“You make a sorry Sandman!” I retort, no longer caring if I do sound like a child. The nerve of him to suggest I am failing at my duties when he can barely follow the Sandman rules for a day.

Chimere smiles. “You two are both in a difficult transition period. You must be patient. Eron, Mr. Colburn is trying hard.”

“He hit me. Again. When I was human.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was just an accident. These things do happen. The training is right on schedule. Mr. Colburn just needs to control his impulses a little better.” She takes his hand and pats it. “Isn’t that right?”

He glares at me. “Yeah.”

“Similarly, Eron needs to relearn proper human behavior. For a hundred years, he has had to move close to humans, nearly but not quite touching them, in order to affect them. He needs to reestablish normal human boundaries.”

Reestablish human boundaries. Is that all? Then it is normal for a former Sandman to feel this conflicted? But why, then, do I feel conflicted only when I’m with Julia?

“And, Mr. Colburn,” she continues, “it should not concern you how Eron spends his human days, anyway.”

He spits on the grass. “He practically stuck his tongue down my girl’s throat. Any idiot should know that’s not a proper human boundary.”

“For the thousandth time, your girl is not your girl anymore!” I snap, knowing that Chimere will be behind me on this. After all, she was the one who convinced me, in my early years as a Sandman, that I needed to let my human attachments go. “Tell him, Chimere.”

Instead, Chimere whirls to me, a peculiar, fragile expression on her face. Then she murmurs, not entirely convincingly, “That is right.”

I can’t do anything but marvel at her lack of authority.

She turns to Mr. Colburn and points up at Julia’s bedroom window, which is dark. “Julia’s been waiting for you for some time.”

“Fine.” He pulls himself up to the tree and jabs a finger at my chest. “If I see you anywhere in her dreams, you’re dead.”

I’m too busy studying Chimere to be alarmed by the threat. Chimere sighs. “What a character,” she says, tittering, when he has passed out of earshot.

“You are too easy on him.”

“What shall I do, my pet? Get out the paddle?”

“I recall,” I say, “that when I was being trained, you held my feet to the flame for days if I so much as mentioned Gertie.”

More tittering. “Perhaps I am softening in my old age.”

“I think you’ve softened, but not because of age.”

“What does that mean? I assure you, you are mistaken if you think I am favoring Mr. Colburn.” She begins to braid her hair. “Perhaps you are jealous?”

I snort. “Ridiculous. Me? I just want to ensure that bumbling, pigheaded ass doesn’t ruin us all. How could you tell him about what I did for Julia when she was seven? That was our secret. And now that he knows, nothing is safe.”

She laughs again. She seems to enjoy seeing my feathers ruffled. “Calm yourself.”

“How can I? You said yourself that the transition is difficult, and with him around, I’m always checking my back. I can’t trust him. I’m constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to make some hideous misstep from which we can never recover.” I run my hands through my hair and look up at the night sky. An airplane is streaking across it, red lights flashing. “The human I was placed with—Harmon. He told me human life after Sandman tenure is more than difficult…. He said it’s horrid. Impossible. Is that the truth?”

Her eyes trail to the ground. She holds in a breath. “Harmon is a drunk. He was never the man you were.”

I take her by her delicate shoulders and make her stare me in the eye. “Is it the truth?”

“You still have time, if you wish,” she murmurs. Her reluctance to answer the question tells me everything I need to know.

“Chimere, what are you saying?”

“If you want to stay a Sandman, all you need to do is ask. You know I would love you to stay.”

I slowly pry my fingers from her silken sleeves and sink to the ground, feeling more between worlds than ever.

I try to muster up the energy to feel excited about becoming human again, but it’s impossible. Harmon is likely to give me a piece of his mind for stealing his clothes, and I’m more uncertain than ever about how I should behave around Julia. All her life I’ve done nothing but protect her, and now Mr. Colburn wants me to stay away, despite everything in my body telling me otherwise. Maybe I’m too much of a Sandman to be anything else. Though the thought of one day becoming human has occupied most of my mind for the past hundred years, suddenly, Chimere’s words replay there as well: If you want to stay a Sandman, all you need to do is ask.

It’s later in the morning, and I’ve been perched on the curb for some time, waiting to become human again. As the sun creeps to the top of the sky, I pull out my pocket watch. Nearly twelve. I should have changed by now.

Something is wrong.

Lately, whenever I’ve suspected something was wrong, I’ve immediately thought of Mr. Colburn. Did I even see him again after he crept into Julia’s room to seduce her?

Oh, no.

I jump up and turn toward Julia’s house. I can’t recall seeing Julia leave. Surely she’d be up and about by now. Quickly, I scale the tree and peer inside, afraid of what I might see. But there’s nothing to be alarmed by; Julia’s bed is empty and neatly made, and she is gone. There is no sign of Mr. Colburn.

Relieved, I settle back in the tree, but am quickly startled by Chimere’s face reflected in the window. Her hands are pooled in her lap, as if she can’t decide what to do with them.

“Let me guess,” I say.

“Last night. He never put his other charges to sleep.” Chimere says these words as I’m thinking them. “He’s vanished.”

CHAPTER 25

Julia

My mom pulls this horrible orange and black blouse out from a rack and holds it against me. “Is this New York?”

My gaze travels out the window, into the parking lot, to the sun-speckled windshields of the cars. It’s sunny and warm, yet my breath just about fogs up the glass, I’m panting so heavily. I can’t stop it; I feel like I’m under a microscope. Being watched.

“Hello?”

I’m startled into reality. I scrunch my nose at her latest offering. “I don’t think so.”

“Hon, you’ve nixed every blouse in the store! Since when did you become so picky?”

“I’ll look like a tiger. I think I should stay with safe colors. Black and gray.”

Safe. Safe sounds really good right now. But what is safe? I’d thought my home, my bedroom, was safe. But last night, I dreamt of Griffin. He was so angry at me. And who could blame him? Instead of dreaming I was kissing Bret, I dreamt I was with Eron. But it was more than just making out this time. When I was with Bret, I’d pushed him away. In this dream, I was obviously having a kick-ass time. A small part of me knew I should stop, but the rest of me didn’t want it to end. It was one of those dreams a person never wants to wake up from. And the next thing I knew, Eron was gone, and Griffin was standing over me, shouting, You belong to me. Me! He raised his hand, ready to strike, and then … I woke up, trembling and sweating all over my sheets.

And now I can’t shake the feeling that he’s here. That he saw me with Eron, with Bret. They both had painful spasms in the back of their heads when they got too close to me … so either there’s a contagious brain tumor going around, or …

“Now, what fun are black and gray?” My mom crosses her arms and contemplates the shirt. I know she will beg me to try it on with hopes I’ll fall madly in love with it once I feel the fabric on my skin, and I know I will cave. “Orange looks nice on you. And with your cute body, you should be saying, ‘Hey, world, here I am!’”