Trevor looked surprised. “Oh. Hey. You’re talking to me again?”

  He didn’t sound happy. Well, good for him because I wasn’t happy either. I was so mad and angry and miserable and—and all kinds of other things! Things that swam inside of my heart like an angry shark knowing that chum was about to be tossed in the water.

  Things I couldn’t name.

  I found myself asking, “What, you’re into Alice?” without even meaning too. The words just slipped out from between my strawberry gloss-covered lips all on their own.

  He rolled his eyes. “Quinn, I like you. Okay? I said it. I like you, and I think you’re cool, but you need to treat me nicely if you want to be friends with me. Or anything else with me,” he added that part on a lot quieter. “I can’t be yelled at and stuff all the time.”

  “I don’t yell at you,” I said, aghast at the accusation. “Well, fine, I did that first time you came over. But you deserved it!”

  Trevor said, “Sure, I did. I was being a real jerk that time. But I didn’t deserve it at the party.”

  “I wasn’t yelling at you,” I countered. “I was—I was mad at everyone else. And you said that awful thing about my makeup!”

  “It wasn’t awful,” insisted Trevor. “And you did. You yelled at me, and got mad, and then you left. And everything you said that night? I’ve been thinking about it. I have.”

  My stomach sank. There was literally no way that he could know I was a killer, right? It was just in the dream world. It didn’t count out here.

  It didn’t.

  But Trevor didn’t call me out for burning his dream self alive, and he didn’t call me out for killing anyone else, either.

  What he said might have even been worse than that.

  “The truth is, I’m beginning to think you’re right. Maybe I don’t know the real you. Maybe I only know the ‘new girl at school, playing nice’ version of you. Because the more I get to know you, the more of a spiteful, angry person you seem to be.” He didn’t say it like he was trying to start a fight. It was like listening to someone rattle off facts from a book.

  That’s what he thought, plain and simple.

  I was at a loss.

  “I… you know, people only get angry when there’s something to be angry about,” I told him. “Never getting angry, that’s not normal.”

  “Stuff happens all the time that makes me angry. Like a pretty girl running away from my party,” said Trevor, and that time, there was a note of accusation in it. “But I control it, and let it out in different ways. Like my art.” He shrugged. “Which, you’ve never asked to see, by the way…”

  It was like getting hit upside the head. He was right. All of this back and forth and hassling I was giving Trevor about things, and I had never even asked to see his actual project. I had just been looking at it over his shoulder during classes, and that was totally not the same thing, not even a little bit.

  I felt absolutely terrible.

  “I’ve been so caught up in—” I tried to tell him, but he cut me off with a shake of his head. I didn’t really blame him. It sounded like an excuse even to my own ears, and I was the one saying it!

  “Forget about it. I want to hang out with you, but I don’t want to do it if it’s gonna be so one-sided. Hit me up when you figure out…whatever it is you’re going through.” He gave an annoyed shake of the head.

  “Trevor,” I insisted.

  “No, seriously,” said Trevor. “Just—sort out your own stuff, and then come find me if you actually want to be…friends—or whatever.”

  Whatever, forever.

  And then he turned, and he got onto the bus too. The doors slid shut behind him; the bus driver knew that I almost always walked home at this point, so there was no reason for her to wait on me. A moment later and the big yellow bus was rolling away from where I stood, with Trevor inside it.

  My stomach clenched.

  Where my normal swell of anger would be was just emptiness. I couldn’t figure out if what he said was true, or just more of a false expectation. I was allowed to be angry. Look at my life! And Alice, she was awful. The fact that Trevor would ever have anything to do with her made me doubt his character.

  But… But was he right about some of that other stuff?

  My front teeth caught hold of my lower lip. I worried at it, and tried to figure out what part of his spiel made sense, and what sounded all janked up. It was a lot harder to figure out than I thought it would be.

  Had I been going about this all wrong? Had the house been getting to me? Had the dream world been getting to me? I thought it was helping me before. But now… Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe all of this back and forth was doing something to the way I looked at life.

  And maybe… Maybe there would be more answers in Grandpappy's book.

  The Missing Ballerina

  I read the whole way home. Three different stories, all while I was walking.

  Once upon a time, each tale started. Once upon a time, there was a boy. Once upon a time, there was a girl. Once upon a time, there were two people who loved each other very much.

  The boy wanted to be a fireman. The girl was always reading. And the two people who loved each other so much could never be away from each other, not even for a day, not even for an hour.

  One day, the boy decided that he was going to try and prove to everyone that he could be a fireman. He went out into the woods and lit some leaves on fire so he could practice putting them out. But it had been a dry summer, and the fire spread quick as a snap, and soon the whole forest caught. Not only could the little boy not put out the fire but he couldn’t get himself out of the forest, either, and they both burned up together.

  One day, the little girl sat down to read a book. She got so engrossed in reading that she didn’t hear her mother calling for her. And then her mother came up and took away all of her books. She locked them into the attic, and the girl wanted them back, so up into the attic she went! But when she got there, she fell straight through the floor and broke her neck. Snap! And the girl was gone just like that.

