I wake up curled in shredded drape fabric. Several posters also have some lovely clawmarks in them, which sucks because there's no chance I'm going to any concerts ever again and a good number of the items in there were reasonably valuable. Rest in pieces, Guns N' Roses. I look over my handiwork, bringing a hand up to my face, and emit a low, soft groan.

Absolutely pathetic.

This is something you'd expect from a feral cat you brought home out of the goodness of your own heart, not from your son. I don't know what I qualify under at this point, if the scorn of my parents is any indication. Looking out over the wreckage, I honestly can't even say I don't deserve it. I situate myself on my bed, feigning normalcy, and shut my eyes as far closed as they can go.

Yeah, I'm lucky to still be getting shelter. I don't even talk to them. No wonder they don't want to deal with me. I don't want to deal with me.

My head burns. I don't know how long I sit like this, but the introspection is making everything worse. I need to talk to someone. Anyone. You wouldn't happen to show up again, would you? Ha ha... ha.

My fingers go for my phone as if they have a mind of their own, and I jerk them up, just to lunge for my cell phone and throw myself back off my own bed. I land face up, surrounded by scraps of fabric and infinite disappointment. I swing down my contacts to the only non-family number in there (how have I not gotten all of Class 63's numbers yet? This is total bullshit) and click it without a second thought.

The phone hums for a few seconds, as if arbiting my fate, and eventually gives up and lets me through. I listen to the blocky click as Mikayla picks up her phone. "I was actually going to call you this morning."

"You? Call me?" I ask. My voice is shaking.

"Sure," she says. "Finn and I are working on something right now."

"Hey," calls a voice in the background. It is the most disinterested yell I've ever heard.

"Hi, Finn," I say.

"You have a cold or something?" Mikayla asks. "You sound like you're half dead."

I pause, looking around at my room, and a darkness crosses my face like the shade below a localized thunderstorm. I can still feel some half-dead thing clutching at my innards, more like a mouse than a proper fox, and I hate it more than I even figured I had the capacity to hate. "I don't want to talk about it right now."

"That's fine," she says, roughly as indifferent as Finn was.

Immediately, my thoughts go back to Wait! Yes I do! Please interrogate me about my problems! and I go for the lapels for my typical minor coping tic and flip either fabric or laminated paper off of my shoulder instead. Unwilling to admit either occurence to her, I sit in silence on my knees, holding the phone to my face.

There's a long run of crackling background noise, some hushed conversation, and the sound of Mikayla going up and down the stairs. This is followed by some paper spreading, some more undeterminable noise, and eventually Mikayla says, "Thanks for all the information. I expected absolutely nothing and was pleasantly surprised that you actually gave me something useful."

"What the fuck... what did I even give you?" I ask, rubbing my head. Yesterday is a thousand fuzzy years in the past.

"The Reema Spiral? I can't believe you got this. Apparently it was part of our counselors' college dissertation. I'd tell you more but I don't trust the airwaves."

"Airwaves." I almost want to drop the phone. "Are you from the seventies?"

"That's what Finn calls them."

"Finn, you're not from the seventies. You were literally taken two days before you came back." I yell into the phone. Somewhere in the background, Finn gives a grunt of acknowledgement, as sarcastic as that sounds from where I'm currently standing. "Right. If you don't want anyone on the wrong side of the 'airwaves' to know, what do you expect me to do about it?"

"You could come over," Mikayla says.

I consider this. I then consider transportation. I consider all the reasons it might be a poor idea for me to step foot into Mikayla's house, given every encounter I've had with her up to this point and the fact that I almost got her turned into the police what seems like a week ago. "What's your address?" I ask.

"Ten-fifty on Logan Road," she says. "See you then."

"Yeah. See ya," I say, and she immediately hangs up on me.

I wander downstairs to see my parents in the corner of my eye, sitting in the table in the dining room. There is more pain in their expressions than I know what to do with, and eventually, slowly, my dad says, "Did something happen, son?"

It's so formal I don't think I can touch it, so the statement drops like a small child and subsequently incurs brain damage. Yikes. I'm about as good at similes this morning as I am getting my shit together. "Nothing," I say, absolutely certain that I'm getting my ride from elsewhere.

