Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

And yet I do. “I have connections, too,” I tell her. “Sometimes I feel inside the people around me. I believe I know what they’re thinking—or if not what, then at least how they’re thinking. There are times that I’m certain I’m tied to people on the other side of the world. People I’ve never met. The things I do affect them. I move left, they move right. I climb up, and they fall from a building. I know it’s all true, but I can never prove what happens to people I don’t know in places I can’t see.” “And how does this make you feel?” “Wonderful and terrible at the same time.” She tilts her neck to look into my eyes, instead of looking forward at the sea. It’s a harder move than folding her arms to hold me. I hear the straining squeal of bending copper. “We are not all that different, then,” she says. And I know for the first time that I’ve truly pierced her loneliness. And she has pierced mine.