It wasn't until much later that I understood. At that moment, though, all I could do was take sips of the liquid out of the mason jar Ella had given me. "This is just water?" I asked.

"Yes." Ella sounded tired. "For the hundredth time."

"You didn't put anything in here?"

Ella sighed. "Look, I know your dumb friends think I'm a witch, but I'm not. I'm Wiccan, and I like tarot cards and crystals and stuff. You know this. Stop acting like I'm going to cast a spell on you. That's not what Wiccans do."

"Then why don't you use a glass, like regular people?" I asked, peering through the sides of the mason jar for sediment that would indicate poison.

"Because we like drinking out of mason jars, okay?" Ella growled and turned to Joey. "Can't we just dump her back at her house? She's an idiot and she deserves to get grounded."

"Come on," Joey said, pulling her in. Before I knew it, Ella was on his lap and they were kissing.

"Get a room," I muttered.

My phone pinged and I nearly spilled the water grabbing for my purse.

"Watch it!" Ella snatched the jar away from me.

"Oh no," I said. There were so many texts. When had all these come in? I scrolled up and up. "Ceci's looking for me." Not only was she looking for me, she sounded upset. You left me, she had written. Where did you go?

More texts chimed in. I had to switch to our group text chain.

Maddy: Bree answer your fucking phone

Angelike: We are leaving this party without you

Maddy: HELLO BREE do you even have a clue?

Angelike: We are leaving now

Angelike: I hope you're not passed out drunk somewhere

Angelike: Or maybe I hope you are because friends don't leave friends when they're drunk and wasted and some guy is all over them

I had left Ceci. I had left her because I didn't like how Jesse was grabbing me. He was probably grabbing her the same way. Except she had seemed into it? My head spun and I flopped back against the cushions.

Even though I knew it was a bad idea to text drunk, I had to respond to them. I got a ride home, sorry I left without telling you. I was throwing up and almost passed out.

A ride with who? Maddy, straight to the point. She knew I didn't have any other friends.

My neighbor, Joey

That text hung there for long moments with no response. And while I waited for them to text back something to let me know I was forgiven, something like Glad you're okay! Instead there was nothing. And I fell asleep.

I woke up on a vaguely familiar couch with a terrible taste in my mouth. For a while I lay there, feeling disgusting. Slowly I recalled the events of the previous night, and placed the couch as the worn brown couch in Ella's apartment, the same one we used to sit on while we watched cartoons and ate cereal. The same tapestry on the wall behind it. The same chipped TV stand. New TV, though.

Eventually I sat up and guzzled the rest of the water in the mason jar. I checked my phone, but there were no new messages. I was in deep shit. Opening up Pictagram, I scrolled through my feed. No one was dumb enough to post pictures of a party, but Ceci had posted a selfie of her and Maddie before they'd picked up Angelika and me. Their tongues were out and bright red. I knew they had been drinking before the wine in the car.

The thought of wine had me up and hustling to the bathroom. I peed for a solid two minutes. Even though I felt like throwing up, my stomach refused. I drank more water straight from the bathroom faucet. It tasted metallic.

Ella was waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom. "You're up early." Her voice was low and scratchy.

"Yeah. Um, I think I'd better head home."

"Really? I feel like your parents would be suspicious if the person you haven't spoken to in years dropped you off at your house at six in the morning, when you were supposed to be sleeping over some other friend's house." She raised her eyebrows.

She was right. I straightened my dress. "Sorry, I guess I figured you wouldn't want me here any longer than I needed to be."

Ella sighed. She headed into the kitchen and took out a bag of bagels. "You want one?" she asked.

A few minutes ago, the thought of food had made me nauseous. But suddenly a toasted bagel sounded amazing. "Yes, please."

"I know I'm not a huge fan of your friends, but I never hated you," Ella said, sliding the bagels into the toaster. "At first I didn't get why you didn't want to be my friend anymore, but my mom explained it to me. She said I just had to wait until you were ready."

"Wait, seriously?" That was definitely not how I'd phrase it if someone made it look like I wet the bed and allowed me to take on that humiliation alone. "I mean, what I did was awful. And I can't say it's totally because of my PTSD."

"Really? Because you went to the hospital right after that," Ella said. "Mom said you went because you had PTSD."

I stared at her. She stared at me.

"What are you talking about?" I asked her.

The bagels popped up and Ella busied herself with taking them out and spreading cream cheese on them. "Mom said you were having some problems with your memory."

"Uh, I think I would remember going to a mental hospital!"

Ella glanced at me sideways. "Yeah. You missed fourth grade."

