Into the Mist

Chapter 34

We wandered for hours in that gray haze. We never saw Mr. Grossman's body, or the horse, or the dinosaur. Once we heard someone crying, far off, but when we called out to them, the crying cut off and rapid footsteps tapered into nothing.

"How big is this place?" Joey murmured, because by then the mist had hushed everything into an eerie silence broken by the strange sharp cracking sounds. Now that I'd heard them, over and over, I began to think these weren't always caused some hulking leviathan breaking through the trees: perhaps it was the sound of someone entering this strange place, causing a rift in the time/space continuum.

"Maybe it's limitless," I said. "It's a place between worlds, where time doesn't exist."

"How the hell did you find your way out of here twice?" Joey asked then.

We thought we had been walking in a straight line, but it was hard to tell without landmarks. 

"I saw the porchlight on my house, and I followed it," I told him.

Joey squinted. "Nope. I still can't see anything."

The light had been hard to find, I remembered that. It had been a vague brightness. I told Joey to stop.

"Don't move, okay? Stay there, facing that direction, so we remember which direction we've been going." I was still clinging to the idea that if we moved in one direction we would eventually find our way out. But I was also beginning to be paranoid that we were moving deeper in, toward some world vastly different from ours.

Once Joey had stopped and was now looking at me with faint bemusement, I turned in a circle slowly, looking for the light. The first revolution gave me nothing. Maybe it had to be nighttime, if there ever was such a thing in this place.

But then I saw it: a lightness to the fog at Joey's two o'clock. "There, that way!"

I pulled him, and we set off with a renewed vigor. The diffused light narrowed as we approached, but it remained fixed, and soon more trees were visible, and the ground beneath our feet. Even if my parents were waiting there with an ambulance to lock me up in a hospital, I would go with them gladly, because it would mean I was out of the fog for good.

Finally we emerged onto the road, and we each looked around and then at each other, because there was no one on the road: no ambulance, no Ella's car, no angry Mr. Grossman.

I held my breath until I noticed some sign of life: my dad raking the lawn, as if nothing was wrong.

I checked my phone. The time read 7:01 a.m., but I could tell by the sun overhead that it was much later. It had no signal and no wifi. "Guess we'll have to get new phones again," I said.

"Yeah," said Joey, who hadn't taken out his phone. He was looking at me with a sad expression.

Punching him, I said, "What's with the face?"

"What do you think will be different?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Hopefully nothing. Hopefully everything will be the same as when we left here."

"And..." He took my hand. "You won't pretend you don't know me at school?"

Ah. I smiled, and stood on tiptoes to kiss him. "I won't."

"Okay." He didn't look like he quite believed me.

"Let's record everything that's different," I said. "And tomorrow when we meet for the bus we'll compare."

He nodded, and gave me a little smile before we both turned away and headed to our respective houses.

I waved to Dad, who was raking the lawn.  He had in his airpods and didn't seem much concerned about where I'd been. Inside I kicked off my shoes and passed the living room, where Mom was doing a yoga video on TV. I paused, since I'd never seen Mom do anything like that, but moved on up the stairs before she could ask me anything.

My room looked the same. I flopped onto my bed, the familiar creak of my bed frame a welcome sound. I sat up and looked at my nightstand, where a copy of Divergent lay. "Oh, thank god," I breathed, hugging the book to my chest.

We had done it! Back in the right world. I felt a little bad that I had managed to screw up the other me's life so badly, when she had come here and apparently fit right in. That made me wonder if I was still friends with Ceci in this world, and I grabbed my laptop to check out my social media accounts and try to figure out what was up.

There was a pic of us from the party on Ceci's Instagram Story, but we were all wearing cat ears and little black dresses with heels, eyeliner whiskers drawn on our cheeks. And I was tagged in a more recent pic that showed two mugs full of hot chocolate and marshmallows with the caption Hot cocoa with my bestie and a heart emoji. So we were still friends, which meant telling them that I was dating Joey was going to be a bit of a hurdle. But if they would unfriend me for that, then I would stand firm.

I searched for Ella on Instagram, just to see if she was dating Joey, but her photos had a lot of random people in them and it didn't look like she was dating anyone.

After taking a shower and changing my clothes, I felt normal again. Dinner was normal, and after that I did my homework.

The next morning I headed downstairs at my usual time and made some toast.

"You're dressed up today," Mom commented. She was wearing sweatpants and a baggy sweatshirt.

I looked down. It was my normal school outfit. "Not really." I took out the jar of peanut butter.

"You know no one's going to see your legs, right?"

Half-turning, I gave her a strange look.

"You know. The Zoom wardrobe: business on top, party on the bottom?"

I shook my head. Zoom? Business on top? "What are you talking about?"

"What, did you forget we're in the middle of a pandemic?" Mom asked, chuckling a bit.

"Pandemic?" I echoed, my stomach sinking.

Mom laughed again. "The look on your face! Steve, get this! Bree somehow managed to forget the past six months ever happened!"

Six months? Pandemic?

The knife clattered out of my hands as I sank to the floor.

THE END

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Or is it??  

I wrote several alternate endings... I mean, there were many different universes they could have ended up in!  Give a shout in the comments if this one didn't do it for you...

And as always, thank you for reading!