“How long ago is this supposed to be?” Kasey said. “Ladies in fairy tales don’t go to college.”

“This one did,” I said. “They met in class and they fell in love.”

He was sitting at the desk closest to the door when she walked into the classroom. She was all alone. After class he waited and spoke to her. He asked if she knew where the Remington Building was, and she did, because her father—

“Ummm…Lexi?”

I blinked. How long had I been lost in thought? And…more important, where was this coming from? I’d never so much as daydreamed any of this before, but as the words formed themselves, it felt like I was telling Kasey the plot of a movie I’d watched earlier that day. The details…everything was right there. I just knew all of it.

“They got married…?” she prompted.

The words pushed out of my mouth before I had a chance to think. “So after they’d been married a while and built their house, they had a baby girl. And the mom stayed home to raise her, and the dad worked but spent all his free time playing with her and teaching her about animals and music. And the other kids in the neighborhood were always around—”

“You said they were way out in the country,” Kasey said, almost reluctantly.

“But the kids in town liked the daughter so much they walked miles just to be with her. And she made tons of friends and was everybody’s favorite person to hang out with. She was like a little angel. She wore fancy dresses with bows and lace, and she had blond hair and a round face with cheeks that turned pink when she went out in the cold.”

I could see the girl in my head as clearly as if I were looking at a photo of her. She ran down the upstairs hallway and into what was now Kasey’s room, three little friends running after her. She loved to sit at the window and look out at the lane that led to town, waiting for her father to come home.

“What were their names?”

“Who?” Her question jolted the image out of my mind. The basement seemed to be getting warmer, and what had been the faint beginning of a headache was starting to pound.

“The man and woman.”

“Well, her name was…” I gazed around the room, then it came to me. “Her name was Victoria. And the man’s name was…Robert.”

“And they all had beautiful exotic green eyes,” Kasey said.

“Why does that matter?” I asked.

“Because I like green eyes, and they’re running out. Soon all that will be left is brown eyes and blue ones.”

“There’s nothing wrong with brown eyes,” I said. “Or blue ones like…ours.” But the eyes that popped into my head were Carter’s.

“I know,” Kasey sighed. “But still.”

In my head I saw the little girl dancing down the upstairs hallway. She stopped and turned to look at me.

She did have green eyes.

I didn’t want to admit that Kasey was right. “So…where was I?”

“All the girls from town came out to play with me.”

That word— me —swooped in at me, made me catch my breath.

I looked at her. “I never said the girl was you.” “Who else could it be?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking up at the pipes again. Every time I looked, there seemed to be a new one winding around the room. “It wasn’t you, though.”

But as the picture of the girl faded back into my head, I could see a slight resemblance: the girl had the same soft caramel-color hair as Kasey, and the same sweet, soft eyes—although the girl’s were green, and Kasey’s were blue.

“It’s my story,” she said.

“Yeah, but it isn’t you,” I said.

“How do you know?”

Because I can see her when I close my eyes, that’s how I know. “I just know, okay?”

“I want it to be me,” Kasey said. She clenched her teeth, making her jawbone jut out near her ears. “You don’t have to be a jerk about it.”

I started to stand up.

“Forget it,” she said. “Forget it. It’s not me, okay?”

“All right.” I took a deep breath. “So anyway, when she turned ten years old, the little girl got a beautiful doll for her birthday.”

Kasey fell silent.

One pipe above our heads was covered in small red painted marks, a sloppy job. I couldn’t even tell what the marks were supposed to be.

“And when she took it to school, all the other kids got jealous because they didn’t have anything nice like that. But she loved her doll so much that she talked about it all the time. And eventually she started taking it everywhere, and acting like the doll was talking back to her. And the other kids were so freaked out that they stopped coming to see her. Gradually it got worse and worse.

They were mean to her at school and called her names and stuff.”

The red-painted pipe was so old the surface was flaky, and the end I could see was open, not connected to anything. The other end…I followed the pipe with my eyes. It led deeper into the room, back toward the darkest corner.

She came home from school one day, gray and pale, and said she didn’t want to go back. Her mother asked why, but the girl refused to tell. She was ashamed to say that the children in town were making fun of the whole family now—saying the mother was unfeminine for going to college, saying that they were vulgar show-offs for building such a big house for just three people.

“And the kids just got more and more suspicious,” I said. “Pretty soon they started telling everyone in town that the little girl was crazy. That she thought her doll was alive.”

The doll was her only friend. She sat in her bedroom staring at it, wishing it would wake up and speak to her.

“So one day when she wandered too near the school, all the town kids started teasing her. She ran away, but they chased her and grabbed her doll, and one of the girls took a pair of scissors and cut her hair off.”

“The girl?”

“No, the doll.”

Kasey breathed in sharply. A vicious doll-haircutting was probably the worst fate she could imagine.

“So she tried to stay away from them, and she never took her doll with her anywhere. But the next time they saw her, they chased her home, and she was so scared that she climbed up the oak tree to get away from them.”

“Wasn’t her mom home?”

“No,” I said.

“What happened?”

“The kids saw her in the tree—”

It was like the words were being planted in my brain all by themselves.

I could see it unfolding in my head—the girl climbing the tree, a pack of dusty, rowdy children shouting up at her, making fun of her, telling her she was going to tear her fancy dress.

“And they started…yelling…”

I forced myself to stop.

These were words Kasey didn’t need to hear. It would just increase the crazy quotient in our house, which, frankly, didn’t need any boosting.

I tore my eyes away from the pipes and spread my fingers flat on the ground. “Then the girl’s mother came home, saw all the rude kids, and scared them away. But first she scared one of them so badly that she peed her pants and none of the other kids ever talked to her again.”

It was a lie. Saying it made my throat hurt.

“Nice,” Kasey said.

The knotted feeling in my chest grew looser.

“Yeah, well, that was…was the evil Megan Wiley,” I said. The air in the basement was getting easier to breathe. As I went further from the story in my head, the words came out more smoothly. “And the girl came down, and she and her mom had tea, and it was cool. She went back to school and she was the most popular kid in her grade, because her mom made the evil Megan Wiley pee in her pants in front of everybody.”

“And?”

“And what?” I stared into the corner, where all the pipes seemed to end. “And then…?”

I was done. My whole body was sore and tired, and I rook that as a really good reason to get up and get ready for bed.

“And then nothing. She had all the bad town kids thrown in jail.” I sighed. “Happily ever after. The end.” “Wait, Lexi…” “What?”