Ramirez doesn’t even pause in her explanation of tangents, simply waving her hand in a “sure, go ahead” gesture. I run up to grab the clipboard and rush out the door.
I know it’s Adam. I could recognize his anger and fear anywhere. Even though our connection is strong, and even stronger now that I’m actively thinking about him every second of every day, there are still parts of the school day when I don’t feel him. Math is one of those times—Adam has a free period when I have math, so sometimes he wanders far and sometimes he’s just in his little library nook working and his emotions are quiet enough that I lose the connection. But the spike of adrenaline I just felt is definitely his.
Without me actively making the decision, my feet are carrying me through the hallways in the direction of the feeling. The anger grows stronger and stronger—a powerful, deep blue wave—and I round a corner to find its source. Adam. Squaring off with Bryce. Again.
What an idiot.
“God, Bryce, what’s your damage?” Adam groans and I can hear the eye roll even if I’m too far away to see it. He’s full to the brim with false confidence—there’s too much jittery fear for the confidence to be anything but false—and I stifle the impulse to run to him, grab him by the legs, and throw him over my shoulder.
“I’ll damage you.” Bryce takes a step toward Adam in a way that I do not like at all. There’s sharp-edged sludge cutting up my insides so bad I can barely move.
“Wow,” Adam says dryly. “Not even enough brain capacity for a Heathers reference.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, fag?” Bryce spits, and my whole body is lit on fire.
“What’d you call me?” Adam clenches his jaw, stepping to Bryce, but he doesn’t have time to do anything else because before I know it, I’m between them, staring Bryce down like I can liquify him with my gaze.
“Yo, Michaels, what gives?” Bryce reels back a bit and the anger is cut from Adam’s blue-yellow surprise mixed with Bryce’s instant spike of panic. Even with their emotions making war in my chest, I’m so angry I could beat Bryce into the ground.
“What the fuck did you just say to him, Bryce?” I growl.
“Chill, man, jeez,” Bryce says, putting up his hands in a mockery of innocence. I can practically feel his pulse alongside my own, beating frantically with the fear that comes from stepping into something you’re not sure you can get out of.
“I can handle this, Caleb,” I hear Adam say. He’s defiant and fucking furious, and for once, it doesn’t do anything to my own emotions. I’m so mad I can barely see the green.
“Yeah, but now I’m handling it,” I say to Bryce’s face.
“Oh yeah?” Bryce sneers. “How exactly are you handling it, Michaels?”
Don’t punch him. It will not be worth it. Just … talk him down.
“Look, Bryce, I’m sorry you hate yourself, but you don’t need to take that out on someone who’s minding his own business. Just go to therapy like the rest of us.”
Way to go, Caleb. Now everyone knows you’re in therapy.
A flash of anger bursts out of Bryce’s nervousness and then the whole thing is smothered in self-loathing sludge.
“Whatever,” Bryce huffs, stepping back. His feelings are all over the place, jittery and sharp. I reach out for Adam’s feelings—for that sense of belonging—and find a boiling sea.
“God, Michaels, you’re so dramatic.” Bryce forces a laugh. “See you around, losers.”
There’s no sting to his words—just a deep, permeating despair that makes me almost pity the guy. Bryce swaggers away with a speed I wouldn’t have thought possible for a swagger. I take a deep breath and turn around to face Adam.
He looks pissed.
Wait, he looks pissed. I reach out to find the emotion to match his face and hit that wall I haven’t bumped up against since that first lunch. What the fuck?
“What the fuck, Caleb?” he asks, crossing his arms.
“What do you mean?” I bite back. “I just saved you from getting your face beaten in. Again.”
“I don’t need you to protect me.” The wall erodes a little and I feel the flutter of nerves before I feel the wave of anger. But I’m not worried about drowning in it—it’s not directed at me.
“I know that,” I say evenly. “But that doesn’t mean I can just stand by and let him talk to you like that.”
