“The chickens are always in twos,” my 16-year-old says, watching our laying hens grub with clawed toes, then peer at the ground, tilting their heads for a close look, just outside our kitchen window. (I think) my daughter is distracting herself from the homework on the counter in front of her. School is often miserable for both of us, a legacy of her difficulty reading, stemming from her very poor vision, an outcome of her very premature birth.

I don’t look up from the red pepper I’m slicing, but I know what she’s talking about. Having raised dozens of chickens, I’m convinced that hatchlings of different varieties, even when brooded together, seem to bond with others of their same breed–by size, disposition, or color, maybe, although they see a different spectrum than humans do. Something teaches them who they trust.

I don’t look up at my daughter, but having watched her social awkwardness, beginning with elementary school drop-off, now more so in text exchanges I occasionally check on her phone, I know how finely tuned she is to rejection. Until maybe nine months ago, the slightest pressure could cause her to scream, “I wish I were dead! No one would miss me!” She would burst open, spilling angry, lonely tears, then slam and lock the nearest doors.

My daughter is still watching the chickens. “When you see them, they always have a buddy,” she says simply, then shifts in her chair, returning to her assignment.

I think how this year is different, how she has a BFF she’s so close to that they’ve been incubating the same head cold for weeks. They spend hours talking, not on the phone but over Facetime on their iPads, propped next to them in bed, on the counter in the bathroom as they do their hair, sometimes carried like a bouquet in front of them as they grab a snack from the fridge. They see each other from all angles, curling their eyelashes, positioning star-shaped patches over pimples, applying gloss. It’s a close read that would make me uncomfortable.

I glance up from my cutting to say something about buddies, but my daughter is bent over her phone, chin tucked, head at just that angle I’m sure physical therapists will soon say causes “text neck.” She turns her face slightly to the right, preferencing her better left eye, the one that reads 20/20 through the lens of her glasses.

She has learned, faster than I realized, faster than me, both to look and to see.