever happening to you.”

Her words should freak me out but any fear is dampened by her cloying concern. I start to open my gummy mouth to ask more questions, but she quickly changes the subject before I can.

“Why don’t we do some meditation?” I look up to see her smiling kindly at me, and it makes the toffee easier to swallow.

28

ADAM

I’m shooting lasers through the back of Caleb’s neck in Latin but he has yet to turn around and look at me. Too scared to text him after the park yesterday, I walked into school determined to make things right between us. Instead I slunk to the back of the classroom and looked down when he rushed in late. I don’t know how to fix things—I’m not even sure things need to be fixed. I’ve replayed yesterday over and over in my head and I can’t put the pieces together. He got so worked up so quickly and I said something wrong without meaning to and now he won’t look at me.