Clancy nodded. “That’s the way I do it. When I feel the sensation, I push back the image of that curtain and I don’t let up, no matter what. So what I want you to do is bring to mind some kind of secret or memory—something you wouldn’t necessarily want me or anyone else to see—and I want you to drop your own curtain down to protect it.”
I must not have been doing a good job of hiding my hesitation, because he took both of my hands in his again, lacing our fingers. “Come on,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen? I see some embarrassing moment? I think we’re good enough friends now that you can trust me when I say I won’t tell a soul about any falls or public puking.”
“What about streaking and eating playground sand?”
He pretended to consider it for a moment, grinning. “I suppose I could refrain from sharing that with the entire camp at dinner.”
“What a fair, just leader you are,” I said. After a moment, I added, “Do you really consider me a friend, or are you just saying that because you want to see me get my four front teeth knocked out when I tried to play soccer?”
Clancy shook his head and laughed. His favorite stories always seemed to be the ones that involved me trying to pretend I was a boy, or the fast-food binges my dad used to take me on when my mom was out of town at a teacher’s conference. They were so completely foreign to his experience, I realized, that I must have seemed like an alien.
“Of course I consider you my friend. Actually…” he began, his voice low. When he glanced at me again, his dark eyes were burning with a kind of intensity that made me feel like my head was full of air, ready to float away. “I consider you a lot more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You may have been looking for me, but let’s just say that I was waiting for you. It’s been a long time since I felt like someone understood what I was going through. Being an Orange…you can’t compare it to what the others are. They don’t understand us or what we can do.”
It’s only us, came a small voice in my mind, it’s just the two of us.
I squeezed his hands. “I know.”
His attention seemed to wander, his eyes carrying over to the other side of the room, toward his computer and TV. I thought I detected a glimmer of sadness in his eyes, a real kind of pain, but just as quickly, it was gone, replaced by his usual confident expression.
“You ready to try?”
I nodded. “I promise I’ve been trying. Please—please, don’t give up on me.”
I was surprised when I felt his hands pull free from mine. Stunned, when I felt them glide up my bare arms and over my shoulders. I didn’t stop him. This was the thing about Clancy—the thing I was quickly coming to terms with. With him, I didn’t have to be afraid, not of what I could do intentionally or by mistake. I didn’t have to throw up every defense I possessed to keep my brain’s wandering hands still, because Clancy was more than capable of keeping me out of his head.
But Liam…he was something precious, something I could break with a single misstep. Someone I couldn’t be with, not right then, not the way I was.
Clancy leaned forward to begin his work. I leaned forward, too, right up against his chest, where it was warm and smelled of pine and old books and thousands of possibilities I had never known.
I didn’t block him on the first try—I didn’t even block him on the fifth try. It took three days and his witnessing almost every sour, cheek-reddening memory in my head for me to finally throw up some kind of defense.
“Think deeper,” he told me. “Think about something you wouldn’t want anyone else to know. Those memories will provoke your strongest defenses.”
There wasn’t anything left that he hadn’t already seen. I swear, the kid could have been a brain surgeon for how sharp and accurate his pokes and prods were. Every time I brought to mind a memory or thought and tried to put an invisible wall around it, my defenses crumbled, as flimsy as waxed paper. Still, he didn’t get frustrated.
“You can do this,” Clancy kept repeating, “I know you can. You’re capable of more than you’ll admit to yourself.”
It was his strange badgering for some kind of juicy memory that finally produced my first actual result.
“Does it have to be a memory?” I asked.
He seemed to consider this. “Maybe you should try something else this time. Something you imagine.” It could have been my mind playing tricks, but his face suddenly appeared much closer to mine. “Something you want. Or…someone?”
The way he said it made me think it was a question, a serious one cloaked by a casual voice. I kept my face impassive.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I’m ready.”
Clancy didn’t look so sure. But I was. This particular fantasy had been creeping up on my dreams for weeks, invading the slips of time when I wasn’t holed up practicing my abilities.
It came to me in the middle of our third night at East River, right at the hour that separated day from night. I startled awake in bed, confused as I listened to Chubs snore and Zu toss and turn. Every inch of my skin had tingled as I tried to process what I had just seen, if any of it had actually happened—if any of it might actually happen.
This was a dream I could never share, one I carried deep inside my heart, tucked so far down that I hadn’t even realized it was there until it sprang out of me, fully formed.
I must have dreamed we were in spring. The cherry blossom trees at the end of my parents’ street in Salem were in full bloom. We drove past them in Black Betty—Liam and I, sitting up front together, listening to a Led Zeppelin song that might not have even been real. Outside of my parents’ house were white balloons, tied off on either side of the white fence’s gate, floating arrows that pointed us up to the open front door. Liam took my hand, wearing exactly what he had worn the day I had met him, and together we walked straight down the house’s main hallway, through the pale yellow kitchen, until we found the door to the backyard and everyone outside waiting.
Everyone. My parents. Grams. Zu. Chubs. Sam. All sitting around a blanket my parents had spread out over the grass, eating whatever it was my dad was grilling. Mom was running around, tying up more balloons, her hands still stained with dark dirt after planting all of the new, pale flowers that flooded over what once had been a yard of plain grass. We said hello to everyone, I hugged Sam, I pointed out the birds up in the trees to Zu, and introduced Chubs to my mother.
And then, Liam bent down and kissed me, and there were no words to describe that.
Clancy’s intrusion came like all the others had before, first with a tingle, then with a roar. I had been so lost in thinking about the dream that I hadn’t even felt him take my hand to start that trial run.
I liked Clancy a lot. More than I ever expected. But he didn’t have a place in this dream. There was nothing there I wanted to share with him.
I clenched his hand back, hard, and threw everything I had into sending my other set of hands out from inside me, like a shove.
His curtain strategy hadn’t worked for me, but this one? Using offense as defense? This one was maybe a little too effective. Even before I opened my eyes, I felt Clancy jerk back, sucking in a hiss of what sounded like pain.
“Oh my God,” I said, when I finally shook the haze from my mind. “I’m so sorry!”
But when Clancy looked up, he was smiling. “Told you,” he said. “Told you that you’d figure it out.”
“Can we do it again?” I asked. “I want to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.”
Clancy rubbed at his forehead. “Can we give it a rest for a little while? I feel like you just tackled my brain.”
But Clancy didn’t get a rest. Almost as soon as the words had left his mouth, we both heard a very different kind of warning. There was a shrill wail from the other side of the room, one I had never heard before, almost like a car alarm. He winced, tucking his head down to escape the noise, even as he jumped up from the bed.
He made his way to his desk, flipping open his laptop lid. His fingers flew as he typed in his password, the blue-white screen of the laptop illuminating his pale face. I came to stand behind him just as he clicked open a new program.