New phone in hand, I wanted to dance. I wanted to text until after midnight. I wanted to catch up on all the Instagram posts and stories I had missed.

Then I realized I couldn't even find Instagram in the app store.

The store had been able to transfer all my apps and contacts from my old phone, but it was clear after a few swipes that whatever old phone they had on file for me was not the same as the one Dad had taken into work. He and Mom were right: there was no app called Instagram. Instead, there was something called Pictagram, which they said sounded like what I'd written down for Insta. When I opened the app, I was already logged in.

Scrolling through my own profile, I found images that looked slightly familiar, but definitely not the same as the pictures I had posted. My most recent one was the selfie from our trail ride on Saturday. I knew I had been wearing a flannel shirt, and I remembered matching the purple flannel shirt to my purple socks. But in this photo, I was wearing a red and orange flannel shirt.

I flipped over to my photography account to check those photographs, and saw even more differences. The image of the trees reflected in a puddle was flipped. A photo I'd taken of some graffiti had the word "error" instead of "oops."

I shut down that app and opened Chatsnap, which at least had the same logo of the yellow ghost. Was it possible that I had been wrong about it this whole time, and it had always been called that?

My only conclusion to all of this was that I was going insane.

That was, at least, until Joey leaned over during photography class, as I was editing some of my fog pictures, and whispered, "Okay, am I going crazy or did this program used to be called Photoshop?"

I looked at him. "Yeah, we're using Photoshop..." Then I actually looked at my screen, beyond having clicked on the icon I recognized. "Photostop," I read off the screen in a monotone.

"Right?" Joey's voice was so loud Mr. Hansen's head lifted from where he was helping another student. Joey ducked down and hissed, "Right? It was PhotoSHOP. Adobe Photoshop. And it's like every single app on my phone is different." He pulled out his cell and held it under the desk so Mr. Hansen wouldn't see. "Tweeter," he said, "Pictagram? I asked Ella and she said she's never heard of Instagram."

"Hold on," I said. "Your phone already had these apps on it? Because my phone stopped working, remember? And my parents think I'm crazy, even though my old phone still had these apps."

Joey's head dropped onto his hands. "Oh, thank god. Seriously, I thought I was going insane. I felt like you and those stupid pony toys."

"Yeah, well, my parents also think I'm crazy," I said, not feeling the same sense of relief. I lowered my voice. "Except, oh yeah, I have a history of being crazy. They think I'm relapsing."

"Oh, no," Joey said softly.

"Yeah. I have to go see Dr. Warren tomorrow." I faced my screen and the stupid Photostop logo, which began to blur. I blinked and felt the tears slide down my face. "I just don't know what to do."

Joey's hand touched mine. "At least this time you know you're not crazy. I know these things, too. They're real. And you have your old phone as proof."

Mr. Hanson stood up and I pulled my hand away from Joey's, even though what I really wanted was for him to hug me.

"Thanks," I said.

"We'll figure this thing out. Maybe it's some kind of glitch..."

I didn't know how any of this could get fixed. It didn't make any sense, at least not until the day before the party, when Joey texted me: MANDELA EFFECT!!!!

I only peeked at my phone, because I was at the coffee shop with Ceci and Maddy before riding.

"Ooh, who's texting you?" Maddy said, leaning over my shoulder.

"Nobody," I said.

Maddy raised her eyebrows. "Obviously, it's somebody."

"Nobody important," I rephrased.

"You know what sucks?" Ceci said to Maddy. "When you confide in your friends but your friends don't confide in you."

I felt my phone buzz in my back pocket several times. The vibration was so loud that Maddy and Ceci gave each other knowing looks. "Aren't you going to even look?" Ceci asked.

"It's just my Dad," I lied. "Going on about some techie stuff."

"Uh-huh." Maddy made a duck face.

"He's been trying to figure out what's wrong with my old phone. I swear, he's weirdly into it. I don't understand half of what he's talking about."

"Sure," Ceci said.

Luckily, the other barista was the one waiting on us, the guy Maddy had nicknamed "Greasy Zac Efron," and we could drop the subject for two whole minutes. Then, of course, Ella brought out our drinks. "CeeCee," she called loudly. "Maddy. Arby."

I grabbed my drink before Ceci could say I want to talk to your manager, even saying, "Thanks!" over my shoulder.

"Ugh, what is that girl's damage," Maddy was saying when she and Ceci finally caught up to me at the door. "And why'd you run off, Bree? You scared of Smelly Ellie?"

"No, I'm just trying not to be actively hostile to her."

"You were downright polite," Ceci said, beeping her car doors open. We climbed inside. "It was almost like you were trying to be nice to her."

