What if the AM hadn’t explored things fully with my dad’s diagnosis? As far as our parents told us, the doctors had just said, “Hey, dude, you’ve got Alzheimer’s, it sucks, and the telekinesis might make it worse, but we don’t know why, you’ve got somewhere between two and ten years, good luck bro,” but how much did they really consider how his ability factors into it? Is it just that it might make things worse? Could it make things better? I mean, if they’ve got rooms here that suppress Atypical abilities, surely they can untangle someone’s power from a disease that’s killing them. Right?

JANUARY 9TH, 2017

I’ve just finished moving all my stuff from the intense cinder-block Atypical-ability-dampening room to another, slightly more airy cinder-block room. Despite what Owen had said, I’m not in exactly the same room as I was the first time, but they’re all basically identical, so it shouldn’t really matter. Except I’m all the way at the end of the hall, right next to the stairwell, in the weird, old, stone part of the building and …

OKAY I’M A LITTLE SCARED. Ugh.

I get scared talking to girls, or before math tests, or when Chef comes into the kitchen with steam coming out of her ears, but I don’t usually get scared by “spooky” stuff. A musty, windowless room in some corner of some old hospital would maybe freak a lot of people out but it shouldn’t bother me.

Except, I’m going dreamdiving for the first time in a week tonight and I don’t know what to expect. We’re starting actual trials tomorrow, like we did the first time, where I’ll put myself to sleep in the presence of doctors and try to walk into their heads. I think they’re going to be waking me up every couple of minutes, training me to understand how long five minutes in the real world feels in the dream time. That was what Owen had said.

“They’ve done this with a lot of other dreamdivers?” I asked after he explained the scope of the tests, leading me down and around the halls of the medical wing, where all the sleep test rooms are. This is how we’ve done most of our talks the past few days—I sit still with Dr. Loving in therapy and walk circles around the facility with Owen. I find walking around with Owen a lot more productive.

“Yep,” he said, sounding almost proud. “Believe it or not, you’re not the first person who has had such a good time in the dreamworld that you haven’t wanted to spend any time in the real world.”

I looked up at him to see that he was smiling, lightly teasing me.

“Ha, yeah,” I chuckled. “I guess that’s not too surprising.”