Elliott is quiet for a moment. “The Beings are the aliens’ weapons, or at least that’s what we’ve always assumed,” he says slowly. “Does that mean the fog is supposed to be a weapon too?”

“A torture device, more like,” I mutter.

He hesitates. “You still worried about your … what, intrusive thoughts? That’s what you said earlier, right?”

My first instinct is to get defensive. To say something flippant and snarky, or maybe turn the conversation back on him, bring up the scorpion he was terrified of or something. But the instinct fades after a second, and I decide to risk honesty.

“Yeah,” I answer. “They’re these weird, out-of-the-blue thoughts that don’t feel like something you’d normally think. Like you’re standing at the edge of a road, minding your own business, and out of nowhere you picture yourself pushing the lady next to you in front of a semi truck and then you panic, wondering why you’d think that. Or in my case, you’re shopping at the corner store when you stop dead in the middle of reaching for a Twix because you suddenly get this awful, graphic mental image of your brother being murdered during a home invasion.”

I’d dropped everything and run all the way home, panicked to the point of incoherence because the image had felt so real, and even though I knew it was just a thought, I also knew that if he did get murdered it would be my fault for not locking the door. That was the first time I started to realize something weird was going on in my head.

“So intrusive thoughts are caused by OCD?” Elliott asks. He sounds intrigued, not judgy, which is encouraging.

“Yeah,” I reply, then think better of it. “Well, actually, no. Almost everyone gets them, but non-OCD people tend to just shrug them off and forget about them. People with OCD freak out about them, try to figure out if they could really come true, whether they’re a bad person for having them, et cetera.” I shrug, but the gesture feels tight and uncomfortable. “I actually don’t get the intrusive-thought part of OCD nearly as bad as some people, though.”

I remember one girl from my support group who had harm OCD—she was terrified she was “secretly evil” because of the violent intrusive thoughts she had. She refused to touch knives or anything that looked even vaguely like a weapon, and would tie herself in knots to avoid being left alone with her little sisters for fear she’d “go crazy” and hurt them.

She wasn’t secretly evil, of course. Her OCD just focused her fears on what was most important to her: being a good person and the safety of her family. OCD is a bastard like that.

“So what part of OCD do you get, then?” Elliott asks.