Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Edit: It appears there was an error with uploading this chapter. I can't tell if it was accessible for a time, so I'm reuploading it now. If you didn't see it, I'm sorry for the delay. Don't worry, I'll still be posting as usual tomorrow.

[Sunday, January 5, 2020]

Lea had wept. She had thrown her arms around Chris's neck and hugged him until he began to feel light-headed. Chris himself had felt stunned in a way. Sure, he had believed it, convinced with every fiber of his being that his plan would work, that Katie would catch the jewelry box. But seeing it weigh her down like that, her look of awe at this new experience, like someone deaf hearing for the first time—somehow, he had not prepared himself for that moment.

Now, Lea pulled away from Chris, tears still streaming down her cheeks, her grin so wide it hurt. "I don't believe it," she whispered over and over again. "I take back every horrible thing I said about you, Chris." Her eyes were earnestly wide. "Really." Stepping abruptly backwards, she declared, "We have to tell Mom and Dad!"

"No."

The soft voice drew Chris and Lea's attention to the little girl standing stock-still in the middle of the room. "No?" Lea echoed in bewilderment, "Why not?"

Katie still stared at her hands, rubbing the pads of her thumbs back and forth across the tips of her fingers as if to re-stimulate the nerves there. "No," she repeated. "I don't want Mommy and Daddy to know." Finally, her glistening gaze rose up to meet theirs. "Not yet."

"You want to wait until you can control it, don't you?" Chris guessed. Katie shared a shy smile and dipped her head into a nod.

Lea stepped toward her sister, fingers curling open and closed at her sides as she protested. "But, Katie, we can't keep this a secret. They might be able to help you control it."

Katie watched her sister with solemn eyes. "They haven't been able to so far," she pointed out. Though she spoke without judgment, Lea winced at the implicit accusation in the words. No, all these years, they hadn't been able to cure their daughter. Katie would never say as much, never even think it, but in some way they had failed her.

"I just…" And now Katie seemed to hesitate, casting her gaze to the floor as she twisted her bare toes into the carpet in discomfort. She nibbled on the nail of her thumb. "I make Mommy and Daddy sad," she said at last.

"You don't—"

"I know I do, Lea," she sighed. "And if I tell them now, before I can do it really, I'll keep making them sad every time it doesn't work. If I wait until I know how to do it…" She hitched up her shoulders as if to protect herself. "Then I'll make them just happy. Just happy."

When Lea opened her mouth to argue, Chris eased between the two sisters, holding up a placating hand toward the older girl. "I promise I'll help you figure this out," he told Katie. Turning toward Lea, he added, "We won't stop until you're better. Right?"

Lea released a loud huff. "Duh," she said, then smiled past Chris to look directly at the sister who watched her with pleading eyes. "I'm obviously in." Katie's eyes lit up, her lips quirking back into a smile.

"Thanks," she whispered.

Somewhat reluctantly, the girls agreed to give Chris a week to try to come up with a feasible lesson plan. In the meantime, Katie would keep practicing what she had achieved today, though perhaps with less expensive and sentimental trinkets. By the time Chris orbed back home, his mind was filled with ideas. It was still only early afternoon—he'd been there just over an hour—but he felt as though several days, if not weeks, had elapsed since this revelation. Too eager to wait, he got started immediately on his ideas, jotting down notes as he mulled them over.

A few hours later, when Piper knocked to call him for dinner, she found him at his desk, poring over a notebook. "Hard at work?" she asked, amused. "School hasn't even started yet."

Chris flipped the notebook closed, tapping his pen anxiously against the cover. He forced a smile, aiming for casual. "Yeah," he said with a laugh, then quickly, to distract her, "What's for dinner? I'm starving."

When Chris appeared later that night in the abyss, he felt light, almost floaty, with giddiness. Mutt was waiting for him at the perimeter between the two spaces, sitting with legs and arms crossed. The instant Chris saw him, the boy scrambled to his feet and began to pepper him with questions. "Where do you go when you're not here?" he demanded. "How come you don't got a place to sleep, you can't share my tunnel, that's mine, got anything to eat?"