  One day, the woman went to the store, and the store was robbed, and she was shot. When the man realized he would never see her again, he slit his own wrists so that they could be together forever, even in death.

  The stories were sometimes unnerving, and sometimes haunting, and sometimes almost more ridiculous than sad. But they were what I spent the rest of the month doing. Any time I had a free moment, I would open up the book and read another page or two.

  There were hundreds of dolls in my grandparents’ house, and there seemed to be just as many stories in this big old book. Some of them were only a half-page long. None of them had more than three pages total, and those were hard to come by.

  Tabitha’s had been the longest of them all, and it was the very first one too, so maybe that was why it was so long? Or maybe it was just fun to write. Maybe—and yeah, I know, I had that thought—but maybe I was putting too much stock in this book all together.

  It could have just been a coincidence. Plus, just because these had been Aunt Molly’s dolls, I doubt she had this many of them by the time she was my age. Some of these dolls were probably just as ancient as this book, and they had just been the inspiration for Grandpappy's stories.

  I bet a few of them had belonged to Mamaw, and maybe even to Gramps' own mom.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling completely—the feeling that this book had something to do with the world around me, with the doll world, the illustrations, with all of it.

  I just… I knew there was an answer here. I just had to keep reading to find it.

  By the night of the full moon, I had almost made it to the end of the book. With an excuse of a sick stomach, I went to bed early and climbed under the covers, flicking on the bedside lamp so that the room was illuminated in yellow glow.

  I grabbed the book and flipped to the page where I had left off, finally settling down to read.

  Once upon a time, there was a school teacher who knew a secret that no one else did. He knew that magic was real. And he knew how to use it.

  But the teacher didn’t like to use his magic for fun and games. He liked to use it to expand his collection. He was always looking to add a new doll to his shelf, and once he had bought all of the dolls that could be bought, he began to use his magic to make new dolls!

  One might think that the teacher would make dolls out of dogs or cats, perhaps birds or mice. But he only liked dolls that looked human. And look at that, but there were plenty of cute little humans in his class!

  The teacher knew that he wouldn’t be able to turn all of the students into dolls, so he decided to just pick his absolute favorite: a pretty young girl named Molly.

  Molly loved to dress up like a ballerina. She loved dolls, too. That meant she was the perfect prize for the teacher.

  He didn’t have a ballerina in his collection. Yet.

  I snapped the book shut without finishing the story, my eyes wide and my heart pounding. I had been looking for answers, but I hadn’t been expecting to find an answer like this one; to have the teacher right there, to have the dolls there. The magic and the mice and the girl dressed like a ballerina.

  But it wasn’t just any girl, was it?

  It was Molly.

  Molly, who loved ballet, and dolls, and was oh-so-very pretty.

  But that didn't make any sense. This book came from my grandfather's grandfather! He was alive in the 1800s! How could he have met Molly, who only disappeared thirty years earlier?

  There’s no way it could have happened. I needed to ask Gramps about this!

  Fear curled in my gut. I threw the book down on my bedside table and flung myself out of the bedroom, racing into the hallway—but I didn’t get farther than that. Today, the purple light was everywhere, not just in the basement. It was coming up the stairs, like it was searching for me.

  Glowing tendrils of light curled over the ground, pushed along the walls. It reached out like the legs of a spider, and sitting at the very top of the stairs was a little brown mouse.

  “What are you doing here?” I shrieked, so taken aback by the sight of him that, for a moment, I forgot about Molly’s cameo in the book. “What do you want with me?”

  The screaming should have woken my grandparents, but they stayed firmly tucked away in their room. The mouse squeaked, tilting his head to the side. He wiped a paw over his muzzle in the way that mice often did, and then turned big golden eyes onto the purple streaks of aura that were curling through the air toward me.

  For the first time ever, I didn’t want the purple light to catch me.

  Turning, I raced back into my bedroom and slammed the door shut. Something was wrong with all of this. Whatever piece I was missing from the puzzle, it was more important than I thought.

  There was no lock on the bedroom door. That didn’t matter. Even though I grabbed the chair and wedged it under the handle, the light found a way through anyway. It pushed between the wall and the hinges, and came threading through the gap at the bottom of the door.

  I knew the moment it touched me, I would be pulled through the portal. Already, I could feel the wooziness starting to settle into me. It was sitting in the back of my chest, heavy and daunting, and trying to push up into my throat, trying to eat me alive.

  My legs shook. I ripped open the closet door to grab a jacket—planning on wedging it into the gap between the flooring and the bedroom door—only to scream at the sight that greeted me. Each and every doll that had been thrown in there on the floor was sitting up and looking at me.

  They formed perfect rows, so many of them that they filled up the entire floor of the closet. The blanket that I normally kept over top of them was gone. I slammed the door shut again and ran for the bed, but just as I reached for the handmade patchwork quilt there, my legs gave out on me.

