In my dreams, I walk through a sunny stretch of woodland, breathing in air rich with possibility. I come to a break in the trees, and find myself gazing down on Ketterbridge from the angle of that photographer so long ago. I stand there and look down on it, this place so new that the ink would still be wet on any map with its name. Before me, the town; beyond the town, rising groups of hills blanketed with a thick layer of tall evergreens. Beyond those, the white tips of distant mountains.

People had come here, drawn by the fertile lowlands, the mineral wealth of the mountains. They came to herd and trade and start families. For anyone who lived in Ketterbridge at this point, the place was a new beginning.

I think I hear a voice calling to me from the forest, so I turn and thread my way back through the trees, searching for the source. I step around a corridor of thick brush and find myself on the edge of a grassy, shady clearing. There are people gathered in the middle, so I hang back, watching from behind a tree.

There are three women present, all wearing long-sleeved dresses. Two of the women are on their hands and knees, digging a single hole in the dirt. They are young, brunette, round-cheeked. The other woman has white hair and a deeply lined face. She does not dig, but rather stands there holding something I can’t see from my angle.

The women stop digging, seemingly satisfied with their work. They back away as the old woman steps forward. She very slowly bends to place something in the pit: a sapling. A young tree. They are planting a tree in a tremendous forest.

“Hurry,” the old woman urges, stepping back again, and the two women make quick work of filling in the soil around the base of the young plant.

A child comes running through the trees, a little girl half out of breath, giggling. One of the young women catches her just before she would have stumbled too close to the tree.

“Careful!” she whispers, into the little girl’s ear. “This is for you. It’s for all of us.”

I wake with a start to the sound of my own voice calling for Kasey. She appears in the darkness, silvery and shining.

“Bad dream,” she guesses, cuddling up next to me. She’s used to this; when we were kids we begged our parents all the time to let us have sleepovers. They never said yes, because apparently only same-sex sleepovers were allowed (a rule that stopped being annoying to me around, eh, my junior year of high school). Thankfully, only one block separated my house from Kasey’s, and she was exceptionally good at navigating her way out of her place. We basically had a sleepover every night. She knows when I’m having weird dreams. Every time I did, she’d tell me cool facts from whatever book she’d been devouring that week. Eventually, her voice would send me back to sleep with fresh dreams, usually about some ancient Roman conqueror or a cool Revolutionary War spy.

“It wasn’t bad,” I tell her, trying to get my breath back. “Just strange. It was the one about the tree again.”

“Again? That’s the third night in a row, isn’t it? Every night since Aiden showed you those photos.”

Kasey doesn’t bother to disguise the jealousy in her voice. She’s the one with a degree in and deep love for history. She made me describe the photos in detail over and over again.

Although -

“Is it just me, or are you a little less solid? You feel so light.” I touch her arm, and she sits up, a guilty expression on her face.

“I didn’t want to tell you, because I didn’t want you to be upset. I wanted to try something we decided not to do. I kind of... tried to leave.”

I stare at her, wide-eyed.

“What? Kasey, come on! We talked about this! Don’t you remember what happened when we ran that particular experiment? We got to the edge of town and you nearly disappeared! It was like, the scariest fucking moment of my life!”

It was the first week after she’d died and returned. We were trying out all kinds of stuff to figure out the limitations on what she could and couldn’t do. No one else in Ketterbridge was able to see her besides me, so Kasey had suggested that we drive to Baker’s Bay. We wanted to see what happened with non-locals. We did not make it out of Ketterbridge. I was driving, and we were chatting, and suddenly she’d cried out:

“Jamie, stop! Something’s happening, stop!”

I had slammed on the brakes and almost screamed as Kasey started to fade away before my eyes, dissipating like smoke. In my panic, I turned the car right around and went racing back towards Ketterbridge, and she had reformed along the way. But she felt somehow less there for days afterward. The experience scared both of us, and after that our wild and half-considered experiments were reformed into something more careful. We set rules, we started actually keeping track of the results. We had agreed that we were not going to try to leave town again.

Except, apparently we didn’t really agree.

“I’m sorry. I’m super sorry.” She hesitates, looking down at her hands. “I just wanted to try one more time. We can’t test it once and call that it, can we? You have to, um. Confirm causation.”

“Was that worth it, though?” I protest, shifting to sit up in bed. “Couldn’t we start doing confirmation studies on one of our tests that was less fucking terrifying? Who even cares if you can leave town, anyways, that doesn’t matter right now.”

“It matters to me!”

I lean back, startled.