Chris, ignoring the questions, had started toward his older self's lair with the boy trailing behind him. At the last question, he paused in surprise and turned back to Mutt. "Do you even get hungry in here?"

Mutt shrugged, as if the point were irrelevant. "Ain't people always hungry?"

His older self emerged from his area to meet them in the center of the nothingness, where light and dark merged into a vague, dusty gray. "He may be remembering the sensation of hunger if it was a common one in his lifetime." Chris glanced at the boy. Judging from his scrawny arms, the t-shirt that hung too loosely off his frame, and the sunken-in look of his manic green eyes, the boy had been well acquainted with hunger in his timeline.

"But here," the man continued, his voice taking on a professorial tone as he spoke, "we exist outside of time, and time is a necessary component for change. Which means no hunger, no getting tired…"

Chris cocked his head to one side. "Do you get bored?"

His counterpart smiled indulgently. "We don't experience the passage of time."

"So… no," Chris said uncertainly. The man inclined his head. "That's good, I guess."

His older self watched him for a long moment, so long that an annoyed Mutt groaned loudly in the back of his throat and abandoned them for his playground. The man continued to assess Chris, the loose drop of his shoulders, the unconscious upward turn of his lips, the glimmer of his eyes. "You seem…" He pressed his knuckles to his lips in thought. "Perkier than usual," he finished at last.

"Do I?" Chris asked, but he couldn't help but grin. The memory of today was too recent to hide and too exciting to keep to himself. "We did it," he said, "With Katie. She caught a box. It was only, like, a second"—he flicked his wrist as if to dismiss the admission—"but she did it."

"That's great," his counterpart replied. He waved Chris into his area and claimed a seat on the couch with his legs stretched out in front of him. Chris, too energized to sit, bounced on the balls of his feet at the edge of the rug. The man watched this with a wry grin. "I take it this means she believes you that intangibility isn't some immutable characteristic of who she is?"

Chris paused mid-bounce. "Huh?"

The man sighed, waving his hand as if in concession. "She believes she can turn it off?"

"Oh. Yeah. No idea how we're gonna do it, though."

His older self shrugged. "Just keep doing what worked the first time," he suggested. "Practice, lots of it. From what you've said, she already has discipline, so it'll be easier than when we had to learn to control our telekinesis." He paused to consider, then added, "We were much younger, too, less mature. So she's got a lot going for her."

"Yeah." Chris nodded, then looked past him to watch Mutt in the distance clamber up one of the slides. He was Katie's age, wasn't he? The idea sort of disturbed Chris. An orphan, homeless self no older than his second-youngest cousin. He tried not to think about it too much.

Shaking his head, he flopped sideways into the empty desk chair, one arm draped over its back and his right leg crossed over his left. A mischievous grin crept over his face. "You know," he remarked innocently, "we never gave you a name." His older self raised an eyebrow but said nothing, his lips pressed together. "I didn't know before that my head would fill up with a bunch of versions of me," Chris pointed out. "I mean, he's called Mutt." Chris jerked his thumb in the direction of the jungle gym. "That's easy. So we need a nickname for you." His eyes narrowed gleefully. "How about 'Perry'? You know, since you never got a real chance with it."

The man folded his arms, unimpressed. "How about not, since it's not my name," he pointed out dryly.

Chris clapped. "It is now. I vote 'Perry.'"

"I vote no," the man deadpanned.

"Too bad this is my subconscious," Chris said with a cackle. "Mine's the only vote that counts."

The man pursed his lips, then grumbled, "Like I said, perky."

Too sweetly, Chris replied, "Whatever you say, Perry." The newly-appointed Perry just rolled his eyes.

