Chapter 5

I didn't call Cross.

The weekend passed. Her card sat in my nightstand drawer and I pretended it wasn't there. Pretended the old hospital and the flood of memories and everything she'd told me was just a weird dream I'd had. Pretended I was still a normal kid with normal problems.

It almost worked. If you squinted.

Monday morning I got on the bus like always. Sat in my empty seat like always. Watched Tyler Briggs squeeze in somewhere else like always. The ritual of invisibility, comforting in its familiarity.

But something had shifted. I was hyperaware of every body around me. Every elbow that might brush mine. Every backpack that swung too close. The bus felt like a minefield.

I made it to school without touching anyone. Small victory.

Shelby was at my locker.

She'd been texting me all weekend. I'd responded to a few of them. Short answers. Yeah I'm fine. Just tired. See you Monday. Enough to keep her from showing up at my house, not enough to actually fix anything.

Now she was standing there with that expression I knew too well. Hurt trying to hide behind casual. The purple hoodie was gone. She was wearing something red I'd never seen before.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"You look better. Than last week, I mean."

"Yeah. I think I had a bug or something."

She nodded. Neither of us believed it.

We stood there in the hallway, two people who used to know how to talk to each other, now stuck in some awful limbo where every word felt like a test.

"I miss you," Shelby said quietly. "I know something's wrong and you won't tell me what, and that's fine, I guess. But I miss you."

The thing was, I missed her too. Even knowing what I knew. Even with the memory of her texts to Brianna and her parents asking when she'd done enough. Three years of habit doesn't disappear just because you learned it started as an obligation.

"I miss you too," I said.

Her face brightened. Just a little. Just enough.

"Lunch?" she asked. "Our table?"

I should have said no. Should have kept my distance until I figured out how to be around her without feeling like a charity case. But the loneliness of the past week pressed down on me, heavy and cold, and I was so tired of eating alone in the library.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

First period was a blur. Second period was worse. But neither of them compared to third.

English. Mrs. Patterson. The same room where everything had fallen apart.

I got there early and took my corner seat in the back. Same spot I'd been using since the reading. Far from the windows. Far from Shelby's usual desk.

When she walked in, I felt her eyes find me immediately. She hesitated in the doorway for just a second. Then she went to her regular seat near the windows like nothing had changed.

Maybe nothing had. Maybe that conversation at the lockers was enough. Maybe we could just slot back into our old pattern and pretend the last week never happened.

Mrs. Patterson started talking about the end of Lord of the Flies. The rescue. The officer on the beach. The boys suddenly seeing themselves through adult eyes and understanding for the first time what they'd become.

"Ralph wept," Mrs. Patterson read, her voice taking on that dramatic quality teachers get when they think something is Important. "For the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart."

I looked at my desk. Someone had carved more initials into the corner. Fresh ones, the wood still pale where the letters cut through.

Shelby glanced back at me. I pretended not to notice.

The period dragged. Fifty minutes of discussion about savagery and civilization and whether the boys could ever really go back to normal after what they'd done on the island. I wanted to raise my hand and say that normal was overrated. That sometimes you see something about yourself or someone else that you can't unsee, and you just have to figure out how to live with the new version of reality.

But I didn't say anything. I never said anything in class.

When the bell rang, I waited. Let everyone else file out first. Shelby lingered at the door, looking back at me with a question in her expression.

"Cafeteria?" she asked.

"Yeah. I'll be there."

She nodded and left. I gathered my books slowly. Took my time. Gave myself a few minutes of quiet before I had to navigate the lunch crowd.

This was going to work. It had to work.

Shelby was already at our table when I got there. She talked about volleyball practice, about some drama between two girls on the team, about a show she'd started watching over the weekend. I nodded in the right places and asked the right questions and slowly, carefully, felt something unclench in my chest.

Maybe this could work. Maybe I could just not touch anyone. Keep my hands to myself. Plenty of people were awkward about physical contact. I could be one of those people. It didn't have to be weird.

Shelby was telling me about her mom's new obsession with meal prepping when it happened.

A kid I didn't know walked past our table. Bumped Shelby's shoulder. She reached out instinctively to steady herself, her hand landing on my forearm.

Just a brush. Two seconds of contact, maybe less.

But it was enough.

The flood came. Not as strong as before, but unmistakable. I felt her worry about me, sharp and genuine. Her confusion about why I'd been pulling away. The guilt she carried about the things she'd said to Brianna, things she wished she could take back. The exhausting performance of being the person everyone expected her to be.

