Mom couldn't take me to the store to get a new phone until Wednesday night, which was torture. "I need a phone," I whined on Monday during dinner. "When is Dad getting home? I need to write down the numbers in my contacts. My friends have no way of contacting me."

"Do you not have their emails? What about all those other websites you use?"

"They're called apps, Mom, and I got locked out because my passwords are saved in my phone and my laptop doesn't remember them."

Mom raised her eyebrows. "Perhaps this is all happening for a reason. Perhaps, you needed to learn to remember your passwords."

"Like you remember all your passwords," I muttered.

"And I think it's good for you to not have that phone in your hand 24-7. We had a great time playing board games the other night."

When Dad finally got home from the office, it was after eight. I knew better than to accost him at the door, so I waited in my room, pretending to do homework, until I'd heard him toss his keys on the hallway table, greet Betsy, hang up his coat, fight off Cam and Dom, head upstairs to change into his nighttime sweatpants and faded t-shirt combo, and start back down the stairs.

"Hey, Dad," I said, looking down the stairs from the railing above. "What did they say about my phone?"

Dad's eyes were bleary, but he beckoned me down. "Let me show you."

Mom was getting the boys ice cream, and she got out another bowl for me. We all headed to the living room where the twins were watching their favorite Disney channel show, and I cozied up beside Dad, who pulled out his phone.

"They couldn't believe it. That's part of why I worked so late. It's like this phone came from an alternate dimension or something." He flicked through the pictures of the flipped Apple logo, to images of my phone's screen. "These apps, no one had heard of half of them. We couldn't find them in the app store or anywhere. Which I wanted to ask you about."

I gave him a curious look. "Seriously?"

"Yes," he said. "Here, let's get a notebook." He heaved himself out of the couch to grab a yellow legal pad from his bag. "Okay, I'm going to list all the ones we didn't recognize. First, this one." He pointed to the little rainbow icon with the stylized camera in white. "When we opened it, the top said Instagram."

I continued staring at him. Did Dad seriously not know what Instagram was? Mom had an account. She didn't post often and mostly used it to monitor what I was posting.

Dad tapped the legal pad.

Reluctantly, I wrote down the word Instagram. I glanced at Dad, then over at Mom, who was scrolling through her phone. "Mom, please tell me I'm not crazy."

Mom looked up like she hadn't been listening to our conversation at all. "What?"

"You know what Instagram is, right?"

She winced. "Is that like Chatsnap?"

Chatsnap. Ceci had used that word too. "Come on, Mom, it's called Snapchat."

"Whoa, wait a minute," Dad said. He hunted through the apps. "That's one of them. Snapchat. We figured it was an earlier version of Chatsnap, but we couldn't find any references to it online. Write that down."

I stared down at the pad of paper, blinking hard. This couldn't be happening. Maybe I was in the alternate universe, where my favorite apps didn't exist. The worst part was the sense of deja-vu I was feeling. Like I remembered this happening to me before: people telling me that my memory was all wrong, that it had always been different than I remembered. It had happened all the time in middle school. It had gotten so I couldn't hear the words "My Little Ponies" without freaking out.

"Honey," Mom said.

"This isn't funny," I snapped, standing up and hurling the legal pad down on the couch. "If this is all some stupid joke I don't appreciate it."

Dad gaped at me. Mom tried to appease me, "No one is playing any jokes, honey. Your father is trying to figure it out, that's all."

"It doesn't make any sense!" I cried, and stormed out of the room. Blindly I ran up the stairs and threw myself onto my bed.

I wasn't crazy. I remembered these things. There was proof, right there on my phone, that they existed. And still my parents acted like they didn't.

Years I had gone to therapy. I wrote about these things until I couldn't remember which was the right one. I had my journals in a box in my closet, and I got up and hauled the box down. Dozens of spiral bound notebooks filled with childish handwriting. I dug through them until I found one from fifth grade. That year had been really bad. I flipped through the pages, landing on an entry prefaced by one of my therapist's prompts:

Tell me about the incident at school today.

Today at school I got very upset. Georgia Harris called my scrunchie a "scrungle" and I tried to ignore it like you said, but she kept saying it. "Where did you get that scrungle? I have so many scrungles at home but none like that." Until I screamed that IT ISN'T A SCRUNGLE IT'S CALLED A SCRUNCHIE and she started crying and Ms. Jackson sent me to the guidance office.

Why did this upset you?

Because I know what a scrunchie is and I don't like her anyway

What can you do better next time?

Next time I will pretend Georgia Harris doesn't exist

I didn't remember this particular conversation with my therapist, but she sure wouldn't have liked that last answer. We had probably talked about breathing techniques and finding an adult to talk to and "taking space."

The word scrungle did feel familiar, but I knew it wasn't the word for scrunchie. Scrunchies were called scrunchies. Where had Georgia even gotten that word from?

I flipped to another page.

I found this old book from when I was little that I used to make Mom read to me every night. I recognized it because the color was bright yellow with a pink unicorn on the front. But when I started reading the book the words were different. I don't remember it enough to know which words but lots of the words were different. Especially I remember the name of the unicorn was Cornelia and I remember because uniCORN and CORNelia but in this book the unicorn's name was CORDelia and it was wrong wrong wrong and at the end CORNelia made friends with the princess and let the princess ride her but at the end of this WRONG story CORDelia grew wings and flew away.

I shook my head. Maybe I had repressed this memory, because I remembered Cornelia and Cordelia both. Two books in the same series. Sister unicorns.

