I want class to be over. I only have one lecture today, but it's two hours long, we're only forty-five minutes into it, and I'm already at my wits' end. I know I keep shifting in my seat. I know my fiddling with my pen is starting to get obsessive, and I'm thumping my leg, and looking anywhere but the professor while he drones on, and on, and on. I know the other students are staring at me. I sit in the front row because there are fewer distractions, but it puts me in full view of the lecture hall.

Ophelia is here. She's at the other end of the front row, and she hasn't looked over yet. Either she hasn't noticed me, or she's ignoring me on purpose. It's probably the latter. I'm supposed to care. I could compromise more than all my years of careful work here, and a part of me rings in alarm of that, but that part is all too easy to just not pay attention to. I don't have any brain energy to spare for that game right now. I should, but I don't. Something's drained me right down in the last two days, and it's taking all the remainder just to stay focused in class.

I know what's drained that energy. It's those goddamn notebooks.

I moved on to the second one last night. I know I should stop, but there's something about them that won't let me, and I can't bring myself to counter it. I stayed up until an hour short of sunrise last night, reading. Faster and faster, like I was in a trance of some kind, always pushing onward like I'm looking for something. That's the feeling. The journal entries don't mean to tell a story, but they do, and the more I read, the more I need to continue.

And it's fucking me up. I blame the lack of sleep, but the truth is, reading those books has exposed more and uglier sides of me than I've acknowledged in years. Maybe ever. The unflinching honesty of M and unintentional vulnerability of X feel like they've stripped me down to a skeleton, and it's taking all my mental faculties just to process the blow. They're not me, but at the same time, they are. Like the universe decided to play some sick joke when it dropped a stranger's notebooks in the one piece of furniture I decided to take from dad's house.

I dreamed about X's world last night. It was the most surreal, psychedelic experience: I was a dragon one moment, the wind the next, deep into a forest, a cave, a city with twisted inhabitants that vanished when I looked at them too closely. Like the whole city was empty if you actually tried to get to know its people. I explored its castle. Then I fell from the tower, turned into wind again, and woke up. I read the notebook again over breakfast. And, midway down the next page, my food turned to ash in my mouth.

I'd never read about the city in that world before. I'd been so certain in the dream that it was X's, and there it was on the next page, right down to the wording that jumped into my dream to describe it. In the notebook, I watched X imagine it from scratch. I hadn't read that entry yet.

They're parasitizing my life, and it's compromising my ability to live it. I'm trying to be normal, for fuck's sake—not to quote X, but really, that's the heart of it. I've worked for years to get to where I am. I know how weird I can be when I let that mask slip, and that part of me is still there, right under the surface. The scariest thing about X and M is that they make me care more and less about keeping that mask. X for more. M for less. M is winning.

I care about M. The fact that X is antagonistic towards them sets my hackles on end, and I have no justification. Yet I can't blame X for it, either. I've thought what they're thinking far too many times.

Ophelia glances over.

I stop dead in my seat. I've been running my pen in wide loops up and down my notebook page, capped, taking no notes, and it's getting obsessive. I stop with a barely contained sigh. Only four minutes have passed, and the slide on the screen is foreign to me. I'm tired and cross and my shirt is crawling over my skin, itching the back of my neck, and my socks are too tight around my ankles. I want to shuck off my shoes. But the lecture hall is cold, and I'm still in full view of everyone. I should sit at the back next time. Nobody cares about the people who sit at the back.

Ophelia has looked away again, giving no indication of what crossed her mind when she saw me swirling a pen over my notebook. I put it down and prop my head on my hands, digging the heels of them into my eyes. The glare of the lecture-hall lights pops brightly in the echo they leave on the backs of retinas. There's a light buzzing somewhere over the projector screen. The prof, oblivious to my discomfort, just keeps droning.

I can't take it. Ophelia will notice, but at the breaktime, I pick up my bag and jacket and move to the back of the lecture hall. It's tiered, like stadium bleachers, and the seats at the top are stepped in shadow and muffled by stunted acoustics. I feel a long way from the front of the class, and it's a relief. I pick a new seat. The plastic is cold enough to make me wince, and no more comfortable here than below. I kick off my shoes and put my head down.

The problem with the back of the class is that people here talk during lecture. These are the students who don't care about their grades. I put up with their whisperings in exchange for the dark and semi-quiet, and could not be more glad when lecture finally ends. I've absorbed exactly nothing. I need this shirt off. My head aches and my thoughts blur from tiredness and overthinking and the too many small, aggravating sounds that fill a lecture hall. I'm spending the rest of today at home.

The room shuffles with the sound of everyone shrugging on jackets and gathering things. A guy down the row from me pulls his feet off the desk and drops his chair from its tilt with a thunk. He and his buddies file past me. I let them go. When the back lecture-hall door swings shut behind them, I follow. The door hits a person when I push it open.

