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My eyes were closed and I could feel that warmth, the same warmth all over my body just like I had all those years ago.

It’s real, it’s not real; it’s real, it’s not real; it’s real, it’s not real —my own thoughts wanted to drive me insane. It wasn’t enough that I’d had to live that, see that, but when I told people about it, nobody believed me even though I had the scar to prove it.

Do I?

God, I wanted to slap myself so hard I fell back asleep, but I couldn’t. Because the sun was up and I was already pushing down the blanket and pulling up my leg to look at my ankle, to make sure that the scar tissue was still there, just a small line that had once looked like a scratch.

I had to make sure because I didn’t trust my own self. I’d seen that scar, had had it on me my whole life, and I still didn’t trust myself. I still needed to look to make sure it was there.

It was—and everyone could see it, and they still hadn’t believed me.

Except Mom.

Even when they ran blood tests on me and confirmed that there was no trace of any kind of venom in me whatsoever, she believed me. Even when Dad insisted that I’d fallen when I was three years old and had scratched my ankle and the scar had remained, she’d believed me. Even when the other kids pointed at me from across the street—she’d been the only one who believed me.

And then she’d gone and died just two years later.

“Liar, liar, liar,” I spit, no idea at who, my fingers on the raised tissue of my scar.

I really needed to calm down now because I recognized what was about to happen if I didn’t.

I closed my eyes again, but my head was killing me. Maybe because of the beer, or maybe because I’d only gotten a couple of hours of sleep, or maybe because my fucking mind is my worst enemy and I don’t even trust myself!

Fuck, my hands were shaking so badly, and now the fear had reached its peak because that feeling, that warmth was there again—for real—and it wasn’t going away. It was pressing harder against my center instead and pushing out toward my limbs at the same time, and I had no clue how to make it stop now any more than I did the first time it came.

The warmth was slowly becoming more intense. I was losing control because there were two parts of me battling for dominance inside my head, and the one that said that day at the meadow had never happened was winning.

My God, I’d told everyone, had insisted that it had been real, that I’d seen a boy with pointy ears and golden eyes, and he’d healed me with magic. I’d told everyone and they hadn’t believed me, but what if they were right? What if I’d only made it up?

It was then that everyone started to think I was crazy, but it wasn’t until later, when I told another truth, that things went really south for me.

Fuck, my hands were so, so warm, and the heat wasn’t slowing down. I tried to hide them, put them behind my back, but it wasn’t working.

“ Oh, God,” I whispered to the room when I opened my eyes to find exactly what I feared I’d find.

Every single item that had been on the floor or on my desk or on the chair that served as my universal hanger was floating in the air, almost touching the ceiling.

This was the other truth I’d told people.

“I can make things fly!”

God, I’d been just a kid. When Mom died and I woke up the next morning and I realized I was never going to see her again, everything in my room had suddenly started to float on air. I’d been shocked, and I’d gone outside to the guests who had come to give condolences and had told them all about it. I’d told the kids, too, who’d been made by their parents to come play with me because they pitied me.

And the kids did believe me. They finally believed me, and I thought they would finally be my friends now, and when they asked me to show them, I tried.

I tried hard.

I tried again.

And again and again—and I failed. I couldn’t raise shit on air, not in front of them. Not in front of anyone. Only when I was alone. Only when I was about to fucking burst open by this warmth that came to me for the seventh time now since that day and threatened to set my skin on fire. The seventh time right after I woke up in the morning, or in the middle of the night, after that same nightmare.

In my mind, I screamed.

In reality, I wrapped my arms around my head and squeezed my eyes shut and lay down on the bed again.

I held my breath tightly and I began to count.

When I got to seventy-nine, my survival instincts finally kicked in and I sucked in a deep breath like I’d been about to die for real.

At the same second, every item that had been hovering near the ceiling in my room crashed onto the floor.

Tears in my eyes but I blinked them away as I sat up. No need to cry—it was already over. Nothing was floating in the air anymore— over.

Now, I could get to work cleaning up the mess and continue to fight with myself until I convinced myself that this never even happened.

* * *

“What’s this?”

“Whoa, Fi, what are you?—”

I stopped talking when I realized what she was showing me—the screen of my laptop that was slightly cracked to the side from the fall this morning. It had been in the air together with the rest of my stuff, but it was still working—I checked. Nothing was broken, and my clothes were all on the chair again, and I’d gone to take a shower to clear my head before I had to face the day.

