“This girl, Phoebe—she keeps pushing me. I almost lost it with her.” Remembering filled me with frustration. “What if someone pisses me off and I tell them to go jump off a bridge?”
Noah shook his head. “You’d never say that.”
“Oh, really?”
“You’d tell them to go die in a fire.”
“Helpful. Thank you.”
Noah stood then, and joined me on my bed. “I only said it because I’m sure that’s not how it works.”
“How does it work?” I asked out loud, as my fingers curled into the blanket. They were nearly touching his. My eyes traveled up to his face. “How do you heal things?”
I thought I saw a faint tinge of surprise in Noah’s expression at the sudden shift in the conversation but he answered evenly. “You know that everyone has fingerprints, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“To me, everything has an aural imprint as well. An individual tone. And when someone—or something—is ill or hurt, the tone is off. Broken. I just . . . innately know how to correct it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re not musical.”
“Thanks.”
He shrugged. “It’s not an insult. Daniel would get it. If your mother wasn’t in the kitchen, I’d show you.”
“How?”
“You have a piano. Anyway, it’s like . . .” He stared straight ahead, looking for words. “Imagine the melody to a song you know well. And then imagine one note of that song being changed to the wrong key, or to a completely different note.”
“But how do you fix it?”
“If you asked a basketball player how to shoot a perfect free throw, he wouldn’t be able to describe the physiological process that makes it happen. He just . . . does it.”
I inhaled. “But there are so many people.”
“Yes.”
“And animals.”
“Yes.”
“It must get noisy.”
“It does,” Noah said, “I told you before, I learned to tune it out unless I want to focus on one sound in particular.” He smiled. “I prefer,” he said, trailing a finger down my arm, “to listen to you.”
“What do I sound like?” I asked, more breathily than I intended. God, so predictable.
He considered his answer for a moment before he gave it. “Dissonant,” he said finally.
“Meaning?”
Another long pause. “Unstable.”
Hmm.
He shook his head. “Not the way you’re thinking,” he said, the shadow of a smile on his lips. “In music, consonant chords are points of arrival. Rest. There’s no tension,” he tried to explain. “Most pop music hooks are consonant, which is why most people like them. They’re catchy but interchangeable. Boring. Dissonant intervals, however, are full of tension,” he said, holding my gaze. “You can’t predict which way they’re going to go. It makes limited people uncomfortable—frustrated, because they don’t understand the point, and people hate what they don’t understand. But the ones who get it,” he said, lifting a hand to my face, “find it fascinating. Beautiful.” He traced the shape of my mouth with his thumb. “Like you.”
37
HIS WORDS WARMED ME THROUGH EVEN AS HE pulled his hand away. I was sure my face fell.
“Your parents,” he said, with a glance at the door.
I got it. But still. “I like hearing about your ability,” I said, my eyes on his mouth. “Tell me more.”
His voice was level. “What do you want to know?”
“When did you first notice it?”
When his expression shifted, I realized I had asked him that question before; I recognized that shuttered look. He was withdrawing again. Shutting down.
Shutting me out.
Something was going on with him, and I didn’t know what it was. He was growing distant, but he wasn’t gone yet. So I quickly said something else. “You saw me in December, after the asylum collapsed, right?”
“Yes.”
“When I was hurt.”
“Yes,” he said again. To anyone else, he would have sounded bored. But I was learning, and now I recognized something else in his voice. Something that never fell from those reckless, careless, lips.
Caution.
I was pressing up against something raw, and I wanted to know what it was.
“You’ve seen other people who were hurt,” I went on, keeping my tone even. “Four?”
Noah nodded.
Keeping my tone light. “Including Joseph.”
He nodded again.
And then I had an idea. I pinched my arm. I watched Noah to see if there was any reaction. There wasn’t, as far as I could tell.
I pinched it again.
He slitted his eyes. “What, exactly, are you doing?”
“Did you see me when I pinched myself?”
“It’s a bit hard to ignore you.”
“When you first told me you saw me,” I started, “in December, in the asylum—you said you saw what I was seeing, through my eyes. And when Joseph was drugged, you saw him through someone else’s eyes—the person who drugged him, right? But you didn’t have a—a vision just now, did you? So there’s some factor besides pain,” I said, studying his face as I spoke. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“Of course,” he said indifferently.
“Have you tested it?”
His eyes sharpened, then. “How could I? You’re the only one I’ve seen that knows.”
I held his stare. “We can test it together.”
Noah shook his head immediately. “No.”
“We have to.”
“No.” The word was solid and final and laced with something I couldn’t quite identify. “We don’t. There’s absolutely nothing at stake except information.”
“But you’re the one who said that whatever is happening to me is also happening to you—that was your argument for why I can’t be possessed, right?”
“Also because it’s stupid.”
I ignored him. “So figuring out how your ability works could help me figure out mine. And no one would get hurt—”
Noah’s expression grew very serious, and his voice grew dangerously quiet. “Except you.”