That night I couldn't sleep.

Something made me get up and pull out my old journals again. I hunted through them until I found the one I wanted: the one from when I had just started horseback riding lessons.

Cathy says I can join the intermediate riding class! I'm kinda nervous, because there are kids my own age in that class. Like Cecilia Poole. All those girls have their own horses and win at horse shows all the time. I'm happy that Cathy thinks I'm good enough, but I don't want to look stupid next to them. I guess leasing a horse is almost as good as owning, it's not like I'm using the lesson horses. But I'm still nervous.

Cut to a few weeks later:

The intermediate class is so much better than the therapy class. Like, I'm learning real horsemanship and not just riding to help my mental health or whatever. I'm glad I have Stewie and not a Thoroughbred like the other girls have, because their horses spook at everything. Stewie's calm. Angelika's really nice, she helped me when I couldn't get Stewie to trot over the ground poles. And Ceci talked to me today. "Your horse is really gorgeous," she said. I babbled a bit about how he was part draft horse but how he's really calm and gentle and she said sometimes she wished her horse was that calm. Then she asked if I was going to be in the horse show this weekend! I told her I wasn't but maybe I could come and watch and be in the next one. She said she would teach me how to braid a horse's mane.

And then the following week:

It was the first day of high school and Ceci and Maddy and Angelika asked me to sit with them at lunch!!! Angelika saw me sitting alone and said I should sit with them. They never said anything like they knew what had happened with Ella but everyone knows, they must have known why I was sitting by myself. But all that was back in elementary school. And in middle school I always ate lunch in the guidance counselor's office. So I guess high school is a fresh start.

All of this was the same as I remembered.

I flipped forward, stopped on some pages where my writing was slanted and hurried, as if I was upset and had to get the words out. Ceci told me she was going on a date with Damon Phelps. She told us all, but I saw the way Maddy glanced at me after she said it. Ceci told them about the date before. They all were waiting to see my reaction. I tried so hard not to freak out there in the cafeteria. She knew I liked Damon, I told her that. I had to do my breathing techniques to calm down, and Ceci was all like "Is something wrong, Bree?" So I said, as calmly as I could, "You knew I liked him."

She pretended like she didn't know. "Did you know?" she asked Maddy, then Angelika, and they all looked at me like I was crazy. I had to get up and leave.

And now I have to apologize to her for freaking out. Because I thought I told her, but if everyone says I didn't then I guess I didn't. At least that's what Dr. Warren says. I can't trust my memories.

Who was Damon Phelps? I didn't even remember that name.

I tossed the journal back into the box. So I had apologized for not remembering correctly before. It didn't mean I actually had memory problems. I was just going by what Dr. Warren always told me: if multiple people confirm that I'm wrong, then I'm wrong, unless I have a way to prove it.

***

The next morning I awakened with an indent in my face from my phone. I had fallen asleep scrolling through my Pictagram account, searching for clues in my posts and comments, then Ceci's posts and comments. But we were so good at projecting what we wanted others to see that I couldn't read between the lines to see what might have actually happened, and my new phone didn't have a record of texts we might have sent each other two years ago.

I sighed and got up, walked my feet into my slippers before heading downstairs. The house was oddly quiet. In the kitchen there was a note on the table:

Bree -

You looked tired so I let you sleep in.

At the boys' soccer game with Betsy - home around one.

<3 Mom

I fixed myself breakfast and glanced out the window to measure the fog and decide if I wanted to try to call Ceci for a ride to the barn. There was an unfamiliar truck parked in Joey's driveway. Mug of coffee in hand, I stood close to the window to see. Did Mrs. Grossman have a boyfriend? That seemed impossible. And then I remembered that Mr. Grossman was coming home this weekend.

My phone buzzed on the table, and I plopped down to check my notifications and eat my syrup-drenched waffles. There was a text from Ella that was just a series of question marks. I opened it and found three other texts from her.

Hey

Can I come by today

Need to ask you something

????

The first one had been sent only five minutes ago. It must have come through while the Keurig was rumbling. "Impatient much?" I muttered and texted back a curt, Sure.

Then I realized if Ella was that impatient over a text, she could be already driving here. I almost stood up to get dressed, then settled myself in my chair and kept on eating. I didn't need to impress Ella. She wouldn't care if I wasn't Insta-ready. Or Picta-perfect, whatever they would say here.

Sure enough, I got another text three minutes later, at the same time as a knock at the door.

I wrapped my robe around me before twisting the knob.

Ella glared at me through her black-rimmed eyes. "Hey," she said.

"What's the emergency?" I asked, and because I was cold, I stepped back to let her in. Her boots clomped as she strode through.

"Okay, so I didn't really believe you the other night. Your weird parallel universe thing. I mean," she whirled to glare at me, "you can't honestly have expected me to swallow that, right?"

"I figured as much." I shut the door and headed back to the kitchen, where my waffles were getting cold.

"Ooh, coffee," she said.

I sighed and swerved toward the Keurig. Popping in a K-cup, I took down a mug and turned to face her. "Okay, you didn't believe me. Why are you here?"

"Uh, you got any more waffles?"

"Do you not have any food in your house?" I asked, reaching into the freezer.

Ella arched an eyebrow. "I fed you breakfast when you crashed at my house."

"Fine," I sighed.

"Yeah, so I did some research." She unhooked her bag from her shoulder and pulled out a stack of books. "And my theory is that there's a ley line near your house, running near it."

"What's a ley line?"

"It's an energy channel. Ancient religions used to place their monuments on these lines to draw from earth energies. Like the St. Michael's Ley Line, that connects seven different sites from Scotland to the Middle East, all named after St. Michael. There's another one that connects Stonehenge and multiple other ancient sites in Britain. And the pyramids... I could go on, but there's this energy along these lines that could explain..." Ella glanced out my window. "That."

The fog had obscured nearly everything outside.

I sucked in a breath and tried not to show how much it bothered me. Busying myself with putting her waffles on a plate, I asked, "So these energy lines... are they, like, borders? To other worlds?"

I carried the plate over to the table and set it down near the books, then returned with Ella's coffee and the flavored creamer I liked.

"Not usually," Ella said, upending the syrup bottle and drenching her waffles. "But lots of weird stuff happens around them. Some people say you can see ghosts, because the ghosts are drawn to the energy."

Dragging over one of the books, I flipped through the pages. No pictures, aside from some diagrams of lines and maps. "Look, this is a lot more than I expected, but it doesn't really seem to connect."

"Maybe not. But like you said the other day," Ella licked syrup from her fingers. "We can experiment."

---

What kind of experiments do you think Ella has in mind?