One (One Universe)

pulls me toward him by the waist for another hug. I squeeze his hand and smile at him as he walks me down the hall and out the front door. But instead of smiling back at me, he trains his eyes on the horizon. He’s not normally this quiet — doesn’t usually focus on anything but me, kissing me goodbye.
    “You okay?” I finally ask.
    “Oh. Um, yeah. Just preoccupied.”
    “About what? The girls?”
    “No. I mean, yeah. But…”
    “What? What’s going on?” I search his face.
    “The other night we…uh… The police came to my house.”
    My breath catches in my chest. “Why?”
    “The local police found my backpack, Mer. From Homecoming night. Still on that roof we landed on.”
    “How did they even know…?”
    “I had an old flash drive in there with my name on it. Stupid. Anyway, they brought it to the house and talked to my dad because he’s my dad, you know, VP at the Hub and all, and they didn’t want to press charges against me.”
    “Okay. So what’s the big deal?”
    “They thought I was climbing it, you know, vandalizing it. But they…they don’t know.”
    “About your One?”
    Elias nods.
    “Okay. So?”
    “So my dad does. And he’s still watching me to see when I’ll develop that second power. He’s been dying for it to manifest for the last 10 years. And now he thinks this is it.”
    “So…maybe this is it, Elias. Maybe this is our chance to…”
    “No,” Elias says, his mouth set in a hard line. He shakes his head quickly, then stares into my eyes. “No, we’re not telling them about you.”
    “What’s the big deal, Elias? We’re amazing. Maybe they could figure us out, you know? Why we work. Maybe they could…”
    Maybe they could fix us.
    He shakes his head to each side sharply. “I don’t…” He trails off for a second, looks off in the distance. “I don’t know what’s going on with Nora and Lia. I haven’t heard from them for a while, until now. I don’t know if what’s going on over there is good. And until I know…” He draws me to him, squeezing me tightly to him.
    “You don’t want them to know about me.”
    “I don’t want them to know about you.” He nods and presses a kiss to the top of my head.
    A burning acidic feeling creeps around my stomach and floods my chest. Elias is worried about me being at the Hub, the one place I’ve always wanted to go, where Mr. Hoffman thinks I belong.
    Elias rubs my upper arms, whispers, “I’ll deal with it. I promise. Don’t worry about it, okay?”
    The warmth of his words tamps the burning down and makes my heart jump in the way that reminds me that, at least for now, he’s more important than all that.
    I get in my car to head home, and Elias bends down to toss his sweatshirt on my lap and kiss me while I put my seatbelt on. He shuts the door for me while I start the car, turns, then looks over his shoulder and flashes me that dimple and wink. But I can’t shake the memory of the cloudiness to his eyes instead of the sparkle I love.

FOURTEEN
    F rost has started to decorate the Nebraska grass overnight, and Elias is deep in practices and private coaching now. Personally, I think it’s weird, and he doesn’t seem too excited about it. But I think I know what’s going on. It’s hard for Ones to find a way to fit in and especially hard to figure out how to make our parents happy. Especially if they have crazy kickass twin Supersibs.
    God knows the closest I ever got to appeasing Mom and Dad was driving Michael and Max to practice, getting out of the house, and accepting the transfer to Nelson without a fight. And if I didn’t like Elias so much, they’d be getting an earful about that, too, because these holo-lectures that pass as classes at Nelson are so boring they make me want to crawl out of my own skin.
    So if this makes his dad happy, if it’s their thing together, then I’m not going to argue. Especially since working with the coach more often was part of the deal after Elias admitted to climbing that roof. Scaling historic buildings and not using a Super to do it pissed his dad off twice as much, and Elias picked extra hours in practice over being grounded. I think he’s nuts — I’d rather spend time alone in my room than do a forced workout any day — until he reminded me that he could stop by to see me on his way home from coaching.
    It’s early November now, and we’re in the few weeks between autumn soccer and winter soccer for Michael and Max. Instead of going to