Page 138 of What You Wish For

Duncan. Right? Had to be. Who else?

On instinct, I fluffed my hair. Like an idiot.

The door opened, but it was not Duncan. It was Alice.

“Hey!” she said. “You’re awake!” She was wearing a T-shirt that said, MATHLETE.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, nodding like it was just ordinary insomnia.

She came and sat on the side of my bed. “Babette texted me to come check on you. I was just going to peek in and then sleep on the couch.”

“Babette texted you?”

“She said you had a seizure.”

Huh. Maybe Duncan had told her?

Now I was irritated. Did we really have to wake people up about this? Were we putting a notice in the paper—or driving the streets with a bullhorn?

“I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t need to be checked on. This is not a huge deal. This is just my life.”

My tragic, hopeless, profoundly disappointing life.

I could feel the pull of hopeless thinking. It exerted a force on me like gravity—that temptation to come to simple and very dark conclusions: It was useless. I was hopeless. I would always be alone.

But “dark” wasn’t Alice’s thing. “Okay, then.” She shrugged. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

“It’s two thirty in the morning. We don’t need coffee.”

“Decaf,” she corrected, likeDuh. She walked to the kitchen.

“I’m fine,” I said, not following. “You can go home.”

She turned to look at me and gave a little shrug. “I’m awake now,” she said. “And so are you, apparently.”

“Not because I want to be.”

Alice was reading my voice. She was super even-tempered, and almost nothing flustered her, but she was perceptive, too. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

“What?” I was stalling.

“Whatever has you feeling so… brittle.”

“No,” I said. Then: “I don’t know. Maybe. Not really. Never mind.”

“Cool,” Alice said. And she went ahead and busied herself with the coffeemaker.

Correction: thedecafmaker.

Next, as it brewed, she turned around to look at me with such a sympathetic face that I just completely broke.

I could feel my body sinking, giving in to the weight of the truth. I said, “Duncan was here when the seizure happened.”

“Oh.”

“And then he… left.”

Alice nodded, taking it in.

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