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I shift my position to hold Fancy with one arm. “Thank you so much. You’re a lifesaver, really. I’m sure you get this all the time, but I appreciate it so much.”

Summers preens with the praise. “It’s no problem. All part of the job. Walking people back to their apartments if they don’t feel safe, fighting back harassers, investigating pixie swarms. It’s what I do.”

He swipes on his clunky glass device, and I watch as the symbols glow and disappear, and then the whole thing pulses with a soft golden glow before he lifts it to his face with stern concentration. “She’s not picking up.”

“Try again,” I insist.

Summers nods, and then finally Kat answers on the other end, and I exhale with relief.

“Hello? I have a—”

“Brenda Nguy ? n,” I offer.

“Brenda Nguy ? n here, she says she’s your roommate and she got locked out… oh, that’s great. By the Geology Building. Okay, I’ll tell her to stay put. Great. Thanks. Bye.”

He hangs up and smiles at me. “She’s on her way. You be careful now. And don’t worry about your finals and stuff. It’ll all work out. Just take it one thing at a time.”

I nod. His words are reassuring, even if he thinks I’m a college student. I wonder if it gets easier.

“I’ve gotta go do paperwork. You’ll be all right? You want me to wait with you until she gets here? She said she was over on North Campus and would be here soon.”

“I’m okay. Thanks!”

I sit down on a cold stone bench with Fancy.

I take a deep breath, trying to calm down.

I thought this was all a grand adventure at first, but now a deep-seated fear that I might never get home starts to set in, sickeningly hot and horrifying, growing in the pit of my stomach.

I was so focused on getting away from the pixies and then trying not to be suspicious that I didn’t have time to dwell on the fact that the original spell went wrong somewhere, so the spell to go home isn’t likely to work.

Last time I just walked through a door and got home, but that was on accident.

“Brenda!”

Kat’s voice brings me back to the moment.

“Are you okay? You found another portal?” She catches her knees, doubling over and wiping sweat off her face.

She looks a little pale, her outfit rumpled and sweaty.

“Sorry, I’m a little out of it, I just ran over here because I was in the middle of—” She takes a deep breath, steadying herself.

“I almost got caught,” she says hysterically.

I stand up in concern. “Are you okay? Caught doing what?”

“After our Target date, this creepy guy was lurking and tried to wipe my memory—he mentioned this Order, and I knew they had something to do with these portals between our worlds. So I tracked him here to investigate. But I didn’t expect anyone to call me, no one ever calls me other than Dad, and he’s in the sads tonight—” Kat blinks, registering Fancy in my arms.

“Meow,” Fancy says curiously, reaching a paw out.

“Uh, you brought a cat.”

“This is Fancy,” I say. “I’m not sure how I got here—I tried out one of your premade teleportation thingies in your Target bag and it got messed up when Fancy knocked over our D even the air feels fuller, cooler, and dense with oxygen and life.

Kat leads me down the street toward a somewhat dilapidated house with a wide wraparound porch, covered in rambling vines.

An electric lamp flickers intermittently above us.

The swing on the porch is rusted over and covered in a thick heaping of dust, and the front lawn is in equal disarray, overgrown with dandelions.

In the night air the little puffs are covered in dew, glistening like small jewels.

“Come on,” Kat says, opening the door. She beckons me inside.

I walk down a hallway lined with framed photos.

The first set of photographs are black and white, yellowed and curling at the edges.

A Chinese man with his hair styled traditionally, shaved in the front and combed into a long braid—a queue, I remember from history class—stands proudly with his family in front of a grocery store.

At his side, a woman wearing a traditional cheongsam places her hands on the shoulders of three unsmiling children wearing Western suits.

“Great-Great-Grandfather Jimmy Woo in San Francisco,” Kat says. “He came over during the Gold Rush.”

I whistle. “Did he find anything?”

“Just enough to start a store and bring over his wife, and they had three kids.” She taps the little girl in the center, whose eyes spark with a glint of mischief

“That’s Jìngyi Woo.”