Description: In A World Just Right CHAPTER 1 IT''S TWO O''CLOCK IN THE morning, and the streetlight stretches my shadow across Kylie''s lawn up into her mother''s English garden. My shadow''s head is where the fat yellow lilies will bloom after graduation this summer. Bunches of smaller flowers her mom planted yesterday, a rainbow of color in sunlight, sleep under a blanket of moonlight gray. I glance up and down the street at a neighborhood of unlit windows, to confirm no one saw me appear out of thin air. Without crushing anything, I navigate Kylie''s garden and squeeze between bushes to reach the window. Her curtains are drawn, so I can''t see inside. With a kick to the mulch, I uncover the butter knife we hid there and slide it along the window''s edge to unhitch the screen. I push the unlocked window up, then part the curtains to see into the room. Kylie''s sitting up in bed. Awake. Startled. Watching me come through the window. She relaxes when she figures out it''s just me, Jonathan, the messed-up boyfriend. I crash into the room as quietly as I can and slip off my sneakers. Kylie slides over and pulls back the covers for me to lie down. She won''t ask if I''m okay, because clearly I''m not. I don''t make surprise nighttime visits casually. "Did I scare you?" I ask. "A little." "Sorry." She props her head on her hand, her long red-brown hair looking black as it trails to the pillow. The darkness smooths her face, gives her two wide eyes over a bump of nose and kissable lips. Lips denied me in the real world. She presses closer, and our lips meet. For a few glorious moments we kiss each other, and I start to feel better. She''s warm and smells like she showered before bed, all coconutty or pineappley or something. Then she pulls away. Her eyes search my face, waiting. I don''t actually want to talk. I want more kissing. I want more her. I reach for her hand, separate out her index finger, and draw it down the left side of my face, from my eye practically to my jaw. She doesn''t flinch, and that is exactly what I need. I pull up my shirt and place her hand on my chest, where the scarring is the worst. She moves her fingers over the snarls and craters, caresses them, then replaces my shirt and kisses the scar on my face. Her eyes look into mine. Most people can''t look me in the eyes. The real Kylie has never looked me in the eyes, but this Kylie seeps into me with a gaze. She is not disgusted by me. She loves me. She puts a finger to the scar on my face. "Is this bothering you again?" "I don''t know." Actually, that''s a lie. What''s bothering me is the weird cosmic whisper I got just before I came here, which scared me more than my near-death memories, but I do not discuss cosmic topics with Kylie. Thankfully, she rolls with my faked ignorance and stays focused on my scar. "It''s just a line." She moves a little deeper into the covers and puts her head on my chest, ear to my heart. "And evidence that you''re a miracle." I enfold her in my arms and say nothing. No one in the real world cares that I''m a miracle, not since the doctors congratulated themselves and discharged me. "Seriously," she says, and I can feel her words vibrate against my chest. "Do you want to talk about it?" Talking won''t help. Sometimes the truth cannot set you free. Sometimes, when the night is bad and the universe taunts me, I just need to be with my girlfriend. "I feel better now," I say. Kylie breathes a contented sigh and snuggles against me. My body practically shivers with the ecstasy of being with her. She''s everything I need to live, and she''s not even real. * * * Here''s a story for you. Once upon a time there was this kid named Jonathan Aubrey. He was eight years old. He had a mom and a dad and a six-year-old sister, Tess, and an Auntie Carrie and Uncle Joey. One day they all got on a plane to Disney World. Except for Uncle Joey, who was on some business trip or other. It was going to be the funnest, most perfect trip of a lifetime. The airplane took off . . . and fell out of the sky into Boston Harbor. (Yes, the Tragedy in the Harbor, the famous crash they contrasted with the Miracle on the Hudson.) Little Jonathan was one of three people who survived. He spent three months at Massachusetts General Hospital in a coma, and when he woke up, they sent him home. Except there wasn''t anyone at home anymore. They were in the ground at Pine Street Cemetery, and he had missed all the funerals and everything. He went to live at Uncle Joey''s house instead. Uncle Joey tried to be good to Jonathan, but there was that business thing that often kept him away, and Uncle Joey was grieving just as bad because he''d lost Auntie Carrie. Jonathan didn''t