After the disastrous meeting with the school therapist, I didn't know if Ceci, Angelika, and Maddy would even want me to sit with them at lunch the next day. Ceci still didn't come to pick me up for school, but Angelika had said hi to me, and a few group texts had come through, sounding like nothing had ever happened.

It was almost like the three of them had used that session to foist all the responsibility of what happened onto me. It was my fault, because of my faulty memory, because I had left Ceci there. Even in the texts, Ceci seemed subdued, much quieter than usual, making Maddy sound too loud and Angelika too perky.

I didn't see any of them in the cafeteria. Taking a few cautious steps inside, I looked for an empty table to sit at, as I had on Monday and Tuesday.

"Hey, Bree," came Maddy's voice behind me.

I turned. "Oh, hi, guys," I said, trying to smile. Angelika smiled back. Ceci didn't look at me. She didn't look at anyone.

They headed for an empty table near the windows, and I trailed along behind them.

"We missed you at the barn yesterday," Angelika said, taking out her lunch bag.

Without Ceci to give me a ride after school, I hadn't gone to ride Stewie. I hadn't gone all week. I would have to tell Mom, because she wouldn't be happy to be paying for me to lease a horse I wasn't riding, and surely she would give me a ride to the barn if I told her I needed one. But then I would have to explain this whole situation with Ceci.

I considered telling them that I hadn't felt like riding anyway. The meeting yesterday had taken almost everything out of me. Instead I said, "Yeah, I had a lot of homework."

Maddy and Angelika started talking about a horse show coming up next weekend. Competitions made me too anxious and I never did them, but I often went along to help braid manes and polish tack and cheer on my friends. Cecilia was the best rider out of all of us, and was serious about earning enough points to enter the championship at the end of the season. Angelika was a clean rider but stiff, while Maddy was a sloppy rider and mostly depended on her horse to make her look good.

I had mostly tuned out of the conversation, knowing they weren't trying all that hard to include me, which is how I heard my phone vibrate from deep inside my backpack with a text.

When I fished my phone out from under my history textbook, I saw a text from an unknown number that said, Maybe we should talk.

I stared at it. My new phone had imported all of my contacts, so I knew it wasn't Ceci, Maddy or Angelika. It couldn't be Joey, either. Or my parents. There weren't many other numbers saved in my phone. Caroline, who owned Stewie. Dr. Warren. My uncle Andy. My grandparents, who never called my cell phone.

I couldn't think of a single person in my life who I wouldn't have in my phone.

Who is this? I texted back.

As my friends continued to ignore me, I flipped over to the Pictagram app and started scrolling through my feed. I gave half-hearted likes to a few photos, until I saw Ceci's username appear under a pic posted twelve hours ago. I scrolled back up. It's a pink background with a quote, reposted from who knew where: Without fake friends, you'll never know who the real ones are. Maddy and Angelika have both already liked it, and so have a few of Ceci's other horse friends, as well as 51 of her other followers. Maddy had added a comment, "Real friends forever!" Some randoms left comments like, "What happened?" or "You don't need fake friends, girl!"

Obviously, this post was about me. Even though I was never fake. I was drunk and I made a mistake. Or maybe I have been fake to her: I've never told her about my nightmares or my fear of the mist. She knew about the therapy, but she told me she went to therapy for a while when her parents got divorced. She made it sound normal.

My hand fell to my lap, as if my phone was a ten-pound weight. For all my phone held, it could well be: my carefully constructed world, my public face.

My phone buzzed again, and I glanced up at my friends, wondering if they had seen me on Pictagram, knew I'd just seen Ceci's post. Angelika gave me a side-eye. "Who's texting you?" she asked, drawing the attention of Ceci and Maddy. They all knew I didn't have other friends.

This is Ella, the text read.

I cursed silently. I couldn't tell my friends that Ella of all people was texting me. "Uh, McKenzie Burns. We're doing a group project together." Thinking through my class schedule, I selected the class that I didn't share with any of them. "For history."

"And she's texting you about it at lunch?" Maddy scrunched up her face. "What a loser."

"Yeah." I gave a little laugh. And shoved my phone back into the depths of my backpack.

After lunch I ducked into the bathroom and texted her back: What do you want to talk about?

She didn't text back right away. It figured, since everyone was now hurrying to class, and I had just wasted fifteen minutes of not texting her back as I pretended to be super interested in the horse show next weekend and trying to convince Ceci to register, even if she didn't feel like doing a horse show right now. Oddly enough, what I said - "You're too good to let those snobs from Windcrest Stables win everything" - seemed to be the thing that made her give her most enthusiastic response.

