Chapter 6

Saturday morning I woke up thinking maybe I'd been wrong.

The sun was out. First time in days. Golden light spilled through my window and made the room feel almost hopeful. I lay there for a while and thought about how maybe things weren't as bad as I'd been making them.

So I could feel things from people. So what? I was learning to manage it. Keep my distance, avoid contact, stay vigilant. It wasn't a life, exactly, but it was something. A strategy. A way forward that didn't involve running off to some school I'd never heard of.

Dad was in the kitchen when I came down. Making pancakes. He only made pancakes when he was trying to do something nice without having to talk about it.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

I sat at the table and watched him flip pancakes and tried to remember the last time we'd had a normal Saturday. Before Mom died, probably. Back when weekends meant something other than two more days of avoiding each other's grief.

"Plans today?" he asked.

"Not really."

"I was thinking of going to the hardware store later. That leaky faucet in the bathroom isn't going to fix itself." He slid a plate in front of me. Three pancakes, perfectly round. "You could come. If you want."

It was an invitation. A small one. The kind he'd been making more often lately, like he was trying to rebuild something between us one awkward offer at a time.

"Sure," I said. "Yeah. That sounds good."

He almost smiled. Almost.

We ate in comfortable silence. The pancakes were good. The coffee was strong. For a few minutes, I let myself believe that this could be enough. That I could learn to live around the edges of my ability, careful and controlled, and still have something like a normal life.

Then my phone buzzed.

Shelby: can we talk? please?

I stared at the message. The comfortable feeling curdled in my stomach.

Another buzz: i know youre avoiding me. i just want to understand

And another: please eli. i miss my friend

Dad was watching me. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Just..." I put the phone face-down on the table. "Just Shelby."

"You two haven't been hanging out much lately."

"No."

He waited. When I didn't say anything else, he went back to his pancakes. Not pushing. Never pushing.

I should have left it there. Should have ignored the texts and gone to the hardware store with my dad and held onto that fragile Saturday-morning peace for as long as I could.

Instead, I typed: fine. where?

Shelby: the park? our bench?

We had a bench. A specific one near the duck pond where we'd spent countless afternoons over the past three years. Talking about nothing. Watching the ducks fight over bread. Being the kind of friends I'd thought we were.

ok. 30 mins

I told Dad I'd meet him at the hardware store later. He nodded like he understood, even though he couldn't possibly understand.

The walk to the park took fifteen minutes. I spent the whole time rehearsing what I'd say. How I'd explain pulling away without explaining anything. How I'd apologize without lying. How I'd be her friend again while keeping her at arm's length forever.

None of the scripts worked. But I kept walking anyway.

Shelby was already on the bench when I got there. She stood up when she saw me coming. She looked nervous, which was wrong. Shelby never looked nervous. Shelby was the confident one, the easy one, the one who always knew what to say.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

We stood there, a few feet apart, the duck pond glittering behind her.

"Can we sit?" she asked.

"Sure."

We sat. Carefully. I positioned myself at the far end of the bench, as much space between us as possible. She noticed. I could tell she noticed.

"Eli, what's going on?" Her voice was quiet. Tired. "And don't say nothing, because it's obviously not nothing. You've been avoiding me for weeks. You barely respond to my texts. You ran out of the cafeteria like I was on fire."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I don't want sorry. I want to understand." She turned to face me. "Did I do something? Say something? Because I've been going over everything in my head and I can't figure out what I—"

"It's not you."

"That's what people say when it's definitely them."

"It's not. It's..." I didn't have words for it. How do you tell someone that you saw inside their head? That you know they were assigned to be your friend? That you felt their guilt and their exhaustion and their genuine caring all tangled together in ways you still couldn't sort out? "Something's happening to me. Something I can't explain. It's not about you."

She studied me. I could see her wanting to push, wanting to demand more. But something in my face must have stopped her.

"Are you in trouble?" she asked. "Like, serious trouble?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Is it drugs? Because if it's drugs I won't tell anyone, but I need to know so I can—"

"It's not drugs."

"Then what?"

I looked at her. At this girl who'd been put in my life by her mother's grief and her own sense of obligation. Who'd shown up every day for three years because someone told her to. Who'd somehow, somewhere along the way, started actually caring.

I wanted to tell her. Wanted to open my mouth and let everything spill out. The visions. The floods. The woman named Cross and the school called Mudwick and the fact that I might not be human in the way either of us had assumed.

But I couldn't. Because telling her would mean touching her world with mine, and my world was too heavy to share.

"I can't explain it," I said. "I'm sorry. I know that's not fair. But I just can't."

She was quiet for a long moment. The ducks quacked. A jogger ran past. Normal Saturday sounds in a normal park in a normal town.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay. You can't tell me. But can you at least..." She hesitated. "Can you tell me if we're still friends? Because if you're trying to end this, if you're trying to push me away so I'll give up on you, I need to know. I need to know if I should stop trying."

The question hit me harder than I expected. Because I didn't know the answer. I didn't know if we were still friends or if we'd ever really been friends or if what we had was something else entirely that I didn't have a name for.

"I don't want to lose you," I said. The words surprised me. They were true.

Her face softened. "Then don't. Whatever you're going through, you don't have to go through it alone. That's what friends are for."

She reached out and put her hand on my arm.

She was trying to be comforting. That's all. A simple gesture of connection, the kind of thing friends do without thinking.

But I wasn't able to receive simple gestures anymore.

The flood came.

Not like before. This was different. Deeper. Like falling through ice into black water, the cold shocking every nerve at once.

I felt Shelby's concern for me, sharp and present. Her frustration at being shut out. Her fear that she was losing me.

And underneath that, older things. Memories rising like bodies from a lake.

