and it was something that Helen had grown up with, but it seemed to her as if everyone was leaning on their horns for an extra-long time this morning.
“So, listen,” Lucas said, changing the tone from playful to something a little more serious. “Hector told me you found him on your roof.”
“Yeah,” Helen replied, trying to scrunch down in her seat so no one could see her. “About that . . .”
“I wanted to explain why we didn’t tell you before. I asked to be the one to tell you, and I meant to,” he said. He glanced over at her as if to check how Helen felt about what he was saying. “I just didn’t figure out how to tell you in time. I didn’t want you to think I was some shady stalker hiding out on your roof.”
“I’m not going to lie—well, I can’t lie to you, can I?” Helen said with a grin. “I was a little upset, but I’m fine about it now. If your family is willing to protect mine, I guess I can put up with a little shadiness.”
Helen was forced to stop talking because someone was honking out “Shave and a Haircut” in the most intrusive way possible. She wanted to tell whomever it was to kiss off, but she couldn’t. These were her neighbors and she had to be polite. She wasn’t cramping up, but she suspected that she might start to. She stuck a fist into her stomach.
“What’s going on?” Lucas asked intently. “I’ve seen you do that before. Are you in pain?”
“No, but I think I might be soon. Don’t worry about it, there’s nothing you can do. Well, I guess you could go away and never hang out with me again,” Helen answered.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said with raised eyebrows. “But what are you talking about? Are you allergic to me or something?”
“No.” Helen laughed. “I think I’m allergic to attention. And we tend to draw a lot of it when we’re together.”
“But it’s not just me, right? You feel those pains even when I’m not around?”
“Yes. I’ve had this all my life. I don’t know exactly what causes it, I just know that sometimes when people stare at me I get a terrible pain in my stomach.”
“Allergic to attention,” Lucas said to himself, absentmindedly taking Helen’s hand while he thought. He had to let it go to shift as he parked at school, but as soon as they were out of the car he claimed her hand again and rolled her fingers around in his.
Helen watched Lucas as they stood at her locker together. He seemed distracted. His brow was furrowed and his gaze tuned in, but most disturbingly he seemed to be all blurry.
“What is that you’re doing? It’s giving me a headache,” Helen said quietly while she turned the combination on her lock.
“Sorry,” he said as he snapped back into focus. “I’m bending the light. It happens sometimes when I’m concentrating.”
Helen remembered from her reading that Apollo was the god of Light, and at that moment Lucas was doing things with light that were impossible outside of a magic show. She realized she had seen him do this before in the locker room at his house, but she had taken so many knocks to the head at the time she thought it was just her vision that was off.
“Aren’t you worried someone will notice?”
“Actually, sometimes I do this to make people stop noticing me when I want some privacy to think. People have a hard time forcing themselves to look at things that they can’t see clearly, or things that shouldn’t be possible.”
“Because their eyes slide right off,” Helen interjected, remembering how her gaze was diverted from Lucas’s face in the locker room even though she had really tried to focus on him.
“Exactly. If I look far away or too hard to see, most people just block me out,” he said, and then he gave her a knowing smile. “You slouch to get people to stop staring at you. I blur. It’s useful in a fight, too, only it’s nearly impossible to do when you’re moving fast.”
“Are you giving me all your fight secrets?” Helen said cheekily as she put her books in her bag and shut her locker. “Not so smart, Houdini.”
“Really? Well, come and get me, Sparky,” he said with a grin as he backed away.
Sparky? Helen thought, puzzled. But he was already through the double doors at the end of the