Once again, I was drowning in guilt over my dependence on others for transportation. Yeah, I felt bad about having Laura drive me back home after everything she’d been through today. At the very least, she wouldn’t have to drive all the way back to her university since she had moved back in with her family’s at Bucktail, but I still couldn’t help but feel ashamed about it.

  Surrounded by the chirping of nocturnal insects, the streetlights coated the dark road in a guiding sheen reminiscent of a play’s spotlight that followed the primary actor around the stage. It felt like we were the stars of our own dramatic play, heading off stage after a heated, emotional exchange.

  I wondered what sort of words we’d exchange backstage if this really was a stage play. I thought about complimenting her for doing so well earlier, but my concern for her well being had overshadowed any possible words of encouragement that had been bubbling up inside of me.

  “Are you okay?” I asked finally.

  Laura’s eyes, still dyed with remnants of red from that little moment in Enzo’s dorm, were intently focused on the road. She was a very cautious driver, something I came to respect after having ridden shotgun with her brother the day before. I never want to experience a roller coaster like that on a public road again.

  “Enzo is probably suspicious of you now,” she said.

  Was she referring to the way I tossed the phone from his hand? It was possible, but he won’t do anything crazy. He’s no Zoey, that’s for sure. The most he’ll do is act weary around me, but at the end of the day, something like a supernatural power just doesn’t occur to most people even if they suspect it. More importantly…

  “Laura, I’m asking if you’re okay.”

  “Hmm? Oh, I’m sorry. I’m good now, I think,” she said, still letting a sniffle loose.

  We hadn’t spoken much since we left the dorms. I’m sure she was just mulling things over on her end, but for me, it had more to do with the fact that things had felt so awkward. Was I being too pushy? Too wordy? Too preachy? All I wanted was to let her know that I’m there for her, but I was suddenly in the midst of an anxiety induced breakdown about the whole ordeal. The adrenaline coursing through me that had forced me to act back then had all but worn off, so what was left was the same bumbling idiot version of myself that I despised.

  “I’m a little embarrassed, though.”

  “Embarrassed? I asked.

  “I’m not supposed to cry in front of others. One of the reasons I moved back was so my roommate wouldn’t hear me crying at night.” She sighed. “Why didn’t you get scared like Enzo did when you saw me with the knife?”

  “You’re just not a very good liar,” I said.

  She would never hurt a soul. I know that much after hacking her multiple times. But even without that knowledge, her face was pleading with me the entire time. She didn’t look like someone who would cause harm. No. That was the face of a lonely girl yearning to be heard and understood.

  Laura exhaled as if to refocus herself. “The thing is, I didn’t even know that I was lying. I really thought I wanted to hurt you two.”

  “Maybe you’re good at lying at yourself then.” I laughed.

  That’s right. She’s the polar opposite of Zoey in every way.

  The natural-born liar, and the girl who doesn’t lie.

  In a sense, I’m lucky that the spirit inherited her personality after Zoey’s. Who knows what kind of rotten personality it would have turned up if it used someone like Benjamin’s influence instead?

  “That’s twice that I was deceitful today,” she said.

  “Twice?”

  “I lied to myself about what I was planning to do in that room,” she continued. “And I lied to Enzo about why I was opening the window.”

  “Oh, well that’s not a big deal, is it?”

  “It’s a sin,” she said.

  “Lying is a sin?”

  She stopped at the red sign calling us to a halt. “’Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’ It’s one of the ten commandments. I’ve never fancied myself a liar, but I suppose things have just been too much for me this week.”

  Saying that she took her faith seriously would be underselling her seriousness. I tried to think about what to say to her about it, but it turns out that I’m not the best person to talk to about things like faith or religion. The only revering I’ve done in my life so far have been for film directors and Zoey Brahm, after all.

  “By the way Tristan,” she said, driving past the sign.

  “Y-yes?” I called out.

  “I’m going to try to talk to Zoey about the video.”

  Speak of the devil… “You are?”

  “Yes, I’ll talk to her. I won’t do anything crazy like I did with Enzo. I know now that it would only hurt the people around me if I did. But at the very least, I need to at least try to get rid of that video.”

  Zoey won’t give it up though. That was the first thing I thought, and they were words I swallowed before they escaped from my throat. I wasn’t about to walk over the determination she’d worked so hard to build up.

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  Laura shook her head. “No, you don’t have to. It’s okay. I know how painful dealing with her is for you. I don’t want you to have to go back to that.”

  “But…”

  “You know… I really was in a dark place for the past two days. I felt like I’d fallen into some dark cave beneath the ground or something. And like, it was very hard for me to come up for air.” She took a deep breath. “But I guess for whatever reason, you decided to show me that there was a way out. I’m still really hurt, but I won’t give up on the future anymore and I have you to thank for that. That’s why I’m not going to let you fall into your own dark cave on account of me.”

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  “It’s okay, I can handle it,” I said.

  “I’m fine Tristan, really. You don’t need to be there for me on this one. I’ll be okay.”

  She was really too kind. That she even considered my relationship with Zoey when asking for help with something that could possibly change her life was a kind of benevolence that I didn’t envy.

  “If that’s what you want to do…”

  To be honest, I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about talking to Zoey again. If anything, today was a much appreciated break from that black hole of a girl.

  “Hey, Tristan… I am curious about something to do with Zoey.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why didn’t she tell you that you could use Dream Paralysis while awake?”

  I blinked twice. Her question had taken me so far back that I was at a loss for words.

  “H-huh? What do you mean? She didn’t know that.”

  “I mean, from what you told me it sounds like she was good at intuiting certain things about your power. But to me, it didn’t take much to come to the conclusion that you could use it while conscious. So why didn’t she?”

