Just like that, every single person in the hallway faded into wisps of vapor, immediately dissolving into the air like spun sugar. Like they were never there. Aaron and I were still a whole locker block of space apart but he stopped walking, looking down the hallway like he was seeing it for the first time. His brow furrowed, lightly confused, as if he sensed that something was off instead of seeing that a whole hallway of students just disappeared.

“Aaron!” I called out again, jogging toward him. “… Hi.”

I didn’t know what else to say. It felt like we were meeting each other in a place we were both surprised to see the other person, despite the fact that we went to the same high school and are sixteen months apart, so we passed each other in these halls all the time. But there was something wrong—we weren’t supposed to be here.

I was partly correct. One of us wasn’t supposed to be here.

“… Rose?” His body was half-turned to me, his phone still in his hand. Something in his face flickered, like the image of him was glitching and for a moment I was looking at Aaron as I know him now, before I blinked and he went back to Aaron of a few years ago.

“Rose?” he asked again, his voice shaking.

Then, suddenly, everything around us shook and we were in the black void again, the air pressing in around us. There was a bright flash of light, like the sun exploding, and then we were in our living room.

Aaron, with no backpack, no phone, none of the youthful glow he’d had in the high school, looked frantically around the space. It definitely was our living room but, like the school hallway, there was something uncanny about it. Everything looked correct—the couch facing the fireplace, two armchairs on either side, my grandmother’s old coffee table in the middle, photos on the mantel. But we weren’t home.

“Rose, what—” Aaron was breathing heavily, spinning around in an attempt to understand his surroundings that made him look like a dog trying to see where the ball went.

“Where are we?” he asked, stopping his pivot to look at me, his expression like he was noticing for the first time that I was there.

“You—there’s—we’re—” I couldn’t find the words. It felt like I was rebooting, my brain loading along with the environment, a computer trying to run a new program. That was how Aaron described it. Like he was getting the spinning rainbow wheel of death and then a rush of code all at once and then all the graphics coming into focus. I kind of get what he means—my dawning realization felt a bit like that—but I can’t imagine how much worse it must have been for him. At least I already knew I was dreaming.