"Good morning," Will says, from his side of the room.

My eyes blink open. Once again, we're up before the alarm, which would be obnoxious on any morning, but today it makes me want to smother him with the blankets.

I groan and slam my hand against where the snooze button would be on our mutual clock, then enrobe myself further into the blankets.

"Good morning," Will says, again. "I'm going to be downstairs, making pancakes. You know, just being self-sufficient. Maybe I'll save some for you. Maybe I won't."

"Geez, why are you so sensitive?" I ask.

"I'm not sensitive," Will says, getting to his feet. He's thin as a beam of moonlight, and the darkness of the room seems to eat a little more mass out of him. Sometimes I can't even believe we're the same age, and I'm the one who has to keep reminding people. "Anyways, get up. We're going to be late for school."

As he storms out of the room, I turn onto my back with a sigh, lifting an arm up to my forehead. There's a large black fissure on the wall, the likes of which have been popping up for a while, slowly fracturing my world apart. Suffice it to say, I might have bigger problems at the moment.

I wake myself up by looking up the hallucinations I've been having on my phone, but nothing seems to match dark fissures or sudden acquisition of ominously whispering orange stone which never leaves your person. Said stone arrives in my pocket as soon as I have my jeans on. Before that, it was probably under my pillow. I've tried throwing it away at least five times, and no dice. A warm, familiar scent wafts in from the main floor, and I descend to find Will's cooking and humming a theme from some anime. He always cuts off when I enter, and I pretend I didn't hear him.

(I made one comment, once, and the man falls to pieces.)

Parents still aren't up. No, wait-- Dad's probably already gone, Mom's not up. If we leave early as we're going to be ready, maybe my mom won't notice that I look like a zombie right now. I happen to feel like a zombie, which I'm sure Will is blatantly ignoring because showing too much kindness right now would undermine the tough guy persona he puts on whenever we have a fight.

We're not even fighting, Will.

I flinch when the pancake-loaded plate hits the table. Will already has out 'the goods', including fruit and whipped cream, and he smiles to me from out in my corner. "Pancake?"

I pour myself a bowl of cereal. Will leers at me.

"Eat quickly," I tell Will.

"You can't pour the milk in first, Adam," Will says. "It's a sin."

I eat my cereal.

Will begins shovelling pancakes in his mouth. Swallowing the last bites, he says to my half-full bowl of cereal, "Eat quickly, Adam."

"I'm dressed," I say.

Will thunders back up the stairs. It truly is a miracle our parents haven't woken up. They must be more exhausted than I am. As soon as Will's out, I slurp the whole bowl, which he eats, then go to the pantry for a handful of raw black coffee beans. My head thunders with pain, but I swear it isn't the beans. No, I'd place it more under the continued mental break down I appear to be having. Out the window, behind the glass, I can see a telephone pole completely enveloped by darkness. I stare out at it, unbelieving, and then go back upstairs, feigning normality.

I have to hunch over the sink not to hit another rift with my head. It's becoming a huge impediment, but I'm terrified of hitting one. I find myself at the front door, done with everything, and I clutch the orange stone in my pocket. I'm tempted to throw it at Will, and he could go to work on the mess my life has become, but some part of me knows, already, that I couldn't do it if I tried.

Will nods to me, enthusiastically, and the two of us take the town.

"Hey, did you get any sleep last night?" Will asks on the road. "You look like a wreck, and I could tell you weren't asleep before I was. You were just lying in bed making noises like you could have been asleep."

"You caught me. I fake-slept through the whole night," I say.

"Really?" Will says.

"Yeah," I say.

He passes by a tree that's been cleaved in two by one of the portals, and I flinch. They're mainly on the ground, although there's a long, thin crease running along the arc of the sky when we near the school-- I feel like I'm living in a broken snow globe. I expected it to be harder not to panic, but I think I'm past panic, now.

"So," I say. "This is where we part ways?"

"I'm going to walk away first," Will says, moving towards a gaggle of girls on the corner. They've all got garrish t-shirts on and their backpacks are cluttered with memorabilia. I'm supposed to be proud for him, right? Because honestly, Will, you had to find the most obnoxious group of friends possible. We could all hear you at lunch yesterday, screaming. "Because I have friends now. I just want to establish that. Because I'm not clingy. This is going to be a great year."

"I'm proud of you," I say. "Which I've said five times in the last day, after you've given me that exact spiel, again, ten times, last day. Kind of a small timespan."