Chris was at his locker first thing Monday morning, digging around for his biology textbook. After finding it and stuffing it into the knapsack at his feet, he shoved his locker shut. On the other side of the door, Dwight was leaning against the neighboring locker with his foot propped up against it, knee extended in front of him, and his arms crossed over his chest. His knapsack lay on the floor beside him. Years of surprise demon attacks stopped Chris from reflexively jumping backwards, but it was a close thing. Calming his suddenly racing heart, he waited in place.

"Okay, fine, so there's real magic," Dwight began. Nervously, Chris cast a glance at the students around them, but no one seemed to hear the comment amidst the bustle. "And now you're a"—he lowered his voice—"witch." The boy felt silly even saying it aloud.

"I've always been a witch," Chris pointed out half-heartedly.

Dwight kicked off the locker and dropped his arms to his sides. "And that accounts for every time you've flaked on me or forgotten plans or whatever?" He pressed a defiant finger into Chris's chest.

Shrinking back, Chris said, "Pretty much."

Dwight's eyes narrowed. "And now that I know about all that stuff, there won't be any other lies? You're not also, like, secretly a leprechaun, right?"

Chris bit down on a smile at the absurd image conjured. Dwight had no way of knowing leprechauns actually existed and were rather strange-looking creatures to boot. "No, nothing else."

Dwight jabbed him in the chest a second time. "Total truth from now on," he insisted.

Chris was already nodding, relief flooding his face. This time he couldn't hide the smile. "No more lies," he promised, holding up his hand in a scout's salute.

Dwight stepped back, the determined expression melting into his usual cheerful demeanor. "Well, all right, then." He swung his knapsack up, then spun around. Over his shoulder he remarked, "Should be interesting."

Grabbing his own knapsack, Chris raced to catch up. "So—we're all good?" he asked, barely daring to believe it as they trekked down the corridor.

"All good," Dwight affirmed.

By the end of his first week back at school, Chris felt ready to implement his plan for Katie. When, on Friday afternoon, Dwight called to suggest they finally go see Knives Out on Saturday, Chris hesitated. "In the interest of full disclosure…" he said guiltily.

"You have a demon thing?" Dwight guessed.

"No, actually. But it is a magical thing." He considered for a moment. "Actually, if you're up for it, you may be able to help me." Was it a barely-concealed ploy to get Dwight more comfortable with magic and to avoid seeming like a flake? Yes. But he still hadn't come up with a non-suspicious explanation to Phoebe and Coop for why he suddenly planned to spend extra time with his two cousins. He had considered ushering the couple off on another date and offering to babysit, but he knew that, unprompted, that would raise eyebrows. Dwight's presence would offer him a much more reasonable explanation.

Later that evening, he stood pleading in front of his aunt. She sat on her living room sofa with her legs and arms crossed, looking skeptical. "Please, Aunt Phoebe. She'll be fine. I just want him to know the truth about her. He's my best friend. He knows most of the family already."

"I don't like it," Phoebe said with a frown. "Just because you told him your secret doesn't mean he needs to know about Katie's disability."

Chris tried to appeal to the empath's overly-sensitive sense of sympathy. He mulled over what wording would best guilt her into caving. "I promised him I'd be honest from now on. I want him to feel like he can trust me, and he can't if I'm hiding such a major person in my life. And Katie said she was interested in meeting him."

This angle seemed to work to soften his aunt's expression, but she continued to worry at her lower lip. "I don't want Katie to feel like a freak who's on display."

"She won't," Chris said quickly. "Dwight's great with kids. And I'll warn him in advance. We can make a whole day of it; I promise it'll be fun for her." He held his breath as she mulled it over and was finally rewarded with a hesitant smile. They were in business.

Saturday morning, Chris met Dwight at the Shack. The boy looked eager in spite of an attempt to come across as nonchalant. Katie and Lea wouldn't come for half an hour yet, which gave Chris time to ease Dwight into things first. He hadn't lied to Phoebe; he intended to warn his friend in advance.

They were sitting outside, Dwight on a broken tree stump and Chris a few feet away on a large root that bulged out of the ground like an orca leaping clear of the ocean. "Just don't freak out when they come, okay?" Chris told his friend anxiously.

