1 0 - N O A H

"Okay, I'll tell you," I say softly, not completely sure why I agreed. My brain is all muddled, and I'm making way too many illogical decisions. Maybe Emma's right, in a way, about how getting this off my chest might help. But I don't know where to start, so I just sit there in silence, fiddling with my hands.

Eventually, Chance asks, "Would you be more comfortable on the couch?"

I don't know what else to do but nod. He stands up and places a hand on my back to lead me over to the living room. As he sits down, he pats the cushion next to him invitingly. I join him on the couch reluctantly, apathetically, letting my body slump down.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asks, and the sheer amount of genuine concern in his eyes makes me feel guilty. "You really don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

I shake my head. "No, I should. I just don't know where to start." After a long pause, I look up at him, saying, "Have you ever heard of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?"

"Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?" Chance looks confused. "You were tired all the time? I know this is going to come out wrong, but...doesn't everyone get tired? Why is there a special name for it?"

I sigh, burying my face in my hands. I can already feel the waves of dread and panic washing over me, but I push them down, reminding myself that he's only trying to help. "Yeah, that did come out wrong. But I know you didn't mean it like everyone else did, so it's okay. That's what everyone told me, but this is different."

"Different?"

"It's not just fatigue, it's worse. It's like you physically can't get out of bed in the morning because you're so tired even though you've slept for seventeen hours straight and it feels like you haven't slept at all and your arms just won't move, no matter how much you want them to. Like there's a weight holding you down."

I take a shuddering breath. Just talking about this makes me remember the feeling of everything, and the panic is getting harder and harder to hold at bay. My chest starts to feel tight, and every time my heart beats, it feels like there's an invisible force pulling me further and further into myself. I curl in until my head rests on my knees and my arms hug my legs and I can't fold myself any smaller. "Never mind. Just forget about it. You wouldn't understand. You wouldn't—"

I stop and remember to breathe when Chance rests his head on my shoulder and grabs my hand, coaxing it down from where I'm painfully gripping my head. He turns my chin so that my eyes meet his. "Then help me understand. You have to be willing to tell me so that I can understand."

"Sorry," I mumble. I want nothing more than to stop talking and just shut down. To retreat back into myself. But I'm so close to getting this all off my chest, and I don't want to let this opportunity slip away. "I thought you wouldn't want to hear because you might not want to get close to me. To get attached to me. Because of your moving and stuff. I don't know what it's like to move and leave people behind, but it sounds really sad."

Chance frowns slightly, his eyes trained on where I'm fiddling with my fingers. His hand still rests over mine, so every time I move my hands, he feels it. "It's not that I don't want to get attached because it'll hurt to leave. As cliché as that is, it makes sense. But that's not what I want. I want to get attached to someone so that I know what it's like to feel sad when I leave. Because even though it will be sad, it's even sadder not being able to say that I've ever missed someone. I just don't know what I'm doing. So please, tell me and help me understand."

"Okay." I don't pull my hand out of his grasp, finding the feeling of his hand wrapped around mine comforting, keeping me grounded. I simultaneously want to hug him and run away, and this strikes a good balance. "It all started when I got sick like this. Just a cold. I didn't think anything of it until three weeks had gone by and I hadn't gotten better. And then by a month later I was getting worse."

"Worse?"

"I developed horrible headaches. They were probably close to the most painful thing I've ever felt, and they never went away. I woke up with a headache, went to school with a headache, went to sleep with a headache. Then my throat started hurting all the time, so I started drinking massive amounts of water to keep my throat wet, which meant I was always full, so I didn't eat anything. I got dizzy spells whenever I went from laying down to sitting up or sitting to standing.

"It eventually got so bad that I couldn't go to school anymore. I ended up missing so much school they made me stay behind a grade. Everyone in my old grade thought I was stupid and stopped acknowledging me, and the people in my current grade also think I'm stupid and won't talk to me. Because I'm the kid who got held back. That's why I don't really talk to anyone else and why I don't care about skipping school."

I pause, but he doesn't say anything. He just nods and squeezes my hand as a gentle reminder that he's still listening. I reach over with my free hand and grab a pillow, wrapping it in a hug. I need to squeeze something or else I'll cry.

"My family was concerned, of course," I continue, "and they started taking me to doctors. Pediatricians, neurologists, cardiologists. Infectious disease doctors. Anyone they could think of. I must have seen at least fifteen doctors. One doctor prescribed me a course of antibiotics even though she couldn't find any signs of infection. Just kind of a last-ditch effort, you know? But it actually started making me feel better after few days, and I felt normal about a week after I started taking the medicine. But a few days later, I was back to being sick. So the doctor gave me more antibiotics. Different kinds, different lengths. But it followed the exact same pattern.

