His name was Daniel Voss, and he saw the fire.
It was October of Nora's junior year, and she had been having a terrible week — the kind where the hum under her skin turned into a roar, where she broke two phone screens by holding them too long and made the school WiFi go out for four hours. She had eaten lunch alone behind the art building, pressing her back against the cold brick, trying to breathe herself smaller.
She didn't notice the trash can catching fire until she smelled the smoke.
It was small — just the paper overflowing the top, catching from nothing, from the static crackling off her in waves she couldn't control. She stared at it, horrified, and then a boy crouched beside it and calmly poured his entire water bottle over it until it hissed and died.
He stood up and looked at her. He had dark eyes and a calm face, the kind that had seen things and decided they were interesting rather than frightening.
"That happen a lot?" he asked.
She opened her mouth to deny it. "No," she said instead.
He sat down beside her on the ground as if they were old friends. "I'm Daniel. I moved here two months ago and I don't know anyone and lunch is unbearable. Can I sit here?"
"You're already sitting."
"Good point."
She waited for him to ask about the fire. He didn't. He just opened his sandwich and ate it and told her about the terrible town he'd moved from, and then asked what she was reading, and they talked about books for twenty minutes while she waited for the world to fall apart.
It didn't.
He became her second friend. And then, against every wall she had built, he became more.
He was the kind of person who paid attention — not the prying kind, but the quiet kind, the kind that catches what everyone else misses. He noticed when she flinched at loud sounds. He noticed that plants grew faster near her. He noticed that she always knew when it was about to rain.
One night, walking home, the streetlights ahead of them blinked out one by one as they approached. She stopped walking.
"It's me," she said. She hadn't planned to say it. "I do this. To lights. To a lot of things. I don't — I can't always—" Her voice broke on the last word.
He was quiet for a moment. She was terrified of the silence.
Then he said, "Okay."
Just that. Okay. As if she'd told him she was left-handed.
She burst into tears in the middle of the street, which mortified her, and he didn't try to fix it or hush it — he just stood there with her, steady as a wall, until she was done.
"I'm not normal," she said, wiping her face roughly.
"I know," he said. "I've known since the trash can."
"And you're not—" she couldn't finish it.
"Afraid?" He considered it seriously, like a real question deserved a real answer. "No. Should I be?"
She thought of every lightbulb she had burst, every garden she had killed, every room she had made too cold with grief. "Probably," she said honestly.
He smiled. "Too bad."
It was, she would later think, the best and most devastating night of her life. Because being seen — truly seen — is only beautiful until the world decides it won't allow it.