Seconds later, I’m cupping my hands over my mouth and yelling too. “Hey! What’s your problem?”
Marcus has gone quiet and stopped walking; he’s clearly thinking something derisive if his smirk is anything to go by.
“What?” I demand.
“Nothing,” he says. The kids completely ignore us as they go into Dot’s; they don’t even glance our way. There are five of them, young and fresh-faced. They remind me of me and my friends when we were in middle school, happy and carefree, laughing as they disappear through the aqua-colored doors.
We’re on our own again.
The migraine I had at lunch is gone, but my head doesn’t feel fully clear.
“Maybe I have a concussion,” I muse out loud. “I fell on you and got a concussion.” I was sure I didn’t hit my head just now, but maybe I did.
“You don’t have a concussion. I broke your fall,” Marcus says helpfully. “It’s more likelyIhave a concussion. Fuck, doIhave a concussion?”
I roll my eyes. “You’re literally fine, Marcus.”
“No. I think I have a concussion.”
I turn away from him and speak compassionately to myself. “It’s okay, Zadie, you’re hallucinating. This is all a bad…episode. A bad dream.”
“A dream!” Marcus snaps his fingers like I’ve just said something brilliant. “We’re dreaming.”
“You think so?” I ask, embarrassingly hopeful.
My brain latches on to that hypothesis but when I pinch myself, I feel a very sharp, very real pain on my forearm.“Ouch!”
“That doesn’t work,” Marcus says belatedly. “Pinching yourself? That’s a myth.”
“How doyouknow?” I say, rubbing my arm.
“You’ve never been in a dream before?”
I look at him like he’s batshit, because I think he actually might be.
“So, if I’m dreaming…” I begin, trying to voice out the different scenarios.
“Who saysI’mnot the one dreaming?” Marcus asks, as if now is the time to argue. “The dreamer is the main character, usually the only one who’s aware that they’re in a dream. So you know what that means.”
I frown. “No, I don’t actually.”
“Well, since we’re having this riveting discussion, we have to both be in a dream. I’m pretty sure it’sourdream. We’re co-dreaming.”
I make a face, mostly because there is an unfortunate logic to his theory.
“Okay, hypothetically, one of us is dreaming. Or both of us are,” I add reluctantly. “Maybe when we fell, we likebothgot a concussion. It knocked us out, and now we’re in a weird dream?”
“Sounds possible,” he says, but his voice doesn’t have the urgency I would expect. It doesn’t contain the sheer panic mine does.
“Marcus, we were just at lunch. And now we’re not. Jason’s parents are probably going crazy looking for us.”
“Nah, because time works differently in dreams. They probably haven’t even noticed we’re gone.”
“For someone who knows nothing, you sure know a lot about everything,” I deadpan. “Where are you going?”
Marcus is walking in the direction of the arcade. “What do you want to do? Just stand here all day?”
I scan around us, unsure of what to do. It is still blindingly bright. We are very clearly outside the arcade strip on the northeast end of town. “We should try to get back to Jason’s, shouldn’t we?”
