But that didn’t last. A relationship cannot be built on joy alone because life isn’t like that. I’m not like that, and neither is Emily. She is more than her infectious laugh and bright, wide smile.

“I want you to know me,” I breathed once we’d settled down. “I want to tell you all the hard stuff. I want to share all of it with you. I mean, just telling you—”

“I know.” She nodded solemnly. “I know how big of a deal it must have been to tell me the truth. And this isn’t just about you, I get that. But now that I know … it changes things.”

“Does it have to?”

“Rose, it’s one thing if you’re sleeping through the day because of a medical condition, it’s another if you’re choosing to so that you can go into people’s dreams.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Yeah, I know. But I’m not doing that anymore. Not as much. And I’ll never go into your dreams again. Not on purpose. I promise.”

“It’s not about that,” she said. “Not really. It’s that the person who is going to sleep so she can mold someone’s dreams is a different person than the one I know.”

“You’re—you’re right.” I sighed, terrified at the admission. “It really does feel like I’m two different people sometimes—Dreamworld Rose and Real World Rose. And I don’t know if it’s always going to be like that or which person I want to be, but … you deserve to know who you’re dating. That’s, like, pretty baseline.”

I tried to smile at her, let her know that I understood how much I was asking of her—how much I had been asking of her—and she rewarded me with a small smile of her own.

“Look,” she said, “I barely know who I am. I mean, we’re technically still teenagers. We’re not going to have it all figured out. But I want to try to get to know who you are now. Not every gory detail”—she smiled bigger and my heart lifted with the corners of her mouth—“but the truth of who you are. There’s this enormous piece of your life that I knew nothing about and I … I want to know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.” Her smile grew again and soon I was fully smiling back.

“Maybe we could start fresh?” I asked, feeling like I was reciting a line from one of the rom-coms that Emily loved. Her smile re-formed in a way that made me feel like that was exactly what she was thinking too.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “I would like that.”

She shuffled on the bench a bit, straightening up, squaring her shoulders, and clearing her throat. Then she stuck out her hand.