Chapter 11: Letters

Dash did not sleep.

He lay on his back until the window went gray, listening to the breath of the boy in the next bed.

He thought about what he was not going to say.

He was not going to say it.

He knew that much.

Everything he had ever read about being kind to someone with a secret began with the same rule: let them tell you.

He found Pru at seven in the morning, outside the Fenn Hall studio, with a thermos and a paperback.

She looked up when his shadow fell across the page, and her face did not move.

He lifted a hand, felt like an idiot, and said, slowly and plainly, "I need to talk to you about Wilder."

She set down the book.

She took a small notepad out of her canvas jacket, wrote in it, and held it up.

HE ASKED YOU ANYTHING?

"No."

She wrote again.

THEN WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME?

"Because I think I know something," Dash said. "And I don't know what to do with it."

Pru studied him for a long moment.

Then she wrote one more line, tore out the page, and put it in his hand.

ASK HIM. NOT ME.

He read it twice.

"That's fair," he said.

She tapped the table to get his attention, then raised her hand and held up three fingers, with her thumb and little finger pinned together.

She did it again, slower, and pointed at him.

He copied it.

She shook her head, fixed his thumb, and made him do it again.

Her eyebrows lifted, a very small grade of approval.

She wrote one letter on the pad.

He stared at it.

Then he understood.

It was a hand for a letter.

"Is that how you spell?"

She nodded and wrote the whole alphabet on the pad, A through Z, each with a drawing of a hand.

She pushed it into his chest.

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