"Okay, school time." I awkwardly laughed, Alessandra was not amused.

"The reason why I was frequently getting brutally attacked was because... I'm a Dream Error."

"A what?"

I conjured up a giant wooden board, filled with grooves like a maze.

"Imagine this is your brain's track for your dream."
"Okay."
I put marbles in the slots, in all different shades of green-blue. They began to roll in their grooves, and when they reached the end, they turned back and rolled again.

"The marbles are the people in your dreams. They play their part and that is it. A dream error is a marble that goes off the track, usually by mistake."

One of the marbles, a baby blue one with a visible plastic seam where the two halves connected rolled slightly off the track. The other marbles rolled faster--cover ups.

"Now imagine I am the red marble," I said. A red marble appeared on the board, bright and clear. It rolled off a little bit, and then suddenly turned into a red hand and flipped the whole board over with a finger. The marbles sputtered and fell and bounced off the air. They went berserk, and then the red marble, caught at the center of the cloud of what had multiplied into billions of tiny marble molecules, disappeared.

Alessandra gasped. "They...they were going to kill you?"

I nodded grimly.

"But now, you are in my dreams. Which might force you into a groove, or might make you a renegade dream error too. I don't know right now.
But I have a theory--but..." I trailed off.

"What?"

"If I die, and you return to your body, there isn't another Kenny Walker fantasy boy to replace me."

"What are you saying?"

I sighed. "I'm saying that when I die you won't love Kenny anymore. You can never have any daydreams about your future or imagine Kenny doing something cute. That's what I meant by a part of you."

Alessandra sat down, her tattered dress ballooning around her.

"I don't want you to die."

That shocked me, but then almost immediately I wasn't surprised. How do you let go of a love that lasted for a long portion of your adolescent years?

"I mean, not you. I could live without Kenny. But you, Kenny, who became sentient and almost killed us because you cared so much ..." Alessandra clarified.

Tears welled in my eyes.

I sat next to her, and she instinctively put her head in my lap. She was crying too. I stroked her hair, which was becoming shinier. Her dress was stretching, darkening, until it was shining and we were so high above the endless expanse of turquoise that there were clouds growing amongst us.

"Don't ever leave me." It was Alessandra carrying me now. Her eyes shone clear, her freckles swam. We were intertwined, until Alessandra and Kenny became AlessandraandKennyandKennyandAlessandra.

Our tears mixed like tea coloring water, we were one.

"Don't leave me."
"I won't."

"Don't leave me."
I'd never.