I shook my head. I remembered fourth grade. My teacher, Mr. Smith, who used to read to us at the end of every day of school. He let me take timeouts when I needed them, which was a lot.

"Yes. Whatever happened to you... I don't know, you missed school after that, just a few days, and when you came back you told me my hair was all wrong and pulled off my wig. In front of everyone at school. And then you didn't come back for a whole year."

"Your... wig?" I didn't remember any of this. I vaguely remembered a confrontation with Ella on the playground. But I couldn't quite remember what it was about. I just remember her saying You're different too... you're the one who's all wrong. And then we weren't friends anymore.

Ella slid a bagel at me, staring at me the whole time. "Yeah. Don't you remember? How I had cancer when I was a kid?"

And suddenly I did remember. We used to play in her room, which always smelled medicinal. She had a long blonde Elsa wig from Frozen. She also had other wigs, a shorter blond wig with ringlet curls, that she wore to school. A sharp memory came to me, of yanking on that platinum blond braid. The way it jerked Ella's head, and how surprised I was. But I also remembered her having no hair. Sometimes the wigs itched her head, she told me the first time I'd seen her without hair.

"Yeah," I said softly.

Ella looked down to take a bite of her own bagel and I watched her. For so long I hadn't wanted to even look at her. Something about her had reminded me of that bad time of my life. Whenever she tried to talk to me I had turned away. I had made up things about her, told people other reasons why I didn't want to be her friend anymore. "She smells" or "She picks her nose" or "Her mother's a witch," and that later became "She's a witch."

I couldn't say what was wrong with Ella all those times I looked at her in school. Looking at her now, she was the same girl I'd been best friends with. Big green eyes, round face. Nothing weird about her at all.

"What do you remember?" Ella met my gaze.

"About what?" I asked.

"About why we aren't friends anymore."

I chewed the inside of my cheek. If Ella wasn't going to bring up the pee incident, I didn't want to. So I went back to the wig thing. "I remember pulling your braid. But I was expecting your wig to come off, and it didn't. It was your real hair."

Ella's face didn't change.

Movement from the other room alerted us to Joey's arrival. We both turned to watch him shuffle down the hallway, yawning. When he saw us, he rubbed his eyes. "Hey."

"You want a bagel?" Ella asked him.

"Hmmm."

"Pizza bagel?" Ella grinned at him.

His eyes opened wide. "Yes, please! How do you know me so well?"

"You only sleep over here every weekend," Ella said. She pulled out a jug of orange juice and took three glasses down from a cabinet. "And it's always the same thing."

This gave me an entry for the question heavy on my mind. "So how long have you two been dating?"

Joey gave me a wide-eyed look. When he didn't answer, Ella glanced over her shoulder. "Uh, since freshman year. You didn't know we were dating?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, guess I'm kinda oblivious."

"I swear you've seen us together," Ella continued. "Like, you walked in on us kissing. In the girls bathroom during the lock-in last year?"

The fucking lock-in. I held my breath for a moment. "Oh, yeah."

"Our third anniversary is coming up." Bumping Joey's arm, she gazed up at him. "Three whole years."

"Wow," I said. By the look on Joey's face, this was news to him. I began to wonder if it was Ella who was crazy.

"Yeah, wow. Joe, Bree didn't even remember pulling off my wig in third grade. Can you believe that?"

"Uh, no way. That's crazy."

I gave him a dead-faced look. Crazy? Really? I stood up. "Well, thanks for breakfast. I should leave you two alone to do whatever it is that couples do."

My purse was on the couch still, and I snagged it as I stormed out of the apartment.

I was hurrying down the front steps of the building, already regretting my decision when the chilly October morning air hit my bare legs, when Joey's voice behind me shouted, "Bree, wait up!"

"What, you want to call me crazy again?"

"No, Bree, come on. I'm sorry. You can't go home like this. You're going to get grounded."

"I don't care." I headed out of the parking lot.

"Look, let me drive you."

At that I stopped. Slowly I turned back to look at him. "You have your license?"

He nodded.

Cocking my head, I asked, "And you have a car?"

"I can take Ella's."

"Oh." My eyebrows shot up. "I didn't realize how close the two of you were, you know, when we almost kissed in the woods the other day."

His face went red immediately. "Look, I don't know what's going on but I swear, I didn't know we were dating until last night. She came over to pick me up for this party... And--come on, you're shivering. Let me drive you and I'll tell you about it." He lowered his voice. "She might be listening."

"And she doesn't mind you just taking her car?" I said.

He shrugged. "I guess not. I guess this is normal for us. I don't know, Bree. Please, let's talk, because there's some weird shit going down and I'm feeling pretty crazy too."

I sighed. "Fine."

