She looks at me again, and I wait for the feeling. The one I used to get in high school, like I was a curiosity. Something on display, like the two-headed snake floating in formaldehyde in the biology classroom. But it doesn’t come.
I stuff the last bite of sandwich in my mouth under her watchful gaze and chew it slowly, while crumpling the wax paper into a ball in my hand. I swallow, then turn to meet her eyes. “It’s true.”
“What Donovan said?”
“No, the alien thing.”
She laughs, and a warmth spreads through my belly, different from the warmth that was occupying my face. I like hearing her laugh and knowing that I caused it. It’s like the satisfaction of planting a seed and then harvesting a tomato. But better.
“So, seriously. What’s it mean? You can’t, like, touch people?”
I get such a spectacular sense of déjà vu, my head feels as if it’s swimming backward through time and I’m sitting on a rock in the courtyard of my high school staring into Donovan’s questioning eyes instead of Madison’s.
My stomach lurches.
I will myself back to the present.
“Yeah, that’s the gist of it,” I say.
Madison’s eyes grow wide.
“So you could die from being touched?”
I shrug. “Hypothetically. Mostly, I just get a bad rash. I did have anaphylactic shock a few times as a kid, but it was before I was diagnosed, so they don’t know if it was too much skin-to-skin contact that overwhelmed my system, or if I somehow ingested skin cells, like sharing an apple with my mom or something.” I pause. “And then, of course, what happened with Donovan.” I expect her to say something then, but she remains silent, so I keep talking. “The problem is, allergies are unpredictable. There’s this girl who was allergic to milk, so her parents made sure she never drank it. Then one morning at breakfast, a gallon of it got knocked over and some milk splashed on her arm, and she went into anaphylactic shock and died. Just like that. Her parents couldn’t get her to the hospital in time.”
“Jesus.”
I know a ton of these horror stories. My mom used to tell them to me like other parents read bedtime tales to their children. They were meant to be cautionary, but all they did was terrify me.
After another few minutes of silence, she says: “I wish Donovan had that. An allergy to people.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. Who would wish this on anyone?
“He cheated on me when we were married,” she says. “A lot, I think.”
Oh. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” She shrugs, then turns her attention back to me. “Did you really almost die?”
I nod my head.
“Geez,” she says. We sit in the still of the car while this sinks in. “Wait, but then what? You didn’t come back to school. You weren’t at graduation. It’s like you just dropped off the face of the earth. Some people said you did die, but I knew it would have been in the paper.” She pauses. “Where did you go?”
My lips part as she talks, then grow dry from my slow breaths. I can’t believe she noticed that I wasn’t at school. At graduation. People did stare at me in high school—like I was a curiosity—but I didn’t think anyone ever noticed me. It’s a strange feeling, to be seen but invisible at the same time. I always felt a little like an apparition. There, but not there. Until Donovan kissed me, anyway. Afterward, I just felt foolish.
And then I wonder: did she look for me in the paper? For my death? I shiver at the morbidity. Madison is staring at me, waiting, her mascara-clumped lashes fanning out from her round eyes like peacock feathers.
“I didn’t really go anywhere,” I say. “I just sort of stayed in my house.”
“What—for a couple of months?”
I hedge, my shoulder blades tensing. “A little longer.”
“How long?”
I hesitate again. “Nine years.”
Her eyes fly open. “Nine? But, I mean, you went out, right? Didn’t you have to work? I just don’t understand why nobody has seen you. Why I haven’t seen you. Or heard about you. This isn’t exactly a huge town.”
A Walcott-ism from my sixth-grade teacher enters my mind: “In for a penny, in for a pound.” I take a deep breath and decide I might as well go all in with Madison H. “I didn’t leave my house at all. Ever. For anything. I’ve been a bit of a hermit, a recluse. Whatever you want to call it. And then, I sort of got a little agoraphobic, I guess, and couldn’t leave my house. For anything. But by then, I had to. I had no money and I needed to work. But I still don’t like being out”—I gesture toward the tea shop in front of us—“like this. With other people. The library’s been hard enough.”
I keep my eyes trained on my lap waiting for her reaction, but out of the corner of my eye Madison is a statue. She’s silent for so long, I wonder if she heard me at all. Or if time is somehow being manipulated and what seems like minutes for me is just seconds for her. I turn my head a smidge toward her to check and that’s when she speaks.
“So,” she says. “You don’t, like, go to Starbucks? Or the movies? Or to get your hair done?”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “Does it look like I get my hair done?”
She smiles.
“Anyway, I couldn’t get my hair done if I wanted to. Can’t be touched, remember?”
“Oh my god—so you’ve never had a manicure?” She glances at her own shiny talons, painted a shimmery purplish color today.
“Nope.”
“Or a massage?”
“Un-uh.” I shake my head.
And then her eyes get big and she holds out her hand as if to stop me, even though I’m not doing anything. “Wait. Oh my god. You’ve never had sex.”
She whispers the word “sex,” which strikes me as funny, considering she nearly shouted the word “fucking” in a library not a few days earlier. I’m perplexed by how she decides when to be discreet.
I shake my head no.
She gasps and her hand moves to her chest, her manicured fingers splayed over her heart, as if to make sure it’s still beating. “Don’t you want to?”
I consider this question as if no one’s ever asked me it before. Mainly because no one’s ever asked me it before.
“I don’t know,” I say.
But then, I think back to those teenagers secretly devouring each other between the stacks at the library, and my body gets all tingly, and I wonder if, maybe, that’s not true.