Fiona must have snuck into my room while I did and saw it. But it wasn’t a big deal—I was older now. Much wiser. You could kill me, and I’d never utter a single word about what had happened this morning to anyone— ever again for any reason. I didn’t even tell Betty anymore.

So, I said, “I pushed it off the desk accidentally earlier. It’s fine, it didn’t even shut down.” I closed the door of my bedroom with my foot while I took the towel off my hair. “Why don’t you go get dressed? I’ll be?—”

“Nilah, look at me.”

I stopped. I looked at her.

She might have only been fourteen years old, but she had a lot of authority—especially when she used what I called her grown-up voice.

“I don’t mean the crack—I mean this. ” And she showed me the screen of my laptop again.

The actual page I’d left open last night when I came back. The website of a college I’d been looking into for a few weeks—or even months now.

My heart fell all the way to my heels. I strode over to where she sat on the bed, took the laptop from her hands and closed it.

“It’s nothing,” I said and sat on the bed next to her to catch my breath—all the while pretending that I was just brushing my hair.

“Are you thinking about moving away and going to college, Nil?”

Warmth—a different kind from that morning—came over me from my very center.

“It’s fine if you are—just tell me, okay? I need to know.”

I turned to her, put down the brush, and grabbed her hands in mine.

“I…”

Fuck, I had no idea what to even say. I had been looking at colleges because even if I had yet to admit it to myself, I was planning on moving away. I was planning to leave Dad and Fiona to live here in peace.

The original plan had always been to take the year off after high school to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Both me and Betty, and I still planned to do just that, except…away from here.

Let’s face it—it would be much better for my family if I left. The people weren’t going to hate them anymore. They weren’t going to pick fights and bully Fi—they’d just…forget. Everything would go back to normal for them. They could enjoy their lives without feeling fear or guilt or any kind of bad way.

Without me.

I sighed, smoothed her golden-brown hair behind her ears. She was so incredibly beautiful my heart ached to look at her sometimes. She reminded me of Mom even more than the pictures, even though she had Dad’s brown eyes and full lips.

Her smile, though. The way her cheeks rounded and her eyes crinkled—exactly like Mom’s.

Meanwhile, I had inherited the blue of her eyes and her light blonde hair, but even so, I didn’t think I looked anything like her. Far too pale.

“I don’t know, Fi,” I ended up saying because lying did become exhausting eventually, believe it or not. “I honestly don’t know yet.”

Fiona thought about it for a moment, looking down at the floor, then said, “You’re miserable.”

I laughed—it was that unexpected. “Thanks, little sis.”

“I’m not joking, Nilah,” she said, and she went beyond her grown-up voice when she continued. “If I were you, I would leave Lavender Hill. I’d go to college or anywhere else. Dad can cook and clean, and I can help him. We will be fine without you—you should go.”

Her eyes were wide and hopeful and so full of love it was like she’d stabbed me right in the gut.

Because she was right on all counts, starting with my being miserable. I knew it well, but I still couldn’t imagine being out there in the world all by myself, the crazy girl in a place where I had nobody else with me to give me comfort, to remind me that Mom believed me even when I didn’t believe myself.

Yeah, maybe I was just a coward and that was the reason I hadn’t made a move yet, made an actual plan.

“Look, things might get…bumpy today, Fi,” I said because of course I’d change the subject instead of talking about this. Instead of facing my own self.

“What? What do you mean bumpy ?” she asked, squinting her eyes in suspicion, which also made her look so much like Mom.

“Nothing. Just in school, there might be talk about…stuff.”

Fuck.

The memories came back to me and I was surprised by them all of a sudden.

What the hell had I done last night with Betty?

Holy shit, had I really slashed the tires of Mr. Owens’s Mercedes with a kitchen knife?!

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Fi grabbed me by the wrists and came closer. “Nilah, what did you do ?” Yep, this was far worse than her grown-up voice.

“I—”

“ NILAH!”

Dad’s scream from downstairs cut me off. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath.

It was going to be a long day.

* * *

For whatever reason, I kept imagining I was in a concert. There was a choir on stage, and they were all singing different tunes at the same time, and someone in the crowd was playing the violin, too. That’s what it felt like to be sitting in the sheriff’s office east of the town, side by side with Betty and seventeen adults who were screaming their guts out at the same time.

The sheriff wasn’t feeling well, we were told, so the two deputies were trying to calm down the parents who had basically accused Betty and me of destruction of property and vandalism and trespassing and whatnot.

And, boy, could they all scream.