I followed him to a beat-up blue Toyota with missing hubcaps. The floor was littered with Starbucks cups and napkins. When Joey turned the key, the engine roared to life then settled into a shuddering growl.

"Okay, hold on, let me text her and let her know," Joey said. "Just.... Driving... Bree... home. There. Okay." He shifted the car and started driving. "Okay, yeah, so this dating thing... we were totally not dating until like three days ago. Three years! What the hell. I can't tell if she was messing with you. She's hard to read, sometimes."

"I thought she was your best friend," I said.

"She is! I don't know. So okay, the first weird thing was that she was excited about a party. She's never been to a party in her life. Her idea of a good time is a stack of horror movies from the library. So she comes over and says we need to get our costumes ready for this party and I'm like, what party? The party at Miles Harrison's, she said, and then she kissed me. I tried not to show how surprised I was, because... well, she didn't seem to think it was weird that she had kissed me. And I kinda always wanted us to be together, a little bit. I mean..." He looked over at me.

"What? Yeah, I know. You always had a crush on Ella. Anybody could see it."

"I mean... I always had a crush on you," he said. "She had the crush on me. She hated that I liked you, after... everything. Like she thought I was betraying her or something. But I guess I always had in my head that I could be with Ella if things didn't work out between us."

"Wow," I said. "You totally friendzoned her."

"Yeah," he said, then, "But that's the thing! I never did anything with her! And suddenly she's kissing me like it's totally normal. And we went to this party and I was thinking I'd get a read on how other people saw us. Would they think it was normal for us to be holding hands, or was this just another glitch in the Matrix?"

"And?"

"And nobody said anything! We talked to Izzy Bryant and Myra Gonzalez, and they didn't say a thing. And Greg Phillips and Darrell, from the basketball team, and they didn't say anything. They saw us holding hands and after Ella had one drink she was dancing with me and kissing me and no one said anything."

"That doesn't mean you've been dating for three years, though," I said.

"But that's how people would react to some couple that's been a couple for three years. Like Leila Huff and Pete Hodges, they're like this ubiquitous couple who will be together forever and you can never see one without the other. That's what it felt like. And meanwhile I'm there in my head freaking out!"

"Oh, it must be so hard, having some girl all over you," I said.

"Okay, but it is! I know you don't believe me but... honestly I thought there was something between you and me. I always did. And it's weird to have someone in your face kissing you who you thought was just your best friend."

I narrowed my eyes. "And you slept over."

Joey slammed his hands on the steering wheel. "Yes! I had sex with her! I had sex for the first time and I was freaking out because, I mean, she took off her shirt and I'm a dude, okay, I got turned on, I mean, I've thought about her before—"

"Did not need to know that."

"But it was so, so weird." He was blinking hard and fast, and I suddenly realized he was trying not to cry. "I got excited to be having sex for the first time. Uh... but apparently I wasn't very good. She seemed disappointed. I told her I was drunk. And the whole time I was thinking I knew how you felt, all those years. Like you had to pretend or you were going to scream at how weird it all was."

"It wasn't, like, rape... was it?" I asked him.

"I mean, no? I could have said no. It was just weird. You heard her, apparently I sleep over all the time. Only I've never slept over her house. Even if we stayed up super late watching movies, she always drove me home."

The ticking of the blinker signaled the turn onto Misty Valley Lane. Ella's car bounced over the rutted dirt road. The fog was patchy, creeping in from the forest. It was going to be bad when we got down to the end.

"So what does this all mean? We're both crazy?"

"You read that website. We're not crazy. We're in a parallel universe."

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back, shutting out both the mist and Joey's insane theory. "No, we're not."

"All this adds up," Joey insisted. "The weird apps on our phones. Things being slightly different. That's what it would feel like, being in an alternate reality. In this world, Ella and I are dating. And apparently she had cancer? I don't remember her having cancer."

"I remember her having cancer," I told him, forcing my eyes open. "How can you not remember that? She still had short hair when you became friends with us. Like, she was bald and her hair was only just starting to grow back in."

Joey shrugged. "Like I said, she only had cancer in this universe."

"But I remember it!" My voice had risen. "I remember both! How does your stupid theory explain that?"

"I don't know, Bree."

The car slowed at the bend and then pulled into my driveway. Joey drove partway up and then parked, looked at me. "It's the only theory I can come up with that doesn't sound..."

I waited for him to say the word. When he didn't, I finished for him: "Batshit crazy?"

He looked sad, and I wanted to take my sharp words back.

"I'm not crazy," I said.

"I know," he said. "I just have to figure out how to prove it."

---

What's the weirdest revelation from this chapter?  How do you explain Bree remembering both universes?