Odette looked up. Her mascara was running down her face in streaks as she said, “Oh, Emma, it’s simplyawful!”
“What?” I couldn’t imagine what had happenednow.
“It’s Theo and I,” Odette blubbered. “After he got in that fight with Igor, we made out in the alleyway!”
“The alleyway?”
“Yes! Forfive whole minutes!”
I resisted rolling my eyes and sat on the bed to rub her back. “It’s not all bad.”
“Yes it is!” Odette wailed. “I’m going to lose Theo forever!” She sank her face into a pillow.
“Why would you think that?” I forced her to sit up. Odette grabbed a tissue from her desk and blew into it, her nose sounding like a trumpet.
“You don’t get it. My family totally abandoned me. My mom doesn’t talk to me anymore, and my dad’s not around to notice the difference. Theo and his family are the only people who care about me.”
Her lip wavered. “And… and now things are complicated. Theo likes me, and I don’t really know if I like him, and if we get together, everything will be ruined.” She slapped a hand to her forehead and fell backward onto her cushions.
“I’m sure it’s not that way.” I didn’t want to laugh, but at the same time, Odette was being a bit over the top. I didn’t know who was the bigger drama queen— her or Ethan.
Ethan. It was always Ethan.
Odette shook her head furiously. “Theo and I arebesties.We’ve been close since we were toddlers, basically. He’s the one person who’s always been there, no matter what. Let’s say we start dating, and then we break up. We won’t be able to be friends, then I’ll lose him and his familyforever, and I’ll be all alone! I can’t lose him, Emma!”
Odette broke into a fresh bout of tears. Theo had said something similar during the King’s Ball, but in my opinion, the two of them were being ridiculous.
“You’re acting out of a place of fear instead of a place of love,” I said kindly. I wiped a few of her tears away. “You two are so afraid you’re going to lose each other that you’re not even willing to try.”
Odette stared up at the canopy of her bed, clearly confused. “I don’t know if love is worth putting what we have at risk. Theo never treated me differently because I’m autistic, and I don’t want to lose that.”
“You won’t,” I said. “And if you do, there will be other people there who will accept you as you are.”
“Do you think so?” She fiddled with her glasses. “I just want to be myself, without having to worry about what others will think.”
“And why couldn’t you?”
“I mirror people a lot,” Odette confessed. “It’s really hard for me to read social cues, so instead of being myself, I just try to copy what everyone else is doing so I can fit in. It got really bad when I was in high school. For the longest time, I just pretended to be other people so I could be accepted, instead of trying to be me. Theo pulled me out of that.”
“He wants to pull out something else, too,” I joked.
Odette blinked. “Do you really mean that?”
I facepalmed. “Sarcasm, Odette.”
“Oh, yeah. I don’t get that. I take everything at face value.” She giggled.
Something I’d clearly realized within the first twenty-four hours of knowing her.
“It’s just so hard for me totalkto people,” Odette went on. “I know I can be myself with you, and with our friends, but anywhere else it isso difficultto speak up. I can mimic what other people can do, but it’s hard to convey what’s really on my mind. Being autistic, I can’t decipher body language, or nonverbal cues. Facial expressions are strange to me… I have to guess what everyone’s thinking. It’s like everyone else is speaking a language I don’t know, and I have to make the rules up as I go, because I can’t pick up on the clues everyone else can.”
She sighed. “Being a kid was really hard. People thought I was too blunt, just blurting out whatever came to my head most of the time.”
“That’s not always a bad thing,” I said. I appreciated that quality in Odette. Too many people in this world wanted to pussy foot around, and it drove me mad.
“Because we think in the same way. I didn’t really have any friends that were girls until you,” Odette said. “Women are always really hard for me to read, harder than men. Theo was my only friend until I came to Arcanea University. I was bullied really badly in the Russian company. I just couldn’t figure out what the other dancers wanted out of me.”
“You got attached to me fairly quickly.”
