It's still early in the morning when Luna starts ringing the doorbell to Ivy's house. It chimes for three times, then silence. She doesn't press the bell again, but waits. She leans against the light blue wall of her friend's house and looks up at the sky. Thin clouds are dispersed across the vast stretch of vibrant blue, and the sun doesn't even get to fully peek out from the horizon yet. It sends soft morning light that pours across the jagged mountain tops around, and Luna can see how the dust dances around the air through the sunbeams.

Ivy's house is just near the center of the town where the shops and other businesses are, but no people are around at all except for her, standing on the small porch of a friend's house. She feels a sudden chill in the air and shudders. She rubs her hands up and down her arms and hums a tune she heard from a radio while walking on her way there, wishing Ivy would open the door already.

Meanwhile, Ivy's pouring milk on her cereal when she hears the doorbell ring. She yawns and scratches her head, still groggy from her sleep. She never expects someone to ring the doorbell this early.

"Coming," she calls out and carries her bowl of cereal with her to the front door. She peeks through the door sidelight to see Luna leaning against the wall, checking her nails. She's already dressed up in a lilac baby tee and black cargo pants with her hair adorned with small butterfly clips. On the other hand, Ivy is still in her pajamas, the yellow one with the teddy bear prints, and her hair's still pointing in all directions.

"What's up with you today? Why so early?" She asks the moment she opens the door. Luna looks up from her nails and smiles. "Questions already? No 'Hello, good morning'?"

"Hello, good morning," Ivy says while rolling her eyes and opens the door wider, inviting her in.

"Your dad's still sleeping?" She asks as she sits down on the beige couch in the living room. Ivy shakes her head, not bothering to open her mouth to reply her dad's already off to work early. She sits down from across Luna and settles the bowl on the glass center table. She rubs her eyes and yawns again.

"You look like you're still sleepy. Did I wake you?" Luna asks as she looks closely at her.

"No, but I just woke up."

"Oh."

Ivy picks up her cereal and starts eating. Only the metal spoon clinking against the ceramic bowl is stopping the silence from reigning over the room. Some time later, she places the near-empty bowl on the table and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Luna watches her and chews on her bottom lip. Now she's thinking what she's going to do is not a good idea. There is no way Ivy's going to agree about what she have in mind, especially that she just woke up. She might not process anything at all and just say no. Still, it's better to be sure and not conclude anything before trying.

She opens her mouth to speak, "The thing is," she starts, and that makes Ivy look up and raise her eyebrows. She closes her eyes, thinking here goes nothing. "Can we meet at the town's sign again this afternoon? But just the two of us." She waits for the 'no', but then she hears a question.

"What? What about Jasmine?"

Luna already knew there's a possibility Ivy's going to ask her this, so she already knew what to answer. Taking a deep breath, she says, "I went to her before coming here, but she's gonna have a date with that guy again so that means it's just us today. I actually wanted to take a walk this morning but I'm gonna go to church with mom and my brother then do some grocery shopping after. That's why it moved this afternoon. You free later?"

Ivy shrugs. "Yeah, I'm free."

"Well, I guess I'll see you later then, around three in the afternoon. And also, I have something to tell you."

꘏

Forth Road is as silent as usual. No cars, no motorcycles, not a single vehicle in sight. This might be because the town of Cresthaven is far off to the foot of the mountains, almost hidden in the towering trees. It might even be considered as one of the hidden corners of the country, like one of those places in your house you could have never guessed it was there all along. The nearest shopping mall is even three towns away. All this town have are some grocery stores. Ivy likes this about the town where she lives, because it isn't loud or busy unlike the other places she sees on TV. Life here is simple and quiet, and that might be the reason why her dad decided to move here among other places. It had been three years since then.

Sticking beside the wooden guardrails, Ivy continues walking. She's wearing her mint green shirt under her overalls and finished her outfit with white sneakers. She just grabbed whatever she could put her hands on in her closet, not bothering to dress up. She's just meeting Luna anyway. She's not like Jasmine who dresses to impress although she doesn't really need to do it to look pretty, or Luna who likes to dress her best under any circumstances. Her friends are very different from her, yet they're almost inseparable. She considers herself lucky to have them, especially when they were the one who approached her first. If they didn't, maybe she would still be lonely.

However, something stops her from fully opening up to them—as well as trusting them.

She can already see the sign in the distance, looking all bleak and worn out on the side of the road. There's still no sign of Luna. Maybe she got there earlier than the agreed time, but she can't tell since her watch was left back home.

She makes her fingers run across the wooden rails, thinking how useless it is. It won't help stop a car from driving straight into the trees. She doesn't understand why they even bothered to put something like it there. It even looks ancient with some planks almost falling off onto the ground.

Eventually, she reaches the sign. She wipes the sweat on her forehead with her handkerchief she brought with her, regretting she didn't bring an umbrella. The sky looked cloudy when she left the house earlier so she thought of not bothering to.

The wind is blowing softly and is making some dried fallen leaves rustle as they swirl and tumble across the ground. She looks around and pushes some of her stray curls from her face. Luna still isn't there. If she is, she would have shown herself by now. She looks up, wondering how long she will keep waiting.

The clouds are moving lazily across the sky when behind her, a sound like someone is dragging their feet through dried leaves makes her jump. She looks around and when she sees no one, she squints into the woods. From where she stands, she can see how the leaves form a brown carpet on the forest floor and it seems to get thicker as the trees got denser. She is about to turn to look away when a hazy figure moves in the woods, the crackle of leaves accompanying its movement. She takes a few steps back. The figure moves again, behind one tree to another nearby, swiftly closing its distance.

