I awakened inside the mist.

The cold ground beneath me seeped up through my jeans and sweatshirt. Painfully awake, I sat up and looked around. I had to be dreaming, except for all the details cutting into my brain: the exact outfit I'd been wearing earlier, the chill in the air, the clammy hands of mist on me. The spiky patches of grass prickling beneath my palms.

Sunlight filtered down through the cloud, making it look like I was inside a nuclear winter. I stood, brushing the dirt off my pants like this was an everyday occurrence. Like my heart wasn't in my throat. Like I didn't just wake up into a nightmare.

Cra-aack.

The sound came from behind me, and I whipped around to face it, but of course I couldn't see anything. I held my hand out in front of my face. Even an arm's length away, my hand blurred, faded by the mist.

Cra-ack.

I spun again, eyes searching desperately for something out there. Some visible thing in the fog. A dark shape loomed over there, maybe a tree. Nothing else. Maybe, if I went in the opposite direction, I'd reach the road.

For a moment, I closed my eyes. Told myself this was all a dream.

When I was ten or eleven, Dr. Warren had me record all my dreams. She also told me to tell myself while I was lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep, "I will be aware that I am dreaming." She wanted me to lucid dream, so I could learn to control my fear. During the day, I was supposed to ask myself, "Am I dreaming?" Like looking at my watch, there was a list of things to do when I asked myself this question. I could look at my hands or feet, because in a dream they would be distorted. I could try to smell something. Or ask myself what color shirt I was wearing.

I reached for my phone in my back pocket to check the time, then realized it wasn't there. I could practically see it on my nightstand, where I put it while I was napping.

I just looked at my hand in the fog. I had always thought distorted meant I'd have three fingers like some sick cartoon. Blurry didn't seem to be solid enough proof. And now, when I looked at them again, they appeared normal. I curled and uncurled my fingers, then laced them together, because I desperately needed to feel that I had four fingers and a thumb on each hand.

This wasn't a dream, then. So how did I get here?

I lost sight of the tree, somehow. I spun around, fingers clamped together, until its dark shadow reappeared. Taking a deep breath, I turned and then checked again to make sure the tree was directly behind me.

All I needed to do was walk forward in a straight line.

One step. Two. I was doing it. I was Not Panicking. I was breathing, four counts in, four counts out, timing it with my steps. Breathe in, step one two, step three four. Breathe out, step one two, step three four.

The road slowly materialized in front of me. Though I wanted to scream out in relief, I held it inside. Calm. I reached the road. Put one foot on the gravel.

The mist obscured the edge of my house. Only now did I realize that it was night. My house sat dark and abandoned. No porchlight. But I could see it. Taking my measured steps all the way to the front porch, I climbed the steps. I opened the door.

Inside, I nearly collapsed on my wobbly legs.

I did it. I managed to make my way out of the mist without freaking out. Even with the cracking sound. Without calling for help.

Betsy trotted down the hall and sniffed me thoroughly. I scratched her ears and gave her a good belly rub because I was just so glad to be home. Even if I found myself suddenly thinking of the other Betsy.

That moment didn't even feel real anymore. I got up and started up the stairs with Betsy at my heels, because standing here in the front hallway was too much of a reminder of that night.

I only wished everything didn't feel so sharp. I was so wide awake it felt wrong, my head pounding with how awake I was. At the top of the stairs, I considered heading straight into the bathroom to get one of my pills, but stopped myself in the doorway. If anything I'd been through these past couple of weeks proved anything, it was that I wasn't crazy. I didn't need those pills.

All I needed to get back to the right world.

Betsy wasn't supposed to sleep in our rooms, but her presence at my heels comforted me. Until she stopped in the doorway of my dark bedroom and growled.

"What is it, girl?" I asked.

She wasn't looking at me, or growling at me. I turned to see what had gotten her freaked out.

My bed wasn't empty.

It was hard to make out in the darkness. The shape under my blankets, completely covered up except for the long brown hair.

Just like mine.

***

I couldn't stop screaming.

I kept seeing myself, asleep, swirling in the mist, another version of me, and I didn't know if she had returned while I'd been out there and decided to steal my life, or if I had wandered into her world. Then the realization that I could be in some other world hit me. How could I know which world I was in? How many worlds were there? Was it possible that this world wasn't my own world, and was actually a third world that was so close to my original world that I hadn't noticed? I had been gone for eight years. Something might be different and I'd never know it, never trust myself to know it.

Mom and Dad came running, and Dad gathered me up into his arms, where my screams turned into gasping sobs, only to start screaming again when he carried me over to my bed. "Don't let her wake up!" I screamed, because I did not want to face the horror to looking into my own eyes.

"Jodi, get her pills," Dad said, then wrapped his arms tightly around me. "Bree, I need you to calm down, okay? You're okay. No one's going to hurt you. Take some deep breaths."

Somewhere in my head I could see that when we sat down on the bed, no one was there. No other me sleeping. The sense of unreality did not leave me, however. "None of this is real," I said. "I'm dreaming. This is all a dream. Wake up. Wake up!"

Dad's hands circled my wrists once I began slapping myself in the face.

"We need to call someone," Mom said from a distance.

"Dr. Warren?"

"An ambulance - look at her! She's incoherent!"

"She'll calm down. Give me the pills."

"Steve..."

"Then you do it."

I jerked my head away from the fingers forced my mouth open.

"This isn't going to work."

"If we call an ambulance they're going to have to hold her for a psych eval. Is that what you want?"

"I don't want this!"

"Mom, why is Bree screaming like that?"

A door clicked shut.

I managed to fight my father's grip enough to reach my face, grab fistfuls of my hair and hold them over my eyes. "Wake up, wake up..."

After a while this seemed to work. My breathing slowed with the rhythm of the words, and the rocking. I was rocking myself. "Okay," Dad whispered into my hair, and he repeated this until it became part of the soothing rhythm. "Okay."

All the energy drained out of me, I didn't think I could open my eyes. When my father rolled me over and folded me into my blankets, I had no fight left in me. "Wake up," I mumbled as he tucked the covers around my shoulders and kissed my head.

"Take your pills, honey," Dad said, and through my eyelashes I saw the familiar pills in Dad's hand.

I stared at them. There was some reason I didn't want to take them, but mostly I just wanted to disappear into oblivion. I tried to lift my hand and couldn't. Dad saw my efforts and popped the pills past my lips, lifted a glass of water so I could drink and swallow them down. They stuck in my throat and I coughed a little. The room tilted as he lay me down. I closed my eyes against the dizziness.

A sliver of light crossed my eyelids as my bedroom door opened and shut, and then I was in darkness again.

"Did she take the pills?"

"Eventually... I think she tired herself out..."

"I can't do this, Steve. This isn't like when the twins were babies... There's something seriously wrong with her and they shouldn't have to witness that."

"Do you really want to send her away again? She calmed down..."

"Eventually."

"It's getting worse. I don't know why, but she needs more help than we can give her..."

The voices faded as I faded. Deep, deeper into sleep, even as I thought to myself, Wake up... 

---

Do you think what she saw was real, or was it a dream?