During baseball and football seasons, pretty much everyone wore a blue baseball cap. It was to show support for the team, they said, although really it was because if you didn’t wear one, you were likely to get bullied, yelled at, or otherwise interrogated by a slick, smiling button-nosed jock who looked like he was already planning his presidential campaign.

“You know you make people uncomfortable,” he said. “When you don’t wear one. Like you think you’re better than us.”

“That sounds like an ‘other people’ problem, rather than a ‘me’ problem,” I said.

Sheffield scoffed. “Later, Ash. Jewel, may the Lord bless and keep you.”

Sheffield shuffled off. Jewel and I rolled our eyes, and headed in opposite directions to get to our homerooms.

Someone ran past me, sobbing.

And then the hallway erupted. Talking, pointing, laughing. I could feel the gossip move through the air like a thunderclap. Phones were passed around. A photo, sent to a bunch of people, each of whom passed it on to a bunch more. Someone shoved it in front of me, without asking if I wanted to see it. And, like an idiot, I looked.

Six swastikas, spray-painted onto the side of Judy Saperstein’s house.

The bell rang, but the crowd barely budged. Everyone had something to say on the subject, and they were all saying it at the same time. Most of them were angry, afraid, pissed off—but more than a few people seemed to find it hilarious.

I went to the window and tried to catch my breath. Outside I saw the same old boring landscape as always: the sloping soccer fields, Hudson’s rotted city sprawl, the mountains across the river beyond.

But then I raised the camera to my eye, and looked again. I saw the dark fog, the billowing black clouds. The longer I looked, the more they took on shape. Became something real. Something terrifying. Buildings rose up into the sky. Shapes flew through the air, flapping wings too big to belong to birds.

Another city. The one that Solomon saw, where monsters walk harmlessly through the streets beside hordes of delicious humans.

The city where I, supposedly, was a princess.

Except it couldn’t be. Because that city wasn’t real. It was all in Solomon’s mind.

“No,” I whispered. The shivering in my spine had become so pronounced I could feel my fingers shaking.

This can’t be real.

This can’t be happening to me.

People say Solomon is suffering from a serious mental illness, the kind that will inevitably lead to his inability to function as an independent human in the world.

It’s because of his other world. His delusions.

But if he sees this—and now I’m seeing it—maybe I’m sick too. Sick with something more serious than depression.

And then the thought came like a whisper into my mind.

The treehouse.