Molly just blinked at me.

  Shaking my head, I said, “Never mind. Let’s just—okay, so. The Narrator. Who’s that?’

  “The one that tells the story.”

  “I thought that was supposed to be me, since it was my story.”

  “You would have thought.” She shrugged her shoulders but wouldn’t meet my eyes. The light in her eyes seemed dimmer; it was clear that whoever this mysterious narrator was, Molly didn’t like talking about them.

  Molly scuffed one foot over the ground, folding her arms neatly behind her back. When had she changed out of her white swan lake outfit? She was wearing a black bodysuit, with a pink tutu on it now. The bodysuit went all the way down and covered her legs and her feet. Even her shoes were black now.

  “What—” Then I shook my head. It didn’t matter. Whatever, forever. I randomly seemed to switch between what Ghost Girl was wearing and my own clothes. So what did it matter if Molly could do the same?

  “Are you going to follow the story?” Molly suddenly sounded serious. She stepped toward me, reaching out and putting one hand on the curve of my shoulder. “You wrote it, Quinn. It needs to be finished.”

  “I’ll finish it,” I promised her, if only so that I could wake up from my dream.

  With the pair of scissors in hand, I stalked over to Dream Hero. There was nothing in her eyes. They were glassy and blank. She didn’t move.

  The others—they had made me angry. They had been fun. They had been—something. But when I sunk the blades of the scissors into Dream Hero’s stomach, I found that I didn’t feel much at all. She made a noise like a deflating balloon. Her arms stayed down at her sides. Her fingers twitched, but that was it.

  “She isn’t right,” decided Molly. “You made her all addled up.”

  “This isn’t her room,” I announced. I wasn’t sure why, but that thought suddenly seemed important. I hated that Dream Hero was here. I had lost my house once, in the fire. The thought of giving up this room to Dream Hero, even if it wasn’t real, made this anger burn hot inside of me.

  I pulled the scissors back out. Red stained her star-covered shirt. She made that sound again: eeee. Her hands didn’t move. Her body swayed slightly, back and forth, like leaves on the tree branches out in the park.

  I pulled my hand back. With a wet sound, I plunged the scissors into her chest. Blood spilled onto my hands. Dream Hero swayed backward. It was like punching a big rubber ball. I would slam the scissors into her, and she would sway backward and then toward me again. So I just kept stabbing her, and stabbing her, and stabbing her—until she finally went backward and kept going.

  Timber!

  Down Dream Hero went, onto the floor.

  Her eyes were still open and glassy. She stared up at the ceiling. Red soaked into the front of her shirt. It colored in all of the white stars. There was way more blood than should have actually been there. It was everywhere, spreading out over the floor like a lake.

  I stepped backward, startled. The scissors slipped out of my hands and hit the floor with a clatter. “What’s happening?”

  Molly stepped over to join me. She folded her hands neatly behind her back and bent forward at the waist. “Wow. I think what’s happening is that she’s dead!”

  Molly laughed.

  I scowled at her, flicking blood from my hands onto her pretty pink tutu. “That’s not what I meant!”

  The blood was thick enough that it was splashing around our feet now, like a puddle. It was still coming.

  “Why didn’t she turn into a doll?” I demanded.

  Molly shrugged. “She did.”

  And Molly was right.

  The blood was gone, just like that. And sitting in the middle of the floor was a plush doll, made out of the same fabric as the pink cat that had been on the bed. She had button eyes. They were glossy and unseeing.

  I stepped toward her, strangely hesitant. Then I picked her up by one arm, carried her over to the closet, and tossed her inside. She looked small lying there on the floor. The closet was full of shirts covered in stars…and then all of the hangers were empty.

  It felt like something inside of me was breaking up all wrong; like there was something good about this, but something bad about it, too.

  Behind me, Molly said, “You didn’t know.”

  “What?” I turned to look at her, fixing the black-and-pink-clad ballerina with my frown.

  Molly repeated herself, “You didn’t know.”

  “I heard you, Molly. I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When you made the story,” she explained. “And wrote about all of this happening. You didn’t know that you were going to need to make it real. So that means it’s not your fault. Right now—” Molly stepped closer, reaching out and grabbing me by the hand. “All you can do is follow the story! We’ll keep making it a game though, okay?”

  Wait.

  Was… Was Molly trying to make me feel better about having to kill the dolls? Did… Did she not have fun when we did this?

  “I thought you liked killing them.” I closed the closet door and let Molly pull me from the room, back into the breathing hallway. The walls were still moving but they had been painted black. Each doorway was outlined in a different color; red and yellow and green and blue.

  Molly said, “A game is a game is a game, and they aren’t supposed to live. That’s just how things are here. The Narrator sent you to finish the story that you wrote. You have to. Otherwise -”

  “I’m stuck here,” I finished, remembering what she said earlier.

  Molly took both of my hands then and stepped so close to me that our faces were only inches apart. I could feel the heat of her breath ghosting over my face. It smelled like King Cake. “I don’t want you to be stuck here, Quinn. You didn’t know what was going to happen. You shouldn’t be punished because of that.”

