On the morning I planned to overcome my fears, the mist had crept out from the hollow and pressed itself against the windows of my house as if trying to wall me in.

I stood there behind the glass storm door, building my courage. The driveway was hidden beneath a dense, flat cloud. Like I had learned in therapy, I took a deep breath and imagined myself stepping outside.

Then I imagined the cold fingers of misty air curling around me.

"Aubrey? Do you need a ride to school?" Mom asked carefully from behind me.

Her words were enough to snap me back into action. "No," I said, and pushed the door open.

Unlike the other kids in my photography class at school, I didn't have a normal fear. That was our current assignment: photograph your fear. I wasn't just afraid of fog. I was petrified. Like, went to therapy and took medication for six years. I'd been off my meds for two years now, and my life was approaching normal. But there were still the lingering nightmares I didn't tell my parents about, and I wanted this assignment to prove to myself once and for all that I was cured.

It always sounded better in my head, when I didn't have to step out into a world that looked like it had been erased.

Joey Grossman, my next-door neighbor, was doing spiders as his fear, and he was going to use my basement and its multitude of cobwebs for his assignment. In exchange, he was going to talk me down from the inevitable panic attack that would occur when I stepped into the mist to complete my photo shoot.

If I lived anyplace else, fog wouldn't be such a life-altering fear, but my house, and Joey's, stood on Misty Valley Lane, which departed from Durham Road and made a long and winding loop. We lived at the end of the loop, and beyond that, a dreary forest rose up from the water table. On a good day, I could see Joey's house across the way. On a day like today, I couldn't see the road.

Fortunately, I only had to make it to the end of my driveway. This year, my best friend Cecilia Poole had her license and could pick me up. When she was on time.

"Hello!" Joey called. Through the fog, his lanky silhouette waved.

Last year, we had waited for the bus together, but since Ceci thought Joey was a loser, and picking up just one of us was an awkward situation I wanted to avoid, I only ran to his driveway if I heard the bus rumbling down the dirt road before Ceci got there.

"Hi," I said. The mist seemed to muffle my greeting.

"Bet you a Twinkie your ride will be late!"

Cecilia had already been late twice this year, earning all of us a detention.

"Yell if you see the bus coming!" I shouted back. "If I get another detention I'm grounded!"

"Will do!"

To distract myself from the claustrophobia pressing down on me, I pulled out my phone and scrolled through Instagram. The picture I'd posted last night already had 70 likes. It was a black and white photo of some cool mushrooms growing in our backyard. A bunch of people had even commented. "Great pic! What camera do you use?" and "Nice depth of field!" I grinned as I scrolled through them, then switched over to the Instagram account I used for my regular life, where Ceci and Angelika and Maddy liked and commented on everything I posted.

Flipping over to my phone's camera, I scanned over the ghostly landscape. There were some bright red leaves by the roadside, next to a puddle, and the reflection of the trees overhead formed a decent composition. I still had no idea how I was going to complete the assignment. Fog was hard to photograph. I only hoped that my digital Nikon would do a better job of it.

"Bus!" Joey's voice yelled, and I shoved my phone into my pocket as I began to run toward Joey's house. This fog was so thick I doubted the bus would see me, and the driver was used to not picking me up. I reached Joey, out of breath, no bus in sight.

"Where is it?" I asked.

Joey had out his camera and was going through the photos. "Oh, it's not here yet. I just wanted to show you something."

I glared at him and his stupid floppy brown hair and that army jacket full of holes, his knock-off Converse held together with duct tape. "Seriously?" I flicked my hair over my shoulder. I had straightened it that morning, and between the fog and running, it was going to be a mess once I got to school.

"Look." Joey tilted the camera's screen toward me. "I took some test shots of the trees in the fog. You could totally do something like this for your assignment."

His photos were amazing. The trees looked like skeletal monsters lurching out of some netherworld.

"Maybe you should focus on your own assignment," I retorted. "You know Mr. Chamberlin isn't going to let you off easy." In class, when Joey had announced his fear, Mr. Hanson had told him that he expected Joey to go beyond the mundane and superficial.

Joey huffed. "Don't you worry."