"Hey hey hey, watch it," says one of the guys' voices. The rest laugh.

The posse that just passed me is standing outside the lecture-hall door, blocking my way out.

"Excuse me," I say.

"Yeah, yeah, we're going," says another guy. None of them move. The one that the door hit leans back a little, starting to push it shut against me.

I'm done. My internal alarms should be catching me right now, but they've all gone silent. They don't care. I don't care. Exactly nothing tempers the heavy oil slick of unidentified feeling that simmers under my tiredness and done-ness as I put an arm to the door and stop it in its tracks. I'm stronger than most people without trying very hard. I scale it back normally, but I'm just so tired.

"Excuse me," I repeat.

There's a small crowd behind me, and a small crowd ahead. They're all watching. My tone seems to have surprised the posse, because they look at me, too. Like they're not sure if they should be angry. I should roll my eyes and back down, leaving by the lecture hall's lower door. That's the only solution that preserves both my dignity and normalcy while still getting me out of here. But because something about the posse's expressions is so familiar, and I know all too well how this situation could go, I do something else.

I brace my foot against the door.

I look the guy blocking it dead in the eye.

And I smile.

His eyes dart to his companions and back. He's going to base his response on however they respond, but they're all looking at me, too. I say nothing. I've said all I need to. I just keep staring at the guy and smiling—a cold, dead-eyed smile—and oh, the way his expression wavers is the most cathartic thing I've seen all day.

The stand-down only lasts a few seconds, but it feels like hours. Then one of the other goons tugs the sleeve of the one I'm watching, and they all saunter away, taking care to look casual.

"Creepy motherfucker," I hear one mutter as they leave.

I give the door a push that swings it wide. I walk through without looking back, or around, or anywhere that isn't my route to the building exit and the freedom beyond. My heart speeds up in time with my footsteps. The thrill and horror of the situation are catching up with me, and I'm walking too fast by the time I trot down the building's front steps to the street beyond, but I don't slow down. I hone in on home and keep walking. People on the sidewalk take one look at me and jump out of my way.

Ophelia didn't see all that. That's my one consolation, though even as I think it, I turn the thought over with a detached kind of fascination. I don't need consoling. The emotionlessness that consumed me when I stared down that guy has engulfed everything else. I feel nothing. Not sorry. Not upset. Even the satisfaction of winning is dampened, almost not there at all. And Ophelia? She could have seen that for all I care. Because I wouldn't have cared.

My fascination finds a new target. My whole game with Ophelia is suddenly alien to me, like I'm holding it at arm's length and there's a fundamental refraction of the light between us. Like I've forgotten how to interact with a human, and in that absence, the very prospect of interaction—let alone wanting it—is absurd. It's been nothing but a game all along, after all. And the rules are so frivolous, I almost laugh that I've been abiding by them. It's been fun. A good intellectual challenge. But it's over now. I don't get real crushes anyway.

I gaze around me in awe as I walk. The whole world has cracked, surreal, and the cracks aren't just bright; they're opaline. They're gorgeous. Human beings go about their days, caring about their lives, and all the serious and frivolous things those lives contain. They never did make sense to me. It's like I'm seeing that for the very first time. In this moment, reality has fractured, and it's iridescent and real and validating and bright and terrifying, and I can't look away.

So this is what M saw.

I marvel at the tilted world all the way home, then climb the stairs to my apartment with more energy than I've had in months. I close the door behind me. Silence and stillness and dim light wrap my senses. The notebooks still lie where I left them this morning.

Those notebooks tell a story, and it's a story that speaks to me. I need to know how it ends.

I need to know how X and M sort out their differences, and who they truly are. I need to find that person. They're out there, somewhere, unless they've died in the ten years since these journals were written, which is unlikely. Hell, if they're about my age and in this city, they might even go to my university. I might share a class with them. I need to meet them and ask how they deal with reality, and I already feel we could talk for hours about things neither of us has shared with anyone else.

A friend. I could make my first real friend, free of the false veneer of that lower-case reality M saw through so clearly. If I had that friend, I wouldn't need to be normal. I wouldn't need to prove my successful integration into society through a contrived date with Ophelia. None of this would matter anymore, because meeting X and M would be my proof that I can be myself and still not be alone.

I'm almost done the second journal. It's yellow; M hates the colour. The third one is grey and faux leather-bound, smooth and heavy to the touch. I want to reach it. I don't know why. I just do. I change clothes, drop back to the couch, and pick up the yellow notebook again.

I want to know how X deals with their desire to be normal. How M deals with their dissociation from it. How they reconcile the fight I read this morning with the fact that they share a mind.

Which one will win, in the end.

I flip to my bookmark and begin to read.