“Right.” I nod. “Yeah, thanks.”

“I’m proud of you, Caleb,” Dr. Bright says. “It can be scary to put yourself out there like that, but it sounds like the lunch went very well.”

“Yeah.” I nod. “It did.”

Dr. Bright smiles softly and I can feel the warmth shifting to something else—she’s about to give me new homework for this week, I just know it—and I keep talking before she can change topics.

“I think I want to do it again,” I blurt. “Get lunch with him, I mean. I liked hanging out with him and, I don’t know, I feel like he probably could use a friend.”

The warmth swells in time with Dr. Bright’s smile.

“I think that’s a lovely idea, Caleb,” she says. “It sounds like you two have a real connection.”

The way she says it makes me shift nervously in my seat but I can’t claim that she’s wrong. I felt more at peace watching Adam fiddle with his watch and avoid my eyes than I do anywhere else in school.

“Yeah, we do, I guess,” I admit. “It’s not weird, though, right? For me to be his friend when I can feel that he’s lonely? That’s not, like, breaking some kind of rule or anything?”

“There aren’t really hard-and-fast rules with this,” Dr. Bright tells me. “As long as the ability itself stays a secret, many Atypicals use them to improve their lives or the lives of others.”

“So, like, there are really other people like me?” I ask.

“I can’t talk about my other patients, Caleb,” she deflects, distracting me with a new mindfulness exercise before I can ask the questions that are sprouting in my head.

Between the pleased and proud feeling that Dr. Bright sent me off with and my phone telling me I have a text from Adam, I’m riding pretty high. It’s a nice day—crisp and sunny—so I walk right past the bus stop near Dr. Bright’s office to take a different route home.

I open the text to a link to a Hozier song. Adam is one of those guys who’s always got his headphones on, and he has a lot of opinions about music. I didn’t know a ton of the stuff he mentioned at lunch on Wednesday, but we did agree that music is good for blocking out everyone in school sometimes. He told me about this Hozier song that didn’t make it onto his first album but that Adam says is really great. It makes him feel less afraid to walk down the hallways.

Okay, so he didn’t say that last part. I sort of figured it out by the strong feeling he got when talking about it. Like he was taller and less vulnerable to attack. I could use a little of that feeling myself.