“You can open your eyes now,” he said.

She did, and was surprised to see that he was taller and skinnier than he looked in the water—probably at least six foot two. He had a swimmer’s build: long arms, broad shoulders, skinny waist.

“I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of nudist,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone came down this way.”

“No one does, except for this guy.” She hefted Toby in her arms, glad her hands were full and she didn’t have to figure out what to do with them. “He got out.”

He reached out and scratched Toby on the chin. Toby stretched his head to the sky. As he purred, his body vibrated in her arms.

“What’s his name?” he asked.

“Toby,” she said.

He kept his eyes on Toby. “And what about your name?”

She hesitated. “Odea,” she said. “People call me Dea.” This wasn’t exactly true, since most people didn’t speak to her or address her at all. But her mom called her Dea, and so did Gollum.

“Connor,” he said. There was an awkward pause, and then they both spoke simultaneously.

“So, you live around here?” he said.

Just as she said: “You new?”

He laughed. He had a nice laugh. Nice teeth, too. “You first.”

“Yeah. The farmhouse,” she said, jerking her chin to indicate the direction from which she’d come.

He smiled. Suddenly, his whole face was transformed. The slightly-too-big chin, the crooked nose, and eyes maybe spaced a centimeter too far apart—all of it became perfect, symmetrical. Beautiful. She looked away, suddenly embarrassed.

“We’re neighbors,” he said. “We just moved in across the street.”

“I figured,” she said. He raised his eyebrows, and she clarified. “Everyone knows everyone around here. I figured you were the new kid. I saw the moving truck.”

“Busted,” he said. “You go to Fielding? I’m a transfer.” When she nodded, he said, “Maybe you know my cousin. Will Briggs?”

Even thinking the name brought a foul taste to her mouth, like rotten gym socks and watery beer. Will Briggs was huge and dumb and mean; rumor was that his dad, who worked for the police department, had once cracked him over the head with a guitar, and he’d been screwed up ever since. Nobody liked Will Briggs, but he was good at football and his dad was a cop, which meant that no one messed with him either.

Apparently he was the one who’d started calling Gollum Gollum in third grade, probably the only vaguely creative thing he’d ever done.

“No,” she lied. In Dea’s opinion, Will Briggs was radioactive material: anyone associated with him was contaminated.

He was still smiling. “I thought everyone knew everybody around here.”

“Guess not.” She squeezed Toby tightly, burying her nose in the soft scruff of his fur. Connor would get to school on Monday and hear from his cousin that she was Odor Donahue, friendless freak; then her new neighbor would turn suddenly unfriendly, and make excuses to avoid looking at her when they passed in the hall.

It had happened to her like that in Illinois. The summer before freshman year, she’d spent two months hanging out with a girl, Rhoda, who’d lived down the block. They’d spent hours looking over Rhoda’s sister’s yearbook and giggling over cute upperclassmen. They’d shopped for their first-day-of-school outfits together. And then, as always, the rumors had spread: about Dea’s house, and the clocks; about how she and her mom were crazy. On the third day of school, Rhoda wouldn’t sit next to her at lunch. After that, she would make the sign of the cross when she saw Dea in the halls, like Dea was a vampire.

In fact, Gollum was the only semi-friend Dea had had in years. And that was only because Gollum was weird. Good-weird, in Dea’s opinion, but definitely weird. Besides, Gollum couldn’t really be counted as a friend, since she knew hardly anything about who Dea really was—if she had, Dea was pretty sure even Gollum would go running.

“I should get back,” she said, not looking at him.

“See you Monday,” he called after her.

She didn’t bother responding. There was no point. She already knew how this whole thing would go.

TWO

Dea was six years old the first time she ever walked a dream.

It was an accident.

They’d been living on the outskirts of Disney World then, in a large condo meant to look like a castle, with turrets on the roof and flags hanging above the doorway. Inside, however, it looked nothing like a castle. The carpeting was green and smelled like cat pee, and the elevators were always out of order.

There was a central courtyard, basically a paved deck with a pool in the shape of a kidney bean, surrounded by sagging lawn chairs and straggly plants overspilling their planters. There was a tetherball pole, and a small outdoor pool house that held a bunch of moldy umbrellas, an old bocce ball set, and a foosball table whose handles had been palmed smooth.

Dea was sick a lot back then. She had an irregular heartbeat. Sometimes she couldn’t feel it at all, and she’d find herself gasping for breath. Other times, it raced so hard, she thought it might fly out of her mouth. It was as though her heart were tuned to the rhythm of a song she couldn’t hear.

Her mom had forbidden her to swim—she wanted Dea to stay away from the pool entirely—and Dea was too weak to play tetherball. But she killed at foosball. When her mom was away at work, she spent hours playing both sides of the table, watching the ball spin between the plastic players.

There was a girl, Mira, who lived in 7C. Like Dea, she was too sick to go to school. She had bad asthma and legs that were kind of collapsed, so she walked really slowly, knees crooked inward, dragging her feet. She was one of Dea’s first friends. Dea and Mira made up elaborate stories about the other residents of the condo, invented a new language called Inside Out, and buried treasure in the potted plants so that aliens would someday find it.

The day it happened, they’d spent the morning pretending to be scientists, inventing names for every flower they could think of, drawing them carefully with crayons in a big book of heavy-duty artist’s paper Mira’s dad had bought her, of which Dea was insanely jealous. She was jealous, actually, of everything Mira’s father did, even stupid things, like coming down to the courtyard and telling Mira when it was time to come up for dinner, standing with one hand on the door, looking impatient.

She was jealous that Mira had a dad at all.

It was hot. Even the pool was too hot to give much relief, not that Dea would have swum or even known how. Instead, Mira had the idea to drag a lawn chair into the pool house, next to the foosball table, where there was a fan. At some point, they fell asleep, lying next to each other in their shorts and T-shirts, their feet just touching.

And Dea found herself walking down a narrow stone corridor, open to the air on both sides and half collapsed, as in a castle gone to ruin. As she moved forward, the stone shifted and re-formed into individual doorways.

Later, she learned from her mom that this wasn’t uncommon. The dreamer, sensing an intrusion, builds walls, buildings, sometimes whole cities, to prevent the strange element, the walker, from getting in—kind of like the body releases white blood cells to the site of an infection.

But Mira’s mind wasn’t very practiced, and so Dea passed easily through one of the doorways and ended up in the open, standing on a vivid stretch of green grass. Walking someone else’s dream was like moving through a stranger’s house. Everything was unfamiliar, and Dea knew instinctively not to disturb or touch anything.

On a tennis court several hundred feet away, Mira was playing. She was running back and forth on legs that were both strong and straight, and each time her racquet connected with the ball, there was a satisfying thwack. Then, midair, each ball turned into a bird and soared away. Soon there were dozens of birds, circling overhead, as though waiting for something.