I was able to check my phone again in Photography class. Joey had Photostop open and was going through all the photos on his SD card while I read her text.

Look, I know you probably don't want to hear from me, but it's just weird some of the stuff you said at my house and some stuff Joey's been saying.

She still hadn't apologized for calling me crazy, but this felt like she might want to. I kept my response vague. What do you mean?

Immediately the dots that indicated that she was writing a response began dancing. I just thought I knew exactly what went wrong between us, but I guess I don't.

Lately I can't seem to remember anything right, I typed back. Maybe I'm wrong.

That's why we should talk. Can you meet me at Starbucks after school? My shift starts at 3.

Joey glanced over when I sighed. Of course she wanted to meet today, immediately, when I had my appointment with Dr. Warren after school.

I might be able to come by after 4? Will you be working then?

If you can come at 5, that's when my shift is over. Or we can meet at my apartment?

I didn't really want to go back to Ella's apartment. The coffee shop was neutral ground. I'll see if I can get my mom to drop me off, if you can give me a ride home after.

K

That last text came through as the bell rang, and I shoved my phone away.

"Hey," Joey said.

"What?"

"Look at these." He pushed away from his desk to show me his screen. His spider photo shoot was at the top, but it was all of his photos.

"Have you not decided on your photos yet?" I asked him.

"No, I mean, I have, but look at these. Really look!" He gestured at the screen.

I glanced at Mr. Chamberlin. Since he was talking to another student and hadn't started class yet, I scooted my chair over and peered at the images. "What am I supposed to be seeing here?"

"They're different! See, these ones we did in your basement? The lighting is all different. Like we did the shoot in the morning or something."

I didn't want to tell him I didn't see anything different. I'd had the same experience. And yet... I didn't see anything so at odds with the photo shoot we had done. And hadn't we done our photo shoot in the morning? It was around noon, at any rate. "Yeah," I said vaguely.

"You don't believe me," Joey said flatly.

I shrugged. "I mean, I noticed some of my photos on Instagram... Pictagram, whatever, they were different than I remembered. But I can't prove it!"

"Fine, Aubrey," Joey said, turning away.

"Look." I kept my voice low and an eye on Mr. Chamberlin. "Can we get together to talk about your theory?"

"Why, so you can tell me how impossible it is?"

I pushed away. "Hey, I never said it was impossible! Why are you being like this?"

"Ella said..." Joey sighed. "Never mind."

Mr. Chamberlin finally stepped to the front of the room and I couldn't ask Joey what he was going to say. What had Ella told him? Had she told him all about what happened between us?

I would have to ask her when I saw her later. I had a lot of things to ask her.

#

Outside the café window, night was falling over Oakridge, even though it was only 4:30. The streetlamps illuminated misty patches of light. Curling my hands around the hot paper cup, I shuddered a little.

I should have been doing homework. Instead, I had my book open and was staring out the window.

I didn't know what I should have expected to happen at therapy. After going for so many years, it was a relief to not go. To think that I was cured. To not have that one (or two, or at the beginning, three) days a week when I knew I would become so frustrated I would cry or have to relive my worst fears and try to talk about them. Therapy was stressful, for the most part, until I started getting better. Then it felt good to stop, because it was easier to pretend I was normal.

"Aubrey, it's good to see you again," Dr. Warren had said when she saw me in the waiting room. Then, "Well, not good that you're not doing well. But good to see you. Come on in."

Her office, strangely, looked smaller than I remembered. But there was the Rubik's Cube that I'd often played with when I didn't feel like talking, and the little table by the window where we would sit if she wanted me to draw, or if we were going to play a therapy game, which were other things she'd have me do if I didn't want to talk. I sat on the couch across from the armchair where she usually sat, and she got out her notepad and sat down, crossing her legs.

"Your parents said you're having nightmares again."

"Yeah."

Slowly she dragged it out of me, how I had decided to go into the mist for my photography project and how I'd gotten scared all over again. Dr. Warren asked some questions about how I felt when I was in the mist, and eventually we got to that point where I had to tell her I didn't remember what I'd seen out there eight years ago, and then she finally asked, "And has anything else happened?"

Instead of telling her about the apps on my phone that no one had apparently ever seen before, I asked her a question: "Is it a symptom of PTSD that I can't remember things right?"

Naturally she didn't give me a straight answer. "What aren't you remembering right?"

"That was what happened before, right? I couldn't remember the right names of things. I wrote about it in that journal you made me keep."

"You were quite distressed about it," she told me. "Almost more distressed about it than about the mist."

I thought about that. "So I wasn't scared of something I saw?"

"Oh, there was a bit of that. Especially once the nightmares started." Dr. Warren uncrossed and recrossed her legs. "Do you remember when we tried hypnotherapy?"

