The bruise on his cheek had turned an amazing purplish-gray, spreading around his eye in a crescent. Otherwise, he didn’t seem too badly hurt. He favored his shoulder, but he could still move it. It could have been so much worse. Her big fear was that he would be knocked unconscious while invisible and not rematerialize. Just stay invisible forever, and she’d be the only person who could find him, zeroing in on him with her power and tripping over his body.
“I’m surprised you even came to school today,” she said.
“I could only stay away so long.”
“But you’re okay, right? What are you doing here?” She nodded toward the nurse’s office.
He looked changed. “As soon as I showed up, one of the teachers dragged me here. They kept asking questions about trouble at home.”
“They think you’re being abused?”
“Look at my face.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.” She resisted an urge to brush a flop of brown hair off his forehead. Weirdly, the bruise made him look simultaneously tough and vulnerable.
“I told her I walked into a door,” he said.
“You couldn’t think of a better excuse than that?”
He huffed. “I wasn’t thinking. It’s not important. I know what I did wrong. You’re right, I have to figure out how to phase out when people are hitting me. I’ll do better next time.”
How about avoiding getting hit at all? “That’s what we need to talk about. You need to back off.”
“It didn’t go perfect but I did okay—”
“You have to back off,” Anna said. “My mother knows it was you.”
He stared. “What? That’s impossible, how could she?”
“I don’t know, but she does. It’s her thing, she’s a control freak.”
“But how does she know about me?”
“She keeps tabs on everybody.”
“So it’s not enough that she’s president of the richest company there is, she has to spy on everybody?”
Flustered, Anna waved him off. “I don’t know, she’s paranoid. That’s not the point right now. You need to cool it because she’s watching.”
He thought for a minute, so grim and serious she almost laughed. “I can’t back off now. It’ll go better next time, I know it will. I need more practice.”
“Crime’ll still be there in a month or two. You need more practice where someone isn’t trying to kill you.”
“But that’s just it, how am I going to get practice using my powers when there’s danger if I’m not really in danger?”
“That’s a stupid argument,” she said. “I worry about you, Teddy.”
“Well. Thanks for worrying.” Even with the giant bruise, his gee-whiz smile lit up his face. It was hard staying mad at him.
“Any time.”
The warning chime sounded, a bell tone that was meant to be soothing but managed to be annoying as it echoed through the halls, because it meant they had five minutes to get to class. Anna didn’t much want to go to class at the best of times.
She hooked her arm around Teddy’s and hauled him away from the nurse’s office. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“What if I go out with Teia or Lew? Or Sam? We can watch each other’s backs—”
“So you can get in twice as much trouble?”