“No, this is important.”

“School is important. I shouldn’t be.”

“No,” she said, closing the door tightly behind her. “You seem to know I have trouble saying no. But I do know how to say no when it matters. So I’m not going anywhere.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, shrugging in an “it’s a free country” kind of way. But it wasn’t possible to ignore her when we were the only two people in a nine-by-nine-foot room. I knew I should kick her out, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.

“What did you get?”

“Suspension. One week.”

She nodded. “Brutal. But not entirely unjustified. You nearly killed him! Considering how sick he is. Where did you get those Ali moves?”

Great. First she gets cozy with Nose Ring Dude, and then she pours sympathy on Sphincter. Not what I wanted to hear right now. “I did him a favor,” I muttered. “Now he’ll go to the doctor and find out what’s wrong with him. Maybe it won’t be too late.”

“It’s already too late. The tumors are spreading. They won’t be able to stop it,” she said softly. She dropped her bag and sat down on the edge of my bed. She must have noticed the dump trucks and airplanes on the sheets because she smiled a little but didn’t say anything. Then she looked around, probably trying to find out what other things I had in my room that the normal four-year-old would go crazy over.

“I have glow-in-the-dark planet stickers on the ceiling,” I offered. “But you can’t see them since it’s daytime.”

“I have them, too!” she said brightly, then started to cough. It was a horrible, wracking cough, like that of someone with TB, and it went on long enough that I wondered if I should get her some water or smack her on the back. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and said, her voice weak, “Well, I had them at my old house, in Maine.”

She stared up at the ceiling for a long time, and finally I said, “You were about to explain something? Something about why you were getting with that guy in the hallway? What was his name?”

She blushed. “His name’s Kent. Kent Something. And we were not with each other!” she said, slapping me on the shoulder.

“Okay. Well, Kent Something looks charming. I can totally tell why you’d get with him.”

“Stop being so smug. You know he’s far from charming. And if you say I was getting with him one more time, I will smack you. It’s all perfectly innocent.”

I stared at her. “Don’t tell me he’s your brother. That excuse has been pretty much done to death.”

“No. He is not my brother,” she whispered. “And he’s gross. Seriously.”

“You were the one getting with him,” I said, emphasizing the words she didn’t want to hear. Just because.

“Clearly, you’re an idiot,” she mumbled, smacking me again on the shoulder, which was starting to hurt. “I needed skin-to-skin contact to see what was going on with him.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You mean, he’s … Touched?”

“No, but he wants to be. He’d been following me around ever since yesterday. He really has a need. It’s so strong. And I was trying to figure out what it is, if maybe I have the Touch he’d want.”

“Do you?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to process it. It happened so fast. I saw you and I felt so terrible.” She sighed, but then ended up coughing the last bit of air. “I am really sorry if I made you feel bad in front of Bryce and his friend. Is that why you ran away?”

I shrugged. “It’s not that. It’s … you’re right. I want to protect you. The vision—the bad one.”

Her eyes widened. “It’s still there? But we changed—”

“I know. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s going haywire because that’s what my Touch does around you. Maybe I’m seeing things in my head that aren’t real. I have no idea. But to be safe, I think we have to stay away from each other.”

She threw up her hands, exasperated. “What? Why? Really, Nick, you’re so infuriating. Every time we talk about this you keep saying you need to stay away from me. But you never do. I mean, what’s the deal? Do you want to stay away from me?”

I shook my head immediately. “No way.”

“But that’s what you make me think. I don’t want to stay away from you, either,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I like you. You make me happy. When you aren’t avoiding me or thinking I’m trying to get with other guys.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t do a really good job of that.”

She nodded. “Yeah. You pretty much suck at that.” Then she surprised me by leaning forward. She lifted up a small chain around her neck. “See what I got for my birthday?”

She was so close. I tried to concentrate on the piece of jewelry, a silver butterfly or a dragonfly or something, but the only thing registering in my head was that she smelled so good, apples again, and that she wouldn’t be this close if she didn’t want me as much as I wanted her. So I kissed her. “I meant to tell you … happy birthday,” I whispered into her hair.

She looked a little dazed, probably as dazed as I felt, when she finally pulled away. She smiled.

“Better than Kent Something?” I asked.

“I never …,” she began, and then she sort of fainted. She leaned backward, closed her eyes, and then straightened up and shook her head. “Whoa. I feel sick.”

I fanned her face. “Want some water or something?”

She shook her head, a small, embarrassed smile on her face. “No, I’m good.”

“I have that kind of effect on women,” I joked. But then I realized something. “The Touch. You haven’t performed it yet?”

The corners of her mouth turned down. “No. Tonight. Hopefully. Grandma has the person all lined up. But it’s … I’m so nervous.”

I nodded. I got it.

“I mean, what if the person doesn’t show up? What if they change their mind? That was why I was … with Kent … I thought maybe he could be my backup.”

“Calm down,” I said. “Don’t worry. They’ll show up. Do you know who it is?”

“No. But it’s not just that,” she said. “Grandma says this person wants a whole different Touch. So I had to learn a new spell. And it’s a hard one. I didn’t have a lot of time and I’m not really sure I know it. And I feel so weak. And—” She stopped and buried her face in her hands. “Nick. It’s terrible. This whole thing is so terrible.”

I took her in my arms and that’s when she started to cry on my shoulder. So of course it went without saying that I would be there tonight. I had no doubt about that. “I’ll be there for you, okay? I promise. Even if my family bars my doors because of the suspension. And I won’t get in the way this time.”

She sniffled. “Okay.”

“And if this person doesn’t show up, I’ll kidnap some poor loser off the street and you can perform the Touch on them. Okay?”

She laughed. “But nobody should have this Touch,” she said into my T-shirt. “It’s the really bad one. Invisible Assassin. The one that scares me the most.”

The You Wills told me I’d meet with resistance while trying to leave the house, and as usual, they were right. “You don’t think you’re going somewhere tonight,” my mom remarked from her room as I appeared at the top of the stairs in a clean T-shirt. It was like, not only could she see the future, but she had radar and Spidey sense, too. Or maybe she could just sniff my shaving cream and deodorant and hear the jingling sound of my house keys going into my pocket. “You’re grounded for as long as you’re suspended.”

“I need to—”

“Should have thought of that before you got yourself suspended,” she snapped.

I stared at her, hard. Funny that she would pick now to play mother, when she never did the other 1,439 minutes of the day. “Fine. Guess I’ll just go downstairs and watch TV.”

“Fine,” she answered, and I could hear the groaning of her mattress as she settled into it to watch whatever action movie she had picked out.