"I just thought, maybe she's only mean to us because we're mean to her," I said.

Ceci, who'd been about to back out of her parking spot, turned around to look at me with wide eyes. "Who are you and what have you done to Bree?"

"I'm serious!" I said, laughing a little. "I don't know, the other day Joey said Ella hated me because I was mean to her, and it made me think—"

"Ew, are you still talking to Joey Gross?" Maddy said.

I didn't remember them ever saying I shouldn't ever talk to him. "He's my neighbor. Sometimes we see each other."

"Neighbors say hello," Ceci stated. "They don't have long conversations about friendships that ended years ago and how to fix them."

Ceci was right, in a way. Me talking to Joey about Ella was definitely more than us being neighbors. Her words turned over in my mind as the road outside my window flew by. Ella and I used to be best friends, and something happened that destroyed our friendship. There were lots of things I didn't think about from that time, and Ella had become one of them. I just avoided her.

There was something that happened, beyond the pee incident, which had been the final straw. The pee incident had been years later.

It had happened shortly after my family moved. We'd had the apartment down the hall from Ella's. She lived there with her mom. Ella had practically been a member of our family, coming over every day after school. And then I moved. But Ella had still come over a lot. She would ride the bus to my house after school, and she and Joey and I would play outside.

The Pony Pals came to mind. She had stolen one of my Pony Pals, my favorite one. I knew it was her, because the twins were too little, and Joey didn't like playing with them. It had disappeared, and then... No. Not and then. The night with the mist came first. Then my missing Pony Pal.

And then it was years of therapy and a haze of medication. Ella wouldn't talk to me for a long time after the Pony Pal thing, not that I really noticed. Joey was my only friend. Then I started riding lessons, and became friends with Ceci and Maddy and Angelika. Our freshman year, they did a lock-in at the school gym. It was the first school thing I decided to do, and I was nervous. We put our sleeping bags near each other and stayed up until 2 a.m., until almost everyone was asleep.

Then I had a nightmare about the mist creeping into the gymnasium, and I woke up to the acrid scent of urine and wetness around my legs. Somehow, I had managed not to scream, but when I got up to wash up, Ceci was looking up at me. "What happened?" she asked.

I started crying.

"Shh," she said, and helped me carry everything to the bathroom and wash it off and dry it under the hand dryers.

"Everyone's going to know," I sobbed as quietly as I could.

"No they won't," Ceci said.

And they didn't, because when we went back, Ceci moved her sleeping bag to the other side of Maddy and put me on the other side of that, and then she took one corner of Ella's sleeping bag while I took the other, and together we slid her over into the puddle of pee I had left.

I had expected Ella to wake up right away, but she only moaned a little and fell back to sleep. And in the morning, when everyone woke up, Ceci said loudly, "Ew, someone had an accident last night."

I hadn't wanted it to happen. It was my worst nightmare, what happened to Ella. Everyone laughed, and her face turned bright red. No one listened to her saying she didn't pee in her sleeping bag. By that point the pee had seeped through the sleeping bag and wet the back of her pajama pants. Madame Howard, the French teacher, had ushered her into the bathroom to shower and change, and the other teacher lectured us about not making fun of people. It didn't matter. Ella Peabody became Ella Peebody. I was safe.

Only Ceci and Ella knew the truth. Because I had slept over Ella's house one time after the mist, and I had wet the bed then, too.

"Guys, you know what we should do?" Maddy said after our riding lesson. "We should pregame the party."

"Pregame?" I asked.

"Yeah, you know." She wobbled her head. "Get a little drunk before the party."

The thought made me nervous. I didn't really like how drinking made me feel, hazy and weird. "You have alcohol?"

"I could steal us each a bottle of wine from my mom's stash and she wouldn't notice," Maddy bragged.

Ceci clipped the lead to her horse's halter and led him into the stall. "I think one bottle will suffice. We don't need to be wasted before we get there."

"Yeah, of course not. Duh. I'm just saying."

"So are we meeting at your house then?" Ceci asked, sliding the stall door shut.

"No way. I'll have to steal the wine while Mom's in the shower and hide it in my bag. Maybe we could meet at Bree's house. She's always the last to get picked up."

"We can't drink at my house. My parents will know. My little brothers will probably tell on me."

"No, not in your house, obviously," Maddy said. "Like, we pick you up, and then we park by the woods and drink."

By the woods. By the fog. I hated the idea.

"I don't know..." I started.

"That's a great idea," Ceci said. "If I pull over far enough, you'll barely notice my car sitting there with all that fog."