“He’s been talking to me like that for years.” Adam rolls his eyes and the wall goes up again.
“What, really? I thought it was just stuff about you being a nerd, not…” I trail off, letting the F-word hang between us. Impossibly, the wall grows thicker.
“Well, okay, yeah, that was the first time he’s gone that particular direction.” Adam shrugs. “But I can handle Bryce.”
“You shouldn’t have to,” I tell him, taking a step closer in the hopes he’ll uncross his arms, and with them, bring down the wall. It works. Something in him softens and he looks in my eyes for the first time.
“How did you do that?” He matches my volume, speaking like we’re in one of our rooms, not a school hallway.
“Do what?”
“Know exactly what to say to people. It’s like you take off their masks.”
His eyes are roaming my face like the answers are somewhere in my frown lines. A rush of nervousness—my own—floods my veins.
“I—” I start, having no idea what to say. “I don’t know. People are just … easy to read.” Even as I say it, I know I’m not convincing him.
“Right.” He nods skeptically. “Well … thanks, I guess. For intervening. Again.”
There’s a small smile on his face but sadness in his eyes and I want to kiss him into oblivion.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “No problem.”
37
ADAM
“I can’t believe you haven’t heard this album yet,” I say, typing rapidly on Caleb’s computer as he leans over me. I can smell the spicy scent of his shampoo and it fills my head with distracting vapor. I focus on the task at hand: getting Caleb to listen to the newest Panic! at the Disco album.
It’s been a few weeks since the double-whammy birthday incident/Bryce encounter and things have thankfully gotten back to normal. As promised, I’ve been spending weekends at Caleb’s with his non-humiliating family but his inferior music collection.
“I mean, I know a lot of their songs,” Caleb says, close to my ear as he watches me pull up the album, “but I don’t think I even knew they came out with new stuff.”
“Well, prepare to have your mind blown.” I hit Play on the album and a shrill chorus comes chanting through Caleb’s speakers.
Tonight we are victorious
I turn my head to look at Caleb. He’s got one hand on his desk, the other on the back of the chair I’m sitting in. He’s surrounding me and it makes me feel safe and warm. A grin is blooming on his face, growing with each rhythmic nod of his head as he gets into the groove of the music. I can’t help but smile at him in return. Caleb’s joy is always infectious, like an airborne disease with symptoms that appear in its victims right away. I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing—a virus that makes you smile as soon as it enters your system—but maybe I should ask my parents.
“I like this.” Caleb keeps nodding and smiling and my internal organs might start melting from the warmth in my chest.
We end up listening to the whole album while sitting on his floor, like we always do, leaning against his bed. Our arms are pressed together from shoulder to elbow, our hands lying on our outstretched legs. It would be so easy to reach over and take his hand in mine. I glance sideways at Caleb to see him looking at me and smiling softly. My stomach drops and my heart rises to my throat, creating an empty, echoing chamber in my torso.
“You look happy,” he whispers over the thunderous chorus of “House of Memories.” I wouldn’t have even heard him if we weren’t sitting so close. The gaping space inside of me tightens impossibly before being filled with a rush of nervous
fluttering.
“I am happy,” I whisper back. We’ve somehow gotten closer to each other and I can feel my heartbeat in my ears.
“That’s good,” Caleb exhales.
My whole field of vision is filled with his face. There’s an electric current between us, so strong I can almost see the sparks in the air. I fear if I move too quickly, I’ll get shocked. I’m frozen in place, paralyzed by the voltage, as “House of Memories” ends, highlighting the silent space between us. The opening piano chords of “Impossible Year” drift into my ears, giving definition to the ache of longing inside of me. It feels impossible—being this close to Caleb, him looking at me this way. It’s impossible that I think he might be about to kiss me.
I hear myself say his name—a question, an answer, a hope—and regret it instantly, want to grab it and shove it back into my mouth, to keep it from smothering the sparks. Because something in Caleb snaps and shutters and before I’m done breathing out his name, he’s leaning back and away from me.
