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cover me, pressing me into a sad fossil. I was just a girl, standing on a pile of rocks. No superstar to see here, people. Move along.
    When I opened my eyes again, I was almost surprised to find I was shivering. The sun had started to set, and the shadows in the quarry were growing longer. The highway noises had picked up. The birds settling along the quarry’s fence top had flown.
    I wrapped my arms around myself and squatted, looking out over the rocks. Billions. There must be billions of them. How could Grayson have thought he’d ever count them all?
    As if in answer to my thoughts, the breeze gusted suddenly, carrying a small noise on top of it, right to where I huddled over the rocks, my teeth chattering.
    It was a small cough. Not a
cough
cough, but a short, nervous burst, almost half throat-clearing, half cough. One I recognized well. I’d heard it my whole life. It was one ofGrayson’s tics—a little noise in the base of his throat. He made it when he was getting to a crisis point. When he was overwhelmed.
    Like a shot, I stood up again, squinting over the quarry.
    Grayson was in there somewhere.
    I saw it—a tiny glint of sunlight reflecting off his glasses, and when I squinted harder, I saw his dirty white T-shirt and blue jeans. He must have been freezing. Even though the breeze didn’t reach the bottom of the quarry, the shadows were so much deeper down there.
    Again I heard the cough. And some murmuring that sounded like numbers being chanted.
    Stepping sideways down the steep wall of the quarry, my shoe sinking into the gravel, I began trotting toward him, just as I’d done a million times before.
    “Grayson?” I shouted. He didn’t respond. Of course not. He never responded when he was counting. It would make him lose track of where he was. “I’m coming down!” Half jogging, half sliding down the steep embankment, holding my arms straight out to keep my balance, calling my brother’s name.
    Saving him.
    On a day when I needed to be saved, once again I was saving him.

CHAPTER
EIGHT
    Grayson was standing ankle-deep in stones, his pointer finger extended out in front of him and bouncing along in the air as if he were touching each one individually. I knew in his mind, he probably was doing exactly that. Touching each rock and marking it. Counted.
    He was up to 4,762. He’d been out here a long time. When I touched his arm, it felt cool, even under my fingers that were practically numb from my run down the pit.
    “Gray,” I said softly, tugging at his arm.
    He pulled away sharply. “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-
three
.”
    I tented my hands over my mouth and blew into them to warm them, then reached out and pulled his arm again. “Gray, come on. You’re cold. We should go.”
    “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-
four
,” he responded, his voice louder. This time he didn’t jerk away, though.
    “Gray,” I said, pulling a little harder, getting frustrated. I tried so hard to be sympathetic. Really, I did. But I was sick of the song and dance. Why couldn’t this ever be easy? I’d come here for myself. Why couldn’t it ever be about me? “Come on. You’re on an even number. Just quit now.”
    Grayson liked even numbers. When he was forced to quit counting, he always held his ground until he got to an even number. He told me about a year ago that if he stopped counting on an odd number, it meant that someone he loved would die. And if he ended on an odd number, even accidentally, he had to count backward from where he’d been, all the way back to zero, and then start all over again, not stopping until he reached the next even number above the number he’d stopped counting on.
    “I know it’s stupid,” he’d mumbled when he first told me that he’d been counting every time a family member left the house. We sat side by side on the bumper of Dad’s car in the driveway. “But it makes sense to me, you know? Like, as long as I kept hitting even numbers, you were going to