He sounded so sincere. She wanted to believe him, but he clearly wasn’t understanding the basic issue. “Okay, yeah, I’m very smart in some very specific ways. But it doesn’t come easily to me. Things that actually brilliant people just… do… I struggle with. If I’m not interested in something, it’s basically impossible to just do it anyway. I forget things all the time, even really important things. I lose things, even valuable things. I’m incredibly careless. And absent-minded. I can go to my bedroom to get my shoes and then leave my bedroom with a book and then go back to get my shoes and put the book back on the shelf and go out and then go back to put on my shoes and come out with a tube of lipstick and, well, you get the picture.”
Carter was frowning at her, but not as if he was annoyed. He seemed very intent. “Fen, were you like that when you were a kid?”
“Yeah, I’ve always been like that. I lost my homework, I forgot to do all the projects that weren’t about things I was interested in, I lost my report cards.” She shrugged. “My parents were incredibly organized, intelligent, focused people. I was such a frustration to them.”
“Did they ever have you tested for ADHD?”
She shook her head, frustrated that hestilldidn’t get it. “No, I don’t have that. I’ve never had any trouble sitting down in one place. And if it’s something I actually care about, I have no trouble focusing on it. In fact if it interests me, I get so focused on it that I forget about everything else.”
Carter’s eyes gleamed with excitement. “Fen, that is the definition of an attention deficit! I have it, and you’ve exactly described what I was like before I started taking medication for it.”
Fen already knew that about him. He mentioned it sometimes in interviews. But it didn’t seem relevant to her. “Yeah, you may have ADHD, but you’re still naturally brilliant. I’m the one who has to work at everything.”
“Fen. I still have to work at everything. But I had to work a whole hell of a lot harder, and I still wasn’t very successful, until I got diagnosed and put on meds. Look.” He sat up, picked up his bag, and pulled out a little orange bottle of pills. “See?”
“Oh, is that what those are for?”
He nodded. “Weren’t you curious?”
With dignity, she replied, “I don’t snoop around people’s personal medical stuff.”
Carter grinned, unabashed. “But youwerecurious, weren’t you?”
She snorted. “I figured they were for something boring and gross, like toenail fungus.”
“I don’t have toenail fungus!”
She couldn’t resist saying, “Maybe you didn’t when you arrived, but after bathing in swamp water…” He looked so horrified at the idea that she relented, saying, “It probably takes a while to set in. I’m sure if you get checked up once we get out, you can get some kind of disinfectant to prevent it.”
“I’llbathein disinfectant the instant I get away from this swamp,” he vowed. Then he rattled the pill container at her. “But back to my meds. And ADHD—emphasis on the attention deficit. I don’t think either of us has the hyperactive part. I’m positive one of my teamma—one of the guys in Defenders does, but it doesn’t seem to bother him any. He’s the one with the bugbear.”
“Of course he is.” Fen still hadn’t completely processed all the mind-blowing stuff about bugbears and shifters and wizard-scientists. She glanced upward. Precious the dragonette was still perched on the tree branch, watching them with her gleaming sapphire eyes. Fen had touched her. She was definitely for real.
It was so typical of her life. Carter got the beautiful golden dragonette, Carter got the diagnosis that made his mind make sense, and she got…
Carter snapped his fingers, jolting her back to the conversation. “Where’d you go just now, Fen? Quick, tell me what you were thinking.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do. Go!”
“You asked for it,” she warned him. “I wish I had a dragonette. I wish I had a diagnosis. It’d be nice to think I wasn’t just careless and lazy.”
Fire blazed up in his eyes, and it wasn’t only reflected from their campfire. He grabbed her by the shoulders, making her jump. “Listen to me, Fen. You are NOT careless. You are NOT lazy. You ARE brilliant.”
The force in his words and the intent behind them seemed to crack something open in her. She didn’t immediately believe that he was right. But she did believe that he believed it, and that stunned her into silence.
“I can’t give you a dragonette,” he went on. “I can’t give you a diagnosis, because I’m not a doctor. I can’t even give you my pills to try out, because it’s not a good idea to take someone else’s meds with no medical supervision even if we weren’t being chased through a swamp by wizard-scientists. But I’ll give you what I can, which is the name of my doctor so you can get yourself tested as soon as we get out of this place. I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised with the results.”
Fen swallowed. For the second time that night, her eyes stung with unshed tears. She couldn’t do more than whisper, “Okay. I’ll do it.”
“Good.” He dropped his hands from her shoulders. But neither of them lay down again. They sat facing each other in the dark night, lit by flames and moonlight.
For what seemed like a long time, they sat in silence. Her thoughts bounced and zig-zagged around in a way that she suspected would have been the case whether she had ADHD or not, all things considered, moving from Carter to shifters to attention deficits to her parents to wizard-scientists to dragonettes to toenail fungus to diagnostic tests and back to Carter again.
“You’re right,” she said.
He gave her a catlike, satisfied, Carter Howe smile. “Yes, I am.”