  “Maybe it slipped under her radar…”

  I mean, it was possible. Zoey isn’t perfect. In the first place, the only reason she found out about this power in the first place was because I was too obvious when I first started using it. And as for the other laws of Dream Paralysis… she had had enough evidence to come to those conclusions naturally. No, she simply must not have thought it was possible. We’d decided that REM sleep was one of the prerequisites early on, after all. That was even the main reason she decided to name it Dream Paralysis.

  “If you ask me, I think she was terrified of your power.”

  “Terrified…”

  I had come to a similar conclusion, but hearing it from Laura’s lips really cemented the reality of it.

  “I mean, I kind of was too when you first told me. You can be anywhere at any time. You could be looking at the world through my eyes as we speak and I wouldn’t know. There’s no privacy, no control. In a way, you’re kind of like…”

  “Like God…”

  Laura nodded. “Or at the very least, like a spirit. If you could only activate your power while sleeping, then at least while you’re awake, Zoey wouldn’t have to worry about anything. So at the very least, she might not have wanted to even entertain the idea that you didn’t need to sleep to activate it.”

  I tried to think about things from their point of view. If my enemy, if Benjamin or Zoey had a power like this, would I ever really feel safe? Even in the comfort of my own home, even if I took a trip to the other side of the world, I would never truly have any privacy, would I? With just a bit of meditating, they’d have full access to me without my even knowing.

  “She told me not to hack her though, and I haven’t done it since,” I said.

  “It’s still scary though. There’s no law against hacking someone. There’s no court in this or any other country that’s going to file a case where it claims that you used a supernatural power to invade someone else’s personal space. You could theoretically get away with doing whatever you wanted with it.”

  An invisible gun. That was what Zoey had called it. Everything was starting to make more sense. Of course she’d try to limit the ways I could use it. She was terrified of me turning it on her someday.

  “What sort of things did she want to do with Dream Paralysis?” Laura asked.

  “World domination.”

  Laura went quiet. For a while, the sound of the night drive was all we heard.

  “Gwen called her the Antichrist when we hung out,” I said. “I’ve only started to truly understand what she meant by that recently. She’s been showing me her true colors all this time, but I… I was just blinded. I let her persuade me into doing terrible things, and… and who knows how much worse things would have gotten had I accepted her?”

  Laura reached over and held my hand, not taking her eyes off the road. “You got out, though.”

  I smiled. “Yeah. I had people in my corner.”

  Thanks to my friends. Thanks to Lance, Naomi, and Jaz.

  “I’m glad that I have people in my corner too,” Laura said.

  I felt the importance of others weighing on me today in this conversation. Without the support of everyone around me, neither Laura nor myself could have weathered the storms we’d been thrust through. But it did lead me to wonder how Gwen was doing. She had run away from everything, leaving her closest friends behind in order to seek a better life closer to the city. Was she happy there, or was she crumbling without the support of people like Penny, Krista and Lawrence?

  I decided to pull my phone out to send her a text message. But once faced with the empty message box, I found myself at a loss as to what to say. I wanted to tell her that I missed her. That I would take it all back if I could. That I would do everything in my power to protect her from Zoey, and from myself if she did come back. I understood that I didn’t deserve it, but I really did just want to see her again.

  The sight of her standing on that stage, reading her poem was still burned into my mind. I can’t escape it. She was just… so…

  “What are you thinking about?” Laura asked.

  “Huh? Oh…” I got caught up in my thoughts and forgot about my surroundings. “I’m thinking about... Gwen. I want to text her, but I have no idea what to say.”

  “Hmmm.” Laura pondered as she turned into the subdivision. “She hasn’t been responding, huh?”

  “No, not really.”

  I wanted to know how she was doing, but… I had no idea how to go about breaking the ice.

  “Why not start by telling her how your day went?”

  “My… day?”

  “Yeah. To be honest, I don’t think she hates you. I think she just doesn’t know if she can trust you anymore. I’d probably find it hard to trust you too after something like that.”

  “I dunno, I kinda feel like I should just apologize again.”

  “I guess you could, but I feel like she’d appreciate hearing about your day today. Tell her about the fun things she missed out on at school.”

  “I guess I could do that…”

  What sort of stuff could I tell her about today, though? Should I tell her about how Lance thinks he’s like Timothee Chalamet or something? About Benjamin’s unhinged rant? About the game Lance and Lawrence played, and about how I got involved and ended up talking to Krista? About my day with Laura?

  “Hey, Laura…”

  “Hmm? What’s up Tristan?”

  Zoey always said that I shouldn’t, but now I have another opinion. If I was going to tell her about today, then I would need to include every single detail.

  “Do you think I should tell Gwen about Dream Paralysis?”

  Laura pondered for a moment as she pulled over next to my house. The two of us sat in silence as the question I’d asked hung over the mood in the car.

  “I think you should do what you think is right, Tristan,” she said.

  It wasn’t a ‘no’.

  It wasn’t a ‘no’, and yet…

  Her answer had only moved me from a ‘no’ to a ‘maybe’. I still had no idea if I should tell anyone else about Dream Paralysis.

  “I wish I could give you a better answer, but I can’t think of one. And after what happened today, I’m not going to lie to anyone anymore. Not to myself, not to you, Enzo, or anyone else.”

  Her words carried within them a tinge of disappointment. In herself, naturally, but I could sense that she was also disappointed with the world for having driven her to lying in the first place.

  “I support it, Laura. I’ll be there for you if you ever second guess yourself.”

  “Don’t support my honesty with a lie now.”

  I went quiet, suddenly anxious about what I’d said.

  “A joke,” she continued. “Sorry, I’m bad at telling them.”

  The girl who never smiled had suddenly showed me a new side of her. I found myself smiling as she hit the gas on her new life of unfiltered honesty.