"You just doubled up on how many times that was! If you're going to hyperbolize, at least hyperbolize consistently," Will says, shoving my chest.

I give him a quick smile. I can already see Jack out of the corner of my eye. "Bye, Will," I say.

He flashes me the peace sign. Thankfully, he's not doing the wink, too, today, but he should also realize that the peace sign doesn't look good outside of an anime, either. We're living in the real world.

I look up at the sky again, which is still fracturing. In fact, I'm pretty sure the crack has gained a few deltas since I last stared at it. That, if nothing else, is pretty conclusive evidence I'm free to rescind that statement at any time.

"You look like you got run over by a truck," Jack says. "Dude."

"No sleep," I say, and the two of us walk into school.

"Why?"

I shrug.

"Not healthy," Jack says.

"Says the man who used to stay up well past midnight playing first-person shooters," I say. "'Uh, do you have the study guide for World Geo? I forgot to finish it up, the new map came out today and...'" I stop mimicking him. "You know, I'll never know how you got a 92 on that final, given that you didn't realize it was that day."

Jack laughs, opening the door to History. "I'm magic, Rosenbloom."

I shrug, but I still find myself almost shaking when I hit the desk. Magic.

The rest of class is a long, gray blur. We're starting with the colonial period, again, which means we're learning information about people halfway across the country, hundreds of years ago, and today I can't get myself over there, mentally. I stare at the words until I think I get what they're supposed to mean, pulling my best Will Rosenbloom impression, and wish desperately that I was back in my bed. Jack pokes me and keeps making jokes, but I can barely hear the man.

Magic.

My mechanical pencil lead keeps cracking against the page. I barely realize how hard I'm pressing down until then, and once I've worked out that I'm practically grinding the thing into the paper, which is why I can barely write (not that I'm making much headway on my assignments, anyways), I still can't force myself to ease up. I think for a hot second I might start hyperventilating in class, since I'm overheating like a generic laptop trying to run a heavily modded video game, but I think I can almost pull myself together with sheer grit and the abiding knowledge that that's stupid, and it would be really stupid to break down over nothing.

Nothing disagrees with me. I kick back against it. The bell rings.

"One day into high school and you're already bombing it," Jack says.

"I think I'm handling it pretty well, actually," I say, sidestepping a hole in the floor, about five feet wide and nearly the length of a car. Jack raises an eyebrow as I proceed to take a detour around the right side of the hallway, almost running into a sophomore... or at least, who I assume is a sophomore. The great thing about being taller than most people is that they assume you're tough shit, so the sophomore doesn't start muttering 'freshies' or anything like that. Then again, she also looks a little disturbed. Like I said, I probably look like one of the undead right now. I don't think zombification includes hallucinations, so I'm probably fine on that front. (Again, what am I thinking?)

We arrive at a corner, caught between a hallway and the stairs. Already, I'm vaguely aware of where everything is, since I can comprehend the systematic room numbering system, and thusly, I know that the fast way is down that hall. Unfortunately, facing me is an impassable wall of darkness. I feel a little like a goldfish who's being pursued by a net.

"Let's not go this way," I tell Jack, turning back towards the stairs.

"Why?" asks Jack.

"If I told you that I prefer the view on the long way, would you believe me?"

"Not for a second," Jack says.

I sigh. I hate to throw the little man under the bus, but that seems to be my modus operandi right now. "Sorry, I just think I saw Will down that way."

Jack's mouth curves into a soft 'o'. "You're really serious about this?"

"Look, don't make me the villain. It was a mutual, immediate agreement. We don't want to share a life anymore, so we're just not going to," I say. "And don't give me that face. You're the one who always makes comments about him in the corner at parties, on his DS, watching all of us like some kind of scared animal."

"He has good comebacks, and I like Nintendo. If I ever say anything, I'm probably joking, and he knows I'm joking. You should also have picked up on the fact that I was joking," Jack prods.

"Half of our friends aren't," I say, looking at the wall. "He's going to thank me someday."

This might just be because I'm not exactly an English student, but I find that there's no word between 'truth' and 'lie' to convey this vague, gray-area concept for something that isn't definitively true, but isn't necessarily false, and is unfortunately necessary. The statement hangs on the air, unlabelled, like a cloud of vape smoke in a high school bathroom. (Oh, yeah, fourth floor. During classes, usually. It'll be awhile before they crack down on that, but I don't get involved.)

