“Let’s go. We’re going to be late.” She frowned.

“I really don’t need to see the doctor. I feel fine,” I said, which was actually a lie. I felt the pull, strong and forceful, leading me to Dr. Logan’s office. Someone was very sick. Someone was going to die. I didn’t want to see them, not by myself, not without Troy to whisper in my ear and hold my hand and act like it was just a natural part of life.

Mom hitched her purse onto her shoulder and stabbed her finger in the direction of the building. “Now,” she said, barely moving her lips.

I kept my eyes on the maroon carpeting when we walked in. I stood in front of a large fish tank near the reception desk and felt the pull. Only it wasn’t from one person. It was coming from everywhere behind me, in a giant semicircle. Faint tugging from every angle, stronger in some directions, just like at the hospital. And in the back corner, something stronger than all the rest.

I scanned the room when Mom and I went to get a seat. People old and young were clustered on the cushioned benches along the walls. There was a wrongness about them. A boy, younger than me, with panicked, fidgeting eyes, breathed through his mouth and followed ghosts darting across the room. An ancient woman clasped her hands together in her lap, trying to control the relentless shaking of her limbs. A woman about my mother’s age lacked any movement in half her face. When the receptionist called her forward, half her mouth turned up in a smile while the other half hung down with gravity, a sideways “S.”

The wrongness made them seem not quite human. Even the fish knew it. They hid inside rock caves and studied the pebbles like they held the meaning of life. They wouldn’t look at us.

Against my better judgment, I took a philosophy elective my sophomore year. It was Decker’s idea. He thought it’d be fun to have a class together. It wasn’t. It was infuriating. There were no finite answers. No timelines or equations or conjugations. Just thoughts and conjectures and debates. Decker thought and conjectured and debated. I took vigorous notes, trying to discern the underlying pattern. I drew arrows and connected dots. I got an A because I memorized everything anyone said in class. I rarely contributed myself.

They spoke at length about what it means to be human—the human condition, they said. The capacity for good and evil, that we are rational beings, that we have free will. No, no, no. I shook my head and finally raised my hand. I read them my list: twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, bipedal, four-chambered heart.

But then Justin Baxter bared his teeth and said his uncle had Down’s syndrome and was missing a chromosome, and he was most decidedly still human. And Tara Spano, who had it out for me even then, said, “Well, what about people who lost a leg?” And Decker smirked at me. I pressed my lips together and never contributed to a philosophy discussion again.

I wanted to go back to my philosophy class and amend my answer. The brain made us human. The undamaged, grayscale imaged, correctly wired brain.

I studied the person in the back corner, where the pull was the strongest. He wasn’t elderly, like I expected. He was barely older than me. A woman in floral scrubs sat next to him, staring off into space. He was rocking back and forth and humming one note repeatedly, pausing only to take a breath. His skin was gray. His eyes were hollow. I would’ve known he was sick even without the freaky brain rewiring.

But he was more than sick. That itch began in the center of my brain, just the hint of it, just a hum really, a low vibration. But it had begun. He was going to die. Like the person in the hospital, like Mrs. Merkowitz, like that man in the fire, like the woman in the church, he’d be dead soon. Very soon.

So when we were finally called back, I didn’t want to talk about myself.

“Your mother says you had another hallucination.” Dr. Logan settled onto a stool and scooted toward the exam table.

“I don’t think I did,” I said, bouncing my right leg and staring at the door.

“Why don’t you explain the situation,” Dr. Logan said to Mom.

She opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to realize that if she told the doctor what she really thought, she’d be claiming I was a murderer. Or a manslaughterer. Or a reckless endangerer. “Well, it was the first night back. On second thought, she may have been sleepwalking. Now she takes her sleeping pills and it hasn’t happened since.”

“Those people out there are pretty sick,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

Dr. Logan followed my gaze to the closed door and looked down at the folder in his lap. “I really can’t discuss my other patients with you.”