In the distance, a rumble and the eerie flashing of red lights warned us of the bus's approach. I shifted my bag on my shoulder, stomach sinking. "Guess I owe you a Twinkie, then," I mumbled, pulling out my phone to text Ceci. The last time, I had forgotten and she had waited in my driveway for me, then blamed me for them all being late.

"Or not," Joey said. There, behind the bus, was Ceci's red Mini Cooper.

"Yes!" I sprinted past the bus.

"See you at school!" Joey said pointedly.

I ignored him and tugged at the rear passenger door once before Ceci unlocked it and I tumbled into the back beside Angelika. "Thank God, I almost had to ride the bus," I moaned.

"The stupid bus is going to make us late," Ceci growled.

"If the bus is late, then we can't be late," said Maddy from the passenger seat up front.

Ceci checked her eye makeup in the rearview mirror. As usual, her blond hair was perfectly straightened, her makeup flawless. "That's true. But the stupid bus is also going to get mud all over my car."

"Sorry," I said, as if it was my fault I lived on a dirt road.

"Why were you at Joey Gross's house, anyway?" Ceci asked.

"I thought the bus was coming," I said. "My parents said they'd ground me if I got another detention for being late."

"Sure," drawled Maddy. "You like him. You love him."

"I do not," I huffed. "I barely even talk to him."

This wasn't really about Joey, it was about how I should be getting tardy slips like them. Friends should stick together, even if it meant getting in trouble once in a while.

"Whatever," Ceci said. "Hold on, I'm three-point turning this bitch."

Ceci swerved into Joey's driveway and slammed on the brakes, then reversed. I scrambled to put on my seatbelt.

In Ceci's car, with Ariana Grande pumping on the radio and hot air blasting out of the vents, the fog outside didn't matter. Soon enough, gravel was spewing out from beneath the tires and we were flying through the misty forest and up to the main road, beating the bus by just a few seconds. "Yes!" we all squealed.

Maddy lowered her window to yell, "Losers!" at the bus as we passed it.

We were already at our lockers when the bus kids wandered in. Last year, that had been me. I tried to pretend they didn't exist, especially when Joey waved at me, and brushed my hair out until Angelika nodded in approval. Last year, I'd had frizzy brown hair that never seemed to look good no matter what.

So much had changed from how I used to be. Instead of a freak taking medication for PTSD, I now had friends. They hadn't really known me before I started riding at Copeland Stables the summer after freshman year. Before that, my riding "lessons" were actually part of my therapy, but I loved it so much I begged my parents to let me take real riding lessons. Ceci, Maddy, and Angelika all had their own horses, while I used lesson horses, but because I had advanced so quickly, I was in lessons with the three of them. At our first horse show, they had taken me under their wing and helped me with my hair, my makeup, and getting my horse groomed and braided to perfection. They never asked why I didn't have other friends. Once we started school, I just started sitting with them, and that was it.

I still went to therapy. Dr. Warren said the only way I was going to not need therapy was if I confronted what happened to me that day when I was eight. I'd never been able to do that, not even after eight years. Even hypnosis hadn't helped. My mind had built a wall to keep out what had happened.

All I knew was that it involved the mist that crept out of the forest at night and blanketed my house in a white darkness.

"I don't know why you even talk to that kid," Maddy said. "I know he's your neighbor but, like, gross."

I wanted to say so many things. It was stupid to make the bus stop twice, within a few feet of each other. Joey wasn't gross, either. Sure, he had that stupid floppy brown hair that desperately needed a pair of scissors. And acne all over his jaw, that wasn't his fault. Just sometimes I wished he would dress in something other than girls' jeans and concert t-shirts and flannels, but whatever.

"Yeah." I tried to think of some way to change the subject, and that was when I saw Ella Peabody and her stupid white-blonde hair and slouchy knit hat. She was talking to Joey, laughing. Linking her arm in his.

I didn't know why it annoyed me that they were still friends. Maybe because I hadn't spoken to Ella since third grade, and if Joey was any kind of friend to me he wouldn't talk to her either.

"You coming, Aubrey?" Ceci asked.

I slammed my locker shut and flicked my hair back. "Yeah," I said, and followed my friends down the hall. 

___

What do you think made Aubrey so scared of the fog? 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this story as I'm working to revise it!