Summer shrugged. “Sure. Ask me anything.” She picked up the fork and started playing with her eggs, pushing them around. It felt like Victor wasn’t taking her seriously. “I’ve always been weird,” she began, quietly, not looking at him. “I read too much, I think too much, I’m too outspoken. No tact, that’s how my mother puts it. I don’t dress right.” She sighed. “Imagine how you felt when you were a teenager. Then double it, triple it, a thousand times — that was my growing up. Because of what I am. I was shy, and introverted, and not enough like most of my classmates.”
Victor looked at her intently, not even touching his food as he listened. “I’m sorry, Summer. It’s not right that you were treated like that. Honestly, I think you had it worse than I did, having to deal with teenage politics sounds terrible. At least with me I knew what I had to do, the path was straight cut, black and white, but for you, it must’ve been hard.” His eyes had gone from the hazel they were last night to a much more green colour. They warmed while he was talking to her, going from their playful light to something much more serious. “Do you mind if I ask what you are exactly Summer?”
“I’m an empath. I’m not sure there’s a name for the other part of it. I just say firechild.” She got up from the table, picking up a candle jar off the counter. “Watch.” Holding the jar by the bottom, she just … looked at it, and it was lit. Summer put it on the table and sat back down. “I transform the energy of the emotions I take in to fire. If I don’t make that transmutation, the extra energy stays in me, and I have convulsions.” She paused. “I was ten when my empathy showed. We didn’t know what it was, just that I was depressed. I tried to kill myself.”