First off, inviting Emily to do trivia night turned out to be a good instinct, even if it didn’t turn out exactly like I’d been hoping. Things had been going well—I bought her a hot chocolate and the theme of the trivia tonight was nineteenth-century literature and she LOVES that stuff—but then an enormous wrench got thrown into our evening and now I’m worried that any potential good favor I’d built back up has been totally shattered.

It all started yesterday morning when Mark texted me to tell me that he’d told Sam about my dreamdiving excursion at movie night. He had initially promised that he would keep it to himself but … I guess that didn’t last. I can’t begrudge him that. It was his head I was invading, his and everyone else’s, and he’s allowed to be pissed about that for as long as he wants. He’s allowed to tell anyone he’d like to, especially the other people who were there. I just wish I had been the one to tell Sam. It makes me feel like a terrible person that she had to hear it secondhand. At least Mark has promised not to tell Caleb and Adam. Then again, he made that promise while extremely drunk and Sam could tell them now, so who knows?

Yep! That’s where my evening went!! With a random Atypical crashing my date with the girl who broke my heart and proceeding to get drunk while we sipped on our hot chocolate! Yikes!

Honestly, the whole thing just made me really sad. Emily too—once I explained everything to her, after we’d poured Mark onto my living room couch (oh yeah, I’ll get to that), she looked totally sick at everything that had happened to him.

“They just imprisoned him for years for no reason?” she hissed as we stood in the kitchen, trying to avoid waking up Mark or my family who were all asleep upstairs.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I guess that’s happened to a lot of Atypicals. I mean, it makes sense … that’s what always happens in stories about people with supernatural abilities, right? They get kidnapped and experimented on.”

“But that’s fiction,” she said. “Real life shouldn’t be like that.”

I just nodded, unable to disagree, but also unable to provide any evidence for life not being like that. I’ll never understand how people don’t instantly get why I like to spend so much time in the dreamworld.

“Rose,” she whispered, “are you safe?”

“Yeah.” I nodded again. “Yeah, I’m— My whole family has been going to the AM for years and, they’re not good, obviously, but they’re also…”

“They’re the only ones who can help your dad,” she finished.