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Goldenhood.
    Despite what I’d seen in the mirror, I managed to tear my eyes away from my now-solid reflection and turned my attention back to Lissy. My hallucinations had started the day she’d pulled me into her world of weird, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I had a sinking suspicion that she was my best chance at making them stop.
    “I can’t do this right now,” I told her, not knowing quite where to start.
    “But you’re the one who brought me in here.” Lissy was clearly confused.
    “Not the talking,” I clarified. “The other thing.” I didn’t believe for a second that Little Miss Aura Seer had no idea what was going on with me. If anything, her Sight gave her too much insight into things I preferred to keep private.
    “Ummmm…what other thing?”
    I hated it that she was playing dumb and doing it so well. This was my life we were talking about here.
    “I want you to make it stop.” I spoke slowly and clearly with the hope that maybe, just this once, she’d understand. It was about time that someone did.
    “Make what stop?”
    I glanced at each of the four bathroom stalls, making sure they were empty. “You know what,” I said, my voice low. “I need you to stop the…” I wiggled my fingers in front of my eyes.
    “Spirit fingers?”
    I rolled my eyes. “No,” I said, forcing my voice to stay calm. “Not spirit fingers. The hallucinations.”
    She bit her bottom lip and tilted her head to the side. “What hallucinations?”
    I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged them to my body. Was she really going to make me spell this out for her?
    “All I know,” Lissy said, looking down at her shoes and avoiding eye contact altogether, “is that in the past thirty seconds, you’ve gone from being lavender to violet to practically black, and your connections look like they’re doing the hokeypo—”
    “That,” I said. “Stop with the that.”
    “The that?” she repeated. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, and if we’d been anything even close to friends, I might have giggled at the absolutely bewildered expression on her face. But the situation was dire, and we weren’t friends, so I didn’t even smile.
    “Stop playing your freaky Sight games with me,” I blurted out. The last thing I’d wanted to do today was end up in the girls’ bathroom talking about the one thing I’d sworn never to mention again, and yet…
    “Sight games?” Lissy asked.
    The moment I realized that she wasn’t playing dumb was the exact same moment the bathroom door opened and Mountain Morrison walked in. Once upon a time, when we were seven, she’d had a real name—Mindy—but there was a distinct chance that I was the only one who remembered what her actual name was, and even I couldn’t pinpoint the exact day she’d stopped being Mindy and started being Mountain. In elementary school, I’d been a little more concerned about finding friends with stay-at-home moms than with chubby little Mindy, who did the after-school program I was forced into when I couldn’t find anywhere else to go.
    “Sorry,” I told her. “Occupied.”
    Mindy (who wasn’t nearly as big as she’d been when she’d earned aforementioned hideous nickname) turned in slow motion to look at the four obviously empty stalls. Clearly, she’d missed out on the girl-talk lessons when the rest of us had learned that “occupied” meant “private conversation in progress.”
    “I think the second-floor bathroom is open,” I told her, careful to keep my voice absolutely devoid of any emotion that might cue her in to the fact that I was on the verge of a Class A freak-out.
    Beside me, Lissy frowned.
    I so did not have time for this. “Mindy,” I said softly. “Second. Floor. Bathroom.”
    And just like that, she was gone, and Lissy was staring at me like I’d announced a secret love of kicking puppies.
    I’d long since come to terms with the fact that I hadn’t gotten to where I was by being the world’s