  “Did… Did you get stuck here?” I asked her, brows pinching down. “Did you get stuck here because you didn’t do the right thing?”

  “You have two more people to take care of,” said Molly, instead of answering. Her skin was always pale, but it seemed so white now it was like milk in a porcelain bone; like if she were really a living thing, I should have been able to see the blue of her veins there.

  But there were no veins and her hands were cold where they curled around mine. Molly’s eyes shined like the stars, but there was no warmth in them. As it turned out, light didn’t have to be warm. Light could be cold and sterile.

  Like hospital lighting.

  The lighting in a police station.

  The way that big white lights gleam down on you while you’re sitting in a small office, waiting on a social worker to show up and tell you, your grandparents will take you, so you won’t need to go to foster care after all.

  My stomach twisted itself into so many knots, I knew they would never be fully untied. I dropped Molly’s hand and stepped quickly around her, heading in the direction that should have gone towards the stairs. “So, we’ve got to get started on that. You said it was almost the full moon, right?”

  “...Right.” She followed after me, quickly catching up on those long legs of hers. She didn’t reach for my hand again, and she didn’t giggle. It seemed as though she realized how serious I was about this, which was good.

  I didn’t totally understand how the whole full-moon nonsense worked, and I wasn’t totally sure what would happen if I started ignoring the rules of the dream world. It could get even weirder, or even more difficult, or…I didn’t know.

  It just felt like following along with what Molly said was the smart way to handle it.

  The hallway suddenly billowed out wide, like a goldfish bowl. I stopped and looked around, wanting to make sure that it would still take us to the stairs. Molly came over to me and looked at me with those bright eyes of hers. “Quinn?”

  I turned to her, frowning. “What?”

  “I need to ask you something,” said Molly. “Was I right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You made the visitors, didn’t you? For your story. That’s what I was told. And on some level, I knew it must have been true.”

  “Oh.” I gave a small, almost-nervous little nod. “I did. Yeah.”

  “Why do they look like that?” Molly asked. “The way that you made them.”

  “They look like that in my life.” I glanced away from her. “They, you know, I based the pictures on people I knew. I wanted them to be…real to me.”

  Molly said nothing, but I could tell that she wanted to know more.

  “We aren’t friends,” I said sharply.

  Molly’s eyes widened. “You and me?”

  I grabbed up her hand with both of my own, clinging to it almost desperately. “That’s not what I was talking about. You and I are friends, Molly. I meant the people, the strangers? We weren’t friends in real life. I hated them. That’s why I drew them as the people my Ghost killed.”

  “What did they do?” Molly looked concerned. “It must have been something awful, to make you feel this way about them.”

  A tightness filled my throat. They had done so much, and all of it had been awful. They had mocked me, and teased me, and used me; they had made me feel like I was nothing, like my ideas weren’t good enough, like my designs weren’t good enough.

  One teacher said that my work was too weird and the other said I wasn’t pushing hard enough. They drew on my work, and they laughed at my hair, and they stared at me as I walked down the hallway of the academy; as if it wasn’t bad enough that I had to come out here and stay in this awful old town, in that creepy house!

  I hadn’t moved out here because it was fun. It wasn’t like I wanted to pack up everything and leave Maryland behind, just to come out here where I could sweat myself to death, in a house that had all kinds of rumors around it, with people who didn’t like me, with people who didn’t even want to try and get to know me.

  Both my parents were dead. My whole life had ended. And no one cared.

  No one cared enough to ask me how I liked living in this town, or with my grandparents. My social worker hadn’t even called once. There was no one going, “Quinn, can we do something to make this easier for you?” Or “Quinn, it must be hard settling in to this new town all on your own, do you want to come and hang out with us this weekend?”

  I had just been totally thrown to the wolves, and left there. I had been forced to try and figure out how to swim all on my own, after being tossed into deep water. The kids had laughed. The teachers hadn’t cared.

  And Trevor, he was the worst of them all.

  My breath hitched.

  “Quinn?” Molly asked, but her voice had turned strangely soft all of a sudden. “Are you okay?”

  I realized I’d just been standing there staring at her without saying anything, and then I made this ugly sound, because I realized that I was about to start crying, too. Like the tears were totally right there at the edges of my vision, like wow, I was becoming a huge bawl baby over this!

  I dropped her hands and scrubbed roughly at my face, blinking hard to clear the tears away from my cheeks. There was no way that I was going to stand around and cry about this sort of stuff. They had been awful to me, and now I was getting my payback by stabbing them with scissors. It was fine.

  It was almost unfair, because all I was doing existed in the course of a dream. But when I went back out there, they were still going to be making fun of me, they were still going to be demanding things out of me, and they were going to be poking fun of the work I did, the place I lived in, the way I dressed—all of it.

  And that just… It was awful.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Molly.” I turned and started down the fish-bowl hallway, toward where it tapered off to normal size.

  “Quinn” Molly hurried after me. “Don’t run off!”

  She grabbed for my hand. I pulled it out of the way, so she couldn’t. “I said I don’t want to talk about this, Molly! Just help me find the stairs!”

  “This is the wrong way,” she pressed.

