I tried.

“You sure you’re not sick?” he said.

“Carson, can I ask you something? When we were little, you had seizures, right?”

Carson turned away and walked for the weight equipment. “You remember that?”

“I remember once. On the playground.”

“God, it was so freaking endless.” Carson maneuvered himself under a long bar with weights on either end. “Spot me, okay?”

I had no idea what that meant. From upside down, he grabbed my wrists and brought my hands to the bar. “Just in case I drop it,” he said.

He was asking me to save him. My hands were damp. I wiped them off on my pants before bringing them back to the bar. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t drop it.”

“So what happened?” I said.

“With what?” Carson lowered the bar for the count of ten. I followed him with my hands. He blew the air violently out of his lungs every time he raised the bar. I cringed each time, thinking he shouldn’t be taking his air for granted.

“The seizures.”

Carson sat up and stretched his arms back and forth across his body, facing away from me. “They started when I was three. Got them under control when I was ten. That’s all there is to it. Changed medicine every couple of months for seven freaking years until they found a combination that worked.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Mostly.”

“Were you scared?”

He looked at me hard, opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, and repositioned himself under the bar again. “Nothing to be scared of,” he said, lining up his hands. “Seizures usually don’t kill you. Unless you’re in the water or you crack your head open.” He tilted his head back and tried to laugh, but it sounded forced.

I put my hands on the bar and spotted him for another set. “And you have to take the medicine forever?”

“Nope. I stopped taking one of them last month. So hard to pay attention while I’m on it. Who knows?” he said with a crooked grin. “Maybe I’m as smart as Janna underneath it all.”

“Does your doctor know you stopped taking it?”

“Yeah. I might’ve outgrown the seizures. Doctors say it’s pretty common.”

“How do they know?”

“If I stop taking the medicine and I don’t have a seizure. So far, so good.”

It didn’t seem very scientific to me. How long had he been sick without anyone knowing? I hadn’t seen him since Justin’s party. Had there been any signs? When had the pull begun? And how the hell would I get him to a doctor?

Carson’s phone rang while I was weighing my options. Pretend to be sick, ask him to take me. Somehow convince Dr. Logan to run some thousand-dollar tests. But Carson said seizures didn’t kill. What if it was something else? God, what if it was his heart and working out was making it worse?

Carson snapped his phone shut and said, “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“Kevin’s house.”

“Janna told us to wait here.”

“Janna tells me to do a lot of things. Janna is my younger sister. If I listened to everything Janna told me to do, I’d be bored out of my fucking mind. Let’s go. I’ll text her to meet us there.”

I stood in front of the steps, blocking his path. “Why can’t we just wait for her?”

He brushed past me. “No point. Justin’s there already. Decker and Tara are on their way.”

Well, that settled it. “I don’t want to go.”

“It’s a miracle Decker gets you to do anything. I’m going.

You can sit here and wait for Janna by yourself, or you can come.”

He was already halfway up the steps. I couldn’t let him out of my sight. “Okay. But I’m driving.”

I drove, on edge the whole way. Feeling the constant pull toward Carson. Wondering how long I had. Kevin lived in the only community in our town for rich people. Community is an overstatement. More like a street. So I drove upward on a steep, winding road, passing the gorgeous homes nestled into the side of a mountain. I couldn’t see it from the road, but the houses here apparently had a beautiful view of Falcon Lake from up high.

Kevin’s home was the last house on the street. With the snow and the ice and the sharp curves, it’d take a good ten minutes to reach the top.

I kept shooting glances at Carson as I drove, but I tried to keep my eyes on the road more often than not. We were about a quarter way up the mountain when something changed. What had been a harmless pull, just a warning, shifted into an itch in the center of my brain. I whipped my head at Carson and slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road.