Excerpt from Picture Us In The Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Your mom's going to understand when she sees the results," he told me. His eyes were hopeful and bright, and maybe nervous, too, underneath that. "It's one thing to hear me talk about it, but when she sees it with the two of you, she'll understand." He finished with the electrodes and patted me on the back. "Ready?"

I nodded. I said, "I hope I do it right."

"You'll do fine. Just watch the screen."

He disappeared again. My heart was thudding as I waited. The screen flashed to life, a picture of my mom appearing. It was her at their wedding reception, dressed in a long red qipao with her hair piled on top of her head; she was turning back over her shoulder to look at the camera and she was laughing. I thought: I love you. I thought: Please work.

It was a few more minutes before my dad came and brought me back to the main office with my mom. She was quiet the way people get when they want to be alone. My dad had two printouts, and he spread them out on the table.

"Look," he said, and we saw it at the same time: the matching peaks and valleys in the graphs in my chart and in hers. He looked at my mom, and it took me a few seconds to identify his expression: he was shy. "Do you see?"

I saw. I saw it like there was nothing and no one else in the room at that moment. And something happened to me then, and we've never been religious but that was the first time I got what it must be like, how sometimes something happens that takes you past yourself and you feel like your body's not your own—you feel, all of a sudden, like it's somehow much more than that. I think I have spent my life since then, with my pencils and ink and sketchbooks, trying to replicate that exact feeling to give to someone else.

"You see?" my dad said again, and without a word she turned and walked out of the lab, her shoes clicking down the linoleum hallway like she was trying to get out as fast as she could.

Later, at home, my mom begged him to quit what he was doing. They argued about it when they thought I was sleeping, but she won, and extracted a promise from him—he'd dismantle the experiment. They never talked about it after that, and I never found out why it had pulled at her the way it did.

As for me, though, I wanted to believe him that his results proved something. I did believe him. I still believe him. Because if you're tangled up in someone else, if your futures are tied that way, if that's real and if you know when it happens—then it means you know who you belong to, and you know whose fates are tied to yours, whether you like it or planned it or not, whether they still exist in the same world with you or they don't, and I think that's where everything begins and ends. I think that's everything.

ONE

The letter from Rhode Island School of Design comes Thursday.

In the moment it most likely arrives at my house in all its power to alter the course of my entire life, I'm sitting next to Harry in the Journalism Lab, trying to fake my way through the graphic Regina asked me to illustrate for Helen Yee's op-ed. I'm not checking my email, and in fact I've logged out of my account, partly because based on my obsessive stalking of old College Board forums I'm not expecting the decision just yet, but also partly because I know I'll never feel ready to find out and I can't risk getting that email at school in front of everyone.

When I get home that afternoon my dad is back from work early. He doesn't even let me get onto the property line before he's waving the letter in my face. My chest goes so tight it feels like it's splitting right down the middle, my exposed heart pounding in open air.

"That's from—?" I start to say, and then can't say it aloud.

Excerpted from Picture Us In The Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert. Copyright © 2018 by Kelly Loy Gilbert. Excerpted by permission of Disney-Hyperion. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.