Jack and I walk the rest of the way in silence. I think I'm beginning to make him nervous.

We part ways at math class. I was hoping this would make my concentration better, but if anything, it's gotten significantly worse. The stone is in my pocket, burning like a heated blanket left on overnight, and when I pull it out onto the table, it seems to be glaring at me. I end up passing it around on my desk, which makes the kind of obnoxious clatter teachers usually catch, but they can't hear me. I also probably look like I'm crazy, passing nothing back and forth between my hand, and this kid in the corner is watching me (haven't seen him work all class. Why is he in Advanced Algebra?) like I'm holding a bag of cookies, which I'm about to share with the class.

When I leave, I catch him following me down the hall like a shadow. He has dark, tousled hair, probably brushed last in middle school, a smattering of freckles, and sepia skin. Most notably, he has sharp brown eyes swimming in shadow, so either way too much eyeliner, or way too little sleep. If it's the latter, I'm afraid we're a matching set. Oh no.

At one point, I almost turn to tell him to fuck off, and he walks past me into gym class. I bite my tongue and join my friends in the gym bleachers for the wrong class.

"They're just blatantly not taking attendance," says James, a close-ish friend. "We could skip. We could totally skip."

"You don't know they're always not going to take attendance," responds Nate, one of many teenage guys in my cluster. "S'up, Adam?"

"Nothing."

"Alright," he says, as if I'd said something significantly more hostile than 'nothing'.

The conversation continues without me. It has a way of doing that. I search the crowds for my brother and find that kid from earlier, who is definitely watching me. He flips an unusually large penny-- no, wait, not a penny, that's a stone-- repeatedly, fixing me all the while with an especially meaningful stare. His eyes narrow to slits and I move my gaze away from him.

Will's with all those girls, still. Looks like things are working out. I don't like to say 'I told you so', but I do, and next time we meet up, he's probably getting an 'I told you so'. Meanwhile, I'm affixed to the benches, hands folded, and something is burning in my shirt pocket. This is what I get for wearing a shirt with a front pocket to school. Most front pockets are too small to hold anything, including this one, but there's that stone, as close to my heart as it can manage, insistently burning my chest hair.

We've done nothing but sit in the bleachers all class, talking. At one point someone explained how the purchase of gym shirts is going to work out, which is great, thanks, but then, when we most needed order, they disappeared again. I think I'd make a great gym teacher, if I wanted to get paid absolutely nothing for doing absolutely nothing.

"You should really get some more sleep," Jack says, patting my back, as the bell rings.

Yeah, thanks, mom.

I tap my phone. Along with several notifications from the group chat, Will's already texted me twice today. I open them, but it's just more conversational niceties. Good morning! Hopefully the cereal is sitting terribly. Would have been nice to have some pancakes :P Thanks, Will, everyone knows you're passive aggressive. Things going ok? Oh, you know it.

Will waves to me on the way out. I don't think I've ever seen him smile that wide in the presence of other people. It's more of his 'cagey introvert talking about something Adam doesn't get' smile, but there it is, on display, in public. He gives me a knowing wink, as if we've shared a meaningful exchange, and carries on talking to his copious number of girlfriends.

I text him back. dude of course things are good calm down

I get a response in two minutes. Sounds fake but ok! Get more sleep lmaooo

Read.

The end of the day finally rolls around, and with it, English, which means I get to listen to our English teacher (yes, our, apparently Will has the madwoman too) ramble about swords and the deeper meaning of not only the books we're reading but life itself for what seems like a solid eternity. I don't understand how any high school teacher could come into contact with such an inflated sense of purpose, except for through careful self-delusion. Maybe she's just trying to be hip with the kids? I don't think she's succeeding, or maybe she hasn't really caught on that most kids in the class aren't going to be receptive. I'm definitely not the type, so I do math homework with my brand-new Calculus textbook. I'm solidly in the middle of the class, so no one notices.

That's what I thought, at least.

There's this... girl.

She looks like the kind of person my brother is now in cahoots with. She has a veritable mane of dusty brown hair, which curls up so it clings around her face at the edges, huge glasses, and pursed lips. She's cute, in a pouty kind of way. She also looks pissed. I meet her eyes and they narrow further. Yeah, she's definitely glaring at me, too, which has to be unwarranted. Has my brother been gossiping about me?

