Caleb tilts his head to toss me a small smile before licking his lips nervously. “Yeah, well, I guess people aren’t always what they seem.”

“Look, I know that sometimes you maybe have, like, anger issues or something,” I offer, thinking of the way he was looking at Bryce in the hall the other week.

“Yeah, it’s not just that,” he sighs, turning away from me again and stepping off the sidewalk to sit on the curb, his body a painful comma curved in on itself. I take a deep breath and sit down next to him, the concrete cold on my legs despite the hint of spring in the night air.

“Well, whatever it is, you can tell me,” I assure him, bracing for the worst. I run through all the things I learned in the program my parents sent me to, in group, and remind myself that, no matter what he has, he’s still Caleb. He hangs out with me even though I have depression—whatever this is, I can handle it. My mind is running through every disorder I’ve ever read about in my parents’ books: depression, bipolar, a personality disorder—

“Have you ever heard of mirror-touch synesthesia?” he says into his hands.

Okay, that I did not expect. It’s a pretty rare condition so I can’t remember all the specifics, but I have heard of it and tell Caleb as much.

“Right, well,” he stutters, “my therapist thought that’d be a good jumping-off point for this conversation—”

“What conversation?” I start to get annoyed that Caleb’s been planning our conversations without me but my mind sticks on the fact that Caleb sees a therapist. I thought his quip to Bryce about therapy was just a figure of speech and I’m about to ask more when—

“The conversation where I tell you I have a superpower,” he says, and I’m too baffled to even laugh at the assertion.

“Well, no,” he corrects himself, “it’s not a superpower, it’s a total pain, but it is, like, not a normal-person thing. I’m not a normal person.”

“You seem pretty normal to me,” I say for lack of anything else to say. I have no idea what we’re talking about.

“Well, I’m not.” Caleb looks at me now, worry darkening his eyes. “I’m special. I can…” He trails off before starting again. “So. Mirror-touch synesthesia—people with that can feel, like, the physical things that happen to other people, right? If they see someone get slapped, they feel like they’re getting slapped.”

“Right…” I prompt, hoping he’ll start putting the pieces together for me.

“Okay, so, I can’t do that.” He takes a deep breath like he’s walking into battle. “But I can feel other people’s feelings.”