I don't think I sat there at my desk for very long. There comes a moment when complete confusion and dizziness subsides to exhaustion, and I found that within fifteen minutes.

When I woke up to my mom yelling "Alana!" five hours later, I was disappointed to see that my room did not return to normal. The oceanic painting still sat on my desk in the corner, the rain still poured heavily, and my bedroom still felt foreign. As I stood up, I felt a familiar soreness overcome me. I have dance practice twice a week so I was used to feeling stiff. However I felt that my soreness may not have been from dance this time. I shoved my now dry painting into my closet before heading downstairs.

As I stepped into the kitchen, Isaiah, my older brother, immediately scarfed down the rest of his food before running upstairs. He didn't even bother to put his plate away. I was used to him not cleaning up after himself but what surprised me was his immediate reaction to leave when I came downstairs. It had only been a few weeks since he'd been back from college. I would've liked to think he wasn't tired of me that quickly.

Isaiah and me were close. I was lucky because my family never really had serious disagreements. As siblings, Isaiah and I usually got along well. If we weren't playing video games, we would be playing some complicated board game Isaiah was currently obsessed with. Sometimes we'd head to a local park and go biking or other times we'd just sit in the basement with our parents and watch a movie. Even though I probably wouldn't admit it to him, I missed doing that stuff during the school year. Isaiah may make terrible jokes every other sentence, but I laugh at them anyways. I love my friends, but their humor just isn't the same as the humor I share with my family. I will come to miss that intensely in these next few weeks.

After I grabbed a plate of lasagna—a dish my mom hadn't made in forever—I sat down across from my dad who was busy typing something on his laptop. He didn't use his laptop at home often, but there'd been a few times when work was more demanding than usual and he'd have to put in some hours over the weekend. It wasn't particularly strange, how my family was acting, but something definitely felt off. Maybe I was overreacting, though. After the weirdness that had occurred earlier, I think I would have thought anything slightly out of routine to be strange.

After dinner I went straight upstairs. As I began to open the door to my bedroom, I could feel little bumps forming on my arms and my heart starting to race. I could vividly imagine that once I opened this door, that morbid blue painting would be sitting back on the top of my desk. It would pull me closer and closer until I finally got sucked inside, back into the whirlwind of thrashing waves. Maybe this time, I wouldn't be able to snap out of it. Maybe I would slowly drown in the painting's ferocious ocean, stuck underneath the dark surface forever. Maybe I would actually succumb to that watery grave that fate had destined for me now.

But as I opened the door to my room, my breathing hitched, I found that the painting was not sitting on my desk waiting for me. It was in my closet, just as I had left it. I wondered in that moment if I should burn it or toss it into the sea, but decided against it. I didn't have much rationale for keeping the painting other than that it could possibly bring forth normalcy just as it had brought strangeness into my life. For now, I decided to keep it. Just in case.

Just as I had feared when I woke up from my nap the day before, my room felt just as strange as it did the next morning. It was my room. The light green walls were the same, my souvenirs sitting on the shelf next to me were the same, my notebooks from my senior year of school were still hastily shoved in the corner by my dresser. And yet nothing felt like it was my own. Had my room always smelled like cinnamon apples? Had I put away that pair of shorts I thought I left on the floor? Had my ivy plant shrunk a little since I last noticed?

In an effort to distract myself, I picked up my phone from on top of my dresser. It felt like it had been a while since I last opened my phone and I guess I was right. There were a good number of messages from two of my best friends, June and Maya. My family was planning to go on vacation in about a week so I had remembered they wanted to do some stuff before then. I quickly responded and got ready for the day.

The day was cool and wet, leftover from yesterday's rainstorm. I rode the two minutes to June's house on my bike, making attempts to swerve around the puddles as I did so. The good thing about living in some small, smelly old fishing town was that everything was within walking—or biking—distance. I enjoyed biking anyways. Summers in Northpass were generally fairly mild so I usually tried to get out as often as I could.

"Hi Alana," Mrs. Pryor greeted after I had arrived at June's. She was a nice lady. My mom and her had been friends since before I was born. It was thanks to their set-up playdates that June and I became so-close when we were younger. "The girls are out back so you can probably just go around." I gave Mrs. Pryor a quick "thanks" before walking around to the back where, sure enough, June and Maya were filling up water balloons.

"Alana!" They yelled together, motioning for me to go over there. "Come help us fill these up." Maya grinned as she handed me a piece of red, wrinkly rubber. I obliged and began filling up the balloons alongside them. I was glad we were doing something other than playing Super Smash Bros. or watching some Netflix movie. Not that that stuff wasn't fun, but I liked doing things like this every once in a while. It reminded me of our summer days when we were younger.

