Either something was very wrong with me, or something was very wrong with the world. Believe it or not, I could deal with something being wrong with me far better than the alternative—and if there was an explanation for this, like Katie’s color-shifting dress, or even a bad concussion—I would have gleefully jumped on it. But I suspected there was no simple explanation. I did my best to shut down my higher brain functions and stop thinking about it. I focused on driving. The ride was smooth. The leather seats comfortable. But when I got to my street, I didn’t turn onto it. Part of me said to turn, but a more present part of me knew it was a mistake. I understood why.

A seventeen-year-old who drives a BMW doesn’t live in a small, fifty-year-old tract home. But where did I live, if not here?

A car behind me honked, so I pulled off to the side of the road. I could sense that if I put my brain on autopilot, I would make all the correct turns, and it would get me home, wherever that was—but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to know where I was going before I got there. I was quickly discovering, however, that my brain didn’t work that way.

It was the skaters that got me moving. Two of them. Twins. One of them knocked on my window, startling me. I rolled it down. “Yeah, what do you want?”

“Hey, could you help us?” one of them said. “We’re kind of lost.”

I sighed. “What street are you looking for?”

“Cabrera Drive,” the other one said.

The name struck home. Literally. “I . . . I live on Cabrera Drive,” I told them. Prior to that moment, I had never even heard of it. And yet I knew that I lived there.

“Cool,” said one of the twins, “we must be neighbors.”

And since we were going to the same place, I offered to give them a ride.

One sat shotgun, the other in the back. They weren’t exactly Ferris Bueller and Marty McFly, but now that they were here, I realized that I was glad for the company. My own head had become a treacherous place.

They were pale and a little too thin, and I had a sense that I had seen them before, but couldn’t place where.

“Hey, I got a joke,” said the first one. “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?” I obliged.

“Depends on which door you open.”

The one in the back snickered. I didn’t get it. I hated when I didn’t get jokes.

The twin next to me rapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t you see? It’s like ‘The Lady or the Tiger.’”