Dwight ripped up a chunk of grass and began releasing the blades to the breeze one by one. "Freak out about what?" he asked. "I've met your cousins before."

Chris fiddled with his fingers, unable to meet Dwight's eyes. "At a distance, yeah," he acknowledged with a terse nod, "But that was before you knew about Katie."

Dwight's brow furrowed as he searched his memories. Katie, she was the younger one. He had met her once in passing a couple of years ago. Chris's aunt and uncle had gone to Switzerland for a week, leaving Chris's parents to watch the girls. Dwight remembered seeing her in the living room with the rest of the family as Chris led him upstairs to work on a class project. From what Chris had told him then, she had some sort of chronic illness. She had certainly appeared frail to him at the time, pale and gaunt. Everyone in the house had fussed over her, too, making sure she was warm enough. They had kept the heat on even though it had been late Spring.

"Knew what about her?" he asked Chris.

Chris leaned back against the tree trunk attached to his makeshift chair and peered up through the leaves to the sky. "The thing she has—it's not really a sickness. She's got these abilities… Well, they're more like disabilities. And we all thought they were…" How had his older self phrased it? "An immutable part of her. Anyway, turns out they're not, but it can be a bit disconcerting to see up close."

Dwight's voice was tinged with humor as he said, "How 'bout, just for fun, you talk to me as if I have no idea what you're saying."

Chris grinned sheepishly at his friend. "Sorry. Katie is intangible."

"You mean, like, transparent?" Dwight frowned. He definitely would have remembered Chris's cousin being a ghost.

"No," Chris sighed, "I mean like solid objects falling through her. Like existing in this world only halfway."

"Geez," Dwight said with a low whistle.

Chris stood up and glided around a thick tree behind Dwight so he could watch the direction he expected his cousins to appear from. Nothing yet, but they would arrive soon. Phoebe would be dropping them off at the park and picking them up again before dinner. (Chris would have offered to orb them home if he didn't need to have physical contact in order to do so.) While they waited, he tried to explain to Dwight a bit more of Katie's history, how her state of being impacted her life.

Pretty soon, he saw several branches rustle from afar. Then, Lea and Katie came hiking into view. Dwight joined him by the tree to watch their approach. Lea carried a miniature cooler strapped across her shoulder. As she pushed past tangles of vines and branches, she did not bother holding them out of the way for her sister behind her. Branches swung back into Katie's face, but she never flinched. They whipped right through her skin.

Dwight winced as though hit himself. "Whoa," he breathed beside Chris.

Dead bark and dried leaves crunched beneath Lea's feet as the girls marched up to them. "So, Melon," Chris said cheerfully when she got close enough, "Are you guys ready to start?"

With a huff, Lea unhooked the cooler and dropped it at their feet. "Mom wanted to make sure we had snacks," she explained at his questioning look. "It's just fruit and Cheez-Its and stuff." The thirteen-year-old turned to Dwight, appraising him through narrowed eyes. "So you're Dwight, Chris's mortal friend."

Dwight threw a stunned glance at Chris. "Wait, witches are immortal?"

Chris sighed patiently. "It just means non-magical," he explained, then scowled at his cousin. "Leave him alone. He's the whole reason your mom didn't get suspicious about today, okay? And he's cool, so relax."

From around Lea's shoulder peered Katie, a shy blush on her cheeks as Dwight nodded a greeting. "Hey, you're Katie, right? I'd like to help with your powers, if you're okay with it."

She offered him a smile and peeped, "Okay."

"Great." Chris clapped his hands together to get everyone's attention. "Now that we've all met, let's do this. We're far enough from the park that no one should see us, so I think this is a good spot. Ready?" They backed up and formed a triangle around Dwight's tree stump, with Katie sitting on the stump in the middle. They gave her a chance to catch her breath after her brief hike and then got down to business.

