By late July, we’ve picked our way through most of the locks at the Golden Apple factory. I’ve gotten almost as good as Aaron, but I don’t feel the need to tell him that. He already knows. Most of the time, I think he’s glad about it, but sometimes—like today—I think maybe he’s jealous.

Imagine that. A kid jealous of Nicholas Roth. The new kid. The Narfinator. The one who knows every Twilight Zone episode by heart (thanks, Dad) and every element on the periodic table (thanks, Mom). The one who likes sushi better than cheeseburgers and likes girls who are taller than him and thinks Talking Heads is still the best band there ever was, I don’t care what anyone says.

“You planning to bust that lock this century, or should I start rationing food?” Aaron says behind me.

Yeah. He’s jealous.

“I told you to eat your breakfast,” I say in my best mom voice.

“Eat this,” he says, leaning in to punch me in the shoulder, but I spring the lock just in time to swing open the door, and he stumbles through and lands squarely in a pile of bubble wrap packing. It seems we’ve found the shipping department.

I laugh so hard I think I’m going to rupture something, and eventually Aaron laughs, too.

“Welp, nothing to see here,” I say, shoving a box of packing peanuts aside.

“Not so fast,” Aaron says, mesmerized as every human on earth is by the simple act of popping a sheet of plastic bubbles.

Once we exhaust an entire roll of bubble wrap, we both are really hungry, and we make our way back to the room that used to be the elephants’ graveyard of electronics before we picked it clean. Now we refer to it as the Office. We left an operating TV and VCR in there after we discovered that the generator that powers the conveyor belt powers electricity for some of the second-floor offices as well. Aaron’s amassed a sizeable library of movies thanks to an obsession he has about recording them when they air. His timing for catching the best movies is freakishly good. Throw in a couple of cushy executive chairs pilfered from the nicest offices and we have our very own media room.

Aaron rummages around in a filing cabinet and pulls out a bag of cheese crackers and a couple of sodas.

“You seriously have rations?” I say, tearing into the crackers. I pause for a second when I hear skittering behind the wall beside me. Great. Now the rats know we have crackers.

“I like to be prepared,” Aaron says. “The end is nigh.” He laughs a ghoulish laugh and I roll my eyes, and things feel normal again. As normal as they can around Aaron.

That’s why it feels like the right time to ask him about how everyone acted when he walked into the Gamers Grotto at the Square. It’s been a few weeks, but I haven’t been able to shake the memory.

“I went clothes shopping with my dad,” I offer.

“Sounds riveting,” he says.

“It was all right. A kid named Enzo hooked me up with some pretty cool stuff,” I say, easing into what I really want to ask him.

Aaron doesn’t say anything, though. He just fiddles with the metal tab on his soda can.

“I think he said he knows you,” I say, trying again.

This time Aaron looks up. “He doesn’t know anything.”

Just like that, I’ve hit a nerve. Instead of backing off, I decide to press on it.

“Yeah, so what’s up with the way everyone seems … I don’t know …”

He eyes me carefully.

“Weird around you,” I say, but that’s not really what I want to say. I want to say “scared around you.” I want to ask him why I’m not afraid of him. I want to ask him if that makes me a chump, the would-be victim of a C-list horror movie.

“You didn’t, like, kill a cat or something, did you?” I ask, and I don’t know how to follow that up, so I say, “’Cause I like cats.”

Aaron looks at me like the Aliens have already arrived, like I’m their alien spawn, like I have tubes for ears and antennae for eyes and a long, forked tongue that I use for catching and eating the human race I used to be a part of.

“Why would I kill a cat?” he asks, and his question lays bare how stupid my question sounds.

“I don’t know,” I say lamely.

“Enzo stopped hanging out with me because he’d rather play video games,” Aaron says quietly, wiggling the tab of his soda can until it comes off. He flicks it across the room into an old waste basket.

He doesn’t have to say any more. I can hear every single word he’s left out—Enzo would rather play his expensive video games that his successful dad can buy him because his dad has a job, and that job isn’t going away. It’s yet one more thing I can’t figure out how to bring up with Aaron—that his dad is always around, even during the day, like how my dad is around all day when he’s between jobs.

There are reasons why the Enzos of the world don’t hang out with the Aarons and the Nickys of the world. They don’t have to be good reasons or fair reasons. But there are always reasons.

Too bad, I think. Enzo seemed okay.

I let out a massive belch that echoes across the empty factory floor. “I don’t even like video games that much,” I say.

It’s a humongous lie, and Aaron knows it, but for the first time all day, he looks relaxed, like a tiny bit of the twelve-year-old he is has started to seep back in.

Later at Aaron’s house, though, the lightness that seemed to free Aaron of some massive burden that afternoon disappears once again under the weight of his family. Everyone at the Peterson house is in a bad mood.