She passes a furiously scrawled note onto the empty desk between us, and I pick it up as discreetly as possible. Her handwriting is wildly loopy, like cursive squared, and she punctuates her sentences with little emoticons, which is kind of sweet, although the emoticon I got is definitely not a friendly one.

We need to talk. >:(

Oh man.

At the front of the room, the life fades from our English teacher, who sees to have resigned herself to the fact that half her class is on their phones and the other half just wants to leave as soon as feasibly possible. "I'll now be passing out the 'getting to know you' activity for the day," she announces. "You'll receive a page with a list of characteristics, each inside of a Bingo square. Your job is to go around the classroom and find people who have those traits, and get them to sign your paper. If you get a Bingo, you can have one Jolly Rancher."

That grabs everyone's attention, and the classroom breaks into pandemonium. Someone is yelling, "I'm from the West Coast!" and waving their paper around. They get mobbed. The teacher has this look in her eyes like she regrets setting this up, but upon closer inspection, it might go deeper than that. She just looks depleted, period, which is strange, because a moment ago, she had the room lit on fire. Even if none of us were paying careful attention, she seemed to be playing it up like it was some kind of show.

The note girl taps my shoulder. It's not a friendly tap, either, and her brows are furrowed tight as they can go. "Excuse me."

"Want me to fill out a box?" I say. "On your sheet. I'm the twin. I guarantee Ms. Adana looked at some roster before she picked these--"

The girl folds her arms, crinkling the paper between them. "I heard about your brother. What do you think you're doing?"

"Filling out this sheet for you," I say, brandishing mine in her direction. "You wouldn't happen to have any exploitable fun facts about yourself that might help me fill my own sheet, in your eternal gratitude, would you?"

She rolls her eyes. "No, really, what do you think you're doing? You can't just ditch your brother on the first day of school. Do you know how stressed he is?"

I glare at her dully. "Seems like he's fine. He's got you guys, doesn't he?"

"Well-- yes-- and apparently, we're doing a better job being his brother than his brother is!" she exclaims.

"Something's not quite right about that sentence," I tell her. "Look, I don't know what you have on me, personally, but it's been a tense, tense few days, and I don't need the added stress of you sniping at me right now."

You can't just assume you're the only one things have been rough for," she says, and man, she has such a nice voice, but right now I would pay for her to stop talking. Big bucks. I get a sizeable allowance. Name your price. "Lately it feels like the whole world is falling apart and--"

Never mind. Please keep talking. "Literally?" I ask.

She goes to her backpack and takes out a small blue stone, which she raises, as if to offer it to me. It glimmers with that same insidious light mine does, and I grab the glowing orange stone from my chest pocket. They're obviously different minerals, but they look like a matched set. The girl offers me her free hand, as if to shake on it. "That's why you're acting weird, isn't it? Right. I'm Megan Briggs."

"Adam Rosenbloom," I return the gesture. We legitimately shake on it.

"So, what's... what's happening to us?"

I grip the table. Out the window, the world is being ripped into confetti, slowly as possible. There's a long gash through the ceiling, widening as it draws closer to the teacher's desk. I don't know what will happen when I finally make contact with them, but I don't think I have a choice. I just have to pray it doesn't happen when I'm in a car or something like that. What kind of existence is that? What did I get myself into? "I have no fucking clue. You're getting the weird hallucinations with the shadows, too, right?"

She laughs, fearfully. "One almost cleaved my bus in two. I had to jump over one of the seats to get out. Amanda thought I was crazy."

That was the girl Will mentioned. "Right. Have you told anyone?"

"I don't think I can," Megan whispers.

I nod. "But now we've told each other."

"You haven't told your brother, though. Are you going to?"

"Nope. You haven't told your friends, have you?"
"It..." Megan hesitates. "It spoke to me. I was going to explain everything, and it told me that I was free to say whatever I wanted, but when I did, everything would be over. It would find someone else, see where that went--"

"Shit, guess I'm telling my brother," I say. "I didn't realize it was that easy to get out of the contract."

"No, wait. Please don't," Megan says. She grabs my hand again. Someone is unusually touchy, not to mention open. I don't mind, but seriously, if I was a villain or something, this girl would already have gone under the knife. "I hate your guts, okay? But at least I know who you are. If someone else gets it, someone random, it could be someone much worse, or someone who isn't from here. We can work this out together."