Though Katie had practiced hard all week, she had not managed to achieve tangibility again since that first time. Chris hadn't really expected her to. At the time, she'd been flooded with adrenaline. They had to get her to tap into that same place without relying on fear to get her there. Intense emotion had just been the first step. If she let it become a crutch, she would be no closer to true control.

"All right, Katie. Close your eyes." Chris tried to pitch his voice deeper, attempting to channel the soothing "whitelighter voice" his father often employed when giving advice or lending an ear. Obediently, she let her eyelids close. Her hands rested gently in her lap as her feet dangled over the stump, too short to reach the ground. "Now, do you remember what it felt like to hold Lea's jewelry box? Focus."

Katie's fingers twitched in her lap as she called on the memory. She didn't notice herself instinctively begin to smile. Her breath evened out, slow inhale, pause, slow exhale.

The surface had been grainy, almost gritty. It gave just slightly to pressure, a softer wood. The gold design had started off cool to the touch but quickly began to warm under the natural heat radiating from her skin. Finally, half-entranced, she murmured, "I remember."

"Good," Chris said. "Try to get there again. Bring yourself back to that morning."

They waited while she sat there, listening to the far-off sounds of the park. Katie used the background noise to motivate her, thinking fiercely, I want to be normal like them.

After a moment, Chris edged over to nudge Lea in the ribs. "Poke her," he instructed in a whisper. The girl crept forward, fighting every instinct she had developed over the years, and stuck out a finger to jab her sister. Her hand dove right through Katie's shoulder. With her eyes still closed, the girl didn't even notice. But Dwight did. He had seen the tree branch swipe through her when they came up through the woods, but it was something entirely different to see it happen four feet in front of him. Eyes as wide-rimmed as saucers, he stumbled back with a half-swallowed, "That's crazy!"

Katie peeked one eye open, then noticed Lea there with her hand still inside her skin. Her face fell. "Oh…"

"Don't worry," Chris said quickly. "It's just the first try. We'll get there." Lea withdrew her hand and stepped back.

They tried again. Several more times, in fact. At one point, eyes scrunched up, she cried, "I think I felt it that time!"

Exchanging a glance with their cousin, Lea said, "I haven't touched you yet."

After just over an hour, they paused for snacks. Lea fetched the cooler and rooted inside for cans of soda, which she distributed to everyone, and navel oranges. Chris sat cross-legged in the dirt and dug his nails into the skin, peeling it back strip by strip. Lea pulled apart slivers for her sister first, passing them to her on the stump, and then took some for herself.

Dwight seemed to ponder his orange, turning it over and over in his palm. "Maybe you should try to scare her," he suggested at length. "Just at the beginning. So she can get used to what the—er—magic feels like."

"Maybe," Chris said, unsure.

"We could throw something at her," Dwight suggested. "A tree branch. Nothing too heavy."

Katie's expression, which had frozen with dread the moment she contemplated recreating the conditions of their first attempt, melted quickly into a confused frown. She swallowed the orange wedge in her mouth to ask, "Why would a branch be scary?"

They all looked over at her with surprise. It struck Chris suddenly how unnatural her life until now had been. When it came to the obvious, the differences didn't seem that strange, or at least no stranger than other unusual forms of magic. But Katie's powers impacted even the most overlooked details of her life. In all her years, she had never developed the reflex to duck oncoming objects. The very idea of reacting to one was foreign enough to bewilder her.

"If this works," Chris remarked dryly, "we'll have to teach you that stuff flying at your face is a bad thing." Lea laughed. Katie, blushing, stuffed another orange slice into her mouth.

Dwight was the first to finish his snack. He took a moment to scatter his peels beneath some trees for the squirrels to find, then came back to toss his empty soda can into a paper bag Lea had pulled out of the cooler. While the two sisters chatted quietly with each other a few feet away, he plopped himself onto the ground beside his friend.

Chris glanced at Dwight sideways as he shoved a wedge into his mouth. "You doing okay with all this so far?" he asked, trying to sound casual. He had no frame of reference for how "odd" this experience would seem to someone unfamiliar with magic, but he didn't want to overwhelm Dwight so early on. "You don't have to stay, you know. If it's too much too fast."