And underneath it all, something that surprised me. She actually cared. Not because her mom told her to. Not anymore. Somewhere along the way, the obligation had become real.

I yanked my arm back.

"Eli?" Shelby was staring at me. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Sorry. I just—" I couldn't explain. Couldn't tell her I'd just been inside her head again. "I have to go."

"What? We just sat down."

"I know. I'm sorry. I just. I forgot I have to do something."

I grabbed my backpack and left her there, confused and hurt, our almost-normal lunch in ruins on the table behind me.

I ended up in the bathroom near the old gym. Same stall as last week. Same mildew smell, same cracked tiles, same hiding place for when the world got to be too much.

I sat on the toilet lid and pressed my palms against my eyes and tried to breathe.

It wasn't getting better. It was getting worse. The grocery store, Shelby just now. The triggers were becoming more sensitive, not less. A brush of contact that wouldn't have registered a month ago was now enough to send me spiraling into someone else's inner life.

Cross had said it would keep getting stronger. I hadn't wanted to believe her.

I pulled out my phone. Stared at the screen. I still knew her number by heart. Could type it without even thinking.

But I didn't.

I wasn't going to some school I'd never heard of, run by a woman I'd met twice, in a world I didn't understand. I wasn't going to leave Dad alone in that empty house, eating soup by himself, staring at newspapers he wasn't reading. I wasn't going to give up on having a normal life just because things were hard right now.

I put the phone away.

There had to be another way. I just had to figure out what it was.

The rest of the day I made it through by not touching anyone. This was harder than it sounds. Schools are crowded places. Bodies press together in hallways. Hands brush when passing papers. Teachers touch your shoulder to get your attention. The whole social infrastructure assumes a baseline level of physical contact that I could no longer afford.

I kept my hands in my pockets. Walked close to walls. Arrived at classes early so I could take corner seats. Flinched away from every near-miss until people started giving me looks.

Let them look. Let them think I was weird. I was already weird. At least this kind of weird I could control.

After school, I walked home the long way. Not to avoid Shelby this time. Just to be alone with my thoughts.

Dad was home when I got there. Early again. He'd been coming home early a lot lately.

"Hey," he said from the kitchen. "How was school?"

"Fine."

I tried to walk past, to escape upstairs before he could ask more questions. But he stepped into the hallway, blocking my path. Not aggressively. Just present.

"Eli. Hold on a second."

I stopped. Waited.

"Mrs. Petrosky called," he said.

My stomach dropped. "The librarian?"

"She's worried about you. Says you've been eating lunch in the library every day. Sitting alone. Not talking to anyone."

"I just like the quiet."

Dad sighed. Pressed his palm against his forehead for a moment. For a second he looked less like my father and more like an exhausted stranger wearing my father's face.

"I know things have been hard," he said. "Since your mom. I know I haven't been... I haven't always known what to say. What to do." He swallowed. "But if something is going on, something you can't handle on your own, I need you to tell me. I can't help if you don't tell me."

"I'm fine, Dad."

"You're not fine. I can see you're not fine."

"Then what do you want me to say?"

The question came out sharper than I meant it to. Dad blinked. Took a step back.

We stood there in the hallway, the space between us feeling wider than the few feet it actually was. I thought about telling him everything. The visions. The floods. The woman named Cross who said there was a school for people like me.

But how do you say that? How do you tell your father that you can see inside people's heads, that the world is full of hidden experiences most people can't sense, that you might not be human in the way he thought you were?

You don't. You can't.

"I'm just going through something," I said finally. "It's not something you can help with."

Dad looked at me for a long moment.

"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay. But Eli..." He hesitated. "If that changes. If there's ever anything I can do. You'd tell me, right?"

"Yeah, Dad. I'd tell you."

Another lie. Adding to the pile.

He nodded slowly and stepped aside. I went upstairs to my room and closed the door and lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

The card was in the drawer. Three feet away. All I had to do was reach for it.

I didn't reach for it.

Tuesday was worse.

I got to English early again. Same corner seat. Same strategy of making myself small and hoping nobody noticed.

Shelby walked in and went straight to her desk by the windows without looking at me. Progress, I thought. Maybe she'd given up. Maybe yesterday's cafeteria escape had been enough to convince her I wasn't worth the effort anymore.

Then Mrs. Patterson announced we'd be doing small group discussions.

