So I talk, telling her about the most recent events with Gus and the buffalo and the renovated church. But the more I talk, the more the piercing headache behind my eye swells. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I gasp.

“You’ve come to the right place,” Alice says, without looking up from her notebook. She has the voice recorder I traded her this morning balanced on her lap. “I mean, maybe. Hopefully. In an ideal world, yes, this is the right place. Look, you may have been having these extended conversations with one of Them for your entire life, but what you’re experiencing now is much more common. I mean, typically they’d only be happening on your way in or out of a dream state, but the gist is the same.”

“Well, what are they?” I ask.

“Too soon to say. What I do know is that most people only experience very brief visitations, like the flashes you describe. You wake up and you’re not in your room, but as soon as you scream you’re back. You fall asleep on the bus and when your eyes open someone’s staring at you—you jump up and they’re gone. You hear someone talking downstairs, so you go see a couple having dinner at your table. When you flip on the light, they vanish. Usually, they don’t even see you. When they do, witnesses describe the Others as seeming just as surprised as they were. I don’t think they’re fully aware of us.”

“Grandmother is.”

“Grandmother, like you, my dear Natalie, is different. And that’s why this is so important.”

“She is God, isn’t she?” I say.

Alice exhales. “I’m a scientist who studies nighttime hallucinations under the primary assumption that there’s something supernatural about them. I’m the last person prepared to make a statement about what God is and if it exists. I personally have never really bought the idea of a higher power, but then again, as far as the rest of the faculty’s concerned, I might as well be the chairperson of Leprechaun Studies. All I know is that Grandmother and all the visions that came before her are something. God, ghost, or something in between, we’re going to find out who Grandmother is. I believe that, Natalie.”

The next morning Jack and I are walking out to the Jeep when it happens again. The shutters and door flash red. The basketball hoop in the driveway and my baby brother vanish. I stand in the middle of the front yard, the whole world frozen and congealed, feeling like I’d have to cut through gelatin to move another step.

Just as quickly, though, a blast of sound tears through the stillness, and I jump.

“Hurry up!” Jack calls from the car. He’s leaned across the seat to hit the horn, which wouldn’t be so alarming if I had any idea how he got there. I shake myself out of it and climb in beside him.

“Sorry,” I say. “Thought I forgot my phone.”

Jack chortles then tries to play it off like he’s clearing his throat, a trick Dad frequently employs when Mom disapproves of whatever he’s laughing at. “Nothing,” Jack hurries, before I even get a chance to glare. “You just checked it, like, three times between the kitchen and the porch.”

My cheeks burn at his observation, and I start the car, devotedly pretending not to have heard. It’s been four days since Matt’s party. I’m still actively fuming over what happened with Matt that night, but it’s Beau who has me wavering between giddiness and obsessive, all-consuming overthinking. It seems like the Wrong Thing incidents and the thought of Megan leaving for Georgetown in a couple of days are the only things that make me stop wondering why he hasn’t called.

As I drive toward the school, I do what I’ve done every time I didn’t want to deal with or think about something for the past two years: I imagine myself at Brown, with new friends who don’t know about Matt or care about why I quit the dance team, a place where I can start over. But the daydream gives me no relief. I’m too angry at Matt, too embarrassed about whatever happened with Beau. It felt right while it was happening, sweet and genuine and so intense that I’d been sure he was feeling the same thing. Now I’m forced to replay all the highly personal details I shared with him and cringe at my own vulnerability.

When we pull up to the gate outside the field house, Jack springs out of the car, calling, “Later!” but I don’t drive off right away. Instead I watch my brother sprint across the field. He’s blipping in and out of view—just like Beau did at Senior Night—and then I see his teammates in the distance buzzing with the same strobe-light effect. Only those guys aren’t disappearing like Jack is. They’re shifting, rearranging with impossible speed, on the left side of the field one second and the right the next; mid jumping jack one instant and jogging along the far side of the track the next. I watch one boy in particular, T.J. Bishop, whose hairstyle keeps oscillating between a close shave and a pathetically short ponytail, his body bulking up and slimming down in steady, alternating beats.

“The Wrong Things,” I say aloud to myself. I still have no idea what they mean.

12

Thunder crackles overhead, but it’s distant and soft, like a bass drum covered by a towel. Megan and I are sitting in my garage with the door cranked open so we can watch the thick spray of rain slap the driveway and the blue-green foliage framing the yard.

We’ve storm-watched like this for as long as I can remember, and it’s always given me a sense of peace. We don’t need to talk to feel happy or understood. The rain flooding the cul-de-sac is enough. Our eleven years of friendship tell me so. We may be different, but in this moment we’re feeling the exact same thing: the sad kind of bliss where you realize, suddenly, how perfect your life really has been all along. So perfect it hurts, and you could let yourself weep if you wanted. So perfect that even though everything you know is ending, you truly believe life will continue to be beautiful, even—or maybe especially—in those pure moments of loss.

We sit there for hours. When the rain finally lets up, we stand, brushing the dirt and leaked car oil smears off the backs of our thighs.

Goodbyes have always been as natural for us as silence, unspoken agreements between us nine times out of ten. There’s no I should go or look at the time. Megan just smiles and squeezes me tight in a hug. “Love you,” she says.

“Love you back,” I say. “Get home safe. Get to school safe.”

“I’ll see you so soon, Nat,” she says, and I nod, unwilling to doubt her. She pulls up the hood of her thin sweatshirt and darts through the drizzle back to her black Civic parked at the curb.