Despite the warmth of the other night, the final gasps of winter are giving their last hurrah and I suck in a deep breath of cold air as I replay the last seconds of our phone call over and over again in my head. He said he liked me and I said “me too” and asked to talk and he said he would leave therapy early to come find me. We should be inside, in one of our houses—the sun has just dipped below the horizon and there’s that sharp-soft feeling in the air that comes just before snowfall. But this doesn’t feel like something we can hash out indoors, where there are other people and other feelings and so much that can get in the way.

I’m waiting for a boy who can feel everyone’s feelings. I’m waiting for a boy who is something more than human.

I’ve spent the past twenty hours trying to piece it all together—my parents’ weird jobs, my mom calling him “perceptive,” everything that Caleb’s told me, the fact that he has a special therapist who knows about him—and none of those revelations or questions are as important as “I like you too.” There’s a part of me that’s beating myself up for even thinking that way. I hate being the teenage cliché who cares more about romance than actual, real-life superhumans—but wait, that’s not a cliché. This is entirely new territory and I can’t believe that I’m the one charting it.

I pause in my pacing as I take another gulp of cold air. The park is completely empty—as bare as the trees that line the pathway through it. It’s a surprisingly quiet night, as if the city knows that something important is about to happen here and is trying to be respectful. The hush is like a blanket over the block, making everything still.

Inside me, there’s a cacophony of sound. My head and my heart are battling it out. My head says, “No way, this can’t be. You’ve read it wrong. This is all a trick, he doesn’t have a superpower, and he definitely doesn’t like you. Think about it: it doesn’t make any sense.”

My head is right. It doesn’t make any sense. Me standing in the middle of a frigid city park on a school night when I haven’t finished any of my homework for tomorrow (like I was going to get any work done with everything Caleb told me last night running around my brain) makes no sense. But my heart doesn’t care.

My heart is screaming yes. It’s saying, “This is right, this is how it’s supposed to be. You knew. Somewhere, deep down, you knew this was true. He’s it. There’s no version of this story where this doesn’t happen.”