Her mother crying at our kitchen table after the funeral. You'll look after him, won't you? He doesn't have anyone else. The weight of that request settling onto eleven-year-old shoulders.

Years of showing up. Checking in. Performing friendship until it stopped feeling like performance and started feeling like something real. The guilt when she complained to Brianna. The shame when her parents asked if she was done yet. The confusion of not knowing if she stayed because she had to or because she wanted to.

And underneath all of it, a question she'd never let herself answer: Would I have chosen him if no one had asked me to?

I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't separate her history from mine, her doubts from my understanding.

But then something shifted. The flood kept coming, but it was changing, going somewhere new. Somewhere I hadn't touched before.

I felt the places Shelby had been. Not her memories of them, but the residue they'd left in her. The volleyball court where she'd won her first game, the triumph still clinging to her like perfume. Her grandmother's kitchen, thick with warmth and the smell of something baking. The hospital room where she'd said goodbye to that grandmother, grief soaked so deep it had become part of her bones.

She carried pieces of everywhere she'd ever felt something. And I was feeling all of it at once.

It was too much. Way too much.

But it didn't stop there.

Something cracked open further. I felt the bench underneath me. The wood, old and weathered. And beyond that, the ground. The soil and roots and the weight of everything that had ever happened here, in this park, on this land.

I was reading the place.

Cross had said I couldn't do that. That I only read people.

She was wrong. Or something had changed. Or I had broken through into something I wasn't supposed to reach.

"Eli! Eli, oh my god, what's wrong? Should I call 911? Eli!"

I couldn't answer. The world was spinning. Everything was too loud, too bright, too present. I could feel the park around me, all the Saturday-morning joggers and dog-walkers and families with children, their lives pressing against my skin like heat from a fire.

And the ground underneath me. The earth. The soil. The weight of everything that had ever happened here.

I was drowning, and I couldn't find the surface, and Shelby was shaking my shoulder which only made it worse, every touch another flood pouring into me.

"Don't," I managed. "Don't touch—"

She pulled back. I curled into myself on the bench and tried to remember how to exist in just one body, one life, one present moment.

It took a long time. Minutes, at least. Maybe longer.

When I finally uncurled, Shelby was sitting a few feet away. Watching me. Her face was pale, her hands clenched in her lap.

"What was that?" she whispered.

I sat up slowly. The world had stopped spinning, but everything still felt too close, too vivid. The colors of the leaves. The texture of the grass. The distant sounds of children playing.

"I don't know." My voice was hoarse. "I don't know what that was."

"You just... collapsed. And you were shaking. And your eyes—" She stopped. Swallowed. "Your eyes weren't right, Eli. They went somewhere else."

I didn't know what to say. There wasn't anything to say.

"I need to go home," I said.

"I'll walk with you."

"No. Please. I just need to be alone right now."

She looked like she wanted to argue. But something in my face must have told her not to.

"Okay," she said quietly. "But Eli? You're going to tell me what's going on. Eventually. Because whatever that was, it's not okay, and I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen."

I nodded. Stood up on shaking legs. Started walking without looking back.

I made it two blocks before I had to stop and lean against a tree. My whole body was trembling. The world kept threatening to tip sideways.

I pulled out my phone. Found Cross's number.

This time I didn't hesitate.

She answered on the first ring. Like she'd been waiting.

"Eli."

"Something happened." My voice cracked. "Something bad. I touched someone and I couldn't stop, I couldn't control it, and then I started feeling the ground, like I was reading the park itself, and I don't know what's happening to me."

A pause. Just a breath.

"Where are you?"

I told her.

"Stay there. Don't move. Don't touch anyone else." Her voice was calm, but there was something underneath it. Urgency, maybe. Or something else I couldn't name. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"Okay."

"Eli. Listen to me. What you're experiencing is a breakthrough. It happens sometimes, when the gift is strong enough. It's not dangerous, but it needs to be managed. Do you understand?"

"No."

"That's okay. You will." Another pause. "Twenty minutes. Just hold on."

She hung up.

I slid down the tree until I was sitting on the ground, back against the bark, knees pulled up to my chest. People walked past. A woman with a stroller. An old man with a newspaper. They didn't look at me. Just another kid sitting by a tree on a Saturday morning.

They didn't know that I could feel them. All of them. Every person who passed within a dozen feet, their lives brushing against mine like static electricity.

And underneath that, the land. The park. The weight of history pressing up through the soil.

I closed my eyes and waited for someone to come and tell me what I was.

Twenty minutes. Maybe less.

The black car pulled up to the curb. Cross got out, and for the first time, she didn't look calm. She looked worried.

Part of me wondered how she'd gotten here so fast. Twenty minutes from wherever she was to this random spot in Millbrook. But the question slid away before I could hold onto it. I had too many other things to worry about.

"Can you walk?"

"I think so."

She helped me to my feet without touching my skin. Held my elbow through my jacket sleeve. Guided me to the car like I was something fragile that might break.

I got in. She got in. The engine started.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Home first. You need to pack a bag." She pulled away from the curb. "And then we're going to Mudwick."

I should have argued. Should have said I needed to think about it, talk to my dad, make arrangements. But I didn't have any arguments left. The life I'd been trying to hold onto had just cracked open in a public park, and there was no putting it back together.

"Okay," I said.

We drove in silence through streets I'd known my whole life. Past the school. Past the grocery store. Past the Presbyterian church.

All of it looked different now. Flatter. Like a painting of a place instead of the place itself.

I was leaving. I didn't know for how long or what I was leaving for. I just knew that staying wasn't an option anymore.

The card had been sitting in my drawer for weeks. You belong.

I was about to find out if that was true.