Aiden is rubbing a little circle into my arm as explosions go off all around us, reflecting in the waters of the lake and leaving white trails of smoke like chandeliers in the dark sky above. “Ditto.”

A shiver runs through me, and a realization explodes inside me—I’m falling for Aiden Emerson.

It’s dark out here, perfect for looking at the stars. Especially on a night like this, when the only clouds are in tiny, thin little strips that stretch across the sky like white gauze. We’re lying on the blanket, my bare feet hanging over the edge into the hard dirt. There’s a soft glow from the wall I’ve lovingly dubbed “the ruins,” but otherwise it’s black and still all around us. We both took about a million pictures of his mural, trying to capture the magic of it, but probably failing.

“Why’d you quit?” I hope I’m not going to ruin our perfect night with my curiosity, but it’s like this is the one piece of Aiden that is missing from his story. “Was it your dad?”

He shifts a little and looks at me, obviously surprised.

Crap. “He’s just really … intense.”

“Yeah, but he’s not like that all the time.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“It’s fine.”

I can feel a tenseness radiating off of Aiden as we lie in the silence, close but not touching.

“I can’t play because my vision is screwed up,” he says, his voice hesitant.

“Because you got hit.”

“No.” He rolls onto his side and props himself on one elbow, facing me. “I got hit because my vision is screwed up. I have an eye thing.”

“An eye thing?”

“Saying I have an eye disease sounds gross. Like pus is going to start oozing out or something.” His face scrunches up like even he’s grossed out by the idea. “But yeah, I have an eye disease that’s making my vision shit.”

“Wow.” I should probably say something more profound, but I don’t know what.

“Yeah.”

The only thing I know about eye diseases is that my Oma is always complaining about her cataracts, even though they were supposed to get cut out a few years ago. And my neighbor used to have a little yippy dog with some sort of eye thing. She told me after I mentioned that the dog had the weirdest opaque eye color. Not an eye color, just diseased, she’d said.

“But you don’t wear glasses.”

“Glasses fix the lens of your eye. It’s the back of my eye—my retina—that’s messed up. Glasses won’t help.”

“You know a lot about eyes?”

“I do now,” Aiden says. “More than I used to, at least.”

“Can they cut it out?”