“I’m not confused.”

The air between them tensed.

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

Kane sighed. In his head he watched Ursula running into the night. He replayed it again and again. The steeliness, the concealed anguish. It had seemed so odd then, but he understood it now. Like thick mist, pity threatened to blot out Kane’s determination. The familiar urge to retreat pulled at him. To sink into the limbo, where no one could find him. But he darted away from the urge like a fish sliding up from the darkness, toward sunlit waters; he needed to see this through.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s not just you, okay? Other stuff is foggy. I’m not sure how much I’ll get back. Or when.”

“Okay.”

“And I might never remember our friendship fully.”

“Okay.”

“Or at all.”

“Okay.”

“Can you say something other than ‘okay’?”

Ursula smiled. “This is sort of stupid, but I brought something for you.” She pulled a plastic container from her bag. “Close your eyes.”

Kane did. Ursula placed something cool and smooth into his hands.

“Okay, you can look.”

At first he mistook them for flat dolls of some sort. One had a tuft of brown hair, the other had red hair. They smiled wanly at Kane while he tried to figure out what strange, occult talisman he’d just been handed.

“I couldn’t get your boots as detailed as I would have liked,” said Ursula, pointing to the brown-haired one, “But I got some tips from this baking blog, and I think I could do the laces with a finer piping tool.”

“Oh!” Kane was holding cookies. Two incredibly detailed, frosted sugar cookies, made to look like him and Ursula.

“You made these?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve just been carrying them around?”

“Ha. No. You and I are good friends with the lunch ladies. They let me keep them in the cafeteria freezer. I just grabbed them.”

“But…why do this?”

Ursula’s smile turned bashful. “I needed to do something, I guess. And I…I missed…” A sad pain rose in Ursula’s voice. “We used to have this joke with my dad about how we wished we could live as cookie people in the cookie kingdom and… Actually it’s hard to explain.”

She didn’t bother. She shook herself and said, “And I wanted to try out this new recipe. They might suck, just warning you.”

“They look too good to eat.”

“Oh, please. I have like, hundreds more. Here.” She took one cookie, snapped off the leg, and handed it over. They both took a bite.

“It’s…” Kane’s eyes widened.

Ursula was the first to spit it out. “Oh, God, these are awful.”

Willfully, Kane swallowed.

“Oh, God!” Ursula snatched it from Kane, staring at the cookie faces as though they could tell her what was wrong with them. They kept their secret.