  I toppled to the floor, bringing the quilt down with me. It covered me fully, even my head, but I could see the glow of the aura through the fabric. It had fully made it into the room now, engulfing everything. Those phantom hands that had once made me dream of my mother brushing hair from my face now seemed to be pushing down on me, trying to flatten me to the floor.

  Heart pounding, I shimmied underneath the bed. I scooted as far beneath the old metal frame as I could get. It sat low to the ground in the way that all old beds did, and the scent of mildew and dust filled my nostrils.

  And something else, too.

  The sweet scent of honey, and the chemical tang of bleach.

  It was so strong that my eyes started to water. Tears rolled down the curve of my cheeks. I tried to fight back against the pressure change, but the moment that my ears popped, I knew that I was done for.

  You couldn’t fight back against this.

  I couldn’t escape from it.

  The light decided when I left the world and when I entered it.

  My last thought before I passed out was this: I hope that I’m wrong about the book.

  But I already knew I wasn’t. And this time, of all the times, hope was not going to be enough to save me. Then again, it seldom was.

  When I woke up, I was still under the bed, but rather than a wooden frame, it was a rusty old metal one. I knew I was back in my illustrated dream world. Everything was drawn in, with the thick illustrative lines that had once filled me with a sense of wonder.

  Instead, I was now filled with a sense of dread.

  I wasn’t sure how long I hid there under the bed, only that by the time I managed to shimmy out from my hiding spot and into the room at large, everything ached and I sort of just wanted to curl up in a ball somewhere. I was covered in dust and spiderwebs and for some strange reason…honey.

  The whole room was covered in honey, actually. Thick golden gobs ran in rivulets down the walls and pooled in sticky puddles on the floor. I grabbed the blanket from the bed and wiped the sticky goop off of my hands and my dress as best that I could, though there wasn’t much saving my curls.

  There was a pink-cloth stuffed cat on the bed. It belonged to Dream Hero. I remembered that Dream Trevor had been alive, swallowed hard, and swiftly left the room. The walls of the hallway outside were lined with scissors. Ornate, antique scissors that hung up like pictures.

  Scissors.

  Like the ones that I had killed Dream Hero with.

  A shiver ran down my spine. I wasn't brave enough to call out to Molly right then, worried that she might not have been there but someone else might be. Instead, I picked the direction that led to the stairs at least seven times out of ten, and started to walk.

  Much to my relief, the stairs did come into view, and even better, they were stairs I recognized.

  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. Little puffs of dust rolled through the air farther down, like the sort of misty barely there clouds that you might have seen on a mountain, way up near the peaks, and the banister was just as jagged as a bright flashing bolt of lightning.

  These were the stairs that I had chased Tabitha down, during my second trip into the dream world!

  Relief washed through me.

  “Molly,” I called out. “Tabitha! Are either of you around? We need to talk. Something’s happened, and it’s big, I think!”

  No one answered me. I started down the stairs. The walls seemed to grow taller around me, almost taunting me. I thought this might have been it; this might have been the first time I had been to the same place twice.

  That was a good thing, right?

  It had to be.

  Down, down I went.

  The bottom of the stairs suddenly dropped off into a stretch of hallway. The moment I stepped into the hallway at the start, the stairs vanished behind me and an empty room took its place. Okay, that was right. This is the same thing that happened the last time I saw Tabitha.

  The hallway was a divide, which meant when I pushed my hand out… It vanished!

  “Good. Then this will take me to one of the kitchens,” I said confidently.

  I stepped through the ‘portal’ and out into the exact room I had been expecting. Finally! Something was starting to make sense! Dream logic was hard to follow, harder to learn, and almost impossible to figure out, and yet here I was, figuring it out!

  The hallway let me out into the kitchen where I had killed Mrs. Harringbone. I had drowned her in red wine, in the big basin sink.

  The walls were covered in lemon wallpaper, and there was a weird chandelier made of empty glass soda bottles and cat-eye marbles hanging from the center of the ceiling. They rolled around and watched me as I stepped into the kitchen, and over to the counter where the bear-shaped cookie jar was sitting.

  The jar blinked.

  “I don’t know what you’re staring at,” I grumbled, and then braced both hands against the counter to get a better look. Was everything the same as before?

  Sort of.

  The ceramic was still painted a bright shade of blue, and it was still holding a bowl in the front. Last time, I had gotten a strand of buttons formed into a necklace from it. The necklace had vanished the moment that I woke up, and I had never seen it again.

  This time, there was a heavy-looking brass key in the bowl.

  I reached out, carefully curling my fingers around it. The key was cold to the touch, like it had been sitting there for a long time. It looked older than anything else in the house. The teeth were shaped like actual human teeth, three of them, and the other end of the key was shaped like a rose, complete with tarnished red paint.

  “Careful,” said a voice from behind me.

  I squeaked and spun around, grasping the key tightly in one hand. “Tabitha!”

  Her pudgy face and black dress greeted me. Her long white hair was tied back with a black silk ribbon, which had a bow just slightly on the side. It was the first time I’d seen her since the chase. Had she been hiding in this section of the house the whole time?