My dad sat with us, and Betty’s dad sat on her other side, too, and they were silent, but the rest of the parents weren’t—especially Mr. Owens, the guy whose daughter had invited Fi to her birthday party to make fun of her. He had had his tires slashed by yours truly, had had dog poop smeared all over his windshield by Betty, and the knob of his front door as well as the first front window decorated with feces, too. This last one by the both of us. We had spared no expense—most of the poop in our bucket had been used at their place because they were special.

What were you thinking, Nil? I asked myself in my head while the parents screamed and pointed fingers and showed their phones to the deputies, no doubt camera footage of us doing what we’d been doing.

I was an adult now, for fuck’s sake. I was eighteen years old. I couldn’t keep doing this shit anymore. I should think about getting a job or sign up for college—or even an institution.

I mean, just this morning I could have sworn to you that everything in my room floated on air because of me. Because of that heat that came over me.

And, yeah, it might have been real, but what were the odds that I had some sort of a freaky telekinesis ability nobody knew about that I could only do sometimes when I was completely alone so that nobody could witness it? I’d done my research—extensively. There’s nothing on the Internet I hadn’t read, no video of people claiming to move objects with their minds I hadn’t seen, and it was all fake. All of it, every single thing.

So why couldn’t this have happened only in my head?

Let’s be real here for a minute—that was the most probable explanation. Just like I’d made up that boy in the forest, whether he was an elf or a fairy or whatever creature mythologies of different nations claimed had pointy ears. That was the only option that made any sense.

So, yeah, an institution for the mentally unstable wouldn’t be so bad. I bet they had a division designated just for people who thought they could move objects with their minds. If I tried extra hard, I could probably find it. I’d fit right in.

The parents kept on screaming, demanding our fathers say something, demanding the deputies get us to admit to what we did.

Do you have any idea how much the damage will cost me?!

Who’s going to pay for that?!

Little brats—I demand an apology!

What has become of Lavender Hill—this town used to be safe!

On and on they went, and my dad refused to even raise his head. He had his elbows on his knees, his hands folded in front of him as he stared at the floor.

Betty’s dad had told us one thing before coming in here— do not admit to anything. Say it wasn’t you. Whatever happens, if asked, say it wasn’t you.

So far nobody had asked us, though, and nobody but the outraged parents spoke. I tried to drown their voices as I stared at the chairs across the room through the legs of the parents who were moving, restless as they shouted and complained and demanded this and that.

I bet in institutions they didn’t scream as hard. I bet in institutions they didn’t let you out to collect dog poop in a bucket in the first place.

I bet in institutions there was at least one person who would believe me if I said I could move things with my mind—and he’d tell me he could do it, too.

Those thoughts all crossed my mind, and I realized just how silly it was of me to try to move that chair, bring it forward just a little right now. I realized this was serious and I could get into a lot of trouble for this. My dad, too. And Betty and her dad.

Yes, I realized I shouldn’t have done what I did last night, but I still tried.

Of course, the chair didn’t move.

“What do you have to say for yourselves, girls?”

This from Mrs. Owens, the mother of that girl who’d invited Fi to her home.

My sister was your responsibility. How dare you let them do that to her in your own home?! went the thoughts in my head.

“It wasn’t me,” I said instead, and Betty said it with me.

Eventually, the deputies were able to calm them down enough so they stopped screaming, so they agreed to walk outside and leave the four of us alone to talk.

The look Dad gave me when they closed the door behind them was enough to break me into a million pieces. Not just because of the bruise and the small cut on his nose, but he looked so disappointed I wanted to break something so bad—possibly my own damn neck.

What the fuck was I thinking?!

Too late now.

“Officer, I’m sure we can come to an understanding,” Betty’s dad said, and Mr. Rogers was a very calm man. Betty had gotten her crazy from her mom, she said, back when she was a teenager. Because now, they were both the calmest people I knew.

But even so, Mr. Rogers sounded upset. Very upset, no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

I looked at the deputies who stood before us. We’d never been here before, Betty and I. Normally all our pranks and troubles were dealt with in the principal’s office, but what if now they called us here every time?

No, I said to myself. Fuck, no, I was never doing another prank ever again. This was the last time.

“I’ll pay,” said Dad, and my heart jumped. “I’ll pay for all damages and I’ll deal with it myself, deputies. If you let us go, we both will.” He pointed between himself and Mr. Rogers.

Betty looked at me. I saw the regret flashing in her eyes, too.

We really, really shouldn’t have done that last night.

But no amount of feeling sorry or wishing I could turn back time changed anything.