"It was almost worse that it worked," I choke out, my eyes burning as I fight to keep them from filling up with tears. "It was like they were giving me a taste of freedom and then just taking it away. I finally got somewhat used to feeling horrible, and then they took that away. I felt so much better, and then everything came back with a vengeance. And since I could actually remember what it felt like to feel healthy, it seemed to much worse."

"That sounds horrible," Chance murmurs. He traces patterns over my hand and up my arm, and a trail of goosebumps follows his touch.

"Yeah," I whisper. "None of them could figure out what was wrong, but none of them wanted to admit it, so they started telling me it was all in my head. That my parents needed to send me to therapy. That I was just depressed and making stuff up for attention."

"And were you depressed?" Chance asks me, squeezing my hand. His expression is sad, and like me, his eyes are a little bit glassy from unshed tears.

"Well yeah, obviously. Who wouldn't be? But I became depressed a few months after I started feeling sick, not before. Same with the anxiety."

"Anxiety?" Chance repeats, his brow furrowing. "What makes you anxious?"

I bark out a laugh. My throat is starting to hurt again, and talking is starting to hurt, but I'm too far in to stop now. "Transportation is the worst. Cars, boats, trains, buses, and especially planes. But also pretty much everything else." I turn my head to stare at him. "What if there's a fire in the house and I die of asphyxiation? What if there's an earthquake, I'm on the first floor, and the ceiling collapses on me? What if the house is broken into while I'm home alone? What if I get sick and this whole thing happens again?"

I know what he wants to say before he even makes a sound. "Don't just look at me and tell me how statistically unlikely those things are. I know. I've been telling myself that for the past three years, and it's not working. It terrifies me when I'm alone with my thoughts, so I try to stay active. I go out as much as possible, since when I'm around other people, I'm not stuck in my head. But going out scares me too."

"Is this why you can't sleep?"

"Kind of. Eventually, one doctor diagnosed me with something called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. There's no official test to diagnose it, and there's no known cure. Some doctors say that exercise helps recovery, and others say that exercise makes it worse. There's no known cause. It's just something doctors say when they don't have anything else to give you but still want to sound like they're smart and they know what they're doing."

Chance hums and shifts into a more comfortable position. But he doesn't say anything, letting me pause to collect myself and continue when I feel comfortable. He's such a good listener. With anyone else, I'd probably have stopped talking by now. I take a tissue from the box on the living room table and blow my nose before continuing.

"One of the most common symptoms is a disruption in sleep. You'll either sleep much more or much less. For a while, I was sleeping for seventeen hours a day. For almost two years. And every morning, I woke up feeling like I hadn't slept at all. And eventually, sleeping seventeen hours a day turned into sleeping for seven, then five, then three. And I still wake up feeling like I haven't slept at all, but that's because I actually haven't."

"Can you not sleep just because you can't, or do you stay awake thinking?"

I shake my head, unable to answer because my eyes have filled with tears and my eyes are burning from the effort of holding everything in. My nose is a complete mess, too, because it was already stuffy before I started getting all teary. I definitely sound congested, even to my own ears. And just when I think I have everything under control, Chance wraps his arms around me and pulls my head to his shoulder, running his hand through my hair like he was when I woke up earlier.

I break down, letting him hold me as the sobs I'd been trying so hard to hold back just fall out. I've never talked to anyone about this like I am right now, and even though I feel like a selfish idiot for making Chance put up with this, I feel lighter, even as I cry. Which is a strong sign that I'm long overdue for an emotional breakdown.

"I developed a sort of phantom claustrophobia," I say shakily as soon as I feel like I can talk without breaking down again.

"Oh," he says softly. "Sorry if this made you uncomfortable." He loosens his hold on me and tries to disentangle me from his grasp.

"No," I say desperately, holding his arms in place. A few stray tears make their way down my face, but the force behind them isn't quite so strong anymore. It's weak enough that I can keep a straight face and prevent my voice from trembling, even as the tears drip down from my chin onto my arms. "Personal contact doesn't bother me. It's the walls."

"Walls?"

"At first, I just couldn't sleep with my door closed. So I slept with it open, and that was fine. But then I couldn't sleep if I could see the walls in my room, because it felt like they were pressing in on me. It made it hard to breathe. So I turned off every possible light. But then it was so dark that the darkness felt like a wall, and I couldn't sleep with the darkness there either.

