Yo te inventé

At seven, Alex stands at the lobster tank in a Meijer supermarket, her red pigtails pressed against the glass.

At seven, Alex stands at the lobster tank in a Meijer supermarket, her red pigtails pressed against the glass. A boy with impossible blue eyes approaches—not to comment on her hair, but to recite the lobster's scientific classification. He smells like fish and pond scum, covered in Band-Aids, thrown into a pond by someone he won't name. He lifts her to the tank's hatch, and she pulls lobsters out one by one, dropping them onto the tile floor. Then her mother yanks her away, and the boy waves goodbye with her abandoned Yoo-hoo bottle. She never learns his name. Years later, her mother reveals the truth: she never freed the lobsters, and the boy was never real. Her first friend was a hallucination—the earliest sign of the paranoid schizophrenia diagnosed at thirteen.

The boy Alex hallucinated at seven sits in every class

After spray-painting the word Communists across her old school's gym floor during a psychotic episode, Alex transfers to East Shoal for senior year with mandatory community service. She has a system for managing her paranoid schizophrenia: photograph everything suspicious, because hallucinations fade from pictures over time. Check food for poison. Spin in circles when entering rooms. Her coworker Tucker at Finnegan's diner warns her about a customer named Miles—feared by the entire school—and when he walks in, his blue eyes detonate something in her memory. She spills water everywhere. The next morning, he's at the locker beside hers, in every AP class, assigned as her chemistry partner. During their first lab, Miles murmurs the same Latin classification for leeches that Blue Eyes spoke ten years ago. Alex's hands start shaking and never really stop.

Pranks escalate as a ragtag club becomes Alex's orbit

Miles kicks Alex's pencil across the room; she shoves his backpack off his desk. He steps on her shoelace; she rips his homework in half. This low-grade warfare becomes their language as Alex joins Miles's community service club—Theo, who writes for the school paper, her identical twin brothers Evan and Ian, the enormous and gentle wrestler Art, and the French-speaking Jetta. When football captain Cliff corners Alex after a game, threatening to shave her lobster-red hair, Miles and the triplets materialize to clear a path. Tucker explains the scoreboard legend: a girl died under it years ago, and Principal McCoy worships it like a deity. Alex glues Miles's locker shut. Miles destroys her textbook bindings. She fills his backpack with fire ants. Their mutual hostility starts to feel like something else entirely.