come out of that coma the same way he went in. He had a little lag in his speech. He limped. He had burns and scars on parts of his body. Most of the ugly skin he kept covered with long sleeves and pants, even on days when it got to be almost a hundred degrees. But one uncoverable, ragged red scar ran from his eye to his jaw, and the marks of the stitches made a railroad track on his face. When he returned to school, kids were afraid of him. Teachers tried to be nice, but they just couldn''t stop every kid who whispered "Frankenstein." Jonathan learned to take it quietly. At recess he''d sit on the monkey bars pretending he was part of everyone''s play, even though he got thoroughly ignored. He paid attention in school and liked his teachers, but teachers'' attention wasn''t enough, and they tried too hard to make him feel normal. He wanted so much to be asked to play kickball. The closest he got was when Hunter LeRoy made him fetch the ball out of some poison ivy, saying that if he got a rash, it couldn''t make him any uglier. He really said that. Hunter LeRoy is a jerk to this day. Jonathan would sit in his room in Uncle Joey''s house and stare out the window. Sometimes he would pretend the street crawled with kids fighting some kind of rebellion against alien invaders, and he was their leader. He would have friends and daring escapades with a healthy dose of heroics, and his scar would be a badge of honor, a war wound. One day he squeezed his eyes shut so tightly with longing that when he opened them . . . he was standing in the middle of a battle with a gun in his hands. There were people and aliens running in the street. Laser blasts shot craters into the manicured lawns. Tanks, helicopters, bodysuits full of gadgetry everywhere. He was wearing a bodysuit full of gadgetry. "Commander Aubrey!" someone yelled. Jonathan made a motion with his arm, and a dozen kid soldiers followed him down the street to fight the alien invaders. This new world was Jonathan-is-a-hero. He went there a lot. Until he figured out it was not the only world he could make. * * * I''m awake before Kylie, watching the red digital numbers count down the time till her alarm. Two more minutes. She has rolled away from me, forehead pressing against the wall, and most of the covers are bunched in her curled arms. I''m on my back, lying at the other edge of the bed, not touching her with my disturbed thoughts. I am here because something happened last night--a breath, a murmur, a shift in the earth, like everything under me slid a millimeter off center from where it should be, which is a weird feeling when everything looks perfectly normal and no sound at all has been made. But I got all creeped-out in a way I feel silly trying to explain, and the shiver I got was so powerful, it sent me scrambling out of bed and over to Kylie''s, just so she could put right the world. To a certain extent I just have to put up with weirdness in my totally weird life. Kylie fixed my mood, so all''s quiet on the western front this morning. I can''t reward her for her good deed by letting the squawk of the alarm wake her, so I carefully turn it off and roll myself over to fit my body to hers. She makes a little groany wake-up noise and pulls my arm over her. "What time is it?" she whispers. "Would you believe me if I said school''s canceled?" She takes a deep breath and sighs it out, and we lie there together, content for a moment before we roll back the covers and rise. We exchange a few kisses laced with morning breath, which are sweet anyway. "You okay?" she asks. "All better." I convince her with a smile. She reflects it back at me, magnified by her beautifulness, and I come this close to dragging her back under the covers. With a final kiss she leaves for the bathroom. I slip out the window, replace the screen, and rebury the butter knife. Since witnesses are waking in the surrounding houses, I crouch in the bushes to vanish back to reality. Step one: Squeeze eyes closed. Step two: Picture world. (That would be the real world this time.) Step three: Open eyes. That''s all there is to it. I''m standing perfectly still in the woods behind Pennington High School, sensing the world around me. Nothing seems out of place. Relief carries away my tension like rain washing down a roof. Whatever was worrying me last night has passed. I trudge up a path through the woods to the school. Because my house is pretty far away, there wasn''t enough time to walk here and still get to class by the bell, so my sacrifice for a few hours earlier with Kylie is a shower at school. The back door is always open in the morning, so I sneak insi

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