June and I had always been really good friends. We practically lived in the same neighborhood so we got together a lot when we were younger. It was days like those that I missed the most. The summer evenings when a bunch of the neighborhood kids got together in one of the cul de sacs. We all owned razor scooters and every evening we would race up and down the street, challenging each other on who could get to the end of the street the fastest. We played until night fell and our parents forced us to come inside. Isaiah and I always tried to stay out the longest, even though our mom had been yelling at us for half an hour. We had much rathered gotten into a little trouble than to miss another scooter race. I still have my scooter. The pink foam on the handlebars are now taped together with blue painter's tape and the front wheel sometimes doesn't line up correctly, but it still works. On occasion, Isaiah takes my scooter out into the driveway and tries to do tricks on it. His scooter is more messed up than mine.

We were nearing the top of the bucket full of water balloons when I noticed Mr. Pryor sitting on June's back porch, sipping from a glass of iced tea and reading a book.

"Does your dad not have to go into work today?" I asked. It was a Saturday, sure, but I remembered that June had mentioned something about her dad being a workaholic. I never really saw him much anyways so it made sense. June's family was like that. They valued success immensely, more than mine and Maya's families. During the school year, June was barely able to get together on weekends because her parents forced her to do homework or she was running around doing stuff for the debate team. She's going to some super prestigious school now and Maya and I aren't surprised. We might be a little jealous though.

June looked towards me and shrugged her shoulders. "It's Saturday, so he's got the weekend off." I mumbled a simple "oh" in response. Maybe I was looking way too far into things.

"But he did warn me that if we sprayed him with a water gun he'd ground me for the rest of the summer," June added with a light hearted smile.

"Fair deal."

As we threw water balloons at each other, I could see that June was a lot more relaxed than when I last saw her the other day. I guess now that school was over, we could all relax a little. That was until school started up again in the fall. But for now, I had to keep reminding myself that it was the time to breath easy. It was summer. Things would be good.

We stayed outside for the rest of the afternoon. At one point Maya drove us over to her house to jump on her trampoline. The blue rim kept crumbling and blowing little bits all over her yard and the net was only able to stay up due to a couple of zipties, but we jumped on it anyways. One day I know one of us would jump a little too big and fall through the middle. That hasn't happened yet though.

That night, I felt more at peace than I did the previous. It was a good day, one that reminded me vividly of the moments from our childhood. We use to jump around between our three houses, even to Maya's which was a bit of a bike ride away. We played games of make-believe, the most popular of which was where we were a town full of dogs instead of people. We played fairies and assigned a different area of my backyard as our houses. We played chalktown and drew restaurants and roads on my driveway. I miss those days more than I think. Even if I lived in the same house and hung out with the same two people as I did back then, it's not the same. We grew up.

There were a few minor differences I felt on this day that I took notice. June was more upbeat, even a little more bubbly, than usual. She told jokes, laughed animatedly, and just seemed a lot less uptight. Maya was different too. She was more animated, sure, but she also seemed a lot more distant. I wouldn't say it to any of their faces, but Maya and I seemed to have a closer connection. I think, though, that it's just because Maya was more available during the school year than June. It disappointed me that day that Maya wasn't as involved as much in the conversations. I thought maybe she was upset over something but I had a feeling that this was the way she had always been, even if I had just met up with her a few days ago, as happy and close as ever.

There were a lot of reasons why June and Maya could have been acting different. But there was someone else entirely that made me realize that something was seriously wrong. I spent the rest of the evening mostly watching some TV show on my iPad, so it wasn't until around nine when I finally bothered to check my phone. For a minute or two I was convinced I had grabbed someone else's phone, but sure enough I had several text messages and missed phone calls from someone named West. They were all something along the lines of "are you coming?", "the movie's starting in five minutes", and then last an "is everything okay?".

I read the messages first and then with my heart pounding against my chest, I realized there were more messages between me and this West. It was definitely my phone, though. My background screens were the same as well as all my social medias and pictures. Certainly, however, I did not ever text someone named West. As I scrolled through the messages, which were mostly West and I joking around and making plans, I could feel my mouth becoming drier and drier. I knew I must have written them, even though I don't remember doing so. I didn't really know I had written them out of logic—anyone could fake a text—but I felt like I had. It was the same feeling as when I stared at that painting. The same feeling I actually felt, I realized, throughout these past two days.

I decided not to call West that night. Frankly, I was pretty freaked out and the last thing I wanted was to call up some ghost or alien and trigger some horror showdown. I did send a short "sorry", and decided on dealing with everything the next day.