I pause, biting the inside of my lip. "Alright," I say. "I guess you're right. No telling, we work this out as a team, and then we..." I don't really like 'go our separate ways'. I feel like whatever this is is going to take a while. "We see what this wants from us."
"Thanks for the validation. I was beginning to feel like a terrible person," Megan laughs, this time, it's less fear and a little more like relief. In the same loopy handwriting, she writes down her number on my arm. She clicks her pen closed. We both instinctively look to the clock. Bell's about to ring. "Guess we're not getting that Jolly Rancher."
"Buy them," I say. "With cash. You get hundreds and you have to do no work whatsoever."

"It's not the same as earning it," Megan smiles. The bell begins its onslaught on our ears, and the hallways flood with students. "Well, Adam! At least try to be nicer to your brother, because if you aren't, I'll know, and I will personally fight you." She disappears into the crowd. I can barely read her handwriting, but I input her number into my phone, and text her for good measure. Assuming I got that wrong, I'll probably ask Will for the number. He definitely has it. A chill goes through me at the thought. Is she really going to hold me to that?

hey it's Adam, I text her, the second she's out the door.

Miss me so soon?

At least 've got her number, for sure.

I meet Will by the same corner. This time, I get there first, which I'm not going to rub in his face, because I'm responsible. He still has that giddy smile, and he launches himself up onto the stone wall and walks across it, straddling between the sidewalk and the garden. He looks like an idiot, but I'm preoccupied right now, so I guess I'll just have to chastise him later. "And then she started going off about power rankings, which aren't a thing I care about, because I'm way more into how and why characters use their powers-- you know, emotional arcs and all, because power rankings in fiction are all relative anyways. If they want an underdog to win, they'll just have the underdog win! If anyone can beat anyone under the right circumstances, what's the point of power rankings?"

"Mhm," I say.

"Not that I don't respect where Amanda's coming from. I mean, it's cool, but we're talking about an anime that thrives on character dynamics, not a trading card game where all that matters are rules and numbers," Will continues. "So I explained it to her, and she actually was like 'huh, valid point', and then I was totally taken aback, because when was the last time anyone's ever told me I've made a valid point?"

"That's a valid point," I say.

Will stares blankly at me, then shakes his head. He hops off the side. "Sorry. I know you don't care. How was your day?"

"Fine, and it's not that I don't care," I shrug. "It's more of an I-don't-get-it kind of thing."

"We can call this the one area where I know more than you do, then," Will smiles.

"There's always Art," I say. "And Spanish."

"I don't remember any Spanish. Plus, didn't you go through the whole Duolingo course just because you didn't like the idea that I would know a whole language you didn't, and then I switched to French anyways?" Will says. "Rhetorical question. I remember you doing that. It was a little outlandish, but it was also super funny."

"I didn't have anything else to do," I say. We pass a church, which is split directly down the middle by the cracks. If I was going to cite anything as religious portent, that would be a dead ringer. Guess whatever I'm-- we're-- up against is not going to stop for organized religion. Isn't that a surprise. "Geez."

"You never have anything else to do," Will smiles. "So how are Jack and the boys?"

"Oh, they're-- they're the same. Good. You know," I close my eyes for a second, summoning up strength, and point towards the church, praying for some reason that I'll get a legitimate response, and that this doesn't count as 'telling'. "Hey Will, look at that."

"That's so weird! I totally forgot Cherry Ridge was right next to our old church. Hey, you remember when we went there for a band performance, and I almost broke the bannister with my baritone? Just kidding. I know you remember. Anyways, I think that was the moment I knew I was calling it quits." He smiles. If this kid gets any more excited, he's going to spontaneously combust, and nothing legitimately exciting has happened. "Wait. Adam. Are you going to try to join band again?"

"If I touch another clarinet before I die, it will be too soon for me. Anyways, I hate band kids," I inform him. Guess he's out. Damnit, Will.

"They don't like you either, Adam," Will looks wistfully up at the sky, as if this is all some big joke. He smiles again, white teeth gleaming in the sunlight.

"But you're doing well," I say.

Will frowns. "I mean, yeah, I guess so? I... I wish you'd been there for me yesterday, but I think I'm going to be fine." He pauses. "Adam, are you doing okay?"

I feel the heat rising from my backpack. "I guess so," I say. "I mean, I asked for it, but it's still weird for everything to be changing so quickly."

That answers that question.

At least I'm not doing this, whatever 'this' entails, alone.