There was the sound of nails on stone, a mouse moving behind me. I wondered if it was the same mouse as before and spun around, ready to snap his neck a second time. Hefting up the lantern, I let the orange glow of the flames twist and mingle with the sparkling purple light above me—but there was nothing.

  The mouse had vanished before I could see him, just like he did every night in my room. Was he watching me while I slept? No, stop it. You’re getting confused, that’s all. It’s just a normal mouse in your room, not some weird growing talking mouse.

  Trevor said almost calmly, “I’m sorry… You’re right. That was it. But I changed my mind, Quinn. I wanted to actually get to know you.”

  “You’re just saying that because you know what I can do to you,” I said, refusing to turn back and look at him just yet. I didn’t want to see that cute smile and those sad eyes. I didn’t want to see him.

  The purple light above us started to get brighter.

  Trevor went on, “I don’t want to die. But I know you’re hurting. That’s the only reason any of this is happening. And I know that part of it is my fault.”

  I spun around and screamed at him, “It’s all your fault!”

  The lantern shook with barely contained flames. I was trembling where I stood, head to toe. Every muscle in my body was pulled tight as the fishing line we had used to trip Dream Mr. Tart. I could barely keep my head on straight.

  The sight of Trevor enraged me.

  It didn’t matter that this was just an illustrated version of him. It didn’t matter that the color of the paints and the shirt had been switched around, or that this was only a dream. When I looked at his face, all I could think about was how stupid I had been, to actually think he might have liked me.

  To think that he might have taken the time to get to know me because he thought I was cool.

  Me, cool? Hah! Laughable! I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t anything. I was an orphan living with her weird grandparents, and their weird dolls, a girl who had ideas for art so weird that the teachers didn’t understand me.

  Trevor seemed to think it over for a moment. I could feel the way that his gaze swept across me, and then he seemed to nod to himself just once, steeled himself, and stepped over toward me.

  “Quinn, I’m part of what hurt you, and I get that.” He stayed calm. “But it doesn’t have to be this way. Every hurt should heal eventually, right?”

  It isn’t healing. It’s all scabbed over.

  My hurt has festered. It’s in everything I do. It’s in everything I see. Mashed potatoes without faces drawn in them. Punching-bag key chains. Teachers that don’t know me. Kids that don’t like me. Grandparents that call me champ and never even bothered to ask if I liked lasagna.

  Red wine that looked wrong, and my father’s voice; just promise me you’re not going to drink until you’re twenty-one. Not even a sip, Quinn. That’s what took your mother from us, and I don’t want it to ever take you from me, too.

  But it didn’t take me from him, did it? I’m not the one who left.

  He was.

  Trevor continued, telling me, “How can I help you? What can I do to fix this, Quinn?”

  “There's no way to fix it.” My voice was thick. A stray tear rolled down the curve of my cheek. The stars were humming. I had at least five of them. Did the mouse give me one? Probably not. Molly hadn’t mentioned it, and he did get back up and fix his neck afterward.

  “There’s always a way to fix things,” Trevor insisted. “And I can help you find a way to fix this, too.”

  “Fix what, exactly? What do you think you can help me fix?” I demanded, taking a step toward him.

  Trevor jerked, looking scared again. To his credit though, he didn’t back up. He just stood there, so scared that it his skin tone looked washed out, with eyes so wide I couldn’t even see a ring of color around the black of his pupils.

  “All of it,” tried Trevor.

  “All of it? All of it?” I started to laugh. It wasn’t a pretty sound. It was a rip-cord noise. “What is that even supposed to mean, Trevor? All of it! Are you going to fix the fact that you lied to me? Do you have a magic clock that's going to make it so that didn’t happen?”

  Trevor looked down at his feet.

  I kept going. “Are you going to fix the fact that out of everyone in that stupid school, I thought you were the one person who actually thought that I was worth being around? Because that’s what I thought! I thought that you cared!”

  He opened his mouth.

  I raised my voice, “And don’t give me that spiel again about how you do care! You didn’t!”

  “People change.” He took a step closer to me. There was only about six feet between us now. The overhead light started to sway back and forth, sending that purple, shimmering glow into a pulsating mess all around the basement. “I changed.”

  My lower lip wobbled. More tears spilled down my cheeks. I hated crying in front of other people, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  “Quinn, you’re an amazing person, and I don’t know… I don’t know how to make it clear to you that I want to help you. But I do know this. Everything that has happened so far, all of this—all of this madness, all of murder—that’s not you.”

  “How do you know who I am?” I asked him, but there wasn’t nearly as much challenge in my voice as I would have liked. I sniffed, wiping at my face with the back of the hand not still clutching the lantern handle.

  “Because I know you,” said Trevor. “The real you. Not this girl. And I know you because I care about you, Quinn. I really do.”

  There was a moment where I thought about it, my heart aching. That was exactly what I wanted…someone to care about me, someone to think about my feelings and apologize, someone to acknowledge my pain and ask what they could do to help rather than bulldozing through and acting without my permission, moving me across the country, drawing all over my art!

