“Oh my God, Ahmad!” Winnie exclaimed, and pointed at the ground. Ahmad’s gaze followed her finger. The Switch, which had cracked against the concrete, was bleeding what appeared to be black blood. The dark mass spread out in a puddle, and Winnie tugged Ahmad up with her so that they both stood on the bench, hugging each other.

“Is it supposed to do that?” Winnie asked.

“I—I don’t think so.”

One time when their parents were out at Baba’s office Christmas party, Farah and Ahmad had done a classic monster mash marathon. They’d watched Frankenstein, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Blob. That last movie had been funny to Ahmad at the time. Who got scared of something that looked as easily smashable as Silly Putty?

He understood it now—especially when the black . . . whatever it was . . . reached the edge of the sidewalk, and started creeping up, skyward, forming a wall of darkness in the midst of all the stillness. A low whine buzzed through the air, which itself was picking up into a fierce wind, blowing their hair over their eyes.

“I don’t like this,” Winnie whispered beside him. “Ahmad, pinch me.”

She extended her arm in front of him, without even turning to look and see how he reacted.

“What? Why?”

“That’s what you do when you can’t wake up from a dream, right? This has to be a dream. No, it’s more than a dream. It’s a punishment, because I—” She clamped her lips tight and squeezed her eyes shut. “Just pinch me, Ahmad. Please.”

Ahmad swallowed hard. The little experience he had in friendship, based off enviously observing his sister and her best friends, hadn’t prepared him for a moment like this. Still, the black mass continued to spread, bending and warping around them to form a dark chamber. If this actually was a dream and waking Winnie up would rescue them both from it, he had to listen to her.

Tentatively he closed the tips of his fingers around her arm. “Does that work?”

Winnie’s eyelids fluttered, and when they opened, she looked like her usual determined self. “Not in the way I wanted, but it does prove it isn’t a dream.”

“Why?”

“The Ahmad I might have expected in a dream would pinch harder.”

Before Ahmad could ask what that even meant, there was a resounding crackle. The black “walls” around them shimmered and popped with static, like a television screen.

An oversized head bobbed to life from the scattered pixels.

For a moment, Ahmad thought he was seeing something from The Wizard of Oz: that horrible face surrounded by green flames. But it wasn’t a mysterious, wizened wizard. It was a girl. She looked around their age, with a long pale white face, short blond hair, and a leopard print hat jammed over her ears. A lollipop rolled around her lips as she smirked at them.