"Count off by fours," she said. "Find your groups."

I was a three. Shelby was a three. Of course she was.

We ended up in a cluster of desks near the back corner. Me, Shelby, a kid named Mateo who never talked, and a girl whose name I could never remember. We were supposed to be discussing whether Ralph could ever really go home again after what happened on the island.

Mateo stared at his book. The girl whose name I didn't know checked her phone under the desk. Shelby looked at me.

"So," she said. "Ralph."

"Yeah."

"You think he can go back to normal? After everything?"

She wasn't asking about Ralph. We both knew she wasn't asking about Ralph.

"I don't know," I said. "Some things change you. You can't just pretend they didn't happen."

"But he didn't do anything wrong. He was just trying to survive."

"Doesn't matter. He still saw what people are capable of. What he's capable of. You can't unsee that."

Shelby's jaw tightened. "So what, he just gives up? Stops trying to connect with anyone because it's too hard?"

"Maybe he needs time. Maybe he needs to figure some stuff out before he can be around people again."

"Or maybe he's being a coward."

That landed. She meant it to.

Mateo looked up from his book, sensing the tension. The girl kept scrolling on her phone.

"Maybe," I said quietly. "But sometimes running away is the only option that makes sense."

Shelby opened her mouth to say something else, but Mrs. Patterson called time. We had to share our group's insights with the class. Mateo mumbled something about trauma and everyone nodded like it was profound.

When the bell rang, I didn't wait. Grabbed my stuff and headed for the door while Shelby was still packing up.

"Eli." Her voice caught me at the threshold. "This isn't over."

I didn't turn around. Just kept walking.

In the hallway, I let myself breathe. That had been close. Too close. The whole conversation had felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, one wrong word away from falling.

She wasn't going to let this go. I knew that now. Shelby had never been good at accepting things she didn't understand. She'd keep pushing until something broke.

I just had to make sure it wasn't me.

The next few days were an exercise in denial.

I perfected my avoidance techniques. Hands in pockets. Corner seats. Walls are friends. I stopped going to the cafeteria entirely, eating alone in the library while Mrs. Petrosky watched me with concerned eyes. I stopped walking with Shelby. Stopped responding to her texts. Watched our friendship wither in real-time and told myself it was necessary.

The incidents didn't stop. They just got smaller.

A teacher handed back a test, her fingers grazing mine. A flash of exhaustion and resentment about her salary. A kid bumped me in the hallway. His anxiety about a girl he liked, so sharp it made my chest ache. Someone grabbed my arm to ask for directions. Three seconds of their homesickness, thick and choking, before I pulled away.

Each time, I recovered faster. Learned to compartmentalize. To shove the foreign feelings down before they could take root.

I was managing. That's what I told myself. I was handling it.

The card sat in my drawer. A door I refused to walk through.

Because if I walked through it, everything changed. If I called her, I was admitting that this was real. That I wasn't normal. That my life as I knew it was over.

And I wasn't ready for that. Not yet.

So I kept my hands in my pockets. Kept my distance. Kept pretending that this was sustainable. That I could live like this forever, flinching away from the world, building walls around myself one avoided touch at a time.

Friday afternoon, I came home to find Dad sitting in the kitchen again. Same position as before. Coffee. Newspaper. That thousand-yard stare while playing with his lucky coin.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey."

I waited for the questions. The concerns. The worried-father routine we'd been doing all week.

Instead, he just looked at me. Really looked.

"You know," he said slowly, "your mother used to get this look sometimes. When she was carrying something heavy. Something she couldn't put down."

I froze.

He'd never talked about Mom like this. Never compared me to her. Never opened that door even a crack.

"You have that look now," he said. "You've had it for the past week."

I didn't know what to say. Didn't know what he wanted me to say.

"I'm fine, Dad."

"No." His voice was quiet but certain. "You're not. But I think maybe you need to figure some things out on your own before you can talk about them." He picked up his coffee cup. Set it down again. "Just don't wait too long, okay? Don't carry it alone until it breaks you."

"Okay," I said.

I went upstairs. Closed my door. Lay on my bed.

The card was in the drawer. Three feet away.

I didn't reach for it because I didn't need it. Not because I knew the number on it but because I was going to handle this on my own.

Outside my window, the October sun sank toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of orange and red. Beautiful, if you weren't paying attention to everything dying underneath.

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I'd figure it out.

Tomorrow everything would make sense.