I stared at her, wondering if this was a test. "We never did hypnotherapy."

"Yes. Of course, you may not have remembered it. You were still quite traumatized at that point."

Everything about what she was saying felt wrong. "I don't remember." My voice had risen, and Dr. Warren nodded.

"That's perfectly normal. Here, let me show you your file." She stood and walked to the door, leaned out and spoke briefly to the receptionist. She returned with a massive folder that contained other folders inside of it.

"Don't be worried," she said, settling back into her seat and laying the folder on the table that made the office look like a living room. "This is almost ten years worth of therapy, remember. And half of this was from your hospitalization."

In the coffee shop, I wrapped my hands tightly around the mug and held my face close to the warm liquid inside.

The files had shown that I was hospitalized following an incident at my school. The hair incident. After pulling off Ella's wig, I hadn't been able to stop screaming until the EMTs had injected me with some kind of tranquilizer. The notes from the admitting doctors indicated that I had rejected the idea of Ella having cancer by saying, "She's my best friend! She would have told me if she had cancer! We don't keep secrets!" Parts of that rang true - not the part about her not having cancer, the part about not keeping secrets from each other. We had made a blood vow, pricking our fingers with a pin and touching them together. Sisters forever, secrets never.

That was why I'd been so angry, thinking she had stolen one of my Pony Pals. Candy Swirl. This was after the mist, after I'd freaked out over the Pony Pals and their weird eyes. Mom had put my toys away, but then I saw Ella playing with Candy Swirl on the playground. Whenever we played Pony Pals at my house, Ella always wanted Candy Swirl. So if I took two Pony Pals to play with at school, I'd take Candy Swirl and Princess Sparkle, one for each of us. Ella had lots of Pony Pals of her own but Candy Swirl was her favorite. It was an older one, a Pony Pal that had once been one of my older cousins'. It looked a little different from most of the Pony Pals I had. Special. Like Ella.

Ella couldn't have gotten Candy Swirl anyplace other than me. Once her mom had bid on one on eBay. It had sold for over a hundred dollars. I supposed, if I was a better friend, I would have just given Ella the pony. But I didn't. Ella might have gotten all the newest Pony Pals when they came out, but I had this one special one.

In scanning the files, I didn't even see a mention of the Pony Pals. It felt like such an important detail. I flipped through the pages so fast that Dr. Warren asked me if there was something in particular I was looking for. "Oh, nothing special," I said casually. And then I saw it. I had almost missed it. Patient calls her toys My Little Ponies, and screamed at me when I called them by the names I knew.

If there was one thing I knew, it was this. Well, there were a lot of things I knew. They were called Pony Pals, and I never stayed at the hospital for eight months. The Aubrey described in the file was someone I had never met. Someone who had been given massive amounts of psychotropic medication, who had spent nearly a year doing art therapy and group therapy.

"Hey, you okay?" Ella asked now. She sat down across from me with her own hot mug of coffee.

I lifted my face. "Yeah." I reconsidered. "Maybe."

"Okay, um. So I've been talking to Joe about you. Kind of. He's been weird." Ella blew steam from her coffee, but didn't drink it. "I just keep thinking about how you didn't know we were dating, and how he doesn't seem to remember anything about us dating, either."

I kept my face carefully still. "Oh?"

Ella leveled her gaze at me. "Look, if you and Joe are hooking up or something, I would really appreciate it if one of you would tell me."

It was so far from what I expected her to say that for long moments I was speechless. She thought Joey was cheating on her with me? Well, I had almost kissed him right in front of her.

"Why would you ask me to be honest, if Joey's your boyfriend?" I said finally.

"First off, he hates being called Joey," she said. "And secondly... Well, I guess this is stupid, but remember when we were kids? Sisters forever, secrets never?"

Goosebumps crept up my arms. I had just been thinking about this today. What were the odds? I nodded.

"I guess I thought our blood vow might still mean something to you." Her voice was sharp. She stood. "I guess maybe it doesn't."

She pushed away from the table and headed outside.

I jumped up and threw on my coat to follow her. I hadn't waited her for an hour for her to demand I confess to hooking up with her boyfriend and walking away. "Wait," I called as she pushed open the door.

I had too many things. I left the coffee on the table and grabbed my scarf in one hand and my purse in the other and hurried after her. She hadn't stopped at the door, but she had slowed down and half-turned toward me.

"Ella," I said, breathlessly.

"Is there something you want to tell me, Aubrey?" Ella said, her tone formal.

"Okay, so this is going to sound a little crazy," I started.

---

Do you think Ella will believe her?