I return to my room and begin sweeping up paper while I call my main men, that is, Ms. Haven and Mr. Harring. "Come on. Please?" I entreat the phone over the sound of live gunfire, which is nonreassuring. "I promise it's just a ten minute car ride."

"Derrick, I'm only picking up because I thought you might be trying to kill yourself or someone else. This is not the time and we are not your chauffeurs," Ms. Haven yells. "Harring! It's got us surrounded!"

"Holy shit, what's going on there? Are you guys--" I'm cut off by the beep of the phone. Whatever's happening over there, it's something that I unfortunately will have no part in. I can't say it doesn't stir some curiosity in me, though-- probably something to mention to Mikayla. I look out the window at the landscape, which has long since soured from fall into winter, and exhale deeply. My breath stains the window white, which I draw a half-hearted smile into before stepping back, admiring my clean-up job.

Room's trashed.

I adjust the shredded drapes a few times before just yanking them off the pole they're attached to and folding them neatly into the closet. I then stuff all the paper into the wastebasket by my bed, which is definitely not supposed to be taking this kind of damage. It looks almost serviceable, save for some marks on the walls by yours truly, but those aren't going anywhere. The woods kept calling me, wooden fingers guiding me to the only solution I ever had, and eventually, like any good disciple, I relented. That's all.

I sound like the kind of person the government should be keeping under surveillance. Crap.

"Mom, Dad, going out. Will be back by nightfall... maybe a little after nightfall." I pause. "Sorry."

"O-oh. Have a nice day," My mother says, sounding confused. I try not to let my eyes linger on her or my father too long as I exit the backdoor and take a roundabout way to the road, which lies ahead of me for what I know to be miles.

How had I even done this the first time? Did I just close my eyes and dash forwards, blindly, propelled by my own petty panic? It's like learning how to walk all over again. I know my fox adrenaline is there under the surface, waiting for me, but it might as well be as far away as the sky. I shiver a few times under my skin. I can sense you there, too.

None of that was real.

"If you're out there, can you help me out?" I ask.

None of that was real, Derrick.

I try to run a few times, but whatever kicked in the night I ran home alone doesn't magically come in and save my sorry tail or lack thereof. It's not surprising, as deep down, no matter what I want or say I want, I'm afraid of myself and what I could be when I give myself over. We stick at a clean 5% fox, and that 5% is something ugly. So I lope down the road with my phone in my right hand, forgetting to remember to check the time, ambling towards town. I can sense how alive the forest is around me. Each movement triggers a turn of my head, and when cars rip through I see my narrowed pupils for a split second on the metal. No one stops to pick me up, on the side of the road, even though I raise a hand a few times with the thumbs up, primarily as a joke. If I didn't have anywhere to go, I wouldn't even mind, but as it stands, it's just another way that my own existence inconveniences me.

I make it to ten-fifty on Logan after a little bit of Derrick navigation and a little bit of Siri navigation. I'm surprised to see how large Mikayla's house is, which makes me immediately guilty. How much had I assumed when I heard 'foreclosure'? I hadn't imagined the sweeping rafters or the white patio, nor the blossoming gardens out front. Even then, all the small details of the place remind me of Mikayla, from the grace of the architecture to the way the flowers bow their heads the way Mikayla does in the back of class when she doesn't want anyone to see her. It's her house. You know how people say dogs look like their owners?

She opens the door and looks down at me like you'd look down at a feral cat, which is appropriate, if sad. "We're finishing up," she says, hands on her hips. "Derrick, did you walk here?"
"You caught me," I mumble under my breath, looking at the sun behind me. It's setting, not to the point where it's come close to touching the trees, but it's on the way back down. How late did I get up? Very. How long did this take me? Probably several hours. Yikes.

"Get indoors," she says, and I cross the threshold into a house that smells faintly of cookies and paint.

The interior hurts me more than the exterior. It's minimalist, but I can see how certain items of furniture have been, say, tilted so that they fill more of the room. The shelves are full of books but there are no adornments, and I can see dust circles where things used to be. There are pictures all over the walls, mainly of Mikayla and her siblings, or paintings from their art classes. It's homey in the truest sense of the word, which makes it smaller than the huge staircase or open two-story plan suggest.

