“Like you blocking me this time, not the other way around. I bet it’ll be easier for you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re not vicious enough to put up a good offense—trust me, that’s a compliment.” He waited for me to smile before continuing. “But you are guarded. You don’t show your cards to anyone. There are times that you’re impossible to read.”

“I don’t mean to be,” I interrupted. Clancy only waved me off.

“It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “In fact, it’ll help you.”

Well, it certainly hadn’t helped me fend off Martin.

“Can you sense when someone is trying to break into your head?” he asked. “There’s a tingling sensation.…”

“Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. What should I do when I feel it?”

“You have to push right back up against them, throw them off whatever track they might have been on. In my experience, the things you really want to protect, like memories or dreams? They have their own natural defenses. You just need to add another wall.”

“Every time I tried to get into your head, it was like a white curtain blocked me.”

Clancy nodded. “That’s the way I do it. When I feel the sensation, I push back the image of that curtain and I don’t let up, no matter what. So what I want you to do is bring to mind some kind of secret or memory—something you wouldn’t necessarily want me or anyone else to see—and I want you to drop your own curtain down to protect it.”

I must not have been doing a good job of hiding my hesitation, because he took both of my hands in his again, lacing our fingers. “Come on,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen? I see some embarrassing moment? I think we’re good enough friends now that you can trust me when I say I won’t tell a soul about any falls or public puking.”

“What about streaking and eating playground sand?”

He pretended to consider it for a moment, grinning. “I suppose I could refrain from sharing that with the entire camp at dinner.”

“What a fair, just leader you are,” I said. After a moment, I added, “Do you really consider me a friend, or are you just saying that because you want to see me get my four front teeth knocked out when I tried to play soccer?”

Clancy shook his head and laughed. His favorite stories always seemed to be the ones that involved me trying to pretend I was a boy, or the fast-food binges my dad used to take me on when my mom was out of town at a teacher’s conference. They were so completely foreign to his experience, I realized, that I must have seemed like an alien.

“Of course I consider you my friend. Actually…” he began, his voice low. When he glanced at me again, his dark eyes were burning with a kind of intensity that made me feel like my head was full of air, ready to float away. “I consider you a lot more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You may have been looking for me, but let’s just say that I was waiting for you. It’s been a long time since I felt like someone understood what I was going through. Being an Orange…you can’t compare it to what the others are. They don’t understand us or what we can do.”

It’s only us, came a small voice in my mind, it’s just the two of us.

I squeezed his hands. “I know.”

His attention seemed to wander, his eyes carrying over to the other side of the room, toward his computer and TV. I thought I detected a glimmer of sadness in his eyes, a real kind of pain, but just as quickly, it was gone, replaced by his usual confident expression.

“You ready to try?”

I nodded. “I promise I’ve been trying. Please—please, don’t give up on me.”

I was surprised when I felt his hands pull free from mine. Stunned, when I felt them glide up my bare arms and over my shoulders. I didn’t stop him. This was the thing about Clancy—the thing I was quickly coming to terms with. With him, I didn’t have to be afraid, not of what I could do intentionally or by mistake. I didn’t have to throw up every defense I possessed to keep my brain’s wandering hands still, because Clancy was more than capable of keeping me out of his head.

But Liam…he was something precious, something I could break with a single misstep. Someone I couldn’t be with, not right then, not the way I was.

Clancy leaned forward to begin his work. I leaned forward, too, right up against his chest, where it was warm and smelled of pine and old books and thousands of possibilities I had never known.

I didn’t block him on the first try—I didn’t even block him on the fifth try. It took three days and his witnessing almost every sour, cheek-reddening memory in my head for me to finally throw up some kind of defense.

“Think deeper,” he told me. “Think about something you wouldn’t want anyone else to know. Those memories will provoke your strongest defenses.”

There wasn’t anything left that he hadn’t already seen. I swear, the kid could have been a brain surgeon for how sharp and accurate his pokes and prods were. Every time I brought to mind a memory or thought and tried to put an invisible wall around it, my defenses crumbled, as flimsy as waxed paper. Still, he didn’t get frustrated.

“You can do this,” Clancy kept repeating, “I know you can. You’re capable of more than you’ll admit to yourself.”