Phillip once told her that, during harvest, farm workers often came down with green tobacco sickness. After a full day of handling the plants, they would pass out in the fields. Now, Josie wished she could simply slip into unconsciousness. She turned on her side and pushed her forehead into the hard ground. It felt comfortably solid underneath her, and it reminded her of when she was twelve and slept on the floor of a cabin for almost an entire summer. Josie and her cousin Natalie had convinced their parents to send them to sleepaway camp. Natalie had only gone for two weeks, but at Josie’s insistence, her mother had signed her up for six straight weeks. It was only an hour up the coast, but even then Josie thought that if she just removed herself from Santa Barbara, she would be happier, and she had been, sort of. No one put bleach in her shampoo bottle or told the other girls she wet her bed. She made friends. She learned to ride a horse. But it was also the summer she first dreamt the dream. In it, she was falling, arms and legs spread, the wind rushing down rather than up. And as she rushed toward the ground, her body seemed to split into two bodies, one that fell and one that lay on the bed waiting to be crushed. Her mind would zoom into the Josie on the bed, and she would feel the suffocating weight of her body, her limbs filled with iron. She would stare helplessly up at her rushing other half until the split second before the two collided. Then whatever had held her loosened, and she threw herself out of the way and onto the cabin floor. After a week of bruises the size of plums and bunk mates complaining that she was making too much noise, she had started sleeping on a blanket on the concrete floor, sneaking off her bed after everyone went to sleep, and back again near morning after she rolled away from her plummeting self.

Now she wondered what it would feel like to crash into yourself, one self converging with the other. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the sky was dark.

It seemed like minutes, but Josie knew she must have been asleep for hours. She was cold and stiff and her legs ached so much that when she stood up she thought they might give out under her. Riding her bike was impossible, and she walked it down the long road to an old gas station on the corner and called Devesh from the pay phone.

When he drove up, she could tell he was angry. “It’s not safe going so far out.”

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

He hoisted her bike into the car. “You didn’t even bring your cell phone.”