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FAR AWAY.

That was my first thought—he sounded very far away on my parents’ landline, and the old technology made his voice sound flat with static.

My second thought was that he was real .

A person. Someone who existed somewhere in the world with a Santa Ana area code.

So he couldn’t be some hallucination. I pinched myself—and it hurt. I was awake.

Slowly, I sank down onto the hardwood flooring in the middle of the kitchen. I didn’t trust my legs. I didn’t trust my lungs.

Was the room getting smaller, or was it me?

“You … you’re real,” I whispered.

And almost at the same time I heard his thoughts— “So she is real.”

“You didn’t think I was real, either?” I commented, a little confused, because he’d sounded so sure of himself. And it made me feel a little better. If I was going nuts, then so was the figment of my imagination.

He coughed. “I—of course I thought you were.”

“Probably,” his voice echoed in my head, sounding so much clearer than his voice on the phone.

Liar , I thought.

“Oh, now we’re name-calling?” He sounded offended.

I paled. “I didn’t say anything!”

“You called me a liar.”

“I—I did,” I admitted. “In my head. On accident.”

“Liar,” he thought back.

I scowled. “I’m not lying!”

He said, “I didn’t say you were.”

“You did,” I insisted. “In your head.”

“On accident,” he echoed.

This was going south very, very quickly. I rubbed my face with my hands. Okay, so this was real. He was real. A real person on the other side of the phone, drinking a mai tai in a pool somewhere—

“I don’t drink mai tais.”

I frowned. Infuriating. That was the only word I could think to describe him. That, and inconvenient. But I wasn’t panicking anymore. He’d distracted me long enough to get my breathing back under control, for the kitchen to not feel so small anymore. It probably wasn’t on purpose.

I didn’t have time for this—I needed to concentrate on Mom, and the Rev, and my own burnout. I didn’t need distractions born from … what was this, anyway? Delusion?

“Okay,” I said, “I really need you out of my head. How do I do that?”

“Same way I get you out of mine, I guess,” he suggested.

Fantastic.

Mom let the dogs in from the garden, and I quickly got to my feet before they could lick me to death.

I scrubbed Frodo and Sam behind their ears, and left to go up to my room.

The landline crackled as I put distance between me and the receiver.

And just to make sure, I checked all the rooms upstairs—the linen closet, my brother’s old room turned record-storage room, even my parents’ room—but I didn’t find anyone.

There was a note above Mom’s dresser, though, on the mirror, listing a series of random words.

She’d written them in dry-erase marker underneath, like a memory game. She’d gotten all but one right—

Effervescent .

My chest began to feel tight again, so I quickly left my parents’ room and returned to mine, closing myself inside.

The voice over the phone asked, “How the hell is this happening?”

I sat down heavily on my old bed. The timeless faces of Harry Styles and Edward Cullen stared back at me from posters I’d pinned on the walls as a teenager. “I have no idea.”

“Can she hear everything—”

“No, I can’t hear everything,” I interrupted before I intercepted any more of his private thoughts. “Can you hear everything?”

“Just the loud things …”

Loud? My phone buzzed on my nightstand, and I absently went to check it.

Hey, you here? Gigi texted.

I cursed—I forgot I was supposed to meet her for coffee.

I didn’t have time for someone in my head.

I quickly unplugged my phone and texted back that I was running a little late.

“Look, I don’t care who you are, but I have to go.

Let’s just stop talking to each other and maybe this … connection will just go away, okay?”

“Maybe?” The word was loud in my head. “But what if—”

I hung up and tossed the phone onto the bed.

And I realized I didn’t even get his name.

I wasn’t sure I wanted it, actually, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to have mine—it felt too intimate, especially with him already in my head.

So I grabbed a pair of jean shorts out of my suitcase and threw on an old Eagles T-shirt on my way out of my bedroom.

“Do you really think it will go away?” he asked.

I startled in surprise, and almost tumbled down the stairs. Ignore him, ignore him, ignore him—

If my parents were champions at ignoring things, then I had to at least be a silver medalist.