Dwight propped up his knees and rested his forearms across them, watching the girls. "It's surprisingly normal, actually," he remarked. With a chuckle, he amended, "I mean, crazy, but normal. How you guys treat each other and everything." His shoulders hitched into a careless shrug, and he lay back in the dirt, his knees sliding down in front of him. "Is this how it always is for you?" he asked, throwing an arm over his eyes.

"Yes and no," Chris replied. He bit his last piece of orange in half, letting its juice run down his wrist. "I can mostly control my powers, as long as I'm not overly excited or upset. But when I was little—Katie's age, maybe; definitely Bobby's age—they would go wild when I fell asleep."

Dwight turned his head to look at Chris, silently prodding him to explain. Chris waved a dismissive hand. "I'd wake up and find things floating in the air or moved around from where I'd left them. Sometimes I even rearranged furniture in my sleep." He laughed sheepishly as he popped the rest of the orange into his mouth. "I wasn't allowed to have sleepovers until I was nine or ten," he said once he swallowed. "It was really embarrassing."

Turning back to gaze at the sky, Dwight remarked, "I remember that, actually. I always just assumed your parents were freakishly overprotective."

Chris grinned. "They were, just not the way you thought." Wiping his sticky hand on a brown leaf beside his foot, he shrugged. "Anyway, my dad started meditating with me every night before bed, and after a while I stopped having 'accidents' at night." He climbed to his feet, peering down at his friend.

Dwight followed him with his eyes but didn't sit up. Instead, he chuckled.

"What?" Chris asked.

"So you were, like, magically wetting your bed," Dwight said with a smirk.

Chris winced, wrinkling his nose. "Thanks so much for the visual." He casually kicked some dirt onto Dwight's legs, which Dwight brushed off, still laughing. Shaking his head, Chris wandered over to the cooler to grab a bottled water. Walking a distance away to avoid muddying their practice area, he cracked open the cap and poured a handful of liquid over one palm. Tucking the resealed bottle beneath his armpit, he rubbed both hands together to clean the sticky residue. When he returned, Katie was ready to try again.

When it finally happened, nobody really expected it. Katie was standing in front of the three, staring hard at her fingers to try to will them solid. When she looked up, Lea was walking toward her for another aggressive poke. But the toe of Lea's sneaker got caught beneath a tree root, and she pitched forward.

"Lea, look out!" Katie cried, throwing up her hands as if to catch her.

Lea's shoe flew off, and she went bowling into her younger sister. Katie stumbled backward, tripping over the tree stump behind her, and the two girls hit the dirt in a tangle of limbs.

Lea groaned and, after catching her breath, tried to extricate herself. But suddenly, she couldn't move. It took her a moment to register the reason, a pair of arms that had swung up around her neck to hug her. They squeezed so tightly she almost couldn't breathe. Then she noticed the sounds around her—she hadn't heard anything at first, her ears ringing from the fall—cheers coming from the two boys and a high-pitched, wild sobbing right in her ear.

Her first thought was that Katie had been injured in the fall, so she tried to climb off of her sister. "Katie, are you okay?" she asked frantically, bracing her hands on the ground and trying to push herself up. But those arms clung tighter. She realized her sister, between her cries, was speaking.

"I love you I love you I love you," she sobbed into Lea's shoulder.

Lea's mind spun. Suddenly, there was a new reason she couldn't catch her breath. She fell forward onto her elbows so her arms could dig up underneath Katie's spine and guide her into a sitting position. There, she wrapped her arms around the girl. She had no idea how long she sat there with her knees grinding into the dirt and her sister's face buried in her shirt. She felt herself patting Katie's back.

Patting Katie's back!

Katie only looked up when she felt another weight settle on her shoulder. She peered past Lea's neck to see Chris, hand on her shoulder, standing in front of them. Her tears had subsided by then, and she sniffled through the sudden congestion.

