Chapter 1

Not now. Please, not now. I looked up at the clock. The football game was minutes from starting. Cheering erupted around the bleachers. It was the game Ben and his team had been anticipating for months. I couldn’t become a distraction. I tried to steady my breathing even as my heartbeat quickened. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I thought I’d be able to handle the crowd. I’d been to several games this year already and coped. But now that I sat here, I wanted nothing more than to run. The noises surrounding me were deafening—the cheers, the music, the stomping. It all echoed in my head at once. The sickly sweet smell of Abigail Hudson’s caramel corn filled my nostrils, mixing with the sour odor of Amelia Hudson’s vinegar chips. The feel of their shoulders rubbing against mine made me feel claustrophobic. And since we sat in the front row, the lights were twice as glaring. My palms were sweating as I clasped them together. “Are you all right, Sofia?” Amelia, Ben’s mother, looked at me with concern. She knew I experienced anxiety with crowds. I forced a smile and nodded. “I’m okay.” I looked out at the field and when my eyes found Ben, I forced myself to stare at him. I tried to shut out the stimuli threatening to overwhelm me and focus on him. My handsome best friend. His tall, muscular physique, strong jawline, light blue eyes… Normally it was all I could do to find excuses to steal glances at him, whether in school or at home, but now I found myself barely seeing him as a niggling doubt dug its way into my mind. A doubt I’d hoped I’d overcome by now. Nobody else in this stadium is having problems. It’s not normal to feel like this. Maybe I’m going mad like my mother. “Are you sure you’re all right?” This time it was Ben’s father, Lyle, peering over at me from his seat a few feet away. I bit my lip and gave him another curt nod, wishing they’d just let it go. They still didn’t understand that asking me if I was all right never helped the situation. At all. When the shriek of a whistle pierced through the maelstrom of sensations I was already drowning under, my resolve to not cave in disintegrated. Ducking my head down between my knees, it was all I could do to stop myself from shaking. I was thinking about my mother that brought on my panic attacks, for the other aspects of my mental condition I had learned to cope with. It was thinking of those green eyes, and the last time I remembered seeing her. Thinking that I might be doomed to end up like her. The inevitability of the idea sent me into a downward spiral. All rational thought shut down and the nightmarish doubt replayed itself again and again in my mind. I felt hands touching my shoulders. “Sofia.” It was Amelia’s voice. Yet more stimuli to cope with—her voice and the touch of her hands. She was trying to sit me upright, but I refused. I slipped off the chair and kneeled on the ground. Feeling the humiliation of it all, I wanted to disappear. “Sofia,” a different voice called out this time. A deep, male voice. Benjamin Hudson’s voice. Only his voice amidst the onslaught of other noises could have caught my attention in the state I was in. I looked up to see him jogging toward me, the ball under one arm, concern lining his face. Guilt tore at me. “No, Ben,” I breathed. “Go back to the game.” He closed the final distance between us and, gripping my shoulders, afforded me a close view of his face. Despite my anxiety, I couldn’t help but feel tingles run down my spine at his touch. Over his shoulder, I could see that all the players had stopped and were staring at Ben, looks of frustration and surprise on their faces that a captain would just walk off with the ball. Jeers and impatient mutterings exploded around the bleachers. Despite my guilt, my body was still quivering, a veil of panic still upon me. He reached for my chin and forced me to face him again. “Sit up.” His voice was firm as he kneeled down, placing the ball between his knees. I felt like I didn’t even have control over my own limbs. “I can’t,” I whispered. He frowned at me, a look of deep disapproval marring his handsome features. His face now only a few inches from my own, his blue eyes bored into me. “I know an excuse when I hear one. Don’t you dare deceive yourself into believing that you’re the victim, Sofia Claremont.” Almost as soon as Ben spoke those words—words he had spoken to me many times before—a wave of relief rushed over me. His strong hands gripped my elbows as he pulled me up and sat me back down in my chair. “You’re going to be all right,” he said, his voice still firm. I nodded, letting out a deep sigh and feeling my shoulders already beginning to loosen, my muscles becoming less tense, my chest lighter. The jeers ricocheting around the stadium were becoming louder by the second. Ben’s teammates were yelling for him and several had started running toward him. “Go, now,” I said, pushing him away. A smile lit up his face as he squeezed my hand and placed a kiss on my forehead. A kiss that let loose a dozen butterflies in my stomach. He took one last look at me before turning and walking back to the field. He cast his eyes around the jeering bleachers as he walked into the center and raised his right hand, pumping his fist in the