Mikayla guides me through wordlessly, not that I'm not used to that, and she turns a right as she hits the back and is about to head up the stairs when two bright-eyed children look up from the television. They look like her, if she were six years younger and far more contented with life. Both of them flash matching smiles at me, and one calls, "Is that your boyfriend?"
"No," Mikayla pushes me along.

"Woah, woah," I say, grabbing the bannister. "Boyfriend?"

"Yeah, she talks about the fox guy all the time--" one of them says, and I then learn that for as skinny as Mikayla is, she has a monster grip. She practically yanks me up the rest of the steps, and I flash her the most aggravating smile I can manage (spoilers: I'm good at these).

"It's a different... look. You wouldn't get it," Mikayla says, although I can't see her face to see if she's blushing. She removes her fingers from my wrist at the top of the steps, still facing away, and she stalks towards what must be her room.

"Oh, I think I get enough," I yell after her, taking more than a moment to follow not-so-closely behind. The halls up here are decorated with more pictures. They're everywhere, capturing her before-- that in-between time is uncommemorated, but there are plenty of images of Mikayla, a little rounder and a little happier, Mikayla playing soccer, Mikayla's birthdays, she and her siblings practically living in the walls. I tilt up one and realize I recognize the frame brand. We had these all over my house a year ago, before... well, before.

"Are you crying?" Mikayla asks when I finally enter her room. (It's everything I'd expect out of Mikayla: a nice large conspiracy web in one corner, lots of books, generally tidy, and with three incense sticks propped auspiciously near the window.)

"I love your house," I sniff. "I'm sorry, that's so dumb, I just... your parents really, really, really love you, and I--"

Finn, who is still sitting on her bed, looks slightly bemused if not startled. "Derrick, you alright, buddy?"

I didn't realize it, but no. I'm totally sobbing. "Yeah," I say through a faceful of snot. "Never better. How's the... how's the... conspiracy? I actually have something to tell you guys."

Mikayla guides me over to the bed. I go over the call I got from Mr. Harring and Ms. Haven, which she lines up with a predicted anomaly and deduces must be the shadowy apparitions full of eyes this thing keeps producing. She then begins going over the specifics of the Reema spiral. I understand maybe half of it, but I keep nodding along anyways. "So there's a magical flux here and here... as you can tell, all of these points share something in common, and that is that geographically, they're all spiralling in on..."

"The middle of town," I whisper.

"Our town," Mikayla agrees. "So there's clearly some increasing number of paranatural events here. However, I think it started with a particularly an increased number of local Ground-classes, which has serious repercussions on the real world. This year's been unusual. Eventually we're going to reach a point where you can't hide things anymore. Where you can't keep hiding the strange under the convenient veil of human ignorance or our willingness to overlook small, incongruous details in our day-to-day life. When that happens, we reach a singularity, a rift of some sorts, and then..."

Incredible. She really does sound like the kind of internet conspiracy theorist you would find lurking in the back of the internet.

"She has no idea what happens next," clarifies Finn. "Neither of us do. We're hoping portal anomalies leading to Dream-class otherworlds, but it's more that there might be everything than any one thing in particular. Regardless, we're getting on board."

"This is pretty crazy," I whistle. "You think there might be room in this singularity for apparitions of my dead girl... friend... friend who is, was, a girl..."

"We get it," Finn says. "You can stop embarrassing yourself whenever you want."
I blush a furious red.

"You still crying?" asks Mikayla. The spark that somehow lit her face during her explanation of the spiral is all but gone now, reduced back to that subdued expression between ambivalence and distaste.

"No, I'm not," I lie. "I know I should be focusing on this, but I was just thinking about how lucky--" Voice is cracking. Abort now, Derrick. Do you read mission control? Abort. Abort. "You are to have a house like this, where everything stayed the same when you came back." Abort, abort, abort...