As I tried to fall asleep, I realized there was one West I knew. Weston Greer, a boy my age that moved away last year. He was a preppy kid, hung around jocks, and vaped a lot. He cheated in every relationship he ever had—which was way more than any 16 year old should have had—and spent more hours in detention than he did in class. West came from a bad home. He was rich, he lived in one of the nicer homes on the other side of town, but his parents weren't great. I don't know all the details, but I know for sure that him moving away was a result of his life at home.

I didn't know if the two Wests were the same, considering West Greer had moved away, but I know I did not get much sleep that night.

________

After church the next day, I spent the afternoon researching alternate dimensions. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I don't think I would have questioned it if it weren't for West. That event with the ocean was strange but I might've just lived with the explanation that it was some hyper-realistic dream. I could've lived with thinking that during my imaginative dream, I could have changed the garden painting without realizing. It was a stretch, but it could have happened. I could have lived with things being a little out of the ordinary. I could have said that after my weird dream, I was a bit too suspicious and speculated about anything that was at all different from the previous day. Though I may have never truly believed it, I think I could have lived with that excuse for the rest of my life.

But with the introduction of West into the picture, as such a dramatic difference as that, it was time to look for a truer explanation. I thought maybe there could have been a memory lapse, possibly in between the time I went into the drowning nightmare, but I never recalled any time missing. Between the time I had last checked the clock before and when I went to take a nap, it had been about two hours. Two hours was enough time to have a nightmare, but it was definitely not enough time to build a whole new relationship with someone that you've only spoken to once or twice.

Although somehow transporting into another dimension amidst my nightmarish ordeal is more than somewhat unbelievable, it's the only explanation I thought made a little sense. There wasn't some wormhole that ripped through the center of town and there certainly wasn't some alien-like monster released into our world—at least I hoped not—but it made the most sense. I was in a place identical to my own home but at the same time, a place that was completely foreign to me.

The more I thought about the idea—that I had entered an alternate dimension—the more real it had started to become. This wasn't some novel or movie. This wasn't fiction. If I was really stuck here, in this world that wasn't my own, I could have been stuck forever. There wasn't some boss monster that I needed to defeat to go back. I wouldn't embark on an epic journey across the world to get to the last alter-dimensional portal. I wouldn't need to find the missing key in order to permit my travels to my own world again. I was stuck here and there was no one and no thing that could bring me back.

I had a dream once like this. My grandparents owned an old house in Colorado and my cousins' and my family would stay there a week or so in the summer. The kids—my brother, my three cousins, and I—would sleep up in the loft. One night when I was about ten or so, I had a dream, one that I still remember today. In my dream, I woke up and started moving about the house. There was a lot of weird stuff that occurred: rearranging of furniture and a Nerf-gun inspired outfit my cousin wore, as well as talking trees. Frustrated with the strangeness, I slumped into my bed upstairs. My mom followed me.

"Why is everything so weird?" I asked her, my face stuffed into my pillow.

My mom put her hand on my back, in that comforting way that only mothers know how to do. "Maybe it's because you're in a dream."

I turned towards her, my brows furrowed. "How do I get out?"

"Try naming things that aren't real. Maybe then you'll wake up."

Taking my mom's advice, I travelled downstairs. "That door doesn't belong here. That couch doesn't go there," I said, pointing at the various objects. "And trees don't talk," I said finally. It wasn't a moment later when I had awoken back in the loft. The morning sun peeked warmly through the small window in the corner and already I could hear morning chit-chat from the adults already awake downstairs. As I looked around at my surroundings, a rush of relief had coursed through me. I had escaped the dream, I thought.

There was no such solution for me now. I could not seek guidance from my mom as I had did in my dream. She would worry for my health. I don't think I would have wanted to spend the rest of the summer in a hospital bed. I also couldn't escape through naming things that were different—though I did try that for a good minute or two. But this wasn't spot the difference. Neither was this a dream. I thought maybe I could try jumping into the ocean like I did in the nightmare, but if I was wrong, I would certainly drown.

And then something else dawned on me, something that made my blood run cold and my heart to skip a beat. I had drowned in my nightmare, but I didn't just drown, neither did I just choose to fall into the water without reason. I had seen something.

I hadn't spotted a clown standing underneath a streetlamp or an old doll rocking in a chair in the corner of your room like maybe what you'd expect something horrific to be. It wasn't a giant sea monster, like Nessie or the Kraken, hovering by the shore and waiting for me to fall into their open mouths, nor was it some whirlpool sucking everything within its reach.

What I saw was much worse.

Floating between the thrashing waves and bobbing over the uneven ocean surface was a body. Even though I couldn't make out exactly who it was from the distance, I knew that the body I was seeing was none other than my own.

There's nothing like going on a road trip that will help us writers get our creativity going. I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter! What a way to end it, right?

Thank you for reading!
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As always,
xoxo. Emmy