Almost immediately, the mist closed around us and muffled the voices calling out my name. We kept running, slowing down only to make sure we didn't crash into any trees, until we were both breathless and I couldn't run anymore. The silence was eerie. I was still holding Joey's hand.

"So we're going back," Joey said finally.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It's selfish of me to ask you to go back when you were happy."

"Bree." Joey tugged at my hand to turn me toward him. "I knew it was only a matter of time before we had to come back. I didn't belong there."

I looked up at him. "But I did. That's the world I came from, eight years ago. I don't have any right to go back with you."

"Then we won't go back to my world," Joey said with a shrug. "We'll find another world. One where no one thinks you're crazy and I'm super cool, and we're already dating."

I laughed a little. "There's no world where you're cool."

"Ah, right. Well, a world where I don't care about being cool, then."

"I'm serious, Joey. I don't think I'll ever fit in any world." The mist pressed in around us and I shivered, drew closer to him.

"Then we'll stay here," Joey shrugged.

I shoved away from him then. "We can't stay here," I said. "Didn't Ella tell you anything?"

"She said you had something to show me. But she wouldn't say anything else. She was kinda weird about it, actually."

I patted down my pockets and pulled out Mr. Grossman's wallet, which had somehow stayed put even with all the running. "I found this. In the mist."

I handed it over to Joey, who took it and let it fall open in his hands. "This is my dad's," he said. The license showed a much younger Mr. Grossman. Joey peered at it, then flipped through the little book of photographs stuck in one of the credit card slots. A wedding picture of his parents, faded and worn at the edges. Pictures of Joey as a baby and as a toddler. He looked up at me after he got to the last one, which was his own school photo from second grade. "It was just lying on the ground out here?"

Hesitating, I tried to form the explanation in a way that wouldn't hurt him. "Ella told me a story about your dad," I said. "She said he went hiking out in the mist and was lost for three days, and when he came out he was covered in his own blood without any marks on him." I waited a beat to see if he would put it together, and he did.

"My real dad is out here somewhere?" he choked out, looking into the white darkness.

"He's dead, Joey," I said. "Your dad from that world killed him."

Joey blinked hard and looked down at the wallet in his hands. He closed his fingers around it and pulled it close. "He didn't leave us."

"He didn't." I threaded my arm through one of his and hugged him.

After a bit Joey swiped at his face and put the wallet into his back pocket. "Do you think it was my real dad who killed my other dad?"

A distant crack came through the mist, and we both looked up.

"What else is out here?" Joey asked in a small voice.

"Things we don't want to see," I said. "Come on, we need to find our way back."

Joey reached for my hand. It felt so warm and right holding mine. I smiled up at him, but before we took a step, he said, "Wait - how will we know we're even going the right way?"

"I don't know."

"There has to be something," Joey said, looking around us.

A sharp pain shot through my chest seeing the uncertainty in his eyes, all the emotions I'd felt over the past eight years living there. "We just have to pick a direction and go."

"No, there has to be a way. Some marking. The ground! We can track ourselves." He squatted down and tried to wave the mist away. It stubbornly clung, making it difficult to see. "How is that possible, there aren't even any footprints!"

"Joey." I pulled him back up and put my hands on his face so he was looking at me. "We just have to go. Now. We can't stay in one place for long or things will find us."

"Things? What kind of things?"

"Things. Ourselves. Do you want to find out if your doppelganger would kill you?"

Joey's hands gripped my waist. Then, at the same moment, we leaned in, and we were kissing, finally - the wrong place, but it all felt right. I should have done this a long time ago. I closed my eyes and inhaled his scent, wrapped my arms around his neck.

When we pulled apart, I sucked in a deep breath. "I want to go to a world where we can be together," I said. "A world where I don't care what other people think."

"Well, that'll never happen," Joey said with his lopsided smile. "I'll always care what you think."

I laughed a little.

"Are you hoping there's a world with no Cesspool?" he asked more seriously.

"I suppose." I looked away. "I guess I wish there was a world where things were easy. Where I didn't have to worry about what Ceci thought of me, where nobody thought I was crazy."

"Let's make a deal, then. You'll only care about what I think about you, and I'll only care what you think of me."

I tried to imagine a world like that. A world where I didn't worry that people would think I was a bedwetter, or that I had left my best friend to get sexually assaulted by the school rapist. I had done those things. But I supposed I cared what I thought about myself, and I knew that I had done things that were wrong and hurtful. But Joey still liked me anyway, for some reason.

I couldn't change the things I had done out of fear. But I could try to forgive myself, and if I did that maybe Ella and Ceci would begin to see me as worthy of forgiveness too.

"What if my parents still think I'm crazy?" I asked, my face buried in Joey's chest. "What if we get out of here and they're waiting to take me away?"

"Then you go with them. You stay calm, and don't give them a reason to restrain you. You talk to the doctors, and when you have nightmares again, you remember that nothing is going to come out of the mist to hurt you, and you remember that I don't think you're crazy, and I'll come to visit you, and we'll get through this. You'll get through this. You're strong, you know. If I'd had to go through all this alone, all this weird surreal stuff, I don't know how I would have reacted. And you were just a kid." Joey kissed the top of my head and squeezed me tightly. "Or, I'll bust you out of that mental hospital and we'll come back through here and go to a different world. And another and another."

"You know... I haven't been scared this whole time out here. Because you're with me." I smiled up at him.

He grinned back at me. "Progress."

We let go of the hug, though we kept contact with each other, my arm around Joey's waist, and his arm around my shoulders. "Which way do we go?" Joey asked.

I tugged him forward. "This way."

"You're sure?"

"No." I glanced back at him. "But it doesn't matter. Whichever world we end up in, we'll be together." 

___

Into the mist they go... but what will they find?