“Caleb?” This time the word is a question and I hate how hurt my own voice sounds to my ears. I find myself in a moment that is the photo negative of the one that came before it. Caleb is now making an effort to avoid eye contact, and the electricity has been replaced with dead air.
“Do you want to take a walk?” he blurts out.
“What?” I have that two-steps-behind feeling again and I really, really hate it.
“I just—I need some air.” He stands and pulls his letterman jacket from the back of the chair, shrugging it on. I rush to my feet and silently follow him down the stairs, absently waving at his parents when he tells their confused faces that we’re going for a walk, and soon we’re outside, walking away from his house to who knows where.
“Caleb,” I say again, “what are we doing out here?”
His hands are shoved in his pockets, his jaw clenched as he stares straight ahead. He’s stiff and quiet and I want to scream at him and shake him because I’m so disoriented from the last five minutes.
“It’s kinda warm tonight,” he answers flatly. “I don’t know, I thought it’d be nice to get out of the house.”
The back of my neck is prickling—Caleb isn’t behaving like himself and I’m not sure what to do. I’m reminded of my birthday, that sudden shift in behavior and, not for the first time, I wonder if Caleb might have a serious mental health problem. As in, more serious than mine. The thought scares me like it did the first time I had it, but this time it comes with a sense of hopefulness. That, at least, would be an explanation. Maybe, like me, he’s been fighting invisible demons this whole time.
“Caleb,” I repeat, like saying his name has been working at all. This time I gently grab his arm, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and trying to get him to look at me.
“Are you okay?” I ask, craning my neck to try and get him to look at me instead of the ground. He steps back from my grasp, scrubs his hands over his face, and sighs.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he groans, face in his hands.
“Okay…” I try to keep my face neutral but my heart is beating like I’m a rabbit running away from a wolf.
“So, you know that fight with Tyler I got into last semester?” he asks, sounding overly casual.
“Yeah…” I answer, and then, when it seems like maybe he wants me to say more, “I remember being pretty surprised when I heard that you’d beat someone up. You always seemed like a really nice guy.”
Caleb tilts his head to toss me a small smile before licking his lips nervously. “Yeah, well, I guess people aren’t always what they seem.”
“Look, I know that sometimes you maybe have, like, anger issues or something,” I offer, thinking of the way he was looking at Bryce in the hall the other week.
“Yeah, it’s not just that,” he sighs, turning away from me again and stepping off the sidewalk to sit on the curb, his body a painful comma curved in on itself. I take a deep breath and sit down next to him, the concrete cold on my legs despite the hint of spring in the night air.
“Well, whatever it is, you can tell me,” I assure him, bracing for the worst. I run through all the things I learned in the program my parents sent me to, in group, and remind myself that, no matter what he has, he’s still Caleb. He hangs out with me even though I have depression—whatever this is, I can handle it. My mind is running through every disorder I’ve ever read about in my parents’ books: depression, bipolar, a personality disorder—
“Have you ever heard of mirror-touch synesthesia?” he says into his hands.
Okay, that I did not expect. It’s a pretty rare condition so I can’t remember all the specifics, but I have heard of it and tell Caleb as much.
“Right, well,” he stutters, “my therapist thought that’d be a good jumping-off point for this conversation—”
“What conversation?” I start to get annoyed that Caleb’s been planning our conversations without me but my mind sticks on the fact that Caleb sees a therapist. I thought his quip to Bryce about therapy was just a figure of speech and I’m about to ask more when—
“The conversation where I tell you I have a superpower,” he says, and I’m too baffled to even laugh at the assertion.
“Well, no,” he corrects himself, “it’s not a superpower, it’s a total pain, but it is, like, not a normal-person thing. I’m not a normal person.”
“You seem pretty normal to me,” I say for lack of anything else to say. I have no idea what we’re talking about.