"But a cop could drive by and see us!" I said.

"Oh, stop being such a baby," Maddy said. "Cops don't patrol down your road. It's a dead zone. Their radios don't even work down there."

"My phone works down there," I said. I didn't add sometimes, because there were a lot of times I didn't have a cell signal and had to use wifi. Mostly on misty nights when the fog enveloped the house.

"It's a plan," Ceci said, canceling any arguments I may have had.

#

I'd almost forgotten about Joey's text until I got home and pulled out my phone to turn on some music while I was in the shower. After MANDELA EFFECT!! he had included a link, then sent four other texts.

Hello?

Read the article

Did you read it yet??

BREE

I closed him down while I took my shower, then while I was lying around in my fluffy bathrobe I brought up his texts again and clicked on the link.

It was a conspiracy theory website that talked about these "false" memories. The term was coined after Nelson Mandela's death, because a bunch of random people remembered him dying in prison years before. Like my thing with the Pony Pals vs. My Little Pony, people remembered the Berenstein Bears being called Berenstain Bears. Or the Monopoly guy having a monocle.

I sat up and then wandered into the twins' bedroom, ran my finger along the spines in their bookcase. I pulled out a square paperback. Berenstein Bears. Our Monopoly game was downstairs in the closet, so I wandered back to my room, reading the rest of the article, which finally launched into its conclusion: these examples were proof of the existence of an alternate universe.

I called Joey as soon as I read those words. "Are you serious?" I demanded. "An alternate universe?"

"Finally, you read it!"

"Yeah, I read it. Come on, this can't be real."

"It is! Did you read the whole thing?"

"What, the entire website? Of course not. I read the first page."

"Okay, so I've been hunting around for more information about this, but basically it looks like you and I slid into an alternate universe. That's why we remember these things that no one else does. They say cosmic shifts can happen at any time."

I flopped back on my bed. "But that's just so random! When would we have slipped through, huh?"

"I don't know that. But it definitely happened. So many things are just slightly different, you know? Weren't you saying that the other day?"

"Maybe we're just remembering them wrong. It's happened to me before," I said.

"When?"

I sighed. "Remember? I'm crazy."

"Don't say that, Bree. You had a traumatic experience that wasn't your fault. And besides, mental illness doesn't mean you can't trust your own memories."

"In my case it can. I used to freak out all the time." I rubbed at my face. "Things would look the same, but when I really looked at them, they weren't right. And when I started looking, everything was off, and no one believed me."

Tears began leaking out of my eyes. The small, subtle differences were what scared me most of all as a child. Sure, the mist scared me. But it was something that had been shown to me in the mist, I thought, that had changed it all.

"Do you remember a book called Divergent?" I asked him, sniffling.

"Yeah, I read that one. There were movies. Why?"

I picked up the copy of Convergent from my nightstand. "It isn't called Divergent here."

On the other end of the line, Joey struggled to think of something to say. I heard movement. "Not even the books are the same?" he muttered. Then he asked, "What did you mean, here?"

"Huh?"

"You said, it isn't called Divergent here. Where is here?"

I thought about that. "I don't know."

On the other end, I heard a bunch of movement.

"Holy shit," Joey said. "The Starvation Games. They called it The Starvation Games."

"The Hunger Games," I whispered.

"And The Maze Racer. What the—" He didn't get a chance to finish. In the background, his mother yelled his name. "I gotta go. Mom's all pissy for some reason and she wants to have dinner right this second."

"Okay," I said. I was in the middle of saying, "Bye," when the phone beeped in my ear. Joey had hung up.

I stood and put Convergent on my bookshelf. I certainly never wanted to read it. Running my finger along the spines, I looked for other differences. I stopped on John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. Only it was now called The Favor in Our Stars, by Jon Greene. That title was a line taken from Shakespeare. Was even Shakespeare different?

A wave of nausea hit me, and I ran to the bathroom, slamming the door behind me, to dry heave over the toilet. Wave after wave, until I did finally throw up. I hated feeling this way, the world tilting under my feet. Nothing was safe. Nothing was certain.

A light tap on the bathroom door. "Bree? Are you okay?" Mom called.

"I'm fine." I wanted to lie and say it was my period, but I stopped myself.

"Okay... let me know if you need anything."

I sat there on the cold tile floor. I wasn't crazy. I couldn't be, not if Joey knew these things too. Which only made it harder to understand. Crazy would explain all this. Not crazy meant something else was at work. Something larger than my brain making things up. 

___

Have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect?  It's a super interesting theory and sent me down a rabbithole when I first heard about it... and, you know, inspired this whole novel!