  I spun around. “What do you mean it’s the wrong way?” I threw my arms out to the side. “I went in a straight line, down the hallway! How could I have gone the wrong way?”

  Molly pointed over my shoulder at the area behind me. “There’s a wall.”

  I spun around, and was met with a brick wall only about ten feet away from me. I made a frustrated sound, balled my hands up into fists, and stamped my feet. “Ugh! What is wrong with this stupid house? Why is it so hard to get everywhere?”

  “It’s confused.” She stepped around me, over to the wall. She ran her pale fingers over the harsh dark red brick. A sad look crossed her face. I wondered what she was thinking about, but only for a moment.

  Then the frustration came back.

  “Yeah? Well it’s not the only one confused,” I snapped. “I’ve been confused since I got here! The house keeps moving, none of this makes any sense, and I’ve got no idea how to even get to the stairs!”

  “It’s okay! You’re trying to take too much on yourself.” She flattened her palm against the brick, left it there for a moment, gave it a pat, and then turned back toward me, extending her hand. There was brick dust on it.

  I stared at it.

  The brick dust was in the shape of a smiling face, like she had drawn it on all that pale skin.

  “Just trust me,” she encouraged. “Let me help you some. You just said it yourself, we’re friends, Quinn. And friends help each other out.”

  “Just help me find the stairs,” I croaked out, not entirely certain why I was being so short with Molly. The dream was starting to get to me, maybe. It just felt like… Like maybe she was right. I had taken all of this on, and now it was crushing me under the weight of a ton of bricks.

  I didn’t take her hand.

  Molly didn’t move.

  She kept staring at me with that perfectly serene, perfectly steady look. It was like she was the doll, and it had just been painted onto her face.

  “Fine,” I snapped, reaching out and grabbing her hand.

  Molly gave a giggle, though it was a bit stilted sounding, and then she turned and hurried past me, guiding me back the way we came.

  There was no fish bowl center to the hallway now. Molly’s strides were massive, like each step was a jump. I had to hurry to keep up with her. “The stairs are just up here, Quinn. Don’t worry. I’ll try my best to make sure you can find everyone before the full moon!”

  Down the hallway we went, with Molly in the lead. Sweat beaded up on the back of my neck. The sound of our feet slamming on the floor seemed to echo, like great big thunderclaps or like someone was playing around with symbols.

  Then, finally, the stairs came into view! They had a diagonal hallway at the front, with no walls on the side of the stairwell. The floor was dark wood and the faded wallpaper was covered in slices of oranges and lemons and old little seventies-era flower bursts.

  It might have been pretty fifty years ago, but at this point, the colors had pretty much faded away entirely and there wasn’t much left of them. But the most striking thing was that the hallway wasn’t actually empty.

  There was someone already on the stairs.

  Tabitha.

  She was sitting there, halfway down, and looking at the staircase. It stretched out for miles, crooked and disjointed, not connected to the walls or the floor. It just floated in the middle of the air, zig-zagging its way down, down, deeper into the house.

  “Whoa.” I froze at the top of the staircase. The banister was jagged, like lightning arcing through the sky. When I curled my hands over the edge of the banister and peeked down the other side, there was nothing. The staircase vanished down into darkness. Little puffs of dust rolled through the air further down, like the sort of misty barely there clouds that you might have seen on a mountain, way up near the peaks.

  I pulled away from it, struck with a sense of vertigo. Heights didn’t usually bother me—in Maryland, there had been a massive tree in the backyard and I loved to see how high up it I could get—but this one, it was different. It was so totally different that I couldn’t stand it.

  Maybe because there wasn’t any bottom this time around? I couldn’t understand why Tabitha was looking at it like that.

  And boy, was she looking. At least until she realized that I was looking too.

  Tabitha stood up as I watched her, and she put both hands on the railing. She carefully climbed up onto it, her arms held out to either side. There was something so dreadfully sad about the look on her face.

  I should have called out to her. I should have tried to convince her to get back down. That was dangerous, right? And the right thing to do, the responsible thing to do, it would have been to try and convince her that the railing wasn’t safe. The drop was too long. The jump wasn’t worth the thrill that came with it; it was the opposite of the thrill that came with a kill, because the kill was something that the Dream People had to deal with, and not something I had to deal with.

  If Tabitha went off of the edge there, though, she was the only one that would be dealing with the fallout from it. So, I should have done something.

  It’s like when you saw a little blind lady walking into traffic. It was your moral duty, right, to stop them before they got hit by a semi truck. The same thing should have applied here, and I knew that. It wasn’t like I was stupid, or deranged, or anything like that.

  But I was struck with a sort of morbid curiosity.

  Tabitha had started out as the doll in my grandparents foyer. If she jumped, would it kill her? Would it turn her back into a doll, like the family that had infested this house? Would she just get back up from a crumpled heap down below and walk away, as if the jump was nothing more than a shortcut?

  Before I could get any answers to those questions, Molly darted forward. Her slippers were soundless against the wood of the stairs, and she jumped down more of them than she stepped. At points, she soared down so many of the stairs that it looked as though she was actually flying.