“Nothing,” she said quickly. “I like it.”

“Thank you.” Connor actually looked pleased.

“I should probably go home, though,” she said, and then didn’t know why she’d said it: because there was a pause that went on a fraction of a second too long; because she didn’t know whether to keep standing or sit on the bed. Because she wished she could slip into his dream and move around in safety and write a new note: I want to kiss you.

“Really?” Connor sat up. Now that she’d looked at him longer, she decided his chin was her favorite part of his face: it was a chin that no one would mess with. “You don’t want to watch a movie or something?”

“A movie?”

“Yeah.” Connor smiled. “Popcorn, couch, a movie. Sunday classic.”

“All right.” Dea thought about her mom, who would probably be pacing the house, peeking out the windows, waiting for Dea to return. Planning her next lie, and what she would say to get Dea back on her side.

“Awesome.” Connor stood up. “I don’t have any popcorn, though. We’ll have to pretend. I’ll even buy you a pretend soda.”

“How chivalrous,” she said. “But I’m a modern girl. We can go dutch.”

They watched an action film, sitting side by side on the couch, their thighs just pressing together. She couldn’t understand one of the leads, who had an Irish accent, and couldn’t follow the plotline—but she decided it was the best movie she’d ever seen. When Connor’s dad and stepmom came home, Connor introduced her as his friend. The word sounded sweet to her, like a long, sunny dream about a picnic.

Before she left, she pretended to get lost on the way to the bathroom and pocketed one of Connor’s swim medals. Just in case.

SEVEN

She had two friends now. It was a new reality; it was as though gravity had lessened and everything had become easier, lighter.

Instead of waiting with Gollum at the bus stop for Morgan Devoe or Hailey Madison to peg them with empty soda cans, Dea and Gollum were riding to school in Connor’s Tahoe. At lunch, she, Connor, and Gollum split french fries and debated whether mayonnaise was an acceptable condiment. (Gollum was a yes, Connor a firm no.)

They went to the homecoming pep rally together, all three of them, and sat together on the bleachers huddled under an enormous blanket that Gollum had found in the horse barn (it still smelled like hay). They ignored the game, and instead pretended to be sociologists witnessing alien social groups and arcane mating rituals. By group consensus, they vetoed the dance and instead drove Connor’s car to the middle of an abandoned farm, and had a midnight picnic in the field with corn chips and spiked hot chocolate Connor had brought in a thermos. On Halloween, they dressed up like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Gollum was the jelly and wore all purple. Dea was the peanut butter and wore all brown. And Connor didn’t wear anything special, but kept squishing them into enormous bear hugs and shouting, “Sandwich!”

Connor either didn’t notice that he’d made friends with the two biggest losers at Fielding, or he didn’t care. He never teased Gollum about her clothing or the fact that she was on the subsidy program at lunch, although he teased her about everything else—shipping Harry and Hermione (“how obvious”), listening to Led Zeppelin, refusing to pee in public restrooms. And he never said anything about the rumors, which Dea was sure he must have heard: that Dea and her mom were cannibals. That Dea and her mom were zombies. That they sucked the blood out of local animals, and worshipped the devil. He never asked her why she had to sit out in gym, either, or why she sometimes lost her breath even if they hadn’t been walking fast.

Connor made no secret about hating Fielding almost as much as Dea and Gollum did. When he passed his cousin, Will Briggs, in the halls, Dea noticed that they barely spoke to each other. Will sometimes muttered hi. Connor sometimes nodded. That was it.

She was happy. She didn’t worry too much about it. She didn’t wonder why Will Briggs almost seemed afraid to meet Connor’s eyes, as if Connor might hex him.

She didn’t hear the rumors about Connor—whispered stories about what had happened to his mom and baby brother all those years ago; rumors that it was Connor’s fault. That he’d done it and only made up that crazy cover story afterward, of the intruder he hadn’t seen. That his dad had orchestrated a cover-up to keep Connor from getting shoved in a mental institution. That some woman was writing a book about it and was going to tell the truth.

She didn’t hear any of it. How would she? Connor and Gollum were the only two people she talked to.

PART TWO

Once upon a time, there was a pregnant woman who dreamed of a woman, also with child. The woman who dreamed was very sick. The doctors said she was dying. She hadn’t woken in two whole days, hadn’t spoken or stirred.

But only dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed.

And as she lay in her hospital bed, sheathed in sheets as cold as a thick layer of ice, she dreamed of the other woman, belly taut and round as a bowl, lying in the middle of a field of snow. But the snow drifted like feathers, and warmed, too, and the dream woman was laughing, her mouth open to the sky, her pink tongue exposed.

And the real woman could feel the tickle of the snow, the drumming of the dream-woman’s heart, the stirring of the dream-child in the dream-world of snow as soft as kisses.

“I’ll save you,” the dream-woman said, opening her eyes, and sliding a hand inside her coat, onto her swollen belly, where a tiny dream-heart drummed and drummed. “We’ll save you. Just let us in.”

Then the snow became a river of plastic, sliding down her throat, and the snow broke apart into white walls, and the whole world became a scream.

Two screams.

Then the woman who was supposed to have died woke up, and found she had given birth to a beautiful child, with eyes the blue of new ice and skin the color of snow.

EIGHT

In the weeks since Dea and Connor had met, she had walked his dreams four times. She couldn’t stop. She didn’t want to. For the first time in her life, she could sympathize with addicts. She was filled with a near-constant ache, an itch that seemed to come from inside her, as if her blood were infected. She got relief only when she walked. The guilt—knowing that she was breaking the rules, that she was doing something wrong—made walking his dreams feel even more delicious.

Each time she entered his dreams, she found them softer, more pliable, more responsive to her. The overstructure was crumbling.

The second time she walked, she arrived in the middle of a crowded wharf in what looked like the 1920s, except that the deckhands were checking off lists of passengers by administering math homework. The third time, she ended up above an old racetrack that Connor and his dad were endlessly circling in separate cars, trying to get the advantage. In the distance, she spotted a single other spectator leaning against the chain-link fence that divided the car track from the fields beyond it, dark hair hanging to his jaw, hand up to his eyes to shield them from the sun so that his face was in shadow. He struck Dea as somehow familiar, but she was too far to make out what he looked like clearly.

The fourth time she walked, she found herself in a set of high bleachers bordering an indoor pool. The air stunk of chlorine, and people were cheering. Above them, a cracked-glass ceiling was webbed with condensation. Connor was swimming, his arms circling soundlessly, his body sleek as an animal’s. Birds raced above the water, casting shadows on its surface, occasionally submerging to sweep up the flashing belly of a fish.