Maren’s parents hated formal titles, but Amos always felt weird calling them by their first names. His cheeks went pink as he peered into the back seat, and Maren wrinkled her nose.

“Can we give you a lift?” said Maren’s mother.

“Mom, no!” hissed Maren, but it was too late. Amos had gotten up. He hesitated between opening the front or the back door, then got into the back. Maren whipped her head straight forward. This couldn’t be happening. Now she’d have to talk to him.

“Thanks,” he said, pulling on his seat belt. “I missed the bus, and my mom’s driving Benny to baseball tonight.”

“How is your mother?” Maren’s mom triple-checked all her mirrors, then crept back onto the street. “I haven’t seen her since you guys moved.”

“She’s good. Just busy.”

Amos’s parents had gotten divorced last fall. After his dad ran off to Alaska, his mom had moved Amos and his brother from their house on Maren’s street to a duplex across town. The move wasn’t what had killed Maren’s friendship with Amos, not exactly. She’d called him every night and listened to him talk and cry. She’d given him handfuls of dreams to ease his sadness and worries, and she’d even convinced him to see the school therapist. What killed Maren’s friendship with Amos was his new neighbor and sudden new best friend, Curtis Mayhew.

“What were you doing in the hospital?” she blurted out. Amos looked surprised she’d actually spoken to him.

“My grandpa’s there,” he said. “He had a heart attack.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” said Maren. Old Mr. O’Grady used to come to Amos’s house on Tuesdays to watch him and his brother. He always invited the whole neighborhood over to play softball in their backyard.

“I’m so sorry,” said Maren’s mom. “Is he going to be okay?”

“The doctors think so. But nobody else has time to visit him.” Amos traced a square on the back of his phone. “He’s asleep most of the time, and when he’s awake, he doesn’t always know who I am.”

Maren wondered if a dream might help Amos’s grandfather remember him. Brains are stubborn, Lishta had told her. They hold on to things we don’t even realize, bury them deep under layers and layers. Lishta had just begun teaching Maren how to make memory dreams. The trick was to find a vivid, important event and then collect ingredients from the place where it happened or someplace very similar. If it happened near a lake, for example, you could scrape wood splinters from the underside of a dock and grind them with fibers from a beach towel and the feather of a loon. The brain would pick up these threads of memory and recraft the scene, doing most of the work itself.