“You better go with Urs,” Adeline said. “Unless you want to lose your mind, too, no pun intended. I’ll be right along as soon as I clean up these memories. Can’t have that mess respawning again, can we?” She propped her hands on her hips and began counting the people around the field. Kane understood he was being dismissed and slipped through the crowd to where Ursula waited. She shushed him before he could ask her anything.

“I know,” she said. “We’ll explain everything. But first, are you hungry?”

Kane was incredibly hungry. He’d missed lunch, after all.

Ursula smiled. “You always are.”

“So what about werewolves?” Elliot asked. “Twice for werewolves, right?”

The Gold Roc Diner was a narrow, kitschy diner on the edge of East Amity, buzzing through all hours of the night like a neon satellite. The quartet sat at the back-most booth. Ravaged plates spread across the table, covered in streaks of ketchup and grease, except for Adeline’s; the crusts of her dissected sandwich had been stacked in a small tower. Kane stared at the tower. It was all he could do to keep himself from passing out from fatigue.

He had barely talked since they sat down. It was like he’d been jostled in a fundamental way, his mind falling out of alignment with his body by a fraction of an inch, and nothing was lining up. Perhaps alarmed by his silence, the Others just began telling him things. Right now, they were discussing all the past reveries they’d encountered.

Reveries, Kane thought. Plural. These have happened before, and often.

“Yeah I remember two werewolf reveries,” Ursula said.

“Three,” said Adeline, “if you count Barbara Weiss’s last year, during the school play.”

“Those were just giant wolves,” Ursula said.

“No, she’s right,” said Elliot. “It was still people turning into wolves. That’s three werewolf reveries.”

Kane absorbed this. He was way beyond doubt, by now. He was beyond everything, spinning in some elliptical orbit around the conversation.

“This wasn’t the first giant bug, right?” Ursula asked.

“Isopod,” Elliot corrected, but the girls ignored him.

“There were those giant lunar spiders,” said Adeline. “The ones that crawled out of the eclipse in that one reverie.”

“Spiders are arachnids, Adeline.”

“Elliot. I swear to God if you don’t cut that out.”

Ursula steered the conversation into a recounting of her favorite reverie, which was a story about rare dragons raised in ponds who were determined to make hats from lily pads. This devolved into a discussion of the merits of mermaids, a topic that deeply embarrassed Ursula for some reason. Elliot and Adeline smiled, and Adeline made as if she were telling Kane a salacious bit of gossip.

“You should have seen Ursula in a shell bra. You wouldn’t know it because she’s always in baggy hoodies, but Ursula has got great—”