air like a rock star. “Friends before football,” he roared. The jeers turned to wolf whistles. I felt the heat rise in my cheeks as hundreds of eyes fixed on me. I chuckled. Ben. Always knows how to turn a crowd around. Or anyone for that matter… “Are you okay now, Sofia?” I turned to see five-year-old Abigail standing next to me, her baby blue eyes wide with concern. I smiled and kissed her cheek. “I’m fine, Abby,” I whispered, not wanting to draw any more attention to myself than I had already. “D’you want a piece of my popcorn?” Her blonde ponytail bobbed on one side as she held out a sticky palm containing a single piece of popcorn. “No, thank you. Go sit back down next to your mom.” Lyle and Amelia had already returned to their seats—both now looking back at the game as if nothing had happened. Once Abby was seated safely back next to her mother, I leaned back in my chair, breathing out slowly. As the whistle blew a second time, I fixed my eyes on the field and watched the game take off. My eyes followed Ben around the field, his muscular physique easily outpacing the two guys who were chasing after him. It helped that he was also one of the tallest players down there. Football was never my favorite of games. I watched it for Ben’s sake since he was part of our school’s team. After about five minutes of attempting to concentrate and follow what was going on, I found myself drifting off into my own thoughts. What had just happened replayed in my mind. Two problems had plagued me throughout my elementary and high school years. Excruciating awareness of external stimuli and anxiety attacks. I’d seen countless doctors and psychiatrists. While none had agreed on what the former problem actually was—each had a different theory, ranging from Asperger’s to OCD—all of them had concluded that the two problems were related. It had been Ben, in all his twelve years of wisdom, who’d figured out that they were not. I smiled as I remembered the day it had happened. It had been at a game, much like the one we were at today. Only, Ben had been in the bleachers with us. The crowds had triggered off my negative thought process, as they had done today. When I descended into a fit, Amelia and Lyle had said that we would have to leave to take me to a hospital. Sorely disappointed at leaving before his favorite team’s game had even begun, Ben had gripped me by the shoulders in frustration and shaken me. And he’d spoken the same words he did today: “I know an excuse when I hear one. Don’t you dare deceive yourself into believing that you’re the victim, Sofia Claremont.” I wasn’t sure where he’d gotten them from—perhaps a movie or a book. But they’d stung. I wasn’t playing the victim, I’d thought. My concerns were genuine. After all that had happened with my mother, I deserved to feel this way. But the fact was, his words had worked. They’d cut through me and snapped me out of my fit. He’d just figured out the key to solving my anxiety issues. His frustrated, twelve-year-old self couldn’t have imagined how much those words would impact my life. As for my sensory issues, to this day we still hadn’t figured out what they were. Amelia and Lyle had given up on taking me to see doctors and psychiatrists since they all contradicted one another. But the truth was, I could handle the condition—whatever it was. It was hard, and overwhelming sometimes, but I could fight through it. It was only when I allowed myself to descend into self-pity by thinking about my mother that I completely lost it. I felt disappointed that I’d once again allowed myself to succumb to anxiety. In my moment of panic, I’d forgotten how I’d always dealt with this. I’d been trying to teach myself to prevent these fits on my own because I couldn’t count on Ben always being around. And it scared me how dependent I was on him already. Ben Hudson. My best friend. I liked to think of myself as independent, but if I was honest with myself, sometimes I couldn’t imagine a life without Ben in it. A tap on my shoulder broke through my thoughts. A long-legged girl with curly black hair loomed over me. “So are you Ben’s new girlfriend?” My cheeks flushed at the thought. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “We really are just friends.” “Good.” She gave me a stiff smile and walked back to her seat in the row behind us. Her eyes focused back on the field, most likely narrowing in on Ben, as if I didn’t exist. I looked back at Ben on the field. Screams and yells had just erupted in waves on our side of the bleachers. His team had just scored. Two guys hoisted Ben up as he raised his arms in the air. His eyes fixed on mine and I felt shivers again. I smiled, feeling guilty that I had missed the score. I looked back at the girl behind me, ogling Ben as she jumped up and down and screamed his name. Excitement and apprehension coursed through me as I imagined what my answer to her question might have been if she’d asked me in a few days’ time. The Hudsons and I were leaving tomorrow for a two-week vacation in Cancún. I’d already planned that the first day we arrived, I’d take a walk with him along the beach. And I’d finally tell him what I’d been bottling up all this time… if I could just maintain the

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