"I would see the walls or the complete darkness and I could only think about how small the room seemed. How it seemed like the walls were closing in on me. My heart rate goes up, and I can't breathe. That's why I sleep at Emma's, because if the fireplace is on, the darkness doesn't feel like it's pressing in but it's not bright enough to see the walls."

"Why do you call it phantom?" Chance asks, his voice causing his chest to vibrate against my forehead. I can feel his heart beating right under my ear, and each time, it sends a little shiver through my body. It's partly due to the chills from my fever, I think, but it's also something else that I can't identify. "It seems very real to me."

"It's phantom because I have no idea what caused it," I respond. "I never had any traumatic experiences with small spaces or anything like that. It just...appeared. That's why it's phantom."

"Just because you don't know why it started doesn't make it not real," he counters. "I feel like calling it phantom makes you try to convince yourself that it's not as big of a problem as it really is, and that's not healthy."

"Why not?"

"Because you matter. Your problems matter. You shouldn't try to pretend they don't exist."

"Okay."

He taps me on the shoulder, his colder hands against my feverish skin making me shiver. And when I look up, he raises an eyebrow. Or at least, he tries. But just like a couple days ago, he can't actually raise one at once, so his eyebrows furrow into a weird shape instead. If I had enough energy, it'd make me smile. "Do you really believe that, or are you just saying that to get me to stop talking?"

I can't bring myself to reply, scared to meet his eyes. Because the truth is that I don't really believe him, not quite, and he knows it. It's not that I think I don't matter, for the most part, but my problems are a different matter. I always just ignore them until they go away or blow up in my face instead of confronting them or talking about them with other people. Because who am I to complain about my problems when other people have it so much worse? That'd make me ungrateful.

He sighs at my lack of response. "Thanks for not lying to me, at least," he says. "We'll have to work on that, though."

"Work on what?"

"Helping you realize that you matter."

Hearing him say that makes me want to cry again, but I'm too tired to cry. Instead, I just slump over onto the couch. "I'm sleepy," I mumble, finding the words hard to force out through the sudden wave of exhaustion that's come over me. The adrenaline from earlier has fled my body, leaving me without any energy. Negative energy, almost, if that's even possible. It certainly feels like it.

I'm starting to feel awful again, too. Now that I've stopped talking for a minute or two, I've had time to realize just how much my throat hurts and my head pounds. I'm overheating in Chance's arms, but I'm also shivering, and every movement sends goosebumps traveling all over my limbs.

"Yeah," he agrees. "I can tell. Do you want to go back upstairs?"

"Mhm," I hum. Words are overrated, I've decided.

"Come on then," he says, shaking my shoulder. "You can't fall asleep until you're up there." He holds out hand, and when I grab it, he swiftly pulls me upright.

"Woah," I murmur, though I barely notice what I'm saying, one hand flying up to my head and the other gripping the couch for support. "Dizzy."

He steadies me, putting one arm around my waist. "I won't let you fall. Come on." He coaxes me up the stairs, trying to keep me from stumbling. "I think your medicine wore off," he comments, stating the obvious. "But you still have another hour or two to go before you can take another pill. Can you go back to sleep?"

"Mhm."

"Here." We're in my room, and I'm momentarily taken aback. I don't remember walking all the way up here. But I can't say I mind, since my bed suddenly looks really inviting. Chance pulls back the covers on my bed, and I sink down, sitting down first and then flopping over. He pulls the covers back over me, up to my chin, and tucks them around my shoulders. "Can you sleep now?"

"Yeah. Stay here. I don't notice the walls when you're here." I try to speak normally, but it comes out as a whisper.

"Okay," he agrees.

I reach out to where's he's resting on the bed next to me and touch his hair. It's spiky and tickles my palm, and I'm suddenly overcome with the desire to rub my cheek against his head to see what it feels like. But I don't, because even in my half-asleep muddled state, I can tell that's not a good idea and would probably end quite awkwardly.

"You're pretty nice," I tell him as my eyes start to drift shut. I'm not sure if my words are intelligible, since I'm finding them hard to understand and I already know what I'm saying. The heat from the blankets is finally starting to warm me up, chills no longer racking my body every few seconds, and it's putting me to sleep. "Emma isn't this nice to me, even though she gives me free food. Because she only gives me healthy foods. Which is no fun. You're my new favorite person. I think I like you."