  I just wanted someone to understand me. To look at me and see that I was good at heart; to look at me and know that I was trying. That I wanted to get closer to my grandparents, that I had been hoping to make new friends, that when I said whatever, forever, I wanted someone to take me by the hand and go no, everything, right now, and then show me that life could be okay again.

  My dad, he had been the only person in the whole world to do that. After my mom died seven years ago, he told me that things would be okay. Not now. Not soon. But—eventually.

  And that’s when it clicked with me. Of course. It was exactly what I wanted to hear. Because it was my dream. I was making it all up.

  That’s why Trevor was saying almost exactly what my dad had told me before. That was why he was trying to apologize, why he was trying to make me feel better. All that he was doing was telling me what I wanted him to hear; he was a dream.

  This was all a dream.

  None of it was real.

  I tightened my grip on the lantern, and lifted it up in front of me. With the other hand, I flicked open the door.

  Trevor took a step backward, holding his hands up again like he was trying to convince me that he didn’t want to fight. “What are you doing? Come on, Quinn. It doesn’t have to be this way. I just want to help you!”

  “No you don’t,” I said, and took a step toward him. “You don’t care about me. You don’t care about anything that has happened. Or that you hurt me, or anything else!”

  “Quinn!” He was backing away from me quickly now, shaking his hands in front of him. His gaze darted around, looking for an escape. There was only the one tunnel into the basement, though.

  The second basement. The real basement. Whatever.

  The point was, there wasn’t any way for Trevor to get out, not without going past me.

  I threw myself forward, swiping the lantern through the air. Embers fell from the open door and Trevor screamed, backing up and away from me. He realized he wasn’t going to be able to get me to listen to him, so he tried to run, reaching out and shoving me.

  I stumbled backward, surprised. While the other dream people had tried to get away from me, they had never pushed me. Even when Dream Mrs. Harringbone had been struggling at the sink, I had been able to easily hold her down. And it was less that she was trying to get away from me, and more like she was just trying to get out of the water-turned-wine.

  The fact that I was startled didn’t throw me off for long, though. I reached out with my free hand and grabbed onto the back of Trevor’s shirt. The red fabric bunched up in my fingers, and I pulled. Just like with the others, I seemed to have inhuman strength compared to Trevor.

  He was thrown to the ground and rolled. Before he could get up onto his feet, though, I swung the lantern down and broke it over the back of his head. The glass shattered. Flames bounced and jumped, catching on his hair and his shirt, the backs of his pants.

  Trevor screamed.

  Horror filled me as I realized what I had just done.

  That’s exactly what happened to my father.

  I backed away from him, hands flying up to my mouth. The tips of my fingers dug into my cheeks so hard that they left little red crescents behind. Something thick seemed to be in my throat again, moving around, a lump, choking me.

  Trevor screamed, writhing on the floor. He tried to roll to put the fire out, but he wasn’t able to. It spread over him quickly, the flames curling and turning his clothing black. It was the first time I had killed someone that I couldn’t watch.

  Spinning around, I turned my back to Trevor.

  The mouse was sitting on the floor, on the other side of the basement. It was normal mouse sized, and on all fours. I would have thought nothing of the little creature, if not for the fact that I had seen it earlier.

  If not for the look on the mouse’s eyes.

  “What did you want me to do?” I screamed moving toward him. “Did you want me to just pretend everything was fine?”

  The mouse didn’t move. Trevor screamed and wailed behind me, the sound enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. My hands curled into fists at my side.

  I gave a ruthless scream and charged forward, kicking out at the mouse. It didn’t move. I missed. A wave of dizziness washed over me. The purple light was getting even brighter.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” I told him. “They deserved it! Don’t you see that? The way they treated me—they all deserved it! They don’t—I don’t—”

  My throat went tight. Trevor stopped screaming. The mouse just kept looking at me with those golden eyes. Finally, it rose up onto his two back legs, though he didn’t get any taller. Without speaking, the little mouse used one finger to point behind me.

  I felt childish.

  I didn’t want to look.

  I didn’t want to see the burned husk of a boy that I had so desperately wanted to be friends with; and if this dream was going to turn into a nightmare, I didn’t want to see my father there either, stretched out on the floor.

  But the mouse just kept pointing, and the purple light kept getting brighter, and brighter, and brighter.

  They all turned into dolls, I told myself, though it didn’t stop my hands from shaking. I took a step backward, away from the mouse. I hadn’t yet been able to make myself turn around.

  I breathed out hard. I could feel the tremble in my hands curl up into my arms and then lace back down, into my spine. I couldn’t look away from the mouse.

  Backward.

  One step. Two steps.

  Three steps.

  Four steps.

  The back of one heel knocks against something. It skidded a ways further.

  The mouse was still staring at me. Another wave of dizziness hit me. I turned around and nearly fell over, the floor seeming to tilt beneath the flats of my feet. I let out a low, whining keen. The light began to echo the noise that I slipped from between my lips.

  Trevor’s body was gone, though the heavy scent of char remained in the air. A waxy coating had formed on my lips; once, in science class, we were told that happened whenever flesh was burned, because the fat didn’t just vanish. It went up into the air instead.

