“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Did I want him to remember? No one else ever does.

“Why don’t we ever talk about it then?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, his familiar shrug out of place in the fantastical Technicolor landscape. “We just don’t talk like that.”

“Do you ever wish we did?” I asked.

“Do you?”

“I…”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Showing Aaron my vulnerable underbelly has never been easy. But somehow, in a place that was so separate from reality but increasingly becoming my true reality, it wasn’t as complicated.

“I do, sometimes, I guess,” I said honestly. “I wouldn’t really know where to begin but … I think I’d like to know you. More than I do.”

“I know what you mean.” He nodded, squinting into the bright purple sun, staring directly at it in the way you never can with the real sun, seeing its whole shape, its beautiful perfect roundness.

“I just don’t … I don’t know how to connect to people. It’s like I forgot how.”

“Is that why you dig into people’s heads?” he asked, his voice turning sharp, the pinks and purples of the world turning bloodred in an instant.

“What?” I asked, turning to Aaron, who was transforming before my eyes, morphing into an unrecognizable monster.

“You’ve been here for too long, Rosie,” said the demon wearing my brother’s face. “Why did you come here?”

“I—”

“Why did you come here?” he asked again, his voice transforming into something familiar, and then he wasn’t Aaron or some horrific monster, but Mark. A Mark made of stone, with cracks forming along the lines of his face as he pleaded with me.

“Why did you come here?” he asked, his voice choked with tears. “You don’t belong.”

More fissures formed on his face, around the corners of his desperate eyes, and darkness spilled out through the cracks like light, a blinding kind of darkness that spread over his entire body, spread into me, the world, flowing out over the cliff’s edge like a waterfall. I was trapped under the weight of it, unable to move, unable to change it, and then—

I woke up in a cold sweat, gasping for air.

A nightmare. I’d just had an actual, honest-to-goodness normal-person nightmare. But I was still lucid dreaming, still thinking that I was diving, that I had wandered into Aaron’s dream or he had wandered into mine but really … he was just a figment of my imagination in the same way Mark was.