Ivy's heartbeat starts to pick up its pace, and she almost stumbles on her own foot if she didn't get to grab the wooden guardrails behind her. But when she takes a good look at the figure that is now emerging from the trees and out to the clearing in the roadside, her heartbeat slows down.

With the sunlight pouring down on her friend, Ivy takes a deep breath and steadies herself up again. "You almost gave me a heart attack, Luna!" She clasps a hand over her chest.

Luna laughs and smooths her hair with her left hand, with her right carrying a long and slender branch of a tree. "Whoops! I didn't mean to." She shrugs. "I was bored of just standing beside the sign so I decided to go take a stroll in the woods for a few minutes."

"What are you gonna tell me?" Ivy asks.

Luna raises an eyebrow. "Slow down, Vee. Let's take a walk through the woods first."

"Oh, alright."

Seeing how Ivy lowers a little, Luna walks up to her side and puts an arm around her shoulder. "Don't worry," she says and grins. "It's quiet and peaceful, just the way you like."

Ivy looks up to her with a teasing smile, her brow raised. "Nothing's peaceful if you're around."

Luna taps the ground in front of her every now and then with the slender branch she's holding. She's humming a song Ivy doesn't recognize. They have been walking for roughly two minutes into the woods, and still, no words are exchanged. Ivy keeps glancing at Luna who's walking in front of her, and thought maybe she's waiting for her to speak first.

"The more I think about it, the more it frustrates me."

Ivy perks up and tears her eyes away from watching her feet kick some leaves to look at Luna again. From where she is walking she can only see her back, but she knows she's frowning. She stays quiet, wondering what's frustrating her. She doesn't want to ask, and she knows Luna's just getting started.

"Why would she keep secrets like that? I mean, it's not even worthy to be kept a secret. I don't get it." Luna shrugs.

"Is it about Jasmine?"

"Yes! And her 'boyfriend'." She quotes the words in the air. She looks back at Ivy. "Do you believe she really has a boyfriend? Because if she's not hiding something, why wouldn't she tell us? It's not like we're gonna break them up or something."

"I don't know but I wanna believe her. Like she said, she had her reasons. And what would even be her reason to lie to us?"

"Ugh. I don't know. But this kind of thing already happened. You remember what happened last year?"

Ivy shakes her head.

"She kept a secret from us, just like what she's doing now. But back then it was still somehow reasonable 'cause it's not just the two of us, Betty and Cassandra were also in the picture. Betty's a compulsive gossip, we all know that, so I wouldn't tell too if I were her. But this time's different. It's just the two of us. Doesn't she trust us?"

"Maybe she's just waiting for the right moment. But yeah, I get why you're hurt. I am too, and you guys even go a long way back."

"I dreamt of her last night," Luna murmurs as she slows down and starts stirring the leaves in front of her, making a bald patch on the ground. "I didn't like it, it felt so real that it made me think it could happen at any time. Maybe that's why I'm upset. It's stupid, really."

"What happened in the dream?" Ivy asks, not liking the strange feeling taking over her that second. She ignores it and shakes it away.

"Well, how do I put it into words?" She hunkers down to the forest floor. She plucks a frond from a fern and throws it in the air and the girls watch it fall to the ground. Ivy waits for Luna to continue talking. She also wants to know what happened in the dream and why is it making her upset.

"We were walking to Cresthaven and Eagle Rock's border. There was an old cabin there, and Jasmine wanted to check it out. We just quickly agreed to her. So we were near the cabin, and then she ran up to it and entered. We followed her behind, but the door was already locked from the inside." Luna looks back at Ivy who is leaning against a trunk of a nearby tree and continues when she sees she's paying attention. "We tried to open it again and again, but it didn't budge. You also tried the windows, but nothing happened, until the door just opened."

She stands up and claps her hands together. She clears her throat and continues, "We entered the door and I was surprised 'cause the cabin looked so small from the outside but inside, it was so huge. We heard her screaming, it was so loud. We split up because we didn't know where she really was. I went to the left side of the cabin and there were so many doors. I checked them one by one, opening them as I went, but they were all empty until there was only one door left unopened. I hesitated before opening. I was having thoughts that I would regret what I'll witness whatever was on the other side of the door."

"Well, did you?" Ivy asks.

"Did I regret what I saw? Yes."

"What was it?"

"You really wanna know, huh? Well, I didn't really get to open the door. It opened a second before I could even turn the knob. Inside I... I saw Jasmine. She was cuffed in a bed, crying silently. I ran up to her and tried to get her out of there, but when I was trying to break her free, she said that I should stop. I asked her what she was talking about because we really need to get out of there. She just said, 'because my boyfriend's coming'. Then she smiled at someone behind me and then the back of my head just started throbbing and everything started to fade into darkness.

I woke up crying after that. It was horrible. That's why I went to her house early in the morning 'cause I wanna check if she's okay. And she was, of course. I never felt so stupid. It was just a dream but I let it get to me, and even until now I can't seem to forget about it. Earlier, during grocery shopping, my mom kept asking me what's wrong with me because I wasn't much help." She sighs and leans against a tree across from Ivy.

"Maybe you were just a little paranoid about her boyfriend. Especially because we still don't know who he is."

Yeah, I guess so. And knowing that she was gonna have another date with him this morning didn't actually help." She pouts and starts walking again. "Let's go to our spot by the creek. I need to relieve some stress."

"You're just gonna throw some stones." Ivy says with a laugh—an attempt to lighten the mood—and follows her.

"Yeah, what else would my stress reliever be aside from reading?"

"Reading? I thought you only look at the pictures on magazines."

"Well, I do that too." Luna shrugs.

"I hope you'll move on from that dream. Yeah, it was horrible like you said, but dreams don't actually happen in real life, right?"

"Yeah. You're right, they don't."