This time, in the bathroom, he paid attention to the moon slatted through the blinds, the faded copper stain around the base of the old faucet. These were details, he thought, the sleeping brain couldn’t invent.

Ronan turned on the bathroom light and saw the mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!

And then he woke in his bed again.

Again, again.

Shit.

He gasped for air like a dying thing.

Ronan couldn’t tell if he was awake or if he was dreaming, and he no longer knew how to interrogate the difference. He examined every part of both dream and waking and felt no seam between them.

He thought: I might be doing this forever. Trying to wake, never knowing if he had succeeded.

Sometimes he wondered if he was still in that dream. Maybe he had never woken at all. Maybe every impossible thing that had happened since that Ronan! in the mirror, all the outrageous events of his high school years, good and bad, had been in his head. It was as plausible an explanation as any.

The worst dream.

Before, he thought he’d always know the difference between dream and waking. What was real and what he’d invented. But After—

“Wake up, white boy, we’re here,” Hennessy said.

Ronan woke as the car pulled to a stop, tires crunching gravel, brush scratching the exterior. He had been stretched in the backseat; now he sat up, pressing the heel of his hand to the crick in his neck. On the other side of the backseat, Chainsaw, his dreamt raven, scrabbled inside her box, sensing they were about to get out. Automatically, he reached for his phone to check for texts before remembering it was gone.

Outside, the cold afternoon had turned to a warm, golden evening. Flat-roofed buildings huddled around a commercial parking lot, the gutters gilded fondly by the late-day light. It was the sort of complex that looked as if it ought to have school buses parked in front of it, and sure enough, Ronan spotted a faded sign: WEST VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF LIVING HISTORY. An unhindered tree-of-heaven grew around the sign, and tributaries of overgrown cracks ran through the parking lot. End-of-season leaves curled auburn and purple wherever the breeze couldn’t reach.

The Museum of Living History looked like it had been dead for decades.