“Okay…”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.” She presses her hands over her eyes. “What if I’m permanent, Jamie?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say I am a ghost. What if that means I’m literally eternal now?”

“You used to tell me when we were kids that you wished a vampire would bite you specifically so that you’d live forever. You used to say that you wanted to see history from a greater distance. The panoramic view. Remember?”

“I wanted to see the world, Jamie, I didn’t want to spend eternity in Ketterbridge!” Kasey tosses her hands up in frustration. “Eternity sounds fucking awesome. But eternity trapped in one place? Even a place I love this much… it doesn’t matter. It could be forever, literally forever! Even you wouldn’t want to be here forever!”

“Kasey, hey! I understand.” I try to grab her hand, and it feels almost-there, but not completely. Like a vivid memory, rather than the real her. “But let’s come at this together, okay? Don’t just go sneaking off to the edge of town without me. What if you had disappeared, and I never knew what happened to you?”

She drops her head onto my shoulder, and I let out a soft breath of relief: she feels a tiny bit more solid.

“Well,” she murmurs, after a minute. “We can log down one more ghost-fact. I don’t think I can cry.”

“Really?” I lean my cheek on the top of her head. “That’s weird. You hear so many stories about ghostly weeping visions in the night.”

We both lapse into giggles, and Kasey groans.

“When did our humor get so dark?”

“I dunno. Third grade?” I give her shoulder a squeeze. “Listen, we’ll keep trying. We’ll find a way to get you out of Ketterbridge when you want to go. The good news is, if you are around forever, it means we have plenty of time to figure this all out. Right?”

She sighs against my chest.

“I love you, Jamie.”

I plant a kiss on the top of her head.

