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must have known he was coming home. I take a swig of soda. Content to sit and eat and let them do the talking, I concentrate on the competing sensations in my body. I don’t feel so dizzy thanks to the sugar hit. My thirst has backed off with the soda. My pins and needles seem to respond to Kitty like she’s a magnet. Yet, despite this, being with her comforts me. Maybe it’s the whole familiarity thing, a friend on hand after weeks of moping around Miriam’s place. I can’t stop looking at Kitty, like I’m relieved somehow to see her happy and well. But why relieved? And why the tight feeling in my chest? Anxiety tight? How can I feel relieved and anxious at the same time?
That’s easy. You’re losing it
.
    “You know you’re going to have to see him sometime.” Kitty’s back on her brother. “If you come tonight it would be over and done with. Then we could get on with our last few weeks before school without things being all awkward. It’s been three years. Can’t you be grown-ups?”
    “I’m not coming to the ball to prove something to your brother.”
    “Oh? But you are coming?” She sits up straight, eyebrows high. Seeing her so hopeful fills me with a strange unwillingness to disappoint her. I shake my head. Her shoulders slump and I feel bad.
    The waitress comes out with the coffee pot and places cups on the table.
    “I’m good with soda,” I say.
    “I’ll have hers,” Kitty says.
    As the waitress fills two cups, an eerie feeling comes over me. A tingling awareness of the moment that magnifies small details: the silver rim of a passing bicycle winking in the sunlight, the shimmer of heat rising from the asphalt, the breeze lifting a child’s bangs as she whines at her mother on the sidewalk. To my right a man counts change into his palm, the coins chinking.
    My spine tightens.
    The circumference of awareness narrows, the micro-details of the periphery diminish. The glint of light on Kitty’s coffee becomes the riveting focal point. Steam pearls upwards, dewing the inside rim. The porous ceramic bears signs of wear and a hairline fracture on the handle catches my eye. Kitty says something and goes to pick up her coffee by the bowl. It’s too hot. She takes the handle instead. Electricity crackles in my spine. I squint at the sharpening light and time stretches. Kitty raises her cup in slow motion. I observe the gradual trajectory of her hand, hear a small pop like the sound of chalk snapping and the handle of her cup breaks away. The bowl of hot coffee falls in a long elastic second.
    The instinct to protect Kitty seems as natural as the solution. I simply reach out to catch the falling bowl. I don’t even feel the burn on my wrist where it splashes, scalding my skin.
    Time snaps back to its regular speed, my ears clear and I stare at the cup in my hand. Miriam’s on her feet.
    “Bloody hell.” Kitty shoves her chair back. She drops the handle on the table and takes the still full cup from my hand. “How did you do that?” She rubs at a few stray drops on her jeans. “Look at your wrist.” A blister rises in a red weal.
    “No idea.” I feel awake, like I’ve just come out of a long foggy dream and the world is back in technicolour. “Ha!”
    Miriam frowns. “You need something for your hand.” She turns away and goes back into the cafe.
    I look at Kitty, who still gapes at me. I feel more alive than I have in weeks and filled with certainty. My social phobia is irrelevant. Jamie is irrelevant.
    Being with Kitty is important. Urgent. Inexplicably urgent. If she’s going to this thing tonight, then so am I.
    “All right,” I say, as if she’s asked me again. “I’ll come.”

PANIC
    “You’re going to look killer, Evs.” Kitty leans to peer at me through the window of her shiny European car. “Everything, it all works.”
    “For the sake of Miriam’s credit card, I hope so.”
    Kitty argued for a ball makeover, which apparently meant a total overhaul. Face, hair,