  The doll was not burned.

  I was strangely relieved by that. It was lying there on the ground, same as all the others. It was just a normal doll, built using the same materials that reminded me of my father. It laid there on the ground, staring up at me with glass eyes.

  I bent down to pick it up, and my legs gave out on me. I crumpled to the floor beside it, my shoulder slamming against the ground. A wave of bile rose up inside of my mouth, sour and sticky. I couldn’t breathe. It felt like my whole body was put together wrong; like maybe I was burning up, too, or maybe this was just what it felt like to turn into a doll.

  The little mouse came into view, just on the other side of the doll. He still wore that disappointed expression on his face. The sound of mice claws scratching over the floors suddenly filled my ears. I could feel the next star form on the curve of my cheek; that meant that I had six of them in total now.

  Did they look as pretty on me as they did on the Ghost Girl in my drawings? Did they make me seem—

  My thought blitzed out. It was like I couldn’t get my brain to work anymore. Even that was inching a long at a lag. How many mice were there? It sounded like hundreds of them. Thousands, even.

  I reached out, curling a hand in the front of Doll Trevor’s shirt and pulling him close. I hugged him against my chest as the purple light got brighter, and the noises got louder; the keening and the rats and my own sobbing, which wracked through my body like waves crashing against the shore back in Maryland.

  I hated so much, and I was angry over so much, and at the very end of the day there—there was something about it all that I couldn’t control.

  Tabitha had never said goodbye to me. I hadn’t seen her since chasing her down the stairs. And now I knew, in a strange, almost twisted, distant sort of way, that I would never see her again.

  The light devoured the basement.

  And in the same moment, it devoured me.

  Back to Reality

  The pillow case was stuck to the side of my face, fabric clotted against my skin with an unfortunate mixture of drool, snot, and tears. Everything hurt. It felt like I had spent a solid forty-eight hours running track at my old school, back in Maryland.

  Was this what people meant when they said, it feels like I just got hit by a bus?

  Probably. I pulled my head away from the pillow, so I was looking up at the ceiling instead. Scratch that. This was absolutely what they meant.

  I took a quick stock of my body.

  Fingers first. Toes. My shoulders. Both legs. My wrists. Elbows. Everything was there. It all moved, though if it were a cartoon, I probably would have been making creaking-hinge sounds.

  With a low groan, I pushed myself up onto my forearms.

  I was back in my bedroom. All of the dolls that I had moved when I first got here, on that very first night, had been brought back in. Some of them were on shelves, and they looked pretty fragile. Porcelain faces with dainty curls of blonde and black and red, in little satin dresses. There was the array of ballerina figurines that were taking up space on the top of the dresser.

  A big raggedy yarn doll had been shoved onto the floor at the side of the bed. The cushioned window seat for the big bay window had dolls on it again, too; including the large porcelain girl with brown curls and a feathered pink hat. Her silky pink skirt had a single golden button at the front, just beneath the collar.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  I had moved these dolls. And Grandma hadn’t even mentioned it! Why were they all back in my room now?

  A spike of pain shot through my head. I reached up and pressed a hand to my temple.

  “Ow,” I muttered, prodding at a soft, squishy knot of swelling that had formed there. I had clearly hit my head on something. What happened?

  The last thing I remembered was being down in the basement… And then… Was there a light? I closed my eyes, trying to think about it, when the hinges of the bedroom door creaked open, long and slow.

  I jumped, afraid of—something. What? I couldn’t remember.

  Whatever, forever. It was just Grandma, anyway. She had one of her big old silver tea trays. Her gnarled fingers were curled around the edges of the tray, and she seemed surprised that I was up.

  A large glass bowl filled with ice water and several neatly folded pink and blue wash cloths were sitting on the tray.

  “Quinn!” she said, excited. “I’m so glad to see you’ve already woken up. You gave me quite a fright, and your grandfather too. Eddie’s been up in a fit over you for hours. You know, it’s not good for an old fogey to be up this late.”

  “Grandma?” I watched with confusion as she set the tray down on the edge of the bed, and then picked up one of the washcloths. A pink one.

  She shook it out, then folded it again. While it was folded, she dipped it into the bowl of ice water. Chips of ice clinked against the ceramic. She unfolded the cloth, rolled it, and wrung it out.

  Then she started to fold it a third time.

  I watched her, mystified. I had never seen someone get so fussy with a washcloth before.

  “You scared the dickens out of me,” she said, more seriously, as she stepped up to the edge of the bed, where she pressed the wash cloth to the side of my temple, right over the squishy lump.

  I hissed and tried to pull away from Grandma, but her other hand came up and pressed to the outside of my face, holding it steady. Her nails were way too long. Had they always been that long? Yeah, I think so.

  Geez, they needed to be cut.

  It encouraged me to stay still at least, while she settled the drippy wet ice rag over my head. Once it was in the exact spot that she wanted it, she snatched up my hand and pressed it over top of the rag.

  “You need to keep that there,” said Grandma. “And now that you’re awake, no more sleeping. Concussions, they’re rotten business, Quinn.”

  “I have a concussion?” I asked, brows pinched.