“I love you too.”

~~~~

“You’re a scaredy cat! Scaredy cat Aiden!”

“Do you hear this?” Aiden asks me, from behind our barricade of propped-up couch cushions. “This is outrageous.”

“Load faster!” I instruct, snapping more darts into my Nerf gun. “We are never gonna beat her with you fumbling around!”

“Me? I’m fumbling around? Your botched ammo mission nearly cost us everything!” Aiden pops his head up over the highest couch cushion, only to duck back down as a hail of Nerf darts explodes overhead. “What the hell kind of Nerf gun is that?”

“Okay, when an adorable nine-year-old tells you she wants the Nerf N-Strike Mega Megalodon Blaster for her birthday, you don’t ask questions, you just buy the Nerf N-Strike Mega Megalodon Blaster!”

“Oh, so you’re responsible for all this. Great. If we lose, it’s on you!”

“Scaredy Aiden!” Ellen calls, from across the room. “Scaredy Jamie, Scaredy Aiden!”

Aiden springs upright and aims his Nerf gun.

“I won’t stand for such slander!” he hollers, and lets loose. I hear a shriek of mirth from Ellen as I roll to get behind the overturned coffee table. I spot a flash of Ellen’s pigtails: she’s racing for cover. I fire my own round of Nerf darts. With surprising agility she vaults over the couch and lands directly in front of Aiden, who is officially out of ammo: he drops his Nerf gun and then drops to his knees, his hands over his head. “Mercy, Sheriff Ellen!”

“Outlaw Aiden, you are under arrest for - um - horse crimes!” she proclaims. “Your sentence is a Nerf to the face!”

“It wasn’t me who stole the horses!” Aiden cries. “Don’t do it!”

“Noooo!” I spring out from behind the coffee table and leap in front of Aiden. The Nerf meant for his forehead instead hits me in the chest, and I sprawl out on the floor between the two of them. “I’m hit! Aiden - remember meeeee…”

“I’ll avenge you! With tickles!” He tackles Ellen, who bursts into showers of laughter. They roll into our barricade, and couch cushions fly in every direction just as Kent opens the door.

“Oh, good. I see my house has been completely destroyed in the two hours I’ve been gone.”

“Dad!” Ellen crows, leaping to her feet. “I ran the outlaws out of town!” Kent crouches to catch her as she flies into his arms. “Is it story time?”

“Yep, say goodnight to the outlaws.”

“Goodnight, outlaws!” she calls, wiggling out of Kent’s embrace. She rushes over and throws her arms around Aiden’s legs, then mine. She turns and races for the stairs.

“I’d better go,” Kent says, smiling tiredly. “Thanks for your service, outlaws.”

“Anytime,” Aiden answers, picking darts up off of the floor.

“Speak for yourself, I took one in the chest,” I add, shoving couch cushions back into place.

“Don’t even bother with that,” Kent tells us, pulling his shoes off. “The barricades will be reformed tomorrow, as they always are.”

“You want to stay for a bit?” Aiden murmurs, as Kent turns to put his shoes away. Heat rises in my cheeks, and I turn away before they can get too red.

“Sure.”

“Cool. Let’s go upstairs.”

“Be right there.”

Aiden turns and heads into the kitchen while I drift over to Kent.

“Hey. I’ve been meaning to ask. How’d it go, calling Julia?”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbles. “It was fine.” He glances towards the kitchen. “So. You and Aiden have been hanging out a lot, huh?”

“Bye, Kent!” My cheeks are definitely red now.

I jolt to a stop outside of Aiden’s sliding glass door: he’s facing away from me, pulling his sweater off over his head. I watch him drop the sweater on the couch and stretch his arms out. My eyes catch on the broad lines of his back. I just stand there, watching his powerful shoulders stretch and tense with his movements. He grabs a t-shirt from the back of a chair and pulls it on over his head, and I swallow, finding myself imagining what it would be like to run my fingernails over his biceps. Nothing weird. Just wondering what it would feel like.

He turns, tugging the shirt into place, and spots me through the sliding glass door. I step forward automatically, trying to make it seem like I hadn’t stopped at all.

“Aren’t you hot?” he asks, as I slide the door open.

“What?”

“Nerf wars are hard work,” he says, fanning his face.

“Oh. Oh! Yeah. Ellen is terrifying.”

“I know.”

“Should we sit outside?” he asks, gesturing to the little table out on the flat deck.

“Hmm. I don’t know. We always sit out there. Like, every day.”

After our escape from City Hall, I waited three days and then asked Aiden to hang out again. Three days after that, he asked me to hang out again. This happened two more times before we dispensed with these weird waiting periods and I just started showing up at Kent’s place when I felt like hanging out. Then I got worried I was coming over too much, so I stopped, and Aiden started inviting me again. Eventually, I just started showing up again. I don’t know why we’ve gone through this whole thing, but I’m pretty sure it’s my fault. I’m like a scientist looking for proof that my presence has gotten tiresome to him, that he’s not having fun hanging out with me anymore - thanks so much, social anxiety! - but this feeling has started to fade, the longer we’ve spent together.

“Are you sure you have to go?” he usually asks, when I get up to leave. That’s definitely helped.

We always hang out at his place, not mine. We chill on this little porch or hang out downstairs, using Kent’s much larger TV to play video games, leading Ellen on mad chases, bothering Kent. Or in the backyard, where I learned that Aiden likes to grill (unsurprising, honestly) and that he likes to hear about the different kinds of plants Kent has growing there (much more surprising).

But we never hang out inside of Aiden’s actual apartment.

“Do you not want me in here for some reason? Is there something fragile you’re scared I’ll break? Did you bring back a Fabergé egg in your one backpack?”

He lets out a little laugh through his nose.

“Stop it, we can hang out in here, just let me - uh, clean up a little.”

I turn slowly to take in the apartment: aside from two mugs soaking in the kitchen sink (ours, from last night), nothing much looks dirty or out of place. Aiden is neater than I expected him to be, in fact. Maybe it’s just cause he doesn’t have a lot of stuff.

He heads straight to the desk and picks something up: the map. He quickly begins folding it up as I join him.

“Gimme a sec,” he says, trying to block my view with his broad shoulder, but I lean forward to see.

The pair of reading glasses I’d seen on his desk last time are sitting in the middle of it now. The colorful pebbles and strands of plant life that scatter the top of the desk have been arranged into a careful, complex pattern around the glasses. Bizarrely enough, the surface of the desk now has a few dark spots that almost look like scorch marks. I’m pretty sure they weren’t there before.

“What is this?” I ask, reaching towards the circle of oddities. Aiden catches my wrist gently. The warm press of his fingers against my pulse stills me at once.

“No touching,” he says firmly. “Don’t worry about that. Everyone’s got their hobbies, right?”

“What sort of hobby is this?”

“Hey, it’s nice outside. Let’s go take advantage of that. It’s going to start being too cold soon.”

I can tell from his tone that the subject is closed, so I nod reluctantly and follow him to the porch. I guess I can live with a little curiosity for now, but I’m hoping he’ll eventually tell me what he’s doing. It’s probably some sort of aromatherapy or chakra-aligning thing. Not as weird as he probably thinks it is.

It’s only later, on my way out, when I spot three broken pairs of reading glasses in the trash can, that I really start to wonder.