Duncan sighed.

Sitting up had helped a little. I felt slightly better. Encouraging. “And it wasn’t just him, by the way,” I added then. “I wasn’t just teased at school, I was a pariah. I was the butt of every single joke. Utterly cast out of grammar-school society.”

Duncan shook his head.

I went on. “Do we need to talk about the time I woke up to find the kids throwing the spilled peas from my lunch tray at me? Do we have to talk about the bag of spare clothes the school nurse kept in the supply closet for the inevitable moments when I would need to change my pants? Do we have to cover all the years when I ate lunch by myself, sitting across from Richard Leffitz as he ate his own boogers?”

“Fair enough,” Duncan said. “But those were kids. And—all due respect—kids are assholes.”

“Spoken like a guy on the verge of summer break,” I said.

But it was true: after elementary school, I’d blamed it all on the epilepsy and never looked back. Which was fine. Until the epilepsy returned. And then it turned out I had a whole truckload of unquestioned assumptions about my worth as a human being.

Assumptions that, perhaps, I had not examined too hard.

And would not be examining tonight.

Being around Duncan … there was no question it was glorious, and powerful, and hypnotic. The kissing-in-the-waves portion of the evening left me in no doubt of that. There was no doubt that he was a good thing. Too good.

Because: what if?

What if I had a seizure, and he was horrified? Disgusted? Creeped out?

He felt things. He’d said so. He’d kissed me like he meant it—again and again.

But what if I had a seizure—and that killed it for him?

I’d never once dated a person who had seen me go through something like that. Besides my mom, and later my aunt, and a few health-care professionals, everybody who had ever witnessed me have a seizure had decided irrevocably to avoid me.

I’m mostly talking about grade-schoolers here, but the point still stands. How could Duncan be any different?

But Duncan was still focused. “I wish you’d give me a chance to prove you wrong.”

“But what if you don’t prove me wrong? What if you just confirm my worst fears—again?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But didn’t you just yell at me in the ocean and tell me not to live my life in fear? Didn’t you just literally hurl yourself into a black ocean?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

The aura was intensifying. The nausea was coming back stronger. “Because,” I said, standing up to move him toward the door, “this is scarier than that.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

I shook my head. “I can’t be brave about this.”

“Yes, you can.”

The nausea was intensifying. I was running out of time. I stood up and led him toward the door. “Anything in the world—except this.”

“Sam—”

“You need to go now,” I said.

“Let me stay,” he said. “You don’t have to be alone.”

Would I have liked to let him stay?

Would I have liked him to take care of me?

Of course.

But I’d rather be alone forever than let him see me that way. I could bear loneliness. I could bear disappointment. But the one thing I absolutely could not bear was Duncan changing his mind.

I hated that he was arguing with me. I hated that he was still here.

I hated that he was right.

I pushed him toward the door with a rising feeling like I didn’t have much time.

He had to leave. He had to go.

But then, before he could—the world disappeared.

twenty-five

I woke up alone, hours later, in my bed, in the dark.

I checked the clock on the nightstand. Two in the morning.

What had happened?

I knew I’d had a seizure—but only by deduction. Not from memory. Seizures always involve amnesia. Your brain can’t exactly make new memories when it’s short-circuiting.

I was pretty sure I hadn’t gotten him out in time. I was pretty sure he’d been there. And I was pretty sure right now I was completely alone.

I sat up. Listened for sounds of life in my apartment. If Duncan were still here, but not asleep, what would he be doing? Insomniac activities, I guessed. Making tea? Reading a magazine? Or maybe he’d taken himself out to sleep in the living room.

But there was no rattle of a kettle boiling, no swish of magazine pages turning. No rhythmic snoozing of a passed-out man on my sofa.

It was so quiet the silence was practically ringing.

“Duncan?” I called, just in case. “Hey, Duncan?”

Nothing.

I flipped on the bedroom light, then followed it out to the living room. No one. Empty.

I’d been so sure he would leave—but I had also wanted so badly to be wrong.

Now I had my answer.

He wasn’t here. He’d split. He’d seen me at my worst—and taken off. I had stayed the night for him, but he hadn’t done the same for me.

I felt hollow.

I’d been right all along.

I stepped into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash up, and then I just stood there, looking at myself in the mirror. My hair was down, my bangs were mussed up, my eyes were puffy. I washed my face again. I flossed for a while.

You see? This was exactly why I’d tried to send him away. This was exactly why I’d argued with him about staying. To avoid exactly this moment—exactly this undeniable truth about the world and my place in it. If Duncan took off—despite all his cajoling and platitudes—who else on earth was there even hope for?

At least, before, I’d been able to hold on to the hope that I was wrong.

I should go back to sleep, I supposed.

But I was wide-awake now.

So I paced around my place for a while—looking for a note, maybe, that said, “Be right back!” Or any clue anywhere that could prove me wrong.

I milled around, looking for way too long.

There was no note. No sign that he’d been here at all.

Nothing at all to argue me away from the only conclusion I could see. There had been a question at the center of my life ever since my seizures had come back—and now, pretty much against my will, Duncan had given me the answer to that question.

An answer I would much rather have avoided for the rest of my life.

* * *

No going back to sleep after that.

Just pacing. Muttering to myself. Spasms of humiliation.

Just a shame-fueled spiral of misery that could easily have lasted until dawn—but, in truth, lasted only about a half an hour.

Until I heard a key in my door.

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, like Duh. 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: the decaf maker.

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.

“Like, completely split. Vanished. Disappeared.”