“Well, I’m not.” Caleb looks at me now, worry darkening his eyes. “I’m special. I can…” He trails off before starting again. “So. Mirror-touch synesthesia—people with that can feel, like, the physical things that happen to other people, right? If they see someone get slapped, they feel like they’re getting slapped.”
“Right…” I prompt, hoping he’ll start putting the pieces together for me.
“Okay, so, I can’t do that.” He takes a deep breath like he’s walking into battle. “But I can feel other people’s feelings.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, and then something clicks and I think I know what he’s talking about. “Oh, you mean empathy? You’re really empathetic?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Well, I mean, sort of yeah. I’m an empath. It’s not like I’m just hypersensitive or anything, I literally feel the feelings of everyone around me all the time. Really specifically. It’s like being psychic, except it sucks.”
“Caleb, there’s no such thing as psychics,” I say gently. I’m starting to get worried that this is way beyond my capabilities of understanding—is Caleb delusional? How seriously worried do I need to be? I suddenly feel like a child in a way that I haven’t in a really long time.
“Yeah, I think there might be,” he mumbles before continuing, “but that’s a whole other thing.”
“You know, Caleb”—doubt and worry are starting to slither up my spine, a knee-jerk response kicking into gear—“you might be hanging out with jocks too much if you think it’s abnormal to notice other people have feelings.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Caleb’s face flinches and crumples.
“Don’t be a dick,” he says defensively. “I’m not messing with you—”
“I didn’t think you were,” I say, while simultaneously realizing that, yep, that is exactly why I’m getting defensive.
“I know it’s something you worry about.” He’s looking at me earnestly now. “Being pranked or led on or whatever. Because right now, you have a bit of the same feeling you had the first time we had lunch—like you don’t trust me. It’s all defensive and prickly but also scared.”
“What are you talking about.” I don’t phrase it as a question because suddenly it’s not just the back of my neck prickling—there’re goose bumps over my whole body. I know what Caleb’s talking about. I know exactly what he’s talking about. That is something I worried about in the beginning, and the moment he brought up messing with me, I felt my w
alls go up.
“I know,” he says. “I know how you feel. All the time. I don’t always understand it but that’s why—why I know stuff, all right? About you, about Caitlin or Bryce, about your parents—all of it. It’s why I get weird sometimes—like when I got drunk at your birthday—”
“You what?” I interrupt but he ignores me.
“You said I’m strange—well … this is why.” Caleb exhales like he’s run a marathon and I feel like a marathon has run over me.
But things are starting to slot into place. All the oddly tense moments, the weirdly perceptive observations—all those times that Caleb is about to say something before gulping it down like a secret—those things are starting to make sense.
But that’s impossible. Because even though this explanation makes the past few months make a lot more sense, the explanation itself does not make sense at all.
“That’s not possible,” I push back. “ESP and all that stuff isn’t real.”
Caleb looks offended at that.
“Not that I don’t believe you,” I rush to explain. “But just that … just because you’re maybe more sensitive than other people doesn’t mean you can read minds.”
“I didn’t say I could read minds,” he bites, “just emotions. But I’ve gotten good at piecing together the feelings to figure out what’s going on with someone. It’s not perfect, but I’m getting better at it all the time. Dr. Bright has been helping me a lot.”
“Dr. Bright?” I ask, dazed.
“Yeah, she’s my therapist—”
“And she says you’re an empath?” That beggars belief, but I try not to sound judgmental. “That you’re not a normal human?”
“Yeah.” He nods enthusiastically. “After the fight, my parents sent me to her and she helped me figure it all out. It’s what she does. Works with people like me. Not just empaths, but other people who are special too. But she has seen lots of people who are like me—who are empaths. And it made so much sense, when she diagnosed me or whatever. I got into that fight with Tyler because I was so overwhelmed by his feelings. I thought they were mine—all that anger and bitterness—and I didn’t know how to balance it. I’m better now. I mean, obviously, I’m not perfect, but I can usually tell the difference between someone else’s feelings and my own now.”
The Infinite Noise Page 21