Lots of pages were filled with other topics, like what kid at school had been mean to me that day, or the nightmares I'd had. Lots of pages after the therapy sessions where Dr. Hill tried to hypnotize me to make me remember what had happened in the mist.

I didn't always talk about the things that were wrong, like Convergent or the scrungles or the Cordelias or the My Little Ponies. The Ponies had been one of the things, long before I did the journals. It was one of the first things.

The thing that had come between me and Ella, actually.

Mom knocked softly on the door, making me jump and shove the old journal back in the box. "Bree, are you okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine."

Mom watched me shove the box back into my closet. "Do you think you might need to see Dr. Warren again? Just for a check-in. To make sure you're still on track now that you aren't taking the pills anymore."

"Wow," I said sarcastically. "Why don't you just come out and say you think I'm going crazy again."

"Honey, that's not what I mean."

"I'm fine! Did you even know that I went out into the woods yesterday? Huh? Yeah, I did it. I faced my fears, and I'm okay." I held out my arms to show her. "Totally fine."

Mom's face did not agree. "You went out there by yourself?"

"No," I said. "Joey went with me. For my photography assignment about facing your fears."

For a long moment Mom didn't say anything. "You seemed pretty scared on Saturday, and you were with Joey then, too."

I glared at her. I hated the patronizing look on her face. "Fine. Send me to the freaking therapist then, if you're so convinced I'm having a relapse or whatever."

"What's going on?" Dad said from behind Mom.

"Great, two against one." I sat down on my bed with arms crossed.

"That's not what we're trying to do, honey," Mom said. She came over and sat beside me. I scooted away, just an inch, just to show her I didn't want her near me. "We're just concerned."

"What, because my phone's messed up? That's not me! You can see it! You can see those apps. Those are real apps that I've been using forever." At the mention of the apps Mom's face closed down, I could see it happening and it made me even angrier. "You have an Instagram account, Mom! I know you do! Instagram is a thing! Everyone knows about it!"

Mom's eyes filled up, and she looked over at Dad.

"Okay," Dad said finally. "Okay, let's just take a break from this. Something strange is happening, we can all see that. But—I don't think it would hurt for you to talk to Dr. Warren. You like Dr. Warren, don't you? Just talk to her, you don't have to talk to us about what's going on."

"I'm trying to talk to you!" Everything about this argument reminded me of the past. I hadn't had proof then, though. Here was proof and still no one believed me. It was like the world was slanting sideways. All because of my phone... Suddenly I saw an opportunity, and I took it. "How about this: I'll agree to go to Dr. Warren if you agree to get me a new phone ASAP."

Mom's mouth dropped open, and she and Dad shared an intense look that said, Is she faking all this to get a new phone, or has she really gone off the deep end?

Then Dad nodded. "Okay, how about this: we get you a new phone, and you see Dr. Warren, and you also take your medication tonight, and every night until you see her."

"That's not fair!" I said.

"It's totally fair," Dad said. "A new phone costs how much?" A few hundred dollars, at least. "And the co-pay for Dr. Warren is fifty. And those pills we got for you that you hardly use, even when you need them? Still not as much as a new phone."

"Steve," Mom sighed.

I knew I was going to have to do it. I also knew I could pretend to take the pills if I really wanted to. Or maybe just take them. I wasn't looking forward to the nightmares I was going to have tonight about nearly getting lost in the fog. "Fine."

"Okay." Dad nodded and left.

Mom attempted to smooth down my hair, and I sat stiffly, letting her. "I'll take you after work on Wednesday. You don't have riding then, right?"

"Right," I mumbled.

After all that I just took the stupid pills, because Mom was standing over me. And I slept so deeply it felt like only a minute or two passed before my alarm was going off.

Ceci picked me up on both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, which meant I was forgiven. On Wednesday I told them I was getting a new phone.

"Finally," Maddy said. "God, it's been forever."

"Three days," I said.

"You had best get our numbers in there stat," Ceci said. "We've been texting about Halloween nonstop, and you need to get your costume ready."

"What did we decide to go as, again?" I asked.

"Oh my god," Maddy threw her head back.

Angelika gave me a grimace, letting me know that was the wrong thing to say. I should have waited until I had my new phone and texted her separately.

"We are going as sexy animals, duh," Ceci said.

That hadn't even been on the table, not that I remembered. "Oh, okay. So, like, animal ears and then whatever?"

Maddy sighed loudly. "God, get with it, Bree! I'm sexy cat. Ceci is sexy bunny. Angelika is sexy bird, for some weird reason. And you're sexy mouse."

Sexy mouse? Good lord. I decided to try to drop this topic. "Oh, yeah, that's right." Like I knew all along.

"No offense, Bree, but your memory's been shit lately. Do you have early onset Alzheimer's or something?" Ceci smirked at her own joke.

Maddy guffawed.

Shrugging, I said, "I just thought we were doing Heathers, but this is much easier."

I glanced at Angelika. I was definitely going to be texting her later to see what the hell was going on. Also, other than the ears, I didn't know how to make a mouse.

Ceci slapped the steering wheel. "It's like in Mean Girls! Come on, Bree. We talked about Mean Girls. Except for the sexy bird, which as I mentioned, is kinda random."

"I'm not going as a zombie bride," Angelika retorted. "And I have a cool dress with feathers, okay?"

"Whatever."

I remained quiet. At least I wasn't the only one not totally on board with this Halloween costume. Although I now had an idea of what to wear. I could look it up online when I got home.

___

Apologies for being so scattered in posting, now that I'm back from my trip I will hopefully remember to post on Fridays, too!