"I'm afraid to let go," she admitted in a whisper.

"It'll be okay," Lea said into her ear, then drew back. This time, Katie let her. Lea's hand moved from Katie's lower spine to her arm, sliding down it until their fingers intertwined. But as they both stared down, the pressure of the touch began to dissipate. Katie's fingers slipped through Lea's hand. Without the opposing force, Lea's arm fell limply into her lap.

"No, no, no," Katie cried with dismay.

"Katie," Chris said with some force behind his tone. She looked back up. He was grinning. "That was minutes. That was amazing." Why had it felt like a single instant? At her crestfallen expression, he promised, "You'll get there again."

He helped heave Lea up by her elbow as Katie climbed to her feet. Once Lea had dusted off her pants, she scrubbed her cheeks—apparently, at some point, she'd started crying—and stepped back. "Maybe we should take a break?" she suggested, "So you don't tire yourself out?"

But Katie vigorously shook her head. "I want to keep trying," she insisted, "While I still remember how it feels."

No one could refute her logic. They tried several more times with Lea poking and prodding. Most of them didn't work. A few did, though none lasted longer than a few seconds at a time. The duration discouraged Katie, but Chris asserted that this was progress nonetheless.

She did a bit better after another long snack break, but by the time the sun had started its descent even the determined Katie couldn't ignore her exhaustion. An ache had begun somewhere deep in her bones, and her joints felt stiff, her limbs weighted. She had not managed to become solid since at least an hour earlier.

Finally, Lea glanced at her watch. "It's almost dinner time," she said. "Mom's probably waiting outside the park. We should go."

They went around collecting their trash and repacking the cooler. Chris reached over to pluck a twig from Lea's hair, one that must have gotten tangled during her fall. He smirked at her as he flicked it back into the dirt. Dwight offered to carry the cooler, so they all headed out together down the hill.

When they came out of the copse of trees, they saw Phoebe's van idling by the curb near the playground. The four of them hiked over, weary but glowing. Phoebe scrolled down the passenger side window "You guys look like you had quite a day," she called.

Tired as she was, Katie couldn't seem to stop grinning. Lea opened the back door and let Katie climb inside first. Dwight walked around to the front of the car to pass the cooler to Phoebe through the open window.

"Thanks for the snacks, Mrs. Halliwell," he said. "And I, uh, really enjoyed getting to know Lea and Katie."

Phoebe cast an approving glance at Chris and smiled. "That's nice of you to say, Dwight. You boys need a ride home?"

Chris shook his head, jabbing his thumb toward the path behind him. "Dwight lives nearby. We'll walk."

Phoebe nodded, rolled up the window, and waved to them as she pulled away from the curb. Katie swung around in her seat to watch them out of the rear window until the car turned a corner and took them out of sight.

The boys headed in the opposite direction down the sidewalk. "That was…" Dwight began, but didn't finish his sentence.

Chris expelled a long breath. "Yeah," he agreed.

They walked until the corner, where they would each cross and go in different directions. Dwight turned to Chris. "Thanks for inviting me," he said a bit awkwardly. "I'm glad I came."

Chris hitched up one shoulder. "So am I," he replied. Without another word, they parted and headed home.

For much of that night, Katie lay awake in her bed, arms wrapped around each other in a loose embrace. How often had she lain just like this, closing her eyes and pretending she could remember a time before she had her powers, could remember how it felt to have her mother hug her? She would imagine hands folded under her body, a chest resting against her cheek, a pair of lips pressed to her forehead.

It had felt nothing like what she had envisioned. She hadn't really expected so much pressure. It had come from all around her. Not just Lea's skin touching hers but the ground against her backbone. Even the air seemed to press in around her, making the hairs rise on her arms. It had almost prickled. Her skin had itched, uncomfortably so, and yet she hadn't been able to let go.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to recall the sensation now, pictured her mother's body surrounding her, engulfing her. "Soon," she whispered, her fingers tightening their hold. "Soon."

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