Even after Julian could control his new hands telekinetically, there was still a lot of work to be done. There were a lot of therapy sessions; hours upon hours of Dr. Nemesis and Dr. Rao telling him to repeat tasks over and over that he used to be able to do without thinking about it. The goal, apparently, was to do be able to do the same with these hands.

Performing even the simplest of tasks left him with large headaches at first. He couldn't fold his laundry very well (he couldn't fold it very well initially, though, so he didn't count that against himself) so it fell into piles in his drawers. He couldn't turn the blinds to open them up more, so they remained closed, filtering in only a minimal amount of light.

He worked with paper clips again; bending and unbending them without letting the telekinesis take hold of the clip itself. It must be your hands, Dr. Rao reminded him every single day. It must be your hands. Julian sometimes imagined that he was using his new hands to strangle the older woman. It was an awful, violent thought, and he knew he'd never go through with it, at least not without provocation.

Once he could manage the basic things, like opening soda cans and writing legibly with both pencil and pen (he even improved his handwriting from before; he guessed that it was easier to be neater about it when he had to think about every stroke of his pencil), he decided to try something he hadn't done since he went to Beverly Hills High all that time ago. He would draw.

Drawing was something he was secretly pretty good at. It didn't fit with the image he'd kept up at the high school, the Captain of the varsity soccer team, with the superstar older brother. It didn't fit with the crowd that he kept himself around. Yet it had been an inevitability, when that girl that sat next to him in World History had seen him sketching one of the cute cheerleaders instead of writing notes about the War of 1812, she had immediately tried to recruit him for art club.

"No thanks," he'd told her then. "I don't need to hang around a bunch of anime watching, comic book reading freaks."

But now that he picked up the pencil and stared at the lined paper of the blank notebook that he'd unearthed from a pile of textbooks that was gathering dust, he wasn't so sure who the freak was anymore. She probably had some scholarship to an art college and he was sitting on his bed in a dark bedroom on an island that played home to the last members of a dying race.

When he sketched, it took a lot more effort than it seemed to before. Nothing wanted to come out right and he had to keep changing the grip on the pencil. Before an hour was up, he'd worn the eraser to nothing, and had torn through four pages. He almost wanted to give up a hundred thousand times, before he'd even finished anything.

Somehow, though, he started. He covered the entire notebook in sketches of the same thing, over and over, because it was the only thing he could focus on and knew from memory without a reference.

The curve of her cheek, the rounded tip of her nose, the pattern on the ever-present locket around her neck. The way her hair fell into her face more often than not, and how the wind had tossed it around in the salty bay air.

His entire notebook was full of Laura, from cover to cover.

By the end of the night, his hands felt second nature, like they'd grown in over what had been there before. He flipped through at every expression he'd drawn on her face; hints of smiles, vicious snarls, a flicker of sadness in her eyes. Even though she'd left him, left without saying goodbye just like Sofia had, he couldn't get her out of his head.

Julian tossed the notebook behind his set of drawers and threw himself onto his mattress to pretend to be asleep so that no one could make him go to class. He took his painkillers and shut his eyes and remembered the sound his door had made when she'd closed it after leaving.