"It didn't," Mikayla says, getting to her feet. "It was crazy coming back here for the first time. Nothing was in the same place. None of the pictures looked like me. I yelled and yelled at my parents that they shouldn't have saved me... it just, it kills me that it was all my fault that this happened to them. They love this house. They love this town. But there are the other kind of Extras, as it were, and then there are the other kind of people. You find a family you think you can exploit, just moved here, not well-connected, darker than your average chocolate chip cookie... and you just let them slide under your radar. You get out of hospital bills, the kid probably dies in an otherworld, who cares." Mikayla jostles the cup of incense around in her hand. "And for what? I didn't get to save anyone. Everyone I cared about there is probably good as gone."

"Everyone had spirit animals back in your world, right?" I say.

Mikayla nods, turning back from the window. It's not a taboo topic by any means, but there's a kind of disrespect in asking first. "Go on."
"There wouldn't, by any chance, happen to have been someone with a fox?"

Mikayla freezes before laughing nervously. "Sure, I guess. So, transportation back home. You're not walking."

I just got shut down. "But--"

"Look. It's pathetic enough knowing you dragged yourself ten miles here, maybe more than that. I'm not letting you walk back."

"Pathetic?" I complain.

"Pathetic," she reiterates, opening the door out of her room. "Meet me down in five. I'm going to get my mom." She slams it and bolts down the stairs at a speed that might as well be supernatural.

I fall back on the bed. "I will never understand her."
"Don't try," Finn suggests. "Teenagers still baffle me and I've been stuck around them for a good four months now."
"This all must be super awkward for you," I note.

He sits in that uncanny adult posture, looking down at me in a manner somehow fully unique from the way Mikayla did. "Incredibly. I'm not excited about puberty, but I can't say being ten has been that thrilling, either."

"This is super awkward for me," I realize.

"And this would be why I think I'm done with teenagers," sighs Finn.

We make our way downstairs together, where Mikayla stands with her mom. "This is him?" she asks.

"No and don't start," Mikayla warns, her eyes mutinous.

"Oh, I'm just teasing," Ms. Ahlam says, her voice warm as a radiator in the depths of winter. "Love you, baby girl."

"Mom," Mikayla says, pushing her away, and I want to punch her in the face.

Her mom giggles, and I realize the gesture is playful. My fist stops twitching and I just stare at the two of them, recalling something so well lost to me that it might as well be dead. It died with a scared kid in a laboratory, no, it died with a child on his parents' doorstep on the first time and the look of fear in their eyes, the silent removal of pictures from walls and the first awkward nights where it became more and more obvious he no longer belonged on the family couch when Jeopardy! came on at night.

This is the most selfish thing I've ever thought in my life, and I hate myself the second for thinking it, but I would have rather have lost my house and all the surrounding woods than to have lost them. I want to trade places so badly, and I can see the same desire reflected in Mikayla's eyes, in the rimmed dark circles that speak to nights of wanting.

"Drop me off here," I say, twenty minutes later, in the back of Ms. Ahlam's minivan.

Mikayla looks out the window, to where the scenery is slowing down to a stop. "You really do live in the woods, huh?"

"No, I just... told my parents that I'd be out in the yard." I look at the sun. Thanks to this little trip, it's still fairly high in the sky, all things considered. I should have time for my usual weekend excursions, although walking around in the woods, barely even conscious, is beginning to sound like less of a relief and more honestly frightening. "Thanks."

"No problem," Mikayla says. "See you soon." She rolls up the window, watching me cautiously the whole time. My heart pulses with emotion I don't understand, not love but something more complicated, like someone driving a fork into my heart.

We made progress today.
I tell myself I'll walk back, and I don't. I walk in long, looping circles, thinking of you the whole time, you in my room, a ghost of yourself, just as confused as I am. It becomes more of a fixation, ironically, when I have other things I should be thinking about. I imagine you, your family life, reconstruct two doting parents out of the few times you mentioned them, and insert myself there, as a son-in-law or something. I just put myself right there, on your couch, in your house, and it stings a little less when I see my family staring at the blue screen, my mother and father arm in arm around each other. Mother. Father.

The animals stay outside, understanding nothing of human relations.

I manage not to give myself over, to go inside and sleep in my bed, but instinct and angst are fighting me the whole way down.

(A/N: Hopefully you made it down here without cutting yourself on that edge. We're back in the saddle, folks.)