and tried to make herself stand still like he had said, but it wasn’t easy. They stood for a few moments, just staring at each other.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered. Helen’s heart was racing and she had a feeling Lucas could hear it.
“Calm down,” he said, smiling with his eyes closed. “Try and slow your pulse down if you can.”
“I’m trying. Do you have to stand so close?” Helen asked, her voice thin and shaky.
“Yes. I don’t want you to get away from me. That would be bad,” he said in a deadpan voice, maintaining his concentration. A few seconds passed. When he next spoke he sounded very calm and far away.
“Now. Focus on your body. Take a deep breath and follow it in, like your brain is floating gently inside that air you’re breathing.” He waited a few moments for Helen to get to where he was.
It took her a few breaths, but eventually she was able to do it. He knew exactly when she was ready. “Good. Now you’re inside of yourself,” he said triumphantly. “Can you feel the weight of you, all stacked up and all tied together?”
She did feel it. She could feel the weight of her skin on top of her muscles on top of her bones, all stacked up, just like he had said. There were millions and millions of little bits of her, all marching around like soldiers with different but cohesive orders. Those were her cells, she realized at once. She giggled, thinking how strange it was to be this massive army and never feel it. She heard Lucas laugh, too, and she knew that he was right there with her, experiencing what she was experiencing.
“Now I want you to do something really hard,” he said, his voice light and curious, almost childlike. “I want you to stay inside, but also look out, if you can. Don’t be scared. I’m right here with you.”
Helen did as he told her, but the sensation was way too intense to process.
She had lost her sunglasses once. She’d looked all over, in the kitchen, the living room, back up in her bedroom, but she couldn’t find them anywhere. It was annoying because she knew she had just had them in her hand, but she couldn’t remember what she’d done with them. Then her dad told her that her sunglasses were on top of her head.
In that moment she realized that she had been using the wrong sense. She had been looking when she should have been feeling. She reached up and felt her glasses with her hand, but she also felt them with her scalp, and when she thought about it she realized that she had been feeling her glasses up there the whole time. She’d just been so busy looking she hadn’t thought to feel.
This was similar. Again, she was realizing that there were many different ways to experience the world around her. Now she was still aware of all of her millions of cells, but she could also feel something new. She felt herself falling toward something truly huge, and she knew she had another sense that could stop the falling.
Scared out of her mind, she instinctively pushed with this new sense. She needed to put some distance between her little army and the big, fast monster she was falling toward—the monster she suddenly realized she had been falling toward every second of every day of her life.
A moment too late to stop herself, Helen realized that the monster was the earth, and the falling sensation was gravity—and that what she had just done was switch it off. Vertigo sucked at her, pulling her off balance. She grabbed on to Lucas, frantically burying her face against his chest. He was the only unmovable object in the entire universe, and if Helen let him go of him she knew she would spin off into space forever and ever.
“It’s okay,” he whispered into her ear. His breath was warm, and his voice soothed her. “I won’t let you go, Helen. I promise. Do you trust me?” The temperature dropped and great gusts of wind tossed her hair around in a tangle.
She kept her face pressed against the L-shaped hollow where Lucas’s shoulder turned into his neck. She told herself that this is what difficult felt like, this was the “hard” that she had been cavalier enough to tell Lucas she preferred to “easy.”
“Yes,” she whispered, feeling the cold, thin air crawl into her clothes and snatch