I thought it was just his mom, who met us at the door, then floated away without saying a word. Then, after taking too much time removing my rat poop shoes and placing them outside the door, I lost track of Aaron and practically ran straight into Mya in the hallway. She was looking over her shoulder, and when she turned and saw me, she jumped back about a foot.

“Jeez, Nicky, don’t be such a creeper!”

“I’m not—”

“I have to go,” she said, hurrying out the door with one more furtive glance over her shoulder, not at me but behind me. I turned to see what she was looking for, but all I saw were the shadows that lie in the twists and turns of the Petersons’ house.

Now, as we sit in Aaron’s room tinkering with the lock on an old chain we scrounged from a construction site, I wait for Aaron to say something. Anything. Because we’ve been sitting here in dead silence for over an hour.

“My parents got a letter from the school. I have my class schedule, but I don’t know who any of the teachers are, so it’s pretty much meaningless.”

“Mmm,” Aaron grunts.

“I had a Life Sciences teacher at my last school,” I say. “She had this thing about rabbits. Like, she had about a dozen at home, and she was constantly worrying about them. Sometimes she even brought them to class because she was afraid they’d be lonely, but I always kinda thought it was more so she wouldn’t be lonely …”

“Uh-huh.”

“So yeah, I thought that was weird …” I clear my throat.

Aaron stares out the window.

“The Alien Overlords came to see me last night. They brought me aboard their vessel and threatened to melt my brain into soup unless I promised to become a secret alien agent and share top secret human intelligence with them.”

“Yup,” Aaron mutters, still staring out the window.

“So then you’ll help me?”

“Huh?”

“Become an alien-human double agent.”

“Man, what are you talking about?”

“What’s up with you? You’ve been out of it ever since we left the factory,” I say.

Aaron looks back out the window. I’m about to give up and go home when he says, “Have you ever thought that maybe you were … ?”

“What?”

“Nothing, never mind,” Aaron says, looking down.

“What? Like … a merman? No, no, I’ve never thought that maybe I was a merman. I mean, I like to swim and all. I’m not half bad at it, either. There was this lake near—”

Aaron chuckles despite himself. “Weirdo.”

“Now that, yeah. I’ve thought I was a weirdo before. Often, actually.”

Aaron finally looks at me.

“Have you ever thought you were … bad?”

It sounds like such a simple question. I know it should have a simple answer. But Aaron and I both know it’s not that simple.

“I mean, we play pranks on people. I think that’s probably not upstanding-citizen good,” I say, Mom’s refrain of using my powers for good once again pushing its way into my mind.

“No, but I mean really bad,” Aaron says, looking back down at the floor.

My dream washes over me, the one I have practically every night but try not to let myself remember during the daytime, the one in the store surrounded by food lined up on the shelves. The room is dark. I’m alone.

And even though I have no idea why, I know beyond a doubt that it’s my fault I’m there.

“I think I did something bad once.”

I say it before I know I’m saying it. It’s like I’m hearing myself talk from across the room.

“You don’t know?” Aaron asks, looking hard at me now, searching me for a lie.

“I don’t remember,” I say, a truth I’ve never admitted to anyone before. “It’s just this dream I have. It changes sometimes, but I always wind up in the same place, like I was put there or something.”

“So how do you know you did something wrong?” Aaron asks.

I think about it for a minute, and when my brain quiets to a whisper, all I hear is my grandmother’s voice. You stop that wandering, or one day, you won’t make it home.

“Because sometimes I go where I’m not supposed to,” I say. “Sometimes, I go too far.”

Now we’re both looking out the window, and I wonder what Aaron’s bad dreams look like, if he feels as alone in his as I do in mine.

“I don’t think just because you do bad things, it makes you a bad person,” Aaron says after a long stretch of silence.

All of a sudden, it occurs to me that I still haven’t found out why Aaron was so weird about the Golden Apple Amusement Park last month. My mind is racing with thoughts of a prank gone awry. Could Aaron have done something to the roller coaster that made it crash? But I stop myself before I get too far—pulling a prank is one thing, but bringing down a roller coaster at nine years old? It’s not possible. But if he’s not talking about that, then what is he talking about?

“What does make a person bad, then?” I ask.

Aaron shoves his hands in his pockets like he’s embarrassed. Then, so quietly I can barely hear him, he says, “Being happy when bad things happen.”

I watch Aaron’s face for any clues into what he could mean, but his expression is as flat as his tone.

Then he looks at me and smiles, and it’s the old Aaron again, the one who planned a mission just for me to get a sign with my name on it, who carved a safe path through the town of Raven Brooks just so I could get home safely with a two-by-two-foot tin treasure.

He’s my friend. An actual friend. Whatever he did or thinks he did, I